Part 4 - The Long Escape The Russian evacuation vehicle crashed through the wreckage of the forest, passing the upturned, splintered poplar trees and cratered roads. The man riding on top, wherever they could find space to cling, could barely hang on, moaning. Ivan knew he needed a plan, urgently, otherwise they would send him back into battle right away. Whether it had been riding itself through his mind all along, or whether he thought of it on the spot, he would never know. But the answer was self-evident. He needed to insist on surgery for his back. Years earlier, Ivan was holding Sasha in his arms when he fell down hard. Pain shot up his leg and back. It was a herniated disk. Ivan began trying to remember how Roman limped when he came back from the SVO so he could replicate it. He decided that his gait should be more laborious. He needed to really wince when he put weight on his foot. When the vehicle pulled up to a field hospital, it was a broken building with no window panes. Just polyethylene flapping over the frames. There were medics writing down what kind of injury each man had. Ivan observed that most of the assembled could rip open their uniforms and show some kind of blood. He needed to think. He let everyone pass him. What have you got, the medic asked him? My back. What? You got hit in the back? Wounded? No. My back's jammed. Hernia. The guy eyed him. Alright, I'll put you on the other list. At the entrance, the men unclip their belts, unlace their boots and hand it in their armor. The injured were wandering around in their socks on tiles streaked with blood and grime. The nurses couldn't keep up with the mopping. Ivan saw one of his subordinates, space, talking on a cell phone. He thought he had bagged everyone's phone and left them with line before the operation. "Why do you have your phone?" Ivan demanded. "Well, shit," commander, space said, "I had more than one." "First of all, you're an asshole. You didn't follow orders," Ivan told him. "And secondly, give me the phone now, I need to call my wife." Ivan dialed Anna. Everything is fine, he told her. "I'm alive. We're back from there." Anna was sobbing so hard she couldn't speak. When Ivan got off the call, he went inside. It seemed as if the doctors there were churning everyone they could through an X-ray machine. They told Ivan they would X-ray his back, too. My problem doesn't show up on X-rays, Ivan insisted. "I need an MRI," no one listened. The doctors at the field hospitals were overworked, under-prepared, or under-qualified. Either way, they had a reputation for making mistakes. Bare blood, Ivan's deputy, who lost part of a finger in the battle, wasn't even X-rayed properly, so they didn't spot trap mill in his wound, which would get infected and fester. Months later, he would need to have two additional phalanges removed. As the men waited, someone brought them breakfast. The plate was plain, watery potatoes with meat and onions. But Ivan had never tasted anything so good. It was almost sweet, melting in his mouth. There was tea in regular cardboard cups. The firmness of the cardboard felt like a luxury. A galette, which was probably not even a galette, that they dunked in the tea seemed so sweet, too. An hour ago, he was under fire, and now he was sitting barefoot on a bench, eating delicious food. He couldn't stop marveling at the contrast. He was sure in that moment that he would remember this meal for the rest of his life. Ivan limped all the way to the sleeping quarters. He washed his clothes, and was a shower. The two minutes under the water felt like a dream. He hadn't showered in more than a month. He lay down on a clean cup that felt so soft that these realities existed simultaneously was bewildering, a place where there is always something to eat, which people tried to clean with running water, and yet, at the same time, in the distance, you can still hear the explosions, he thought, and promptly fell asleep. The next morning, Ivan was told he would be pushed onward to a hospital in Donetsk for further examination. The men loaded up into a truck. Donetsk was where the military sorted the injured. The fulcrum of the reverse march from Russia's strategy of throwing its men relentlessly at the front. Some were operated on there, others were flown to Moscow, were driven to Rostov on Don. As they waited for intake and triage, Ivan relished the line. The same worthless paperwork and thumb twiddling that had always irritated him became an asset. He had a lot to think about. He needed to get back to Russian soil. He wasn't sure what he would do once he got there, but he knew it would give him the time to figure it out. Donetsk was not safe enough, if you were unlucky, it was still possible to be redeployed to the front line in a few hours. The doctor who initially examined Ivan referred him to a neurologist. When Ivan said he needed a neurosurgeon, he was told there were none. The neurologist began to probe his leg, raising and lowering it, telling Ivan to tell him when the pain started, Ivan yelled, "There, there!" he feigned. "You'll be fine," the doctor told him, "It will pass." Ivan tried to show the doctor his old MRI scan on