I live in a small village outside of Vienna. At a community center I meet with several Ukrainian families taking shelter here. They hide among the locals, fearful of Russian security agents. Unlike other refugees in Austria, the Ukrainians want to go home. I get it. I’ve practiced medicine in war zones in Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East. My family in America believe I am as far away from the threat as they are. But the distance from my village to the front is the same as the distance from Santa Barbara to Sacramento. Every morning since the invasion began, I stand outside in my backyard and raise my Geiger counter to the east. It ticks lackadaisically and I sigh with relief. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is upwind from us. And like Chernobyl, a disaster would send the fallout our way. Making our milk radioactive for years, our mushrooms inedible for longer. At the gathering I point to the Geiger counter I brought with and show the readout to the Ukrainian families. They throw me an OK sign. The parents try to speak to me, first in German, then English, only to revert to their native language in frustration. Their teenagers try harder, with a need to break away from their loneliness. They left their friends behind, and their social media can’t fill the gap. Finally, one teenage girl pulls out a deck of cards where we sit in the hall for a meet and greet. Poker? Blackjack? She shuffles, giving me and her sisters six cards each. She then nurses me through several hands of Durak. Durak, the word for a fool in Russian, is also one of the most popular card games on both sides of the war. It is a game of attack, aggression, and withdrawal. Soldiers play Durak in trenches, in tanks, and in barns by candlelight. Perhaps their leaders, vying for power, are the real Durak, the real fools. Has our attempt at diplomacy boiled down to arms shipments alone? We, like the Ukrainians, just want to raise our children, and have prosperity without greed. We want to live quietly, separate from imposed political agendas. Maybe we are the Durak for wanting such simple things. We play another hand, and one teenage girl looks at me with a little smile, and tells me I have won. I don’t feel like a winner or a loser. Nobody keeps score or places bets. We keep playing until their parents pull them away. We promise to play again. A few months pass, and we never do. We see each other bicycling around in the village and wave. And then one day they are gone.
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Dr. Raymond is a family and emergency physician. He has practiced in eight countries in four languages, and currently lives in Austria with his wife. When not volunteering his practice skills, he is writing, lecturing, or scuba diving. In 2008, he discovered the wreck of a Bulgarian freighter in the Black Sea. He has multiple medical citations, along with publications in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Grief Diaries, The Examined Life Journal, The Satirist, Chicago Literati, Blood Moon Rising, Saddlebag Dispatches, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, and in the Sci-Fi anthologies Sanctuary and Alien Dimensions among others. He is the fiction editor of SavagePlanets magazine.
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Nadia Arioli’s visual art can be found as the cover of Permafrost, in Wrongdoing Magazine, Feral, Strawberry Moon, Anti-Heroin Chic, Northwest Review (Forthcoming) and Kissing Dynamite (forthcoming). They illustrated James Rodehaver’s chapbooks, published by Cringe Worthy Poetry Collective.
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