Lena + Ivan

She is 17, he’s 18 when they fall in love at school. Then, under pressure from his parents, he returns to his homeland, Ukraine. And she? She leaves Germany and follows him into war. The story of a teenage love.

Two teenagers are crouching in a windowless basement, just a few steps above them – Lviv, Ukraine, the war.

The basement is an air-raid shelter that looks like a classroom. Wooden tables arranged in a U-shape, office chairs, white light. She gets up and walks around briefly, as if looking for something to do. She finds nothing except to continue waiting. She waits. One minute, two minutes, 15.

She says, “We should get some board games for the time in the shelter. Monopoly, maybe. We should buy Monopoly!”

Lena, blue eyes, blonde hair with a fringe, born on 25 May 2006 in Warsaw, Poland. Yesterday, she had travelled into the war raging just a few steps above her yesterday. She doesn’t have to be here.

He walks over to her, she takes out her phone. She holds it with her right hand, makes a peace sign with her left, he puts his arm around her waist. They take a selfie. She sends it to a friend, records a voice message, holds the phone out to him. “Say hello!”

He says, “Hello.”

Ivan, brown eyes, brown hair parted in the middle, an attempt at a beard on his chin, braces in his mouth, born on 7 July 2005 in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. He had returned to the war almost six months ago because his family had called him. He can no longer escape.

They’ve been together for seven months and four days. Since he asked her to be his girlfriend on 17 November, while they were watching Spider-Man in his old flat in Germany. She said yes.

She didn’t know yet that he would leave. That she would eventually follow him from Düsseldorf, accompanied by (media name) reporters. Into this war that had torn them apart and kept them separated for so long. That on the first day she’d see him again, she would run down three flights of stairs into a windowless basement because sirens were wailing in the streets. An air raid alarm, the first of her life.

She wants some music now. She presses her screen, “Classicrock” playlist on shuffle, a song begins.

“Forever Young” by Alphaville.

They turn on the torch apps on their phones, raise their arms in the air, and bounce to the beat as if they were standing in the crowd at a concert.

They sing along a little.

Forever young, I want to be forever young. Do you really want to live forever? Forever and ever?

Somewhere in the sky above Ukraine, on this June afternoon, a Russian missile is flying, weighing over four tonnes and explosive enough to destroy entire buildings.

She looks at him and says, “If we get bombed now, we’ll really be forever young.”

Ivan says he remembers exactly where he saw Lena for the first time: it was on the third floor of their vocational college in Düsseldorf in the autumn of 2023. She was still 17, he was already 18. He thought: Wow, she’s pretty. He believed she was from Ukraine, like him, like so many new students here. He spoke to her in Russian.

– Which class are you in? – Hm?

Lena doesn’t speak Russian. Ivan says he walked away without saying a word, feeling a little embarrassed. That’s how they tell the story today, showing chats, letters, and cuddly toys that help reconstruct the story of their love.

A few weeks later, she was standing in the school corridor again, alone. He asked her, this time in English: Are you waiting for someone? – No.

They went off together to buy some sweets, 16 October, a Monday. During the next break, he waited outside her classroom. When she came out of class, he asked for her number. In the afternoon, he texted her a cat picture. She sent one back.

Lena, 09:18: I also had braces for a few years.

Ivan, 9:18: That’s why your smile is so lovely.

The first date, a Sunday, at his place. They made hamburgers and he played her a song on the guitar he had bought at the flea market. David Bowie, “The Man Who Sold the World”. He’d also got her flowers.

At home, in her room with the orange linoleum floor, the posters on the wall, and the dolls on the shelf, Lena puts the flowers between the pages of a book to dry, later glues them to a piece of paper the size of an index card, puts foil over them, writes on the back, with hearts as bullet points:

29.10.2023
First date

- Cooking together

- Spending time together

- First kiss on the cheek

Flowers, always flowers, at every date, in red and purple and yellow. Lena says her ex-boyfriend never bought her flowers, not even from Aldi.

She says, “Flowers are special. You can’t really do anything with flowers. You just give them to someone for the sake of giving them. Flowers have no use except to make the other person feel good. It’s as simple as that.”

Ivan says, “All the flowers in the world wouldn’t be enough. I’d still want to give her more.”

11.11.2023
Third date

- First kiss!!!

- Watching films

Lena says what she likes about Ivan is that he cares, really cares. Once, when they were walking across the street together in Düsseldorf, they saw cardboard boxes lying there, carelessly thrown onto the pavement. He picked them up and stuffed them into a rubbish bin.

Ivan says what he likes about Lena is that she is so radiant. Noone else at the school shines as brightly as she does.

Lena says what she doesn’t like about Ivan is that he sometimes cares so much that he forgets about himself. And that some people take advantage of that.

Ivan says he can’t think of anything he doesn’t like about Lena.

Ivan, 21:23: I wish I were a cat. Then I could spend all nine of my lives with you.

