46 5.8.22
Sumy’’ or ‘‘Evacuate Sumy.’’ Liubov personally
spoke to a driver who said he had a microbus
that he had used to make several safe trips to
Kyiv; from Kyiv, Olya and her daughter could
get on a train to Lviv. After speaking to him
herself, Olya resolved to make the trip.
Before she left, Kersch-Kibler wrote to Anto-
nio and Marilyn, letting them know the plan:
‘‘Do we have your permission to do this?’’ she
wrote them. The responsibility she was laying
at their feet was overwhelming, but they gave
their consent.
That night, Liubov didn’t sleep — she had found
this driver, and now she, too, felt she had some
responsibility for everyone’s well-being. ‘‘Good
morning?’’ she wrote to Olya at 5:20 a.m. from
Krakow. ‘‘Write to me and let me know everything
is OK.’’ Marilyn was at work on a night shift, in
Wausau, Wis., trying not to think about anything
but the jobs in front of her: the patients, the paper-
work, the IV hookups.
At 6 a.m., Olya and her daughter boarded the
microbus with six other people, all of whom were
immediately charmed by her daughter — for the
young girl, this trip started out as an exciting
excursion. But it wasn’t long before the girl fell
silent, along with the rest of the passengers. As the
driver took circuitous routes, on unpaved roads
and even through fi elds, Olya took in with her own
eyes, for the fi rst time, the full force of the war:
The road was littered with burned cars, vehicles
sometimes sheared fully in half, their twisted steel
guts exposed, the roads, at times, choked with
debris. Liubov texted her often. ‘‘I’m trying to keep
my [expletive] together,’’ she admitted, sitting at
the table in her apartment in Krakow, staring at
her phone. She was checking it every fi ve minutes.
‘‘I’m really worried,’’ she confessed to Olya by text.
‘‘Yeah, so am I,’’ Olya wrote back. ‘‘What’s on
the roads here is scary.’’
Liubov sent back an emoji with its eyes down-
cast in distress, then three prayer hands. ‘‘Every-
thing’s going to be fi ne,’’ she wrote.
The group drove through towns where the Rus-
sian fl ag fl ew. ‘‘Maybe we should stop to take it
down,’’ the driver said. ‘‘It’s still our territory.’’ He
was trying to lighten the mood, but no one spoke;
Olya felt a chill. And then deep in her belly, she
felt an ache — she worried she was bleeding. The
pain got worse with the bumpiness of the road
all along the way. They drove around a crater in
the road so vast, so deep, at one point, they could
only imagine the kind of artillery that caused it.
The train to Kyiv from her home usually took
about four hours, but that day, the drive stretched
on — they had been on the road for nine hours and
they were still not close to Kyiv. For an intermina-
ble two-hour period, neither Hrytsiv nor Liubov
heard from her, when she was driving through
locations with no cellphone service. Olya had
not brought enough food or water to sustain her-
self and her daughter for that duration of time.
Her daughter accepted the driver’s generosity,
but Olya could not eat — the pain in her belly
was severe. Hrytsiv and Liubov were texting her,
advising her to take various medications, but they
did not help.
Finally, they drew closer to Kyiv, and Olya heard,
also for the fi rst time, the sound of shelling close by.
‘‘Get out of here fast,’’ a Ukrainian soldier told the
driver with urgency. He had no time to suggest an
alternate route to Kyiv with any real specifi city — he
just needed the vehicle somewhere else, immedi-
ately. Olya started to despair that they would ever
arrive, except that the driver seemed to know what
he was doing — or at least gave the impression that
he would fi gure something else out.
Hrytsiv and Kersch-Kibler were in a hotel room
in Krakow, where Hrytsiv had traveled for the day,
when her phone rang. She looked up at Kersch-
Kibler, her face breaking into a smile: ‘‘She’s in
Kyiv!’’ she whispered, with evident joy. The drive
had taken close to 12 hours.