his phone, but the doctor refused to look at anything, not print it on paper. Ivan was to fill the prescription and return to his unit. This cannot be the end of this story. He raced to print out his old MRI scan. He went back to the original doctor. The neurologist wouldn't even look at the results of my MRI, Ivan said. "I know I need surgery, but he tells me to take a pill. I need a neurosurgeon. Can you send me to Moscow?" To St. Petersburg. The doctor looked at Ivan's printout and agreed to refer him to a different neurologist. Ivan could not afford another setback. As he waited for transport, he called his mother. She had an acquaintance, who was a military neurosurgeon, and specifically dealt with backs. "Give me her phone number," he said. "I need to talk to her right away." Ivan's mother didn't ask questions, but he wouldn't have told her anything anyway. Ivan couldn't have her thinking he was a traitor. He would break her heart, or worse. Ivan's mother was a patriot. She cared more about appearances than about Ivan's realities. This did not hurt Ivan's feelings, because he did not expect it to be another way. When Ivan reached his mother's friend, he explained that the situation in Donetsk was bad. "My back really hurts," he told her. "I'm worried that since I don't have as much pain now, they will send me back. But as soon as I put on my body armor, immediately everything will get worse. When you're lying down, if you can lift your leg above 30 degrees, you're probably not as acute of a case," she explained to him. Ivan thanked her and got off the phone. He had definitely raised his leg further than 30 degrees at the neurologist. He should have started yelping much earlier. He cursed himself for not preparing. Each mistake could cost him his life. Ivan knew he had to be personable. He chatted up the next neurologist, asking him about the situation in Donetsk. Ivan had been destroying the city since 2014, but Ivan noticed that people were eerily unfazed. Parents still walked the streets with their children who played outside in playgrounds. Water was intermittent. The hospital stockpiled it in buckets. "I have no pencils, no paper," the doctor complained. "We buy everything at our own expense," Ivan nodded and groaned along at all the right places. The doctor examined him and said he could send him on to a civilian hospital to see a neurosurgeon there and do another MRI, but he would have to pay for it out of pocket. No question about it, Ivan said, "I'll pay whatever I need to pay. I'll go everywhere I need to go." He left the appointment and immediately went to the store. He bought some stationery and some cognac and returned. "Please, so everything is normal," Ivan said as he handed the items to the doctor. "I just wish you'd keep me here a little longer." The doctor understood. Ivan got on the MRI waiting list. It would be at least 10 days. He needed to pinpoint exactly what symptoms he needed to qualify for surgery. Only surgery would guarantee him a ticket to Russia. Ivan called Roman and asked how he was faring. He said he was much better after rehabilitation. The pain had been so intense that Roman didn't just limp. He dragged his leg. Ivan realized he needed to correct his gait, rather than wincing with each step. He would start pulling his leg behind him. Ivan decided to start saying that before the war, a doctor at home had told him that he needed surgery to make everyone believe that a higher authority than Ivan had cleared it. As an officer, he figured he could insist on doing the procedure in a military hospital in Moscow or St. Petersburg, where the surgeons were competent enough that the operation most likely wouldn't harm him, even if he didn't actually need it. And going through with it would grant him six months of leave for rehabilitation. Maybe the war would be over by then. When the civilian neurosurgeon finally saw him, Ivan went through his whole routine. "Yeah, this is a problem," the civilian doctor told Ivan. "You can either do the surgery at this hospital for a fee or in Russia with your military insurance." "No, no, no," Ivan said, "I would like to be in the military structure." He watched as the doctor wrote his recommendations. The words that would get Ivan back to safety, surgical intervention. He had no idea if a doctor had bought the ruse or if he was just playing along. Either way, the man was saving his life. In the first Russian city Ivan reached Rostov on Don, he marveled at the silence. There was no shelling or sounds of war anywhere. Ivan had continued to think about his act as he traveled. He decided to add a cane to his performance. He thought it would distinguish him from the crowd when he returned to the base, signifying that his injury was serious rather than some kind of sprain. Not far from the train station, he found a shop selling canes. It was November, it would be winter soon. Ivan was playing the long game. He decided to buy the nicest cane. It was solid black with a retractable spike for the ice. He wandered the back streets, practicing how to use it with his left hand while dragging his leg behind him. He went to the post office and put his cane on the