Black lady sang at trunp iina drivers#
Black lady sang at trunp iina driver#
Black lady sang at trunp iina free#

As a junior, she won a one-year scholarship to an international program at Magdeburg University, in Germany. At sixteen, Inna began studying economics at the Kharkiv Polytechnic University. Inna was an excellent pianist-“It was maybe my only talent,” she told me-but Svetlana pushed her to pursue an academic path. But she didn’t chase boys or drink beer her grades were always good. “It was just us and the streets,” Inna said. There was nothing to do after school, so teen-agers found mischief. She didn’t like the area where she grew up. Inna’s father drank heavily and, in her words, “wasn’t such a good dad.” The couple divorced in 1986.Īs a schoolchild, Inna lived with her mother in a brutalist high-rise in Saltivka, a neighborhood dominated by such behemoths. Inna’s mother, Svetlana, was a physician who grew up in Crimea. Kharkiv, in the northeast, was then an important university town and industrial hub within the Soviet Union it is now Ukraine’s second-largest city. Inna was born in Kharkiv in 1978, an only child. The woman’s name was Inna Blahonravina, and her daughters were Sasha, seven, and Oliviia, five. Then she opened her eyes, turned to me, and said, in English, “Here we go.” The woman let out a long breath, closed her eyes, and gathered herself. The woman waved back, as did the older girl, but the younger one was facing the other way and missed the moment. The man ran to catch up with the bus and waved. After a few yards, some pedestrians walked in front of the bus, forcing it to stop. The man removed his hand as the bus drove off. The woman placed her palm on the other side of the windowpane. The woman was looking out the window at a tall man with a birdlike face, who wore a charcoal-colored hat. In the row behind her were two young girls, both dressed in bright ski jackets and pants. She had wavy auburn hair and ice-blue eyes, and she held two cats in a carrier on her lap. Sitting across the aisle from me was a slim woman wearing a beige puffer jacket.

Black lady sang at trunp iina free#

He was leaving immediately, and, because there were still a few free seats, my translator and I got on.

Black lady sang at trunp iina driver#

A minibus driver named Pavlo offered passage to Shehyni, just east of the Polish border, for the equivalent of ten dollars.

Black lady sang at trunp iina drivers#

Outside the station, bus drivers advertised trips to various locations on the border. People at the end of the line told me that they had no idea where in Poland they might go. (Fifty thousand refugees passed through the station that day.) Near the main door, a sign indicated a wait time of eight hours. on March 9th, a frigid Wednesday, the line to catch a train to Poland snaked around the enormous concourse of Lviv’s Holovnyi Station. To reach the Polish border from Lviv, you had to take a train, a bus, or a private car. The Ukrainians leaving the country were generally women, children, seniors, and foreigners-President Volodymyr Zelensky had declared martial law and a general mobilization, meaning that men between the ages of eighteen and sixty were obliged to stay.