The Wheat and the Poppies

Lieutenant Colonel Eduard Petrenko stood before the mirror in his apartment overlooking the Dnieper, adjusting his uniform for what he knew would be the last time. The blue and yellow patch on his shoulder caught the amber light of the setting sun. Outside, the air raid sirens had been silent for three days—an ominous quiet that pressed against the windows like held breath.

His wife, Renata, moved through their small apartment with deliberate grace, her movements carrying the weight of understanding. She had not asked questions when he came home early from the General Staff building, his face carved from stone. She had not asked why his closest comrades—men who had shared his vision of a different military response, a more aggressive counterstrike that their superiors deemed reckless insubordination—had been arrested that morning.

"They gave me twenty-four hours," Eduard said finally, his voice steady as winter ice. "Professional courtesy. To settle my affairs."

Renata nodded, her fingers finding the gold trident pendant at her throat—a wedding gift from his mother. She understood the arithmetic of honor: his refusal to testify against his brothers-in-arms, his name on the same strategic documents they had drafted together, the certainty of court-martial and disgrace. In wartime, such charges carried only one conclusion.

"Then we have tonight," she said simply.

They prepared their apartment as if for a ceremony. Renata lit candles, their flames reflecting off the photographs on the wall—their wedding at St. Sophia's, his graduation from the military academy in Lviv, her parents' farm in the Carpathians that now lay behind enemy lines. Eduard retrieved his grandfather's nagyka from its place of honor, the Cossack whip that had survived the Holodomor, the Soviet years, and now would witness this.

He wrote two letters at their small kitchen table. One to his commander, taking full responsibility. Another to his mother in Poltava, asking her to understand. The pen moved across paper with military precision, each word chosen like ammunition.

Renata appeared in the doorway wearing her vyshyvanka, the embroidered blouse she had worn on their wedding day, its red and black patterns seeming to pulse in the candlelight. She had made her own decision, one that required no words between them. In her hands, she carried a bottle of horilka and two glasses.

"Do you remember," she asked, "what you told me the night before you left for the eastern front?"

"That I would return with honor or not at all."

"And I told you that your honor was mine." She poured the vodka with steady hands. "That has not changed."

They drank together, the alcohol burning clean and sharp. Outside, the city stretched in darkness, practicing its nightly discipline of blackout. Somewhere across that darkness, his men were being interrogated. Somewhere, generals were signing papers that would erase his name from commendations, his service from memory.

Eduard reached for her, his hands finding the familiar curve of her waist through the embroidered fabric. She moved into him with the certainty of seven years' marriage, her body knowing his as a river knows its banks. They kissed with a desperate tenderness, tasting vodka and sorrow and something fiercer than both.

"Once more," Renata whispered against his mouth. "Once more, as if we have nothing but time."

They moved to the bedroom slowly, removing clothes with ritual care. His uniform folded with military precision on the chair. Her vyshyvanka lay reverently across the dresser. In the candlelight, their bodies were maps of shared history—the scar on his shoulder from shrapnel near Bakhmut that she had kissed a hundred times, the birthmark on her hip he had traced with wondering fingers on their wedding night.

They made love with an intensity that bordered on violence, as if they could press themselves through skin and bone into some space where separation was impossible. Renata's nails carved half-moons into his back. Eduard buried his face in her hair, breathing in the scent of her—lavender soap and something indefinable that was simply Renata, simply home.

She moved above him, her body a prayer, her face transformed by boundless ecstasy. He watched her as he had watched sunrises over the steppes, with the knowledge that beauty and ending were the same word spoken in different languages. When she cried out, it was not with pleasure alone but with rage at time itself, at the dawn that would come whether they wished it or not.

Afterward, they lay intertwined, their heartbeats gradually slowing to match. Eduard traced the constellation of freckles across her shoulders, a private galaxy he had memorized but never mapped completely. Renata's fingers found the prayer his grandmother had tattooed on his ribs in Old Slavonic—words for protection that had held until now.

"I would gladly relive these moments," she said quietly. "All of them. Even knowing."

"Especially knowing," he replied.

They rose and bathed together, washing each other with the tenderness of those preparing a body for burial. The water was warm, scented with the rose oil her mother had sent from the village before the war reached it. They took their time, knowing it was the last water, the last touch, the last gentle service of marriage.

When they emerged, they dressed carefully. Eduard in his uniform, every button perfect. Renata had chosen a white dress, simple and severe, that made her look like a photograph from another era. She knelt to help him with his boots, and he saw tears on her face for the first and only time that night.

"Not for this," she said, wiping them away impatiently. "For the children we'll never have."

He knelt beside her, taking her face in his hands. "They would have been brave," he said. "Like their mother."

"And stubborn," she said, managing a smile. "Like their father."

Eduard unbuttoned his uniform jacket, revealing the Makarov pistol in its holster. Standard issue, it had protected him through Mariupol, through the bridge at Kherson. Now it would serve one final duty.

They moved back to the bedroom, where Renata had laid out a white sheet on the floor—the one her grandmother had embroidered with wheat stalks and poppies, symbols of prosperity and remembrance. They knelt facing each other, and Eduard saw in his wife's eyes not fear but a fierce, boundless love.

"For our land," she whispered.

"For our heroes," he replied.

The pistol was heavy in his hand as he checked the chamber—two bullets only. Outside, the first air raid siren of the night began its ascending wail. The sound seemed to come from far away, from some other world where choices were simpler, where honor could coexist with survival.

Renata reached for his hand, intertwining their fingers. Her pulse beat against his palm like a trapped bird. Together, they had chosen this: a death that belonged to them alone, not to tribunals or prison cells or the grinding machinery of military justice.

"Together," she said.

"Together," he agreed.

The siren continued its lament over the darkened city, over the river that had seen so much blood, over the land that demanded everything and gave back only the terrible gift of choosing how to end. In the morning, their neighbors would find them arranged with military precision, their hands still joined, their faces turned toward each other in an intimacy that death could not violate.

The letter on the table would be brief: "We lived as Ukrainians. We die as Ukrainians. Let no one question our devotion to our nation, only our judgment in how to serve it."

The candles burned through the night, their flames unwavering, standing witness to a sacrifice that asked no one's permission and sought no one's absolution—only the savage grace of controlling one's own ending in a time when so little else remained within control.