table to fill out some paperwork. But when Ivan turned around, it was gone. He was in uniform so the person who stole it had to know it was a wounded war veteran's cane. Welcome home. Ivan had joined the tens of thousands of men making their way through the Russian military's medical system, loaded onto evacuation trains, transferred and retransferred into hospitals for treatment and rehabilitation, eventually ending up back at their bases. As he moved through Russia, Ivan perfected his limp and his grimaces. Watching the other injured men around him, he realized that surgery might not be the solution he originally believed it to be, that eventually he would be rehabilitated and sent back to the front line almost as soon as the bandages came off. When he finally got back to his base, he went straight to the colonel's office without showering or shaving. He wanted to look as rough as he could. "I have to have back surgery," he explained, showing everyone his paperwork. "I got an injection to block the pain. It's enough for a while, but I have to have surgery." "Ah, you have the same story as Roman," they replied at the office at HR at the medical clinic, offering him a chair. He was easier to sell his act because they had already heard it. Why would they think to doubt its veracity? Instead, they sped up his paperwork. An injured captain was a war hero. He was on the next flight to Anna and Sasha. Anna met him at the airport. She could scarcely believe that he was real, that he was whole, that he was with her again. They took the weekend to celebrate, but they couldn't allow themselves any further opportunity to relax. They knew they were on borrowed time. "I'm never going back there again," I even told Anna. "Never, under no circumstances will I go back to war. I'd rather die." Russian's have two passports, International and Domestic. When Anna wrote to a detail lesson on Telegram, she explained that Ivan's foreign passport was locked in a safe at the Human Resources Office at the base. The person typing on the other end explained that because Ivan did not have his international passport, his only opportunity to leave Russia would be to use his domestic passport to go to another country in the collective security treaty organization, Russia's answer to NATO, which includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Once Ivan arrived in a CSTO country, he would have to remain there. He would not be in Russia, but he would not be safe, either. Ivan and Anna had followed the case of Mikhail Zilin, a federal guard service officer who sent his wife and child to Kazakhstan and later crossed the border illegally because FGS officers are forbidden to leave Russia. Moscow put Zilin on an international wanted list, and the Kazakh authorities arrested him despite his request for asylum. In December 2022, they deported him to Russia despite the public pleas of his wife and efforts from NGOs. Zilin was subsequently sentenced to six and a half years in prison for desertion and illegal border crossing. Anna decided that the CSTO was not an option. They needed to get as far away from Russia as they could, to a country that would not extradite Ivan once he was declared a wall or a deserter. He agreed in principle but had no idea how to do it. How can I run without a passport, Ivan asked her. Anna was undeterred. Ivan spent his vacation focused on the practicalities. He needed to find the hospital in Moscow with the longest waiting list. They worked together and separately. Anna went back and forth across telegram channels, websites and message boards. She decided on the country they should go to. She told Ivan that she would start studying cosmetology. She needed a profession that wouldn't require her to speak the local language. She would leave first with Sasha. That part would be easier, civilians even the wives of officers were free to travel. Ivan would find a way to join them. Maybe he would have to run through the forest, or maybe if he felt hard enough, he could find a legal way to quit. He just needed more time. Anna registered for courses and an apprenticeship at a salon. She started organizing paperwork, a passport for Sasha. She felt she was at the edge of a chasm, stepping into the unknown with no idea if they would make it or none. They spent the New Year's holiday together. They planned and planned. It would be the last time they saw each other until they met again in their final destination. Anna sat Ivan down, she had been thinking about it. If you don't make it to us, it's okay. Just stay alive, she told him. "I'll know you're alive somewhere, and that's the most important." "I'll do anything to get to you," he told her. "I'll arrange for some guy to load me into a cargo container ship. I'll get to you somehow." When Ivan returned to the base, he went back to work as he waited to get on the surgery list. He reported to all the formations, the meetings, the paper pushing, but now with the respect of a captain injured in war. He kept the curtains closed in their apartment so he could move around without the cane. Otherwise it would be easy to spot him from the main street downstairs, from that bench at the