Crossing

The announcer said that the train — crowded with women and their children — was nearing the last station before the border.

Rosia and the other women in her coupe readied themselves. She changed out of the tracksuit she had been in for 48 hours and put on a clean top and a fresh pair of jeans.

She remembered buying the jeans in a nice boutique on their last beach holiday in Montenegro. Victor her husband had said her butt looked like a teenager’s in them, and she’d liked feeling young that way.

‘Sashko, change into the clothes in the yellow plastic bag in your suitcase, and put the dirty ones away,’ she said to her eight-year-old son.

The boy was dangling the paper packaging from a straw into his pet cat’s cage, and the fat orange tabby was happily swatting it.

The other three women and their four combined kids in the compartment also changed outfits in preparation for exiting the train and crossing the border from their invaded country. They matter-of-factly apologised to each other as legs and arms and sleeves and pant legs tangled and twisted in the small space. Rosia tried to keep herself as little as possible in the tangle.

She flicked on her mobile phone and flipped the camera to see herself. She brushed out her hair and then applied her lipstick and eyeliner.

The other women applied their make-up as well. Was it habit, or following the pack, or choice, Rosia thought to herself. With a last glance at the phone, she said to Sashko who was looking out the window and not listening: ‘It will do.’

Rosia checked again for messages from her husband. Victor and his workmates from the architecture firm had all headed north of the capital the morning the assault started. She’d been lucky; they had had the chance to say goodbye to each other while some of her girlfriends hadn’t with their partners.

There were no messages. She switched the mobile to airplane mode to save battery.

By the time the train reached the station, she, her young boy, and the other women and kids looked like they were going to a mall rather than leaving a war. They said their good-byes and wished each other luck. Some had plans — a cousin in Italy and a brother in Ireland — and some had only hope. Rosia had listened more than she said during the train trip.

She lifted their roll-on suitcase down the railway car’s ladder to the station platform.

‘Put on your backpack and help me with Van Gogh,’ Rosia said to the boy who took hold of the cat’s cage and put it atop to the roll-on.

The big orange cat, who had never been outside of their flat in the country’s capital, sat frozen. The boy, wearing the Dynamo Kyiv jersey he’d just been given for Christmas, looked a little sleepy but mostly happy, Rosia thought. Or, at least, that’s what she wished for.

Train officials and border guards in Soviet-style, brimmed hats waved them to the end of the platform and the passport control point where the queues stretched for a half kilometre. Kids sitting on suitcases while playing on devices, pillowcases filled with soft toys, pet dogs pulling on leads, scratchy voices coming from the speakers on mobile phones.

‘If you’re not wearing your sweatshirt, put it over Van Gogh. He’s scared and that will calm him down. Sometimes, it better for him not to see things,’ Rosia said to the boy.

As they slowly queued for two hours, Rosia kept looking at their passports and switching them from one front pocket of her jeans to the other. She kept to herself when others had tried to chat.

There was only one toilet at the border post and it was overwhelmed. Women and children waited to use it; others gave up and looked for places behind large garbage bins to relieve themselves. Little balls of used tissues lay in the mud. To Rosia, it seemed like the country girls — who you could pick by their somewhat less fashionable sneakers — didn’t mind as much as the city dwellers like her.

‘But we’re all the same now,’ she then thought to herself. But it wasn’t easy for her to accept it. That whether one was a marketer for a fintech start-up with a PhD in philology — like her — or a young mother cooking pickle soup for kids’ lunches in a village schoolhouse cafeteria, they were all one common thing now. Refugees.

Refugees. A word she associated with other parts of the world and other points in history. People from Africa and Afghanistan carrying their lives in plastic shopping bags. People in sinking boats on the Mediterranean. Not her own life. Until three days ago when tanks rolled down the main highway from the north.

Her husband’s elderly aunt and uncle from Winnipeg in Canada had talked of their own parents as ‘refugees’ when they had visited after the year of the Revolution. Their bad accents and big appetites had struck Rosia, as did the shiny tridents they wore on gold chains. After so many decades in the diaspora following World War 2, these people were different. It wasn’t a difference that Rosia wanted for herself.

From behind a scratched Plexiglas partition on a raised platform, the female Polish border guard took their passports from Rosya’s hand.

‘Do you have a place to go?’ she asked Rosia without lifting her eyes. The question was in Polish and Rosia mostly understood it.

‘No. Only to safety,’ Rosia replied in her fluent English.

The guard looked up at Rosia and then at Sashko.

‘Let me see inside there, please,’ she said.

Sashko lifted his jumper from the cat’s carrying cage and Van Gogh released a long meow.

‘Nice cat’, the guard said in Ukrainian, and then stamped their passports. ‘Good luck. Follow the others through that door and there will be “humanitarka” to assist you.’

Immediately outside, there was a cordoned funnel of fluoro tape and traffic cones. Then, after 100 meters or so, the first make-shift stalls started.

Lined up for more than half a kilometre along a trampled gravel track, each bore an organisation’s name and livery. Dozens of their volunteers, wearing t-shirts and safety vests emblazoned with logos, held out things to give away.

Jews in yarmulkes gave out plastic water bottles; Muslims with red crescents on their vests offered bread rolls; Protestants held out paper cups with Borscht and Zurek; Sikhs supplied diapers and baby wipes; Bahai’s shared baked cookies.

Rosia lost track of the faiths and languages attached to knitted beanies, chocolates and candy, energy bars, bags of Doritos, anti-COVID disinfectant bottles, aspirin packets, deodorant roll-ons, hair brushes, and tampons.

