Vira

We have known Vira since she arrived in Turin with her husband, mother and daughter, fleeing her city razed to the ground by Russian troops. She is 65 years old, an engineer by profession like her mother and husband.
The bombs, the hardships, the cold, the fear made her capable of endurance that she would never have imagined. Her Covid took her father away from her, and shortly thereafter her war stole everything she had built. Juri is Vira's husband: six months ago, despite his family's opposition, he decided to return to his city which had fallen into the hands of the Russian army.
The sense of strangeness, the difficult language to learn at his age, the fixed thought on what he has lost, the mirage of a home, convince him that leaving is the only solution. It appears that the Russians are allocating under-construction housing to Ukrainians who can prove, by December, that they have been homeowners. Juri leaves, but the documents he brings with him prove insufficient. He needs to integrate them with originals to request from the consulate.

But from there, he can no longer move. The months pass, Juri is unable to access his pension because the Ukrainian government does not allow him to withdraw it to Russian territory. The stalemate devours him. He lost 15 kg.
Vira doesn't know what to do: leave and leave her elderly mother and daughter for a land where bombs continue to fall and where the masters are those who destroyed their lives?
Or stay here and work as long as her strength allows in a house that will never be hers, with a future that is difficult to imagine?

Her video calls with her increasingly gaunt and depressed husband convince her to quit her job, withdraw the money she has earned and book a flight to Warsaw. You from Poland with a bus you will cross Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. From there she will try to cross the border with Russia and then another 900 km to arrive in what one day not far away had been her city. Her embrace with her mother and her daughter is interminable: they don't know if they will see each other again. Vira collects her life in a 30 kg baggage. Last night, five days after her departure, I received a message: «I'm at the border with Russia. There is an endless queue and from midnight they will close the entrance to all Ukrainian citizens. If I can't get through they take me back." Vira is very tired, it's cold, it's raining, she's out of water and food. Her hope, increasingly feeble.

Simona Pagani
NP January 2024