skate park where he used to watch Anna in their kitchen. It could jeopardize the whole thing. Every night he came home and ate his dinner while streaming some TV show on his computer. Then he put everything aside and sat at the kitchen table in silence. Maybe he could get himself declared insane and be discharged. He had heard about a guy at his base who told the base psychologist that he had fallen asleep on duty, dreamed of killing himself and woke up with a gun in his mouth that he didn't remember putting there. Rumor was that the guy would be dismissed for being mentally unfit for service. Because Ivan could get a fake mental health exemption certificate. Sometimes when he had an idea, like trying to be declared mentally unfit, he messaged his Idite Lesham coordinator. Within the group, Ivan's case had been passed to Anton Gorbatsovich, who specialized in complicated situations. Though the team was public, Ivan knew little about the man he was corresponding with directly, but he liked Anton's manner. He was calm, collected, and responsive. He inspired trust, even though Ivan did not know his last name. For over a decade, Anton had been in opposition politics in St. Petersburg. He was soft-spoken and good with people. Anton himself had fled Russia within days after the mobilization was announced. He had taken a circuitous route to the land crossing with Georgia and had been hunted, threatened, and extorted by the police at checkpoint after checkpoint. So he understood the urgency and anxiety of Ivan's situation better than many. When Anton told Ivan that mental unfitness didn't disqualify anyone from serving anymore because of the mobilization, Ivan returned to thinking. One night it occurred to him. All he needed was his passport. So what if he got a fake and somehow swapped it with his real one? "Hello. I got an idea for a passport," he wrote to Anton. "I can come to HR physically in the office and take it. The issue was only duplication. I've heard there are people on the dark net who can help." "Yes, that's a good idea," Anton replied. He pointed Ivan toward Rutor, a Russian site on the dark web. People could make all kinds of passports, ten-year biometric passports with fingerprints, newer five-year passports with chips, a customer could send a photo of himself, and the seller would find a person who looks similar from the database of real valid passports and change the surname, the first name, the patronymic, at a cost of up to $10,000. Ivan's passport was issued seven years earlier. To create a good replica, he needed to redo the photograph. In his original picture, he had bangs. So he sat down with Photoshop and added bangs, hair by hair. He played with his haircut, making it boxier. He smoothed out his complexion. He moved his ears little by little. He took off some pounds and gave himself a more pronounced jawline. He pulled sideburns from stock images, added them and smoothed them out. It took him a few hours until he was happy with the result. Ivan sent the photo to the seller who showed Ivan what the final page would look like. Ivan would pay $60,000, $650, and then wait about a month. He had submitted the paperwork for surgery, but nothing had moved. Ivan began preparing anyway so he could leave as quickly as possible when the fake passport arrived. He needed to sell their things. He started new telegram accounts to list items so they couldn't be traced to him. Within a few weeks, he was living in an empty apartment. He slept on an old mattress on the floor. When the passport arrived, Ivan noticed that it was missing the watermark and the hologram. The seller had claimed that it would be an identical replica. Ivan kicked himself for not discussing every single detail, but decided he wouldn't complain. Probably no one would examine the passport that thoroughly. His real problem was how to swap it without getting caught. Ivan knew the Human Resources Office from years of worthless paperwork and reports. The HR manager sat at a desk on the right side of the room. Next to him was a six-foot high metal safe with three drawers. They were unlocked with a key. The passports were kept in folders inside the drawers. Each passport had a paper bookmark in it with various biographical details. Ivan thought about returning after hours waiting for the duty officer to go to the bathroom and picking the lock, but that seemed too risky. He would have to find a way to take the passport under the pretense of borrowing it, but he didn't think they would let him just walk off with the document, even asking would raise too much suspicion. "What could I need it for that I couldn't do with it inside the room?" he asked himself. "Maybe," he reasoned, he would say he needed to write something down for his wife's job application and make the switch while the duty officer and anyone else were present. To complicate matters, Ivan could use only one arm. The other would be holding the cane as part of his act, so he had to walk in with his cane and his left hand, take the passport with his free right hand, and somehow swap it for the fake. He would also need to remove the bookmark from the original and place it into the duplicate