Vira Sushynska has spent almost 24 years, waiting for her son’s return from Afghanistan

The window creaks, and her heart skips a beat. Could it be her son rapping on it? Seeing the mailwoman in the street, she catches her breath. Maybe she has a letter from him. The woman, seeing her, averts her eyes in painful understanding.

Vira Sushynska has waited for her son for almost 24 years. The last time she saw him he was 19. And now? She has watched documentaries showing Afghan POWs returning home, unshaven, hair unkempt, dressed in strange clothes, many already professing a strange faith. Yet she is certain that she would recognize her son no matter in what getup. She refuses to believe that he is dead. One simply cannot disappear without a trace. Why hasn’t he written or called?

“I go to church, but I don’t know whether to light a candle for his well-being in life or the repose of his soul,” she says softly.

She looks at Oleh’s portrait, reads his letters from Afghanistan during the war. She has no idea what happened to him. The penultimate and last letters give no clues. But how could he have what would happen after writing that final letter?

At the district viyskomat [military commissar’s office] military registration and enlistment office, she was told that her son was listed as missing in action (MIA) in the line of duty on June 11, 1980.

After that she had visited countless other offices but learned nothing. She wrote to Lishchinsky, then sending televised reports from the Afghan war, to an American female television journalist, on learning that she was buying out POWs with her own money... She did not write to her directly, for she did not know the address; she sent her letters to the relevant dignitaries, asking them to please relay her messages. They replied, saying they sympathized with her, of course, and that they would send her letters on. She even got in touch with men who had served in a reconnaissance platoon with her son.

“They visited me here. They sat silently, looking at each other. They said they knew nothing that I didn’t, that they were in an armored personnel carrier and then the vehicle fell over into a river and was dragged by the current. All the men were eventually found, except Oleh. Someone told me later that there weren’t any rivers deep and swift enough to carry armored personnel carriers,” the old woman sadly muses.

In his last letter Oleh wrote to his mother that he and his buddies had been to Kabul, meeting with [Soviet Defense] Minister Ustinov.

“He mailed the letter on January 4, but I received it in March. I don’t know how that letter reached me. He wrote that they felt like human beings then; they got fresh linen... So maybe he was listed as MIA after what must’ve happened somewhere near Kabul...”

The slightest mention of Afghanistan fills the old woman with trepidation. And hope. She still believes that her son is somewhere there. Alive. She keeps an issue of Komsomolskaya pravda from 2001, reading that “there are still 290 of our POWs in Afghanistan.” Oleh must be among them!

She closely followed every media report after the Americans entered that country. After all, Oleh was not the only MIA; there were many others. There were many other Ukrainian mothers waiting for their sons. It is difficult for her to understand precisely what happened — and is still happening — there, why Taliban zealots and mujaheddins are fighting each other. A monument to men killed in the Afghan War was erected in Khmelnytsky. A huge hand holding an armed soldier, like a pawn poised over a chessboard. What could that giant hand know about the sufferings of Vira Sushynska, formerly a winder at a cloth factory in Dunayivtsi?

“I raised the boy myself, my only son,” she says forlornly, feeling alone and helpless in this big and impassive world.

Then Afghanistan vanished from the media reports, replaced by Kuwait and Iraq. Ukrainians were also there. “They enlisted, and Oleh was drafted, nobody asked him if he wanted to be a part of that war,” Vira Sushynska says. She believes that the Ukrainian generals are different from the Soviet ones, that they care for their men from Ukraine.

Thinking back, the 68-year-old woman admits that fate has never smiled upon her, always leaving little room for independent decisions, always hurling her into the whirlpool of life to sink or swim.

“Before World War II, my father went to the Donbas instead of my mother’s sister Oleksandra. He wrote to say he would send us money as soon as he got his pay, so he could pay for the trip and we could join him. Then the war broke out. The Germans occupied Nesterivtsi, a village not far from Dunayivtsi, where my family came from. My mother, younger brother, and my mother’s youngest sister Mania were sent to Germany [as slave laborers] in 1942. Mania was then transferred to a place on the German-French border, a village outside Hanover. My mother worked for a Bauer and I looked after my brother. We never learned anything about Mania. No one knows anything even now. My father joined the [Soviet] army in the Donbas and we’ve never heard from or about him since.”

Vira Sushynska spent years hoping to learn about and meet with her father and Aunt Mania. It was only when she saw Oleh off to the army that her concern about her son got the better of other worries. And again, there was nothing from or about him.

She tries to picture him as though he were still alive; she can see him stepping into the room, embracing her and then telling her about what happened to him over those long years; she would then tell him about her sleepless nights, of the undying hope of seeing him alive, of her struggle to survive...

Oleh’s comrades in arms responded to her desperate messages seven years after she had received the shattering information at the viyskomat.

“That man from Kyiv, Hennady Zdolnyk by name, called our district and found out where I lived. He came over. And on February 15, marking the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan, I was summoned to the viyskomat again. I saw different people there and was given a medal ‘For Civic Courage.’ I was told the award came from a fraternity of Afghan War veterans. Did I deserve it? What courage, considering that I had suffered so much? Before being drafted, Oleh had graduated from a technical (secondary) school in Khmelnytsky, returned to Dunayivtsi and got a [minor] job as a commodity expert. He also went in for sports and placed second in a local track-and-field contest. I thought he’d come back from the army, get married, and I’d have a family, my son, his wife, and my grandchildren, to look after.”

There is something enigmatic and perhaps inspiring hope about her son’s comrades in arms — men that were with him until whatever happened — offering no information. People said that a man returned to Vykhrivka, a village neighboring on Nesterivtsi, 35 years after World War II. He explained that he had been on special missions, unable to return any earlier. And he refused to comment on any of those missions of his.

Vira Sushynska looks out her window, watching the mournful autumnal flowers. On the windowsill are blooming potted lemons, pomegranates, and other plants. The old woman tends this home flora, does needlework, making refined serviettes, just to keep her hands and mind occupied, but there is always that pain in her heart. She wants her son back.

“I retired; look at these diplomas of honor and medals awarded for ‘meritorious communist labor’ as a winder at the Lenin Cloth Factory. Yes, and these are pieces of cloth they’d sent to Vladimir Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, so they could dress well. I know this only from the factory’s history... Eventually, I sold 18 sotkas (0.18 hectare) and my house in the village. I used to breed rabbits, ducks, chickens, but I’m too old to take care of all this now. It means mowing grass, then carrying it to the barn — I’m content with the 1.5 sotkas I have, so I can have potatoes in the winter.”

* * *

Vira Sushynska provided this author with data concerning her son: Sushynsky, Oleh Mykolayovych, born August 21, 1959, Dunayivtsi. In the Afghan War, his CO was one named Platonov (she wrote to him and he replied, saying he was sorry about her son).

This author promised her to contact the relevant authorities through The Day — at least someone would be kind enough to tell her whether she should pray for her son’s return or for the Lord to rest his soul. So perhaps the [Soviet motto] “No one is Forgotten and Nothing is Forgotten” would prove true again, meaning that someone somewhere still remembers and cares about what came to pass in the state that was and is not more. This memory and concern are something badly needed by Vira Sushynska and all those other Ukrainian mothers whose sons are currently on peacekeeping missions in various hotspots all over the world.