Bad Roads (NHB Modern Plays)

Natal'ya Vorozhbit, Sasha Dugdale

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780019918
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Europäisches Drama

In the darkest recesses of Ukraine, a war is raging.

A journalist takes a research trip to the front line. Teenage girls wait for soldiers on benches. A medic mourns her lover killed in action.

Natal'ya Vorozhbit's play Bad Roads is a heartbreaking, powerful and bitterly comic account of what it is to be a woman in wartime.

It was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, in November 2017, in a production directed by Vicky Featherstone. It was developed by the Royal Court International Department, and translated by Sasha Dugdale.

1.

Quote marks denote speeches by other characters within the monologue.

WOMAN. When I first travelled to the Donbas region they asked me to fill out a form and on the form I had to describe myself, my appearance, any particular features. Just in case something happened to me, so they could identify the body. But I don’t have any particular features. So I’ll describe everything.

My name is Natasha. I’m forty years old already. I have a small build so I look younger. And I have a large nose, beautiful brown eyes, thin lips, small breasts and thin arms and legs. I have some ugly scars on my body, one on my belly from an operation, and another on my buttock, from an injection I had at school. I’m not in great shape, because of all the stress and not looking after myself properly. I’m pale, and sometimes I can feel my heart racing. You’ll call me ‘Sparrow’.

Now I’ll describe you.

Your name is Sergei and you’re thirty-eight. Average height. Although, no, you’re shorter than average. You’re strong, trim, upright. You look older than you are. You’ve got a strong voice, harsh grey bristle on your head. You’ve got brown eyes, and when I look into them I feel as if they have taken me hostage and left me in a dark basement, where some unknown terror is about to begin. I desperately want to look into your eyes. I desperately want you to like me.

I’ve already fallen for you.

I fell for you, but not at first sight. It was the second time. I was interviewing you in a café in Kiev. It was a warm winter. I’d dressed up, I was wearing my red coat, you were in uniform. I said ‘you look good’. A muscle twitched on your face and I realised you were pleased. You’re this hero. You’re talking about the war, about Donetsk airport, which is what I was researching. You start drawing on a napkin the old and new airport terminals, the position of the enemy, list the names of weapons. I pretend I’m following, but I’m not really. You’re remote, inaccessible, but my interest in the war excites you. This is my only road to you. You’re drawing the only road back from the airport. Your hands are coarse.

‘See, Natalya, the storm brigade had been relieved and they were leaving along this road here. And here were the rocket launchers and here the guns, and here are the armed personnel carriers and there’s a lot of firepower concentrated here, and this is one of our tanks burning. We had a casualty and three fatalities that day. Four of the enemy died on the mine wires.’

You are talking and I am watching your lips.

And then I go to the cinema and watch a documentary about the war. You’d just told me about it, and then I go and watch a film about a war you were in. Explosions going off around you. You’re carrying a gun, you’re filthy. Right in front of us a soldier dies, a young guy. And then there’s a casualty, and then another dead body. And you’re shouting orders. I can’t take it all in, that these explosions and shots and deaths aren’t just faked for the film, that the dirt on your face isn’t make-up. That you aren’t just some ripped Brad Pitt lookalike. And that you really have killed another person.

I try to pray to the picture of Mary in one of the cathedrals at the Vydubychi Monastery. I don’t really know how to pray, but all the same the tears are streaming down my face. I pray for my mother, my daughter, for peace in Ukraine, I light a candle for all the dead. But I am not crying for them, let’s be honest, I’m crying for you. I want love with you. But I can’t do it, I’m ashamed to ask her for that.

But Mary understood, and passed up my message. She probably said: this woman wants to suffer. Help her. And then you rang and said, ‘come with me to the zone. I’ll show you the front line. Would you like to?’ Who’d turn down an offer like that? Everyone wants to be on the front line. I made the decision in an instant. I didn’t take hot coffee and cold chicken and all the things a woman should take when she sets off with a man on a long journey. So we ate disgusting hot dogs in petrol stations and drank coffee with the sour taste of vomit. You don’t listen to music in your car with its camouflage paint, you smoke and you don’t say much. Ahead of us the road breaks up. Ahead is the east and the war. You and me, two complete strangers. Completely different species. How come I feel so calm, so happy?

