Against the backdrop of mortars and missile strikes, mobilized infantry, mechanized artillery, mayhem and massacres — scribbled and sprawled against the backdrop of war — nothing fails quite as hopelessly as language.

Words, they stutter and falter.

There are just no words. No words adequate enough. No appropriate words. No words at all.

You come to a distant border in a distant land — Dorohusk, Poland — to serve those seeking refuge from the storm clouds of fire and shrapnel in the neighboring country.

You make them coffee and tea, you hand them food and clothes and medicine, stuffed animals and candies. You offer transport to their places of refuge.

Weary, exhausted, broken but with utter gratitude they say thank you.

But there is no appropriate response.

No problem?

Of course there is a problem. To put it mildly.

Any time?

Who would be so cruel as to utter the phrase “any time” in the context of war?

My pleasure?

Enough. Enough already.

Flag at the Dorohusk Border Crossing

The language barrier in peacetime is already a challenge enough. But a whole new dimension is added to this barrier by the presence of war.

Here at the Dorohusk border crossing/ad hoc refugee camp/humanitarian aid depot, many of these families I’m serving, they’ve travelled days, some even a week or more through bombed out streets, over mangled bridges, sleeping in cramped bomb shelters and basements along the way, to reach what safety we have to offer. Our trips in my rental car from the border to their next destinations — be it train stations, hotels, or houses of asylum — last anywhere from three to eight hours.

Countless hours then of contemplating the correct words and coming up short.

What can I say to those who, for the last three, four, five weeks, have heard nothing but the buzz of fighter jets, impacts of mortars, torrents of gunfire and the wail of air raid sirens?

There simply are no words.

I can only offer a hospitable silence. A smile, a handshake or hug, a meal at a roadside McDonald’s, a safe journey to wherever they ask me to take them.

Perhaps a still silence is exactly what they want now.

Perhaps there is a secret language hidden in that still silence. A tacit acknowledgement that there exists a horror in the world that eludes all adjectives and adverbs. A pact and understanding between us that certain things are better unspoken so as not to diminish them with cheap talk.

I am reminded of Samuel Beckett:

I shall state silence more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

Dorohusk Border Crossing

The overwhelming majority of those crossing the border are children. Busloads from Ukrainian orphanages arrive daily. Swarms of young mothers with their babies and toddlers and young adolescents in tow.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were standing at the entrance queue of DisneyLand. A grotesque thought considering the truth.

But perhaps, in a way, that’s where these children think they’re headed. Many have been told they are simply going on vacation for a while. I suppose it’s easier to explain a vacation to a child rather than an evacuation. The difference between the words is merely on the emphasis; they both derive from the same etymological root, after all — vacate.

Vacate (v) to cause to be empty or unoccupied; make vacant.

And what is the etymology of War?

In short, it derives from the same old Germanic word as Worst.

Dorohusk Border Crossing

****

Nearly every day at the Dorohusk border refugee center arrives a Ukrainian man in a dilapidated transporter van. He seeks and collects supplies to deliver to his village, starving out due to supply chain breakdowns. Food and blankets and medicine he asks for primarily.

He looks weathered, exhausted, thoroughly destroyed. When I calculate the drive time to and from his village, adding in the waiting times at either side of the border, my equation totals zero sleep.

I call him the Sad Faced Man.

Each day he arrives in silent humility, extends me a firm handshake, looks at me with intense pleading with own drooping, bloodshot eyes and nods at the food storage tent.

As time wears on our provision supplies grow ever more depleted. The people of Europe, tragically, are already beginning to forget about the war, the human catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine. Our attention spans are no longer suited to more than a month of battle.

Some days he arrives, his gray stubble now grown into an unkempt beard, and we have nothing to give him.

He lingers silently for a while, hoping for provisions to appear by chance. And perhaps that hope for the impossible is what sustains him through these days without reprieve.

But some days nothing appears.

He silently returns to his van for the long drive home, only to return the next day, looking progressively worse for the wear each time.

In his silence he says nothing, but in that nothingness the most emphatic words are spoken.

What I hear is this: War is hell.

When those refugees I’m assisting do speak of the war, though they speak in Ukrainian or Russian, I’m able to understand quite clearly. The words they use: “rocket”, “grad”, “mortar”, “bomb” — they’re essentially the same in all languages.

I suppose that makes the language of war, in a sense, universal.

Interesting how through those fortified walls of stoic silence, only such a universal language can penetrate. Was then the language of Babel the language of war?

