The New York Times Magazine - USA (2022-05-08)

The New York Times Magazine 23

with two embryos for a couple in North Amer-
ica. Surrogates for Delivering Dreams typically
earn around $18,000 a year, but because she was
pregnant with twins, she would be paid a bonus
of several thousand more. In Ukraine, a typical
schoolteacher would make less than a quarter of
that over the course of a year.
On the train, Maryna met Nataliia, a calm,
warm woman with whom she shared a compart-
ment. They were pleased to fi nd they had a lot in
common: They were both from the same region,
and they both had two children, with some over-
lap in ages. Maryna’s husband and children had
joined her in Kyiv; Nataliia’s were still back in
the southeast with her husband. The two women
talked easily on the train, with understanding and
sympathy about their respective choices, and
ended up sharing housing in Lviv.
And so they were together, nine days later,
when their phones rang, waking them from their
slumber. A family member was calling Nataliia to
pass along news from a cousin, a border patrol
agent: The Russians were invading. Nataliia called
the cousin immediately to ask what he knew. ‘‘I

can’t talk, I have a call on another line, but I’ll

call you right back,’’ he told her. But he did not;

in the following weeks, the family had no word

of him whatsoever.

The moment Nataliia hung up the phone,

Maryna emerged from her bedroom crying. Her

husband had also called to say war had started

— that Russian soldiers were in the area. He

and the children were no longer in Kyiv, but

were near the city of Kherson in the southeast of

Ukraine, where he’d gone to take a driver’s test

and where the children’s grandmother lived.

They were supposed to return to Kyiv after a

short visit, but now it would be diffi cult to get

out: The fi ghting was fi erce around Kherson,

which would become the fi rst city in Ukraine

to come under Russian occupation. Maryna

was distraught, her fears commingling with an

anguished longing: If only her children were

with her in Lviv.

Many of the other surrogates also came

from the eastern part of the country, where

the fighting was most intense. As they followed

the news on Telegram and received harrowing

messages from loved ones, the turmoil and sor-

row among them was so powerful that Oksana

Hrytsiv, the agency’s most senior employee

and a longtime resident of Lviv, worried that

some of the women might flee, leaving Lviv

to be reunited with their children and fami-

lies. She checked in on them frequently during

those first few weeks of the war, trying to dis-

cern their intentions.

Maryna did not show signs of bolting, but

her misery was apparent. When she spoke

to her children, she sometimes heard the

bone-chilling sound of explosions in the back-

ground, so loud that Nataliia, seated beside her,

could hear it, too. ‘‘Mommy,’’ one of Maryna’s

Above: Susan Kersch-Kibler and Oksana

Hrytsiv, from the surrogacy agency Delivering

Dreams, in Krakow, Poland, organizing

documents and preparing money to take

into Ukraine, in March. Previous pages:

Liubov, a Delivering Dreams surrogate.

Previous pages and above: Photographs by Nanna Heitmann/Magnum, for The New York Times