Daena on the Bridge

I was a living character in the daily re-enactment of one or other of these stories. Arriving there each morning, I could never be sure which version the Russians had scripted for the day. Amid the trolling artillery and mortar duels that could erupt any time in the one-and-a-half-mile stretch of roadway that ran through no-man’s land to and from the river, I was always on the lookout for Daena. Some days the Russian army bridge trolls would manifest seductive charm.

At other times they epitomized demonic witches with their proud boasts about how they had, overnight, dispatched Ukrainian soldier giants to the House of Lies.

Source: Disinfolklore (1)

The author’s daily lived experience on the bridge in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine as first-person spectacle. Each morning a new script: seductive charm or demonic boasting. The Russian bridge trolls performed interchangeable roles — one day welcoming, the next proudly claiming kills. The mythological framework is literal here: Daena (the Zoroastrian figure who meets the soul at death’s bridge) becomes the shape-shifting face of occupation, and the author a character who cannot know which genre of story he is entering.

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