War through the eyes of Medusa readers. Today we publish Natasha's letter.
I work in Russia in a large state theater in a city with a population of one million, but not in the capital. Signs with the names of the artists are usually hung near the dressing rooms. Once, at the beginning of the war, someone drew the unfortunate "Z" next to some of the names - not as a sign of pride, but simply so that no one would start talking about the war with these people, because normal dialogue did not work. The prank was successful and everyone fell silent.
The abscess broke when a few days ago some terrible photo exhibition about the Northern Military District appeared in the lobby of our theater. The most incomprehensible event to me in this context is the little dialogue in the women's dressing room. One of the girls from Ukraine, she really loves her city, her country, she moved to Russia even before the annexation of Crimea. When we were all raging about this exhibition together, sharing our misunderstanding of how anyone could rehearse something against the backdrop of tanks, machine guns and bombed trucks, it was this girl who said, “You want to get paid? So don't be resentful."
I felt very sad and empty from that expression from her lips. I'm still trying to figure out why she reacts almost more calmly than anyone else to these pictures. We, like many theaters in Russia, are committed to producing SVOshnye plays. The guys who go into these productions are broken, shaken, contorted - but they go out and do it.
Missile danger alarms cause either joyful anger if they are during the day (if you wanted "Kiev in three days" - get it in your refineries), or sad irritation and shame at night. And it's just amazing how inside you can co-exist, grumbling about the fact that you have to go to work in the morning without sleeping, and guilt over the fact that you just don't sleep enough and are so angry, but in another country people really die, children spend the night in shelters, families lose their homes. You lie in a warm bed and listen to these sounds and scold yourself - this is all the resistance to war that you are capable of.