Duty

David Lean, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Putin destroyed my marriage. Or rather, they made me realize it was just a Potemkin façade.

Now, a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, that marriage is over legally.

When Putin struck, we were married for four years and had a toddler daughter. The invasion shocked my wife. She never explained why. She normally cared little about world events. I think video of dead kids in bombed buildings did it.

When it looked like that 40-mile truck convoy was just going to roll into Kyiv, she glued herself to Twitter and cable news. I feared she would be fired from her job because she was not actually working, but she surprised me with "We Have To Talk." She had already quit, cashed out her retirement and vacation time, and was flying to Poland to go by bus to defend Ukraine. She would use the money to pay her way and to buy surveillance drones.

My wife is from a South Jersey Italian family and speaks only English. She also hates beets, meaning that borscht is off the menu. Her plan, therefore, surprised me. I was unsupportive and wondered aloud if she had gone insane.

She just stood with folded arms and said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

I replied that doing "something" didn't mean doing something unhelpful. She wasn't in the military and never had been. She didn't like guns or camping. Hemingway had joined other foreigners fighting in the Spanish Civil War but only did some great writing. Orwell went, too, and was wounded but won no battles and was purged by Stalinists. All Rick Blaine did was get an interesting backstory to explain why he was mooning over a deceitful Swede. None of them stopped Franco from seizing power or the Nazis from annexing the Sudetenland. The French Army, on the other hand, might have but didn't. And whatever was going on near Zaporizhzhia, the United States had no troops or treaty obligation there. Finally, I hated that she was telling me, not asking.

She said that I didn't understand. I agreed but refused to let her out the door until she called her family and told them her story. They'd never believe me, and I didn't want her South Philly cousins thinking she'd disappeared because I'd whacked her and dumped her body somewhere in the Jersey Pine Barrens.

She left that night, and without her income, daycare was the first thing I cut from the budget. Things improved after I found some neighbors to help. They were two unmarried Central American sisters, each of whom had a three-year-old daughter. They worked various jobs in a sequence that always had one of them home. Their help was way cheaper than the place we had been using.

I was mad and bitter and, to keep my temper under control, I hit the gym and got back into running and cycling. I lost ten pounds in two months and firmed up. Ana, the flirtier of my two sister neighbors, unexpectedly squeezed my bicep one time when I picked up my daughter, blushed furiously, and then retreated inside. That gave me a hard-on that could have poked through concrete.

That same night, with my daughter in bed, I was watching Doctor Zhivago. It came to the scene where Zhivago's half-brother, the Bolshevik Yevgraf, is talking about being ordered to join the army to foment revolution. He says, "Happy men don't volunteer." It's narrated over the scene where Pasha leaves Lara to join the Russian Army. Lara had cheated on Pasha while they were engaged but was forgiven. I realized that Yevgraf was right. My wife would never have volunteered if she was happy in our marriage.

To prove the point, she hadn't done much to contact us. She tried to speak to our daughter a few times by video, but the connection was bad, and the timing was never reliable. She and I found we had nothing to say to each other. She eventually stopped calling.

The next day, I contacted a lawyer to draft an uncontested divorce and mailed the paperwork to the last address I had. Two months later, my wife returned the notarized documents without comment.

My daughter and I have been spending more time with Ana and her family. I asked Ana if she plans to go fight anyone else's war. She said that's the craziest thing she has ever heard.