In Ukraine, A Body Bag and a Sister in Denial

ZMIIV, Ukraine — The wind carried the scent of loss of life throughout the road. The physique of the lifeless man, burned, mutilated and barely recognizable, was taken from the fridge and laid on a steel gurney. The coroner smoked a cigarette and unzipped the black bag.

It was a ravishing spring day. There had been no shelling that morning. And Oksana Pokhodenko, 34, gasped, blinking, on the charred corpse. That was not her brother, she advised herself, that was not Oleksandr. That was barely a human.

Her brother lived as soon as. The household patriarch for 20 years since their father died, he referred to as his sister every single day after the conflict began as he fled together with his household to a village, Husarivka, wedged between rolling wheat fields. He stored calling — “Hiya, Little One. We’re good. How are you?” — however by no means talked about that the Russians had overrun the village the place he was hiding.

Ms. Pokhodenko, in black denims, a black jacket and barely laced sneakers, struggled to maintain trying on the physique. Her brother had taught her how you can journey a motorbike and had cherished to observe cartoons for hours together with his son. To his sister, he was a “stone wall.” This was a charred husk. Half of the person’s cranium was gone, and his chest cavity was splayed open.

“How is it potential to acknowledge something right here?” she cried. “There’s nothing left in any respect. Oh, my god. It’s horrible. There’s nothing left.”

This was Ms. Pokhodenko’s process on Tuesday morning, to determine the unidentifiable, to reconcile the unreconcilable, to place a reputation on a blackened corpse, to fill out the paperwork and to maneuver on. A conflict so massive that it has shaken the world was out of the blue only a physique bag holding the remnants of a person.

“We’ll go in a minute,” the coroner mentioned. “Let me smoke.”

The coroner was drained. He was 51, had been on the job for 25 years and, for safety causes, would give solely his first identify, Vitaliy. Because the conflict started in February, greater than 50 our bodies had come by the door, civilians together with Ukrainian troopers, mangled by rocket blasts and tank shells and gunshots, arriving from completely different fronts in japanese Ukraine, whether or not close to town of Izium or the close to metropolis of Chuhuiv.

He was accustomed to the horror, to how the conflict shredded a physique past recognition. Others weren’t.

“Take a sip of water,” Vitaliy advised Ms. Pokhodenko earlier than she entered the room with the physique. “Did you’re taking masks with you? Right here, have some, put on a double layer. Simply in case.”

The masks weren’t for Covid.

Ms. Pokhodenko had traveled that morning from her residence within the well-tended suburbs of Kharkiv, the nation’s second largest metropolis, now a daily goal of Russian bombardments. The coroner had organized for her to select him up, and after stopping to purchase cigarettes, he guided her to the morgue.

“All the scariest issues are earlier than me,” Ms. Pokhodenko mentioned, standing in entrance of the morgue’s swinging wood doorways earlier than strolling inside. The constructing, a single-story brick relic constructed someday earlier than World Struggle II, was surrounded by weeds and stray canines. Rain from days earlier had left puddles in its yard the place earthworms had risen and floundered.

She had cause to be fearful. Her brother had not referred to as since March 14. She had final seen him on Feb. 23, the day earlier than the Russians invaded.

That they had sat in his secondhand sedan in a parking zone outdoors the place she labored, shortly catching up and handing over payments they wanted to pay for his or her getting older mom. He requested to seize espresso, however she declined. She needed to get again her job.

“If I knew that was the final time I used to be going to see him,” Ms. Pokhodenko mentioned, her hair pulled again in a pony tail and eyes swollen from crying, “I might have by no means let him go.”

Oleksandr Pokhodenko, 43, drove supply vans for a grocery store chain and lived within the Saltivka neighborhood of Kharkiv. Russian forces started shelling the neighborhood from the opening hours of the conflict, and Mr. Pokhodenko, his spouse and their 3-year-old son fled to a small city to the east. When the Russians occupied that city, the household fled once more, this time to Husarivka, a village of about 1,060 individuals.

In early March, the Russians occupied Husarivka and the Ukrainians counterattacked, shelling the enclave incessantly. A village that just about nobody had ever heard of, that had as soon as appeared sleepily aside from the world, was now a theater of conflict.

On March 15, Mr. Pokhodenko and Mykola Pysariv, 57, a distant relative in Husarivka who had taken the household in, set out at round 3 p.m. to retrieve some potatoes for the eight individuals now residing in Mr. Pysariv’s basement. Russian troopers had given assurances that they might perform the errand unmolested.

Mr. Pysariv was a building employee who had served within the Soviet navy within the Nineteen Eighties. His spouse went to the morgue on Tuesday, too. She mentioned that she had final seen him as he was strolling out the door to gather the potatoes, and remembered that Mr. Pokhodenko had stopped him simply as he was about to go away. “Uncle Kolya,” he had mentioned, “let me include you.”

The 2 males set out into the winter chilly and by no means returned.

When Ukrainian troopers retook Husarivka on the finish of March, residents emerged from their basements with horror tales. 5 males had disappeared after going to feed cows at a farm that the Russians have been utilizing as a headquarters. Then, on April 22, Ukrainian troopers discovered two our bodies that they believed have been these of Mr. Pokhodenko and Mr. Pysariv, whose throat had been slit. Quickly after, the corpses have been delivered to the morgue in Zmiiv.

Contained in the morgue, Vitaliy, the coroner, invited Ms. Pokhodenko and her associate, who had additionally pushed over together with her, into his cramped workplace piled with books and scrap paper, a portray of an previous ship hanging behind his desk. He pulled out a passport and defined why the 2 our bodies probably have been as soon as her brother and Mr. Pysariv.

“The smaller man died of a gunshot wound to the left facet of his chest,” Vitaliy mentioned, referring to Mr. Pokhodenko. “Right here is the passport; it has been shot by.”

The coroner confirmed it to Ms. Pokhodenko.

The passport’s edges have been burned, however it was nonetheless legible. On the high of the guide, by Oleksandr Pokhodenko’s portrait, his hair tightly cropped and face stern, was a bullet gap. After Mr. Pokhodenko was shot, the coroner mentioned, his corpse was doused in gas, coated with tires and set aflame.

Ms. Pokhodenko composed herself and walked out into the yard, into the nice and cozy solar, sobbing after taking a look at her brother’s physique.

It was not him, she mentioned. There was no method. The identical top, possibly, “however there wasn’t even a cranium.”

Ms. Pokhodenko’s associate requested to look at the corpse’s mouth. The enamel appeared like Mr. Pokhodenko’s, he insisted, so, after a lot debate, the coroner positioned his arms within the stays and pulled out the a part of the cranium with the highest row of enamel connected.

Vitaliy didn’t want to make use of a noticed as a result of the physique’s joints have been not tight — the bone got here out simply. He set it on a steel gurney outdoors the morgue, away from the rotting corpse.

Hours handed. Ms. Pokhodenko gave her assertion to the police. However it will take one other night time for her to just accept that her brother was not lacking, however lifeless, mendacity in a middle-of-nowhere morgue, the casualty of a brutal conflict that had simply begun.

Her acceptance that it was Oleksandr got here right down to top, foot dimension and the way the corpse’s entrance enamel slanted at a specific and acquainted angle. She would await the outcomes of a DNA check, however, for now, it was sufficient.

Her ideas turned to burying him, to the funeral to return, and to shifting him away from the horrors of the morgue.

“I don’t need my brother to lie there for a month,” she mentioned earlier than he was buried Thursday. “It’s so chilly in that room.”