Several stalls were draped in electrical leads and mobile phone charging cables; others offered free SIM cards; some marquees had small cots and cribs for the youngest kids to rest in. She saw a group of kids around a table, colouring in flowers with crayons.

To Rosia, it seemed like a reverse market where different versions of humanity were being hawked. Like a carnival of competitive compassion. She wondered what was the etiquette for accepting or not accepting what was on offer in this gauntlet of good intentions.

‘Mama, can I? Bud’ laska?’ Sashko asked her.

He’d spotted a young women with ginger-red hair and a shining smile. She wore a hoodie printed with a green shamrock and Caritas, and held out a tray with servings of hot French fries.

‘Chips for the kids,’ she called out in Russian with an Irish lilt.

‘Yes, but only one portion,’ Rosia said to Sashko. ‘And then follow me to where we can get some food for Van Gogh. Stay close.’

Other women and their kids swirled around her. Every family group was at once trying to understand where they were, what was on offer, and where to go next — while hauling their roll-on suitcases and backpacks.

Hungry kids asked for snacks; stressed mothers asked for information; cheerful volunteers asked for permission to carry baggage to the buses waiting to take the river of refugees to the official ‘Welcome Centre’ in the nearby border town. As they spoke with the volunteers, they were realising that was the next point of their journey before being disbursed to Europe’s capitals.

Rosia spotted the stand with a big banner festooned with cartoon dogs and cats. There were blue-and-yellow helium balloons tied to it as well.

Sashko lifted the hoodie off Van Gogh’s cage and he meowed for the Dutch volunteers behind the make-shift counter.

‘Now, that’s a big fellow,’ a boisterous and very tall man said in better English than Rosya’s professors at university. ‘Let’s give him some extra cans. Tuna mornay, chicken breast, sardine surprise — only the best!’

Earlier in the week, Rosia had been scrolling through her phone at cars for sale in the Kyiv area. It was time to replace their Mitsubishi and Victor had dreamed of a German car since his 90s childhood when his family made their money smuggling leather jackets from Turkey. In those days, Mercedes meant the USSR was dead and a new future had begun. Victor loved the future and that’s why she loved Victor.

No one had thought the past would return and that another invasion would happen and, even if they did, they had pretended otherwise. But there was no pretending now, she thought to herself. Her child and her cat were accepting charitable food from strangers, and her husband was probably setting fire to piles of tyres on some access road to the capital.

They said their thank you’s and moved further into the corral.

Some stalls had tables stacked with clothing. Old knitted jumpers, jeans, baseball caps, mittens, imitation NBA t-shirts, ladies blouses, and kids’ onesies. And, blankets, scarves and towels.

A tough-looking, burly woman with two gold incisors saw Rosia looking over. Rosia made out she might be a miner’s wife from the east.

‘Don’t bother. It’s all shmaty, she said, describing the clothes as rags. ‘They must think we’re low-class or stupid or something. Blyat.’

Behind the clothing stalls, there was a truck filled with textiles. Volunteers were using garden rakes to pull the mound of material onto blue tarpaulins stretched on the ground; others were sorting it into piles of pants and tops. The West’s well-intended waste had travelled the world to this place between war and peace.

A young woman with designer eyeglasses and a United Nations vest stood in the middle of the passage as Rosia moved on.

‘Hi, I was wondering if I could speak to you!’, she said in native Russian. An iPad was strapped to one of her forearms and her hair was freshly cut, Rosia noticed.

Rosia tried to avoid her, but Sashko, fascinated by the seeming fair he found himself at, had already put down the cat’s cage to use as a seat. He munched on his fries.

‘Sure, you are from the UN,’ Rosia said in Ukrainian.

‘I am. We’re are getting feedback on your experience of the humanitarian effort. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions,’ the researcher asked.

‘For example, what items did you find useful? I can see the fries are popular with your boy. And the cat food too,’ she continued and poked at the iPad’s screen.

Rosia nodded and tried to make sense of the situation and couldn’t.

‘We’ll use your answers to improve this border crossing station. What other items or services do you think might be helpful here? Is there anything missing?’, Rosia heard.

It was meant to sound so normal, but it was the direct opposite of normal, it struck her then. Normal meant thinking about the new car and the next holiday; normal meant putting Sashko’s maths tutoring and football training and Van Gogh’s next vaccination into their Google calendar; normal meant chatting with Victor about what to pick up for dinner, sushi or Georgian, not whether he could see tanks and troops; normal was worrying about her ageing parents’ health risk from diseases not from bullets and bombs.

The Miner’s Wife overheard.

‘Coffee, dyevochka! We could all use a good cappuccino,’ she barked at the UN worker. ‘I’m sure the international community can find us a decent barista — or a bottle of horilka!’

Other women heard the exchange and laughed at the vodka joke. Part of Rosia knew it was funny, but she couldn’t join them.

Male volunteers with supermarket trollies offered the women help with their baggage. A little boy and his poodle rode atop a trolley stacked with suitcases as it rolled toward waiting buses. A bearded man with a long camera lens — his vest with Press on it — snapped the image. There but not there.

Rosia realised she wasn’t moving. She saw Sashko dangle a French fry in front of Van Gogh. The cat tried to swat it back into his cage, but it bounced off the mesh. He played with the cat the same way Victor did.

She felt wet come down her cheeks. She wished her phone would vibrate.

Ahead of her, the Miner’s Wife herded her three kids and playfully kicked the eldest — a very made-up teenage daughter — in the bum.

‘Forward march,’ she called.

Rosia decided she, Sashko and Van Gogh would follow her.