Photo with a story: There is something about these unrecognizable Cassandras that resembles ordinary women.

These women in yellow scarves on benches near their homes on the road, as if unwell Cassandra were unrecognizable.

My grandmother scrapes off the soap residue from the box on the washbasin, kneads it in a cracked palm, then removes the lid of the jar from under the coffee “Galka” and adds the residue to the rest of the same unwashed abandoned pieces of soap. “Why, Grandma, are you doing this,” my very little one asks. “So that they would not be alone?” The world for me is still such that everything in it does not just live, but lives in complete secrecy, deliberately hiding from my eyes so that I can find it and explore it. “For there will be war, and all will be finished.”

Grandma's daughter, like my mother, cannot explain to me why she puts lumps of sticky soap in the same glass jar, just puts everything on it. At the age of ten, I realized that my mother simply did not know anything about the future, and at twenty-seven, not knowing anything, she moved towards it continuously. And in those distant times of childhood, Dad generally advised me not to be surprised by the wonders of the women of the family, and even more so not to listen to old grandmothers. Seventeen years later from the trench in the middle of the very war, my father did not advise me anything.

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This is a village in Sumy region, the Ukrainian-Russian border, the first week of the Kursk operation, Ukrainian equipment is constantly moving towards Russia, and guided bombs are flying from Russia, nothing stops. An elderly woman in a yellow headscarf sits the edge of her yard near the road that military vehicles pass by. This picture was taken by Vyacheslav Ratinsky, and, fortunately, he and the woman talked. Thanks to this, we have a history. And even then, it's not just an elderly woman in a yellow scarf, past whom the war is carrying. First of all, perhaps, a woman is on the verge of maximum experience, and the war is rushing not past, but through (and everywhere).

The woman, in her words, is eighty-eight years old, and the author of the photo intuitively guesses her name - it must be Maria. In the Second World War and some time after it, along this very road, on the edge of which Mary sits, as she remembers, trenches and trenches stretched, and now machinery stretches. You might think, cunningly and in a literary way, that Mary has been sitting here all her life. But no, for in that first war Mary was small and was at war in a village nearby. But if we turn to literature and metaphor, then, of course, yes: she has been sitting here all her life.

And something about these women at the edge of experience, countries or centuries — whether under fire or under the cross — is from the unrecognizable Cassanders. They just talk to some, and others do not have time to listen. But, Marie, the woman near the road where the war has been going on for so long, tell me when it will end. “Never”.

And there is something about these unrecognizable Kasandras from ordinary women.

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Material created with support The Free Word Foundation.

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Text: Vira Kuriko
Photo: Vyacheslav Ratynskyi