By Jamilah Araf and Kate Riley

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In a WW1 foxhole, Felix, a German soldier, has survived brutal hand-to-hand combat with Nikolai, who carries letters and photos from his wife Svetlana. What happens when Felix assumes Nikolai’s identity…and writes back?

Dear Nikolai,

How will they tell me you are dead?

Just answer me this: it seems like that is all you can do for me in those bloody trenches. Literally. Your shoes drenched in so much of your brother’s blood that the worn-out leather has turned red. 

How will they tell me you are dead? 

Will they tell me you were a hero? Would they disrespect me in such a way as to lie to my face while breaking the news?

Will they talk to me like a visitor in a hospital’s waiting room (at least, how they used to talk to visitors)? Will they tell me they did everything they could, try to dumb it down for me as if I don’t hear the stories and screams from soldiers who have shot off their legs just to return to nightmares?

Of course, the doctors no longer talk like this. With so many dying from the famine, it’s more of a shock to hear that whoever you were waiting for, praying for, is alive. 

Will they even tell me? Will I just have to search for your name in every newspaper’s obituary, all the while my grief spreads, until it infects my entire heart and soul, eating me alive, a death more painful than you could ever imagine in those hellholes you call trenches?

There are no good outcomes here. Even surviving, and returning home on a train filled to the brim with carcasses and the demented, is a bad outcome. I have seen those who have returned. Those whose prayers made it to God through all the overlapping messages and static, overwhelming the channel to the point where he has abandoned his dumbest creation. 

I know that if you returned, it wouldn’t be you. Your skin, soft like snow, would be hard like the metal you hide the worthless brain that decided to leave me under. And its white color would be a reddish brown, from the blood and dirt which would never come off, no matter how many times you’d try to scrub it off. Every time you would look in a mirror, you would see it, see them, and eventually, you’d find comfort in imagining ripping off your skin and forever shedding the past. Your shiny blue eyes will be dull and will be looking through people to the trenches you left in France, as you would watch your buddy die on replay,

over 

and over

so many different times until you can’t take it anymore! Until screams replace your friendly hellos and you are nicknamed mad!

So, I am asking you to die.

Peacefully and quickly, die without pain.

Do with that information as you will.

Just know that you ruined my life the second you walked out the door. 

– Svetlana

“So, I am asking you to die.

Peacefully and quickly, die without pain.

Do with that information as you will.”

My dearest Svetlana,

I wish I could say I was grateful to receive your note. I am wracked with grief, knowing I can’t comfort you, tell you you’re wrong. Because you aren’t wrong: it’s a sorry lot for both of us. I can’t bear to think of you and my Leni starving, struggling to survive, not knowing how you will live to see another day. I can only imagine it’s the hunger that drives you to such flights of fancy.

My love, I will return to you, God willing — yes, I found him in a trench (what a cliché) — and we will begin a new life together, all of us, when I return.

Don’t waste your precious energy looking for my name. You’ll know where I am and what happened to me when I darken our threshold and speak your name. You and Leni are what I’m fighting for, so that we are safe to grow old together and dandle grandsons on our knees. We are apart now, sacrificing (almost) everything so our children and their children won’t have to.

Promise me you will shake these terrible thoughts (at least when you write to me) and replace them with the memory of our day by the lake, when we sipped vodka and held each other close.

Soon, we will look in each other’s blue eyes and remember what we saw there.

I refuse: I will not die.

Yours always,

Nikolai

Process

Jamilah’s Global History class watched and discussed “All Quiet on the Western Front”, and she was later assigned a creative writing assignment to reflect on the lives of soldiers. At our weekly 1:1 session, we worked on the assignment and imagined how we could launch an epistolary series. We looked at one especially moving scene in the film, where the main character — Paul — fights an enemy soldier in a brutal (and intimate) hand-to-hand knife fight. While Paul ends up the victor, he realizes he has lost his humanity and soul in the process. He regrets what he has done and tries to comfort the other soldier, who dies slowly and painfully. After the soldier takes his last breath, Paul searches the uniform pockets and discovers — to his horror — letters and photos from what we assume to be the soldier’s wife and young child.

We imagined a scenario of a WWI German soldier (Felix) who had found himself in the same situation and decided to respond to the letter writer (Svetlana), pretending to be the dead Russian soldier, Nikolai. This is their first exchange.

After struggling with how to write the first letter, Jamilah eventually found an answer with a question. When watching Grey’s Anatomy one day, Jamilah’s focus turned to yet another scene of the doctors breaking bad news to patients. Very familiar with the show, she recited “We did everything we could” along with the fictional doctors. With this project in the forefront, she then wondered how the news of a dead soldier would be broken to his family. With the increasing pile of people dying during this time, she wondered if the exchange was as intimate as a doctor-family one, or if there even was an exchange at all.