You tell me about the battle for Donetsk airport, the battle I’m researching.

‘The separatists wanted to take the airport in time for Putin’s birthday as a present for him. They were going to use this rocket launcher, Buratino, it’s like a weapon of mass destruction, it destroys every living thing within a radius of three k. Our commanding officers weren’t confirming this openly, but they weren’t denying it either. But we were pretty convinced by the way the separatists were evacuating weapons and people away from the airport. In just a few hours the airport, which had been under fire and siege for months, was no longer surrounded. It’s like, there’s this terrible silence all round. The first silence in that airport. All night we were preparing for the end. I rang my daughter, I helped her do her homework over the phone, then I took a good while to wash myself with wet wipes. There’d been no water for a long time. No one wanted to sleep and someone suggested looking for basements. We looked all over but didn’t find any. But actually no basement would have saved us from Buratino and that kind of consoled us. At dawn they began storming the building with tanks. You cannot imagine how ecstatic we were. It meant they weren’t going to use Buratino.’

We were going in deeper, closer and closer to Donbas. Passing wretched, tumbledown houses, broken-up roads and I’m thinking how depressing it all is. You say, ‘it’s depressing isn’t it’. We drive on. We drive through a pine forest. I think, can’t beat a pine forest. You say, ‘can’t beat a pine forest, can you’. We drive on.

We drive into Kirovograd. I’ve never been to Kirovograd, no one comes to towns like this unless they have to. We’re in the military zone now, and you set up an interview for me with a famous battalion commander. For four hours he tells me funny and not-so-funny stories about Donetsk airport, for my research. He tells me things, shows me photos. He must have forgotten you shouldn’t show civilians pictures of bodies ripped to pieces.

‘Once we killed these three separatists and we thought we’d keep their bodies in one of the freezers left round the airport. We thought we might exchange them for some of their captives but no one ever came looking for them. So there they were, the three of them, stuffed in tight together. When we had new recruits they often tried to use that freezer as a table to eat off. And every time one of the more senior lads would come over and fling back the freezer door.

‘We lost a captain on our last tour. We couldn’t find his body. And then we all gathered for a briefing one day and suddenly in the complete silence a mobile rang. It wasn’t one of ours. This childish ringtone ringing out in the derelict airport, no idea where it was coming from. We started to look and we found a body in the debris. It was the lost captain. His mobile was in his pocket and his mum was calling him. It was probably friendly fire that killed him, and his body had been hidden.’

We both stay in a hotel with the most totally inappropriate name: The Palatial. A twin room. You lie down on the bed on the right, lay your machine gun and handgun tenderly by the pillow, sigh a couple of times and fall asleep. Too quickly – you aren’t pretending. You snore. I lie on hot coals all night. And not because I see before my eyes the photographs from the commander who forgot that you shouldn’t show civilians pictures of bodies ripped to pieces by explosions. And not because you are snoring. I lie on hot coals for one reason only. I want you.

I think about how it could happen right now. You get up and come over to me. Or you stretch out your hand in the darkness. No, you say ‘come here’ in a commanding voice. And I step into your dark bed. But no. You won’t call me. You lie there, surrounded by your weapons and snoring.

‘I was injured, so I had to leave the airport with the lads who were leaving after their tour, going back to Peski. At the last moment someone threw a sack of kittens into the car. The mother had been killed in the fighting, the kittens were left and it was a shame to leave them, so we thought we’d take them with. Only we forgot to tell the driver. So we were driving along and we get into some trouble. They’re shooting at us. The car is hit, and it keeps dying and the driver can’t work out how to get it started again, and this bag of kittens opens an...