A rehabilitation and functional rehabilitation center, somewhere in the Paris region. On wheelchairs, amputees, often following road accidents or severe diabetes. And Artem Petrovskyi, a Ukrainian soldier in his twenties currently being treated in France. He was the victim of a Russian shell which tore off his left leg, 2,500 kilometers from here, near Kharkiv.
His other rump was fractured in three places. She is corseted with splints and crucified with multiple metal pins. The injured man no longer has a spleen and has suffered from intestinal infections. He is also left with the scars left by metal shrapnel that pierced one in the shoulder and the other near the heart. He also picked up a splinter in his ear which is impairing his hearing.
The injured man wears a sweatshirt flocked with a weapon and the colors of his country. He carries a satchel on the side where it is written “veteran”. It is, indeed. He already is, a veteran, this kid with fluffy cheeks, with an adolescent look, crushed before his time in the jaws of war. On a table in his room are two gold-colored inflatable numbers – a 2 and a 1 – that Ukrainian exiles brought on December 27, 2022, his birthday. He is 21 years old, this veteran who has seen all the horror of the fighting and who will have to recover, physically as well as morally. He is at the beginning of his life and, at this dawn, mutilated forever, of a member and of the right to carelessness of youth.
We guess the trauma
The soldier recounts what happened to him, regularly massaging an itchy stump, as if the missing leg reminded him along with the memories. His permanent smile, his cold humor, his lymphatic way of drawing on his low-burning cigarette, of drinking his insulated bottle filled with soluble coffee, while recounting the hand-to-hand combat, the point-blank shootings, are only a decoy. We guess the trauma. The mind will take even longer to cauterize than the body.
His story is a mixture of very detailed moments, of photographic and even cinematic memory, interspersed with wide ellipses where his brain searches in vain for the thread. It has black holes, “empty passages”, as he says. “I forgot a lot of things. » The young man does not, strictly speaking, suffer from amnesia. Rather, his injury gave a new hierarchy to his life. This commotion crushed, made contingent everything he had stored up in him before the beginning of the Russian invasion.
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