One day at the Dorohusk refugee reception center, where I’m helping unload provisions from vans arriving from across Europe and load them onto humanitarian convoys headed into Ukraine, a frail, eldery Orthodox priest arrives. He is accompanied by his son, too a priest, and his son’s large family.

Shrinking, weak and immobile, the elderly priest looks to be 120. At the least. He’s clearly disoriented. He blesses us volunteers before he’s rolled into the center in his creaky, weathered wheelchair, then blesses himself as he crosses the threshold.

He has entered a sanctuary of sorts, I suppose.

And upon entering, he immediately falls to silent sleep on a military-style cot.

His grandson stands in the corridor to the kitchen in his own blank-faced silence, holding up a piece of paper.

In Ukrainian and Polish, his sign reads: “It would be cool if you gave me a high five.”

We volunteers give him his high fives. He smiles. We smile.

And perhaps that’s all that needs to be said in such times — mere tangible human connection, one open hand pressed briefly and briskly against another, a smile shared.

Dorohusk Humanitarian Aid/Refugee Center

Driving back to the border checkpoint one afternoon from Wrocław, where I’ve just delivered a grandmother from Zaporzhzhiya, Lyudmila, and her speechless grandson, a flock of birds fly above the car. I gaze upon them in their weightless gliding formations for a moment, gently careening without worry, without intent, without care, and think there may be some peace in the world after all.

A song by Hot Water Music comes on my playlist —

“Collect your things and run if you can

Don’t look back on the rising tide again

’Cause what is gone is gone in the end

We only got what we had when we began”

I think of all those who have already collected their things and run. And then my mind turns to those still trapped in Mariupol and Kharkiv, in Kyiv and Chernihiv, in Zaporizhzhya and Slavyansk. Instead of flocks of birds floating quietly above their homes — flocks of fighter jets and grad rockets. Instead of chirps and tweets and songs…

The birds somehow look different now.

It’s another seven hours of driving back to Dorohusk, alone.

Beginning a journey with one of many refugee families

And yet another day of war across the border rages. But this one, different. A day when the silence was somehow broken, if just for a moment.

On this day I meet a refugee from Kyiv named Tania.

Over tea Tania tells me about how she was a singer-songwriter in Kyiv. She arrived in Poland several weeks earlier as a refugee with almost nothing. A few weeks into her stay in Poland, she stills seems confused, dazed, lost for words.

Not least perhaps because she had to leave her guitar behind, the means by with which she knew best how to speak.

Due to overcrowding on the buses and the urgency of the evacuations, refugees often arrive with little more than the clothes they are wearing and some small personal effects, she explains.

I understand this must be particularly a problem for musicians like Tania. The one means they have for processing, negotiating and sublimating such an experience — their instruments — must be left behind.

Hearing Tania’s story, I make a judgment call and use raised refugee funds to purchase her a new guitar. My hope is she can continue playing and writing her music while in exile from her war torn country. My hope is she can find a semblance of peace.

After giving her the new guitar, I ask if she could play a song of hers for me.

Watching Tania play, I have my first true moment of clarity in over three weeks of working at the border.

It is this: Despite war, despite the decimation of language, despite the untold, unspoken human suffering, despite everything — from cities to syllables — being vacated both physically and spiritually, there will always be music.

And as long as there is music, man will find his voice, his words, his footing, his peace again.

As she plays, I think of the Sad Face Man, the boy with the sign and his elderly priest grandfather, the pensioner from

Chernigiv who could only nervously utter “Missiles! Grads Mortars!” when I asked about his city during a McDonald’s pit stop. Yes, I think of the many silent families I’ve tried my best to assist along the way — the gold-toothed granny and her taciturn grandson who needed a lift to Wrocław; the young husband from Kharkiv and his pregnant wife headed to Chełm; the lady from Kramatorsk who nearly cried while thanking me for a simple cup of instant coffee at the border crossing.

Yes, I think of them all here singing along with Tania now, finally finding those words buried beneath the rumble and rubble of war. I imagine the jets and missiles soaring above their towns shedding their steel skin, them too becoming again simple, singing birds.

Even in the absence of appropriate words, even under eternal aerial assault, even while huddled in bunkers and shelters and refugee camps — as long as there is music, the soul of man shall persist, I realise.

I no longer despair at my own loss of words. There shall always be music, yes, that utter inversion of war.

Here is Tania playing that new guitar in the Old Town of Lublin.

It is an original song of hers.