In Kyiv, now Olya was on her own, exhausted,
in pain, with an equally tired 7-year-old, needing
to call something like an Uber to take them to the
train station, but her phone was at 1 percent. It
was as if the phone had run out of energy at the
moment she did — but it lasted just long enough
for her to get the ride they needed. In the bath-
room of the train station, she learned that what she
feared had come to pass: She was bleeding, or at
least there was discharge. She and her daughter
got on the train to Lviv, at long last, and tried to
sleep. ‘‘Can you schedule me an ultrasound?’’ she
wrote Hrytsiv. ‘‘I’m really scared.’’
She and her daughter arrived in Lviv at 4 a.m.,
but no one was there to meet them. Hrytsiv, who
planned to pick them up, was on her way back
from meeting with Kersch-Kibler in Krakow and
ran into the problem of curfew. No one could be
on the roads until 6 a.m., so that Hrytsiv and her
driver ended up sleeping in the car for three hours,
pulled over near the border. Finally, Hrytsiv made
it to the train station, where Olya had been resting
with her daughter in a separate room set aside for
mothers and children. The two women, who had
never met, embraced.
Just after 1 a.m., Marilyn, at work on a night
shift, realized it was morning in Ukraine — she
should have heard from Hrytsiv by then. She
ducked into a tiny private room and reached out
to ask if the agency had any news. Moments later
she received a text from Kersch-Kibler: ‘‘She has
arrived and is at the apartment.’’ The next day, an
ultrasound revealed that the pregnancy was still
stable. For the fi rst time in a long while, Marilyn
and Antonio felt something like tentative relief —
maybe even hope.Across town, at the hospital in Lviv, Maryna, on
bed rest, talked every day to Nataliia. Marynaspent much of her time worrying about her family
in Kherson. They went without power or water for
13 days. At times, food was hard to come by. On
top of everything, her husband kept telling her he
wanted to join the army. ‘‘Who’s going to take care
of our kids?’’ she’d ask him. She spoke and texted
with her family many times a day, which made
the pain all the more excruciating when two days
went by without any word from them.
She frequently went down to and back up from
the hospital basement, which served as a bomb
shelter, the sirens whining insistently in the area,
a sound she came to loathe. She was rattled one
morning in mid-March when she found herself
in the basement, this time just feet from a bed
where the doctors were performing C-section
on a fellow surrogate. They had already started
the procedure when the sirens sounded, and
they were now completing it in a space crowd-
ed with other patients who had nowhere else to
go. Maryna was close enough to hear doctors
talking, making requests for stitches and more
light. She was anxious for the well-being of the
woman undergoing the surgery and concerned
for the baby as well, while feeling intensely the
discomfort of proximity to such an intimate a
moment. She could see the intended parents
standing nearby, their faces pale.
The stress of the war heightened the anxiety of
her pregnancy and forced new decisions on the
agency, which created tensions with Maryna’s
intended parents. That couple desperately want-
ed Maryna moved out of Lviv to Poland, but
Kersch-Kibler explained to them that the doctors’
advice was not to move her because of the risk
of premature labor. Both parties were concerned
for the well-being of Maryna’s children, and
Kersch-Kibler proposed one possibility for their
evacuation; the intended parents, who judged
that option unsound, rejected her proposal out of
hand, insisting they’d handle it themselves. Over
the course of March, the urgency and anguish
fed resentments between the two parties until
the relationship between the intended parents
and the agency, and between Maryna and the
agency, broke down over questions of her care.
(Maryna and Nataliia declined to continue com-
municating with me.)
Maryna remained in close touch with her
intended parents and hoped that they would be
in Lviv for the delivery. They were in Warsaw;
was it too risky for them to come? She knew they
were anxious about the war, and about everyone’s
safety; and she was not sure she wanted to sub-
ject them to what she was experiencing every day.
‘‘The air-raid sirens destroy you, emotionally and
psychologically,’’ she’d said via Zoom from her
hospital room.
In the end, when Maryna delivered the twins,
both intended parents were by her side. Hrytsiv
had been part of many bruising phone calls with
them; but she had to admit, when she arrived at
the hospital not long after Maryna delivered, thatSurrogates
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