Chapter 8 #3
The family crowded around her on the train in the compartment, and when they had to get off, she hung out the window and held their hands.
Olek and Nina and their boys stood in the background, and Yulya, Daryna, and Pavlo touched her.
They had hugged her tight before they got off the train.
She blew them kisses as the train started to move, and waved for as long as she could see them.
They were crying and so was she. She was sorry she had accepted the job in Paris.
It had seemed like the right thing to do, but it hurt too much leaving them.
She cried for the first hour of the trip, and fell asleep.
The trip from Warsaw to Paris took seventeen hours, with two train changes.
She was going from Warsaw Central to Berlin Hauptbahnhof, then to Mannheim Hauptbahnhof, and finally to the Gare de l’Est in Paris.
She woke up an hour before the train arrived in Paris.
They were already in France by then, and she watched the countryside slide by.
She had been to Paris once before, on tour, and she remembered a big city with a lot of small parks and beautiful monuments, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.
She had no idea what it would be like living there.
She had nothing nice to wear and didn’t care.
All she had were jeans and a few sweaters, her down jacket, and her leotards, and one pair of shoes.
She had nowhere to go anyway. Her heart was heavy with missing Yulya and the children.
The train pulled into the Gare de l’Est, and Tatyanna got off the train with her small suitcase.
She had the address of where she would be living, in the 6th arrondissement on the Left Bank.
She wasn’t sure where that was, but she had a map of the metro to get there.
When she got to the metro subway system, it reminded her of the bomb shelters she had slept in in Kyiv before she left.
Everything reminded her of the war now, they were the predominant memories she had of Kyiv.
People in Paris were strolling around on a sunny Sunday, and the buildings were beautiful.
There were no signs of war or bombs or burned-out buildings.
It was a new life and a new world. A world full of strangers.
When she reached the address, she rang the intercom of the apartment where she would be staying.
She spoke into the intercom, and was buzzed in.
It was on the fourth floor, and an old woman was standing in the doorway wearing a flowered apron.
She had gray hair pulled back in a bun, and spoke to Tatyanna in a gentle tone in French, which she didn’t understand.
The woman beckoned her in, and the apartment was old, like the building, filled with antiques and photographs and mementos.
She led Tatyanna to a small room at the back, all done in faded ballet pink satin.
Tatyanna wondered if it had been her daughter’s, and she smiled and nodded and thanked the woman in Ukrainian.
She put down her suitcase and the woman showed her the kitchen then, and made signs asking if she was hungry, and Tatyanna shook her head.
She was too nervous to eat. But the apartment was warm and cozy, and the woman seemed like a friendly grandmother, with kind eyes.
Tatyanna sat down on the bed in her room.
Yulya had gotten her a SIM card for her phone, so she could contact them.
She sent them a text saying that she was safely arrived in Paris.
And then she used it to look for key words and phrases needed in French for simple translations.
Tatyanna went for a walk when it got dark.
The neighborhood was lively with restaurants and stores and young people in the streets laughing and talking.
The atmosphere was one of normalcy and peacetime, with no hint of war.
It was hard to imagine that other cities and countries were thriving while Ukraine was being decimated and destroyed, with thousands of people dying.
She walked along the Seine and saw the secondhand booksellers.
She went from there to the Champ de Mars in the 7th arrondissement, and when she saw the sparkling Eiffel Tower, she stopped and stared at it and realized that the job in Paris was a blessing, and she was lucky to be there.
People were still at war in Ukraine, dying, fighting for their lives, and starving, and she was safe in Paris.
She would be dancing at the opera house, comfortably housed, and eating normally.
This had been her dream once, and Vlad’s, and now she had to seize it with both hands and make the best of it.
And one day, God willing, she would see Yulya, Daryna, and Pavlo again.
It no longer seemed likely that any of them would see Symon again.
He had disappeared completely the night their building collapsed.
There was no trace of him, probably long dead under the rubble, like so many others.
But Tatyanna was young and alive, and she had survived, and now she knew she had to live fully, to honor all of those who had been lost, and hadn’t been as lucky as she was.
Yana and Vlad, whom she loved, and Symon, and so many thousands of innocent victims of the war.
She wanted to make them proud and for her survival to mean something, to deserve the gift of life she’d been given.
She walked back to the apartment then, and took several wrong turns getting there. She had a new city to learn, and a new language to master. She had to start her life all over. It was like being born again, and she wanted to deserve the opportunity she’d been given.