Soon, Lena says, she was spending almost every weekend at his place, where the heating was never warm enough and the water in the shower was always too hot. Ivan had lived here with his mother and little brother before the two went back to Ukraine in August 2023 – back to their father, back to a country whose language they understood. He stayed.

When Lena cooked, Ivan claimed it was the best thing he’d ever eaten. When she wasn’t there, he secretly tried to repair the rings and necklace that she’d accidentally broken. Once, she asked him, “Would you ever go back to Ukraine?” Ivan said, “No, not when there’s war there.”

Lena says, “In the beginning, everything was like an Elvis Presley song: slow and beautiful.”

When she says that, you realise that this is exactly how she always imagined love would be.

01.02.2024
I don’t think he needs a reason
to give me flowers

- We often go out for a meal together

- We watch series together

Lena says it was a Monday in February. She was at his place, she had a headache, Ivan came home from school. He was crying.

His mother had called and said he should come back to Ukraine. Go to university there. What was he doing in Germany? He was just a useless refugee, he’d end up living under a bridge. His parents had threatened to break off contact with him if he refused. If Ivan didn’t come back, he would no longer be part of the family.

Lena said to him: Call your parents again and tell them you don’t want that.

She waited in the kitchen. After a few minutes, he came back into the room.

He said: I’m going home.

Lena, 23:00: They’ll kill you there...

Lena, 23:04: You can’t go

Lena, 23:07: I can’t let you go there and die...

Lena wrote a letter to his parents, had it translated into Russian by friends, printed it out, two and a half A4 pages, signed it with a pen:

Please listen to me, not for my sake but for his... I saw him crying after the phone call with you. I held him in my arms when he said to me, “I’m useless.” He is not useless. He is a human being. Not something to be used... I understand that education is crucial. It opens many doors. But if he dies or never comes back, he won’t be able to walk through any doors, even if they are open... It’s war... Maybe you think I’m young and don’t know what love is. But I do.

His friends told him: Ivan, you’re of age, sooner or later, they’ll draft you.

His teacher told him: Once you’re in the country, you won’t get out again.

Lena says she lay down on the floor in front of Ivan and begged him to stay.

His parents came by car from Ukraine to pick him up. One last meeting in a shopping centre, the day before Valentine’s Day, 13 February, a Tuesday. They shared a box of chicken nuggets at McDonald’s. They hugged goodbye.

Lena says she could hardly sleep or eat the week after. At school, she went to the toilet to cry. Almost every day, she says, she wore the red denim jacket he’d left her. She had embroidered V+L on the left sleeve, V for Vanya, his nickname[AB1] , L for Lena.

T[AB2] o this day, she still has a small white box in her room where she collects letters, drawings, and found stones that he gave her. They are the only things she has left of him. When she talks about her everyday life since he left, she hardly ever smiles. She doesn’t raise her voice, she doesn’t cry. She says, “It’s like when you’re so tired that you just stare at one point the whole time and everything becomes blurry. That’s how I’ve been feeling for months.”

Lena says she started reading the news, everything she could find about Ukraine, death tolls, where the bombs hit. She searched Google Street View for his parents’ house in the village of Sinhury in western Ukraine. But no Google car had ever driven through Sinhury. If she texted him and he didn’t reply within an hour, she’d panic. Was he dead?

Most of the time, it turned out he’d been jogging. When he finally replied, she was able to concentrate on her maths lesson again.

Ivan, 9:48: I’ll be back.

Lena, 9:48: Don’t lie to me.

After a few weeks, he told her he wanted to flee. Get out of Ukraine again. His parents had only brought him back so he could help them carry boxes in their butcher’s shop. We raised you, you owe us that, they’d said.

Together, Lena and Ivan made a plan. Across the border to Slovakia, on foot through the mountains, from there on to Poland, then by plane from Krakow to Germany. For weeks, he says, he secretly stashed clothes at a friend’s place. She bought a plane ticket for him.

On 2 March, a Saturday, she stayed awake as long as she could. During the night, he called and said he was afraid. Afraid that he would lose his family forever if he went through with it now.

When she woke up at half past seven in the morning, he was no longer writing. No contact for hours. Then a hurried selfie, a little blurry, from the police station.

The police had caught him at 9:20, according to their report. He was about to go to the toilet at a petrol station, his large rucksack on his shoulders. After one night, he was released. He took the bus back to his parents’ house.

Ivan, 14:08: I screwed up.

Lena, 14:08: No, you were great and you didn’t give up.

She says: “Even though he didn’t make it back then, I’ve never been so proud of anyone in my life as I was of him at that moment.”

A street in the south of Düsseldorf, house number 29, white bricks on the facade. On the ground floor, his old flat, where she so often fell asleep and woke up next to him. She says that after he left, she often came here after school. “I needed that. I had to see that the flat was really empty. That he really wasn’t there anymore.”

