Really couldn't think of a good way to title this post.
I was on the way to the institute and came upon a dead body. Carrie said almost every volunteer sees one while in Ukraine, but I still wasn't prepared for it. There it was, lying on the sidewalk in the melting snow. It was a man, fairly tall, lying on his back, heavy boots pointing up, ivory-white and blue-streaked hands sticking out of his coat, fur hat sticking out at an angle from under the purple cloth covering his face. A trail of blood ran from underneath the cloth, down the sidewalk and pooling in the street, diluted thin by the water.
An ambulance sat silent in the street and two policemen interviewed what I assume were eye witnesses. I glanced up at the eves of the buildings: there are a lot of injuries from falling stalagmites when the temperature comes up above freezing, as it has been for the past few days. But the eves were clear. The only thing I could think was that he slipped on the ice, hit his head. He was right in front of the candy store, and I somehow found that ironic.
Mostly I was sad and disturbed. He was right by the door to the institute and I had to step over the trail of blood to go inside. The first thought was: "interesting", then I was hit by a pang of sadness, then I was worried at my first reaction. Then I put it out of my head.
I was even more disturbed when I left two hours later and he was still lying there. The police were gone. The ambulance was there but there was no one in it. People walked by, glancing at the body as they passed. Were the police waiting for it to be identified? Why was it still there? No yellow tape, nothing to stop me from again having to step over trail of blood, feet passing within inches of his boots, me looking closer this time, letting my gaze linger a little longer at the brown coat, dark jeans, black boots, purple cloth. The hands were the only part of him that made it seem like anything other than a mannequin. My sister, who is a nurse and has lost patients, says that they stop looking human when they die, that they don't look like a person anymore. I had that thought while looking at his hands, because I thought they did look real, almost hyper-real, the skin so white and the veins so blue.
I looked forward and kept walking.
When I was going back to the institute a few hours later, I had to push my way through a political rally for Yulia Tymonshenko. "The shit I have to go through to get to work," I thought. When I arrived at the institute, the body was gone and the blood washed away. I made sure not to step on the place where the body had lain--as if that was somehow sacreligous--and went inside.
For the rest of the day, I tried not to think about it.