13th October.
A yellow pattern of flowers in the background of black.
I inspect the photo, think, is that a piece
of wallpaper or a curtain?
Like a winter tree which has shed its leaves,
an armchair in the corner exposes its bones.
And such a blue sky, a sunny day, 13th October.
Agrippina gives a plate of mushrooms to her husband.
He dies, leaving the throne to her son Nero.
Mahler gives his first concert.
Margaret Thatcher celebrates her birthday.
Greenwich is made Prime Meridian.
Larissa and Nastia are watching this day in history--
important dates, important people.
See, Nastia, sweetheart, study hard.
And maybe one day, they'll talk about you on TV.
Larissa works in a shop.
Nastia studies medicine.
Mom, did you know the femur is the longest bone in the human
body and we contain up to 100,000 kilometers of blood
vessels?
There's my clever girl.
Let's go have dinner.
Missile wound to the thorax with damage
to internal organs, lacerations to the thighs,
a fractured skull.
I read the account of the injuries,
think, what is it like to see that longest
bone in the body with your own eyes
and not on the mannequin in the classroom but on your own leg?
And for 20 whole minutes, to hope
that the ambulance will come and save you and mom and everyone.
But this is the firing zone.
And the ambulance will not come.
And 100,000 kilometers of vessels suddenly redundant
because what had flowed inside them has completely run out.
Mom, look, I'm on the news.
Turns out my greatest accomplishment
was to die from shelling on the International
Day for Disaster Reduction.
And an important day in history for an important people.
[APPLAUSE]
I really don't like to read this poem.
You understand why.
And it was written while I was still in Minsk
and working for the Trilateral Contact
Group, who tried to resolve this conflict in Ukraine.
At that time, it was called conflict.
Now, we can name it with the real world.
And I translated lots of letters,
documents, official documents.
And this poem is based on one of the--
this thing I had to translate.
And it said like two civilian women
were killed during the bombing.
And it was just the description of the injuries.
And it was very inhumane.
It was very bureaucratic language.
And it touched me so much.
And I decided to find out who were those people.
And in internet, I managed to find this information, how
they were called, what were their names, what
did they do a bit, and these last minutes of their life.
So actually, everything is truth.
Nothing is invented.
And the horrible black humor about that,
it's really 13th October.
And 13th October is this day of prevention of those
catastrophes.