before returning it. How could he do all that with just one hand? The HR manager's desk faced the room. Ivan would have to find a way to reach into his pocket while holding both the cane and the passport. No, that wouldn't work. He would need to find a way to sit down, put down his cane so he could have two free hands and then reach into his pocket. But that motion could be seen from the side or the back. He decided he had to avoid unnecessary movements. He would have to sit down, put his cane down, and start taking down the passport details while making the swap. Ivan thought maybe he could stick his passport up his sleeve. At home, he put on his uniform and practiced. The passport was bulky, bigger than his wrist, someone could notice. Ivan sat down at the kitchen table to think. He attended meetings with a moleskin-type notebook. Maybe he could take the notebook as if he were coming from some mindless meeting. He carried it in his right hand. What if I take it, open it, and slip the passport inside? When he tried it, he realized that the notebook bulged a bit. You could see something smaller sandwiched inside the larger book easily. Just imagine if it slipped out and there were two identical passports on the ground. He sat down again to think. What if I cut a hole in the notebook and put it in there? Ivan took out a knife and carved a hole in the center of the notebook's pages. He left blank pages at the back, so if anyone asked him to write something down, it would still be usable. He practiced how he would do it. He would walk into the office. To his right, the HR manager would be seated facing the room. "Priviet, can I have my passport, please? I need to write something down for my wife. I'll copy it down right here," Ivan rehearsed. The guy would turn, open the safe, and hand-dive in the passport. Ivan would take the passport with his right hand, the same one holding the notebook, and walk over to a table he knew was on the other side of the room. If it was empty, he would sit down. If it was occupied, he would say, "Buddy, can I sit down? I'll write it down quickly." He was the one with a cane, after all. Of course you can, comrade captain. He imagined the reply. He was an officer, injured in war. Ivan would sit down and lean his cane against the table. Keeping his original passport in his right hand, he would open the notebook with his left. His finger is flipping the cover to reveal the duplicate passport in the hole. Ivan would pull out the duplicate with his left hand and insert the original passport with his right. Once it was in, he would pull the bookmark out of the passport and close the notebook. He would reopen the notebook from the back to an empty page and start to copy the details from the duplicate. As he wrote, he would casually lean back in his chair and ask the guy how the morning formation went that day, so he would see that Ivan was relaxed. When he was done, Ivan would close the notebook from the back and pick it up tightly by the binding in one hand with the duplicate passport on top. He would return it to the duty officer the same way he had taken it and walk out, leaning on his cane. He spent a night and a day at home, practicing the movements. He timed it until he could do it fast, almost with his eyes closed. He wanted to be quick, muscle memory, so if he were nervous he wouldn't stumble or shake. The trick wasn't just in the double-handed swap, but in moving the pages and cover backward and forward with his fingers simultaneously, like a difficult piano piece. Once he mastered the movements, Ivan spent a week casing the HR office, determining when it was the least busy. He learned that the usual senior human resources officer had left for the SVO, and that his place was a green, young lieutenant whom Ivan outranked. Perfect. Ivan waited for the evening, when he had noticed that there typically were fewer people in the office. When he walked in, the young officer was alone. Once Ivan explained what he needed, the officer handed him the passport. Ivan took the original and sat down. His hands were steady. His fingers flicking open the notebook, pulling out the duplicate, while his right hand dropped in the original and pulled the bookmark out seamlessly. He slid the bookmark into the duplicate. It couldn't have been more than a few seconds, but it felt endless. The passports were swapped. Ivan opened a fresh page and began to write numbers. "How did the formation go?" he asked, leaning back in the chair, turning to the officer. "Well damn, there was some bullshit there," the kid replied. "Yeah, like always," Ivan answered, relaxed, slowly writing. He stood up, took his cane, walked back to the desk and handed over the passport. The guy didn't even look at it. Just put it back in the folder. Ivan walked out of the room and back to his car, holding the notebook tightly in his hand. He got in and settled behind the wheel before allowing himself to peep inside. He saw the hologram. It was his original passport. His insides melted. He had really done it. He called Anna. The bird is in the cage, he whispered. The bird is in the cage. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
