The sun was shining.
We were sitting in the small room with the radio operator — the same man who was our only thread back to my father. We were waiting for news.
When the voice finally came through, it wasn’t his.
It was someone else. Too serious to bring anything good.
“We have information… unfortunately, Richard has been wounded.”
The air in the room thickened instantly. Heavy. Impossible to breathe.
Mother froze, as if someone had pushed a spear inside her body.
“How… how wounded?” she asked, her voice stripped of warmth, reduced to something fragile and thin.
“He was hit. A sniper shot him… through both legs.”
He was driving when it happened.
He’s in the hospital now — they’re trying to save his legs.”
Silence.
The worst kind.
The kind that compresses your lungs and erases thought, leaving only fear.
“So… he’s alive?”
“Yes. But the condition is serious.”
Mother closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands.
She cried.
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Not loudly. Not theatrically. Just deeply. Her breathing uneven, as if she were trying to draw air from a room that no longer had any.
And I… I didn’t know what to do.
My father was the one who protected us.
The one with a plan.
The one who seemed indestructible.
Now he was somewhere far away, lying wounded. And we could do nothing.
“We have to go back… we have to return…”
Mother whispered the words as if repetition might turn them into reality.
But we all knew. There was no going back now.
We were stranded here,
while he was fighting there.
She kept asking through the radio.
“Will he survive?”
“The doctors are doing everything they can,” came the answer.
My brother sat beside me, staring at the floor.
We couldn’t cry.
Crying would mean accepting that this was real.
I stared at the radio as if it might suddenly crack open and release his voice — one word, any word — just to prove he wasn’t alone.
Nothing.
Only noise.