She puts her hand on her forehead, press her head against the glass of the front door, and squint. Grey carpet and woodchip wallpaper, that’s all she can make out. She walks onto the pavement, peeks into the window through the bushes before it. There, on the shelf, is an orange Duden dictionary, next to it a water bottle, a colourful timetable is stuck to the wall.

It looks as if he was only gone for a moment.

It’s been four months now.

She says, “Sometimes I’m angry with myself for not meeting him sooner.”

They talk on the phone every day for three hours. At least. In the evenings, their phones next to them on their pillows, they fall asleep together. She at first, usually. He says he always tries to fall asleep after her because it feels like he was putting a blanket over her from a distance. Sometimes, if their batteries haven’t run out, they wake up together in the morning.

He now lives 150 kilometres west of Kyiv[AB3] , back at his parents’ house, which is accessed by a gravel road. In video calls, he shows the rooms, the blackberries in the garden, the white VW under a carport that they used to drive him back to Ukraine from Germany. On his desk are the books that he uses to continue learning German, notebooks full of scrawled sentences: “Danke, es geht prima, super” (Thanks, it’s going great) or “Das wird kein Zuckerschlecken” (It won’t be a walk in the park).

Sometimes he travels to the next largest town, where he walks past advertising posters for the Ukrainian army that look like posters for shooting games. “Enlist now”, they say. Once, he says, he accidentally bumped into an old woman on the bus. She turned around and said to him, “Why are you here, young man? Why aren’t you at the front?”

Young men in Ukraine are not drafted into the military until they are 25. But no one who is of legal age and could potentially be a soldier in the future is allowed to leave the country. Ivan has strong muscles. In the morning, after getting up, he does push-ups. Looking at him, it’s easy to imagine him in a soldier’s uniform. But when he speaks, calmly, quietly, almost delicately, the image becomes impossible.

A Saturday in May, her 18th birthday. He sends her a parcel with a bat plushie, a black handbag, and a letter:

... This bat will be with you until I come back, and we spend every day together ... I want you to know that I’m always there for you ... I will always take care of you and protect you ... You are the brightest and most beautiful star in the entire universe. You are my one and only.

Before, she had asked her mother if she could visit him in Ukraine, in the war.

Her mother had said: No, as long as you aren’t of age, as long as I am in charge, I will not allow it.

Now she is of age. Now she decides for herself.

A train station in Krakow, 20 June, a Thursday. She’s arrived here yesterday, by plane. Now she climbs into a green Flixbus, platform G12, 9:13, summer heat in the air. She is someone who closes her eyes for a moment when warm wind blows in her face.

Around her, a dozen women with large suitcases, sunglasses in their bleached hair, colourful shoes, glittering nails. They look a bit like they’re going on holiday. Behind the windscreen hangs a sign with the bus route.

Krakow – Lviv – Ivano-Frankivsk – Kolomyia – Chernivtsi

She’s wearing black trousers, black shoes, and a burgundy blouse. She has painted small black dots around her eyes with eyeliner. Seat number 14A. In front of her, small children are shouting in a language she does not speak.

This morning, she practised Ukrainian words on Duolingo: city, parents, village.

She stretches her neck over the back of the seat in front of her and says, “It’s so sad. That normal people are suddenly confronted with war. That they’re riding this bus just to see their husband or father.”

She is riding this bus to see her boyfriend again. For the first time in 128 days. That’s more time than they’ve been together in Germany.

Now they want to spend a weekend in Lviv together. It was her suggestion.

Before departure, she bought a cappuccino, and the barista topped it with a foamy heart. She took a photo of it and sent it to him. No reply.

The bus rolls off, humming and creaking. Seven hours and 15 minutes for 340 kilometres, the company has already factored in the wait at the border. Outside, fields and lakes in the sunshine. He still hasn’t replied.

Lena, 11:48: Are you okay?

Lena, 11:56: I’m starting to worry

After three and a half hours, a blue and yellow flag in the sky signals the border. She calls him again and again, nine times in total. He doesn’t answer. A man with a cap and a gun walks through the rows of seats and collects the passports. She rubs her left palm with her right until the skin turns white from the pressure. She says, “My hands are going numb.”

Lena, 12:38: Vanya, please say something

Lena 12:58: I’m afraid something has happened to you or that you aren’t safe

She reads the messages she has written over and over again. Then she puts her phone on her rucksack, display down, folds her fingers with their brown-painted nails together, and scratches the paint off her right index finger with her left thumb.

The bus drives through a grey gate with large Cyrillic letters that say: “Welcome to Ukraine”.

He’s not there. For 47 minutes, she waits at the bus station in Lviv. He should have been there 47 minutes ago, he’d promised, but he’s not there. He’s not texting, he’s not answering his phone. The last time he contacted her was six hours ago. He said he was on the bus.

She sits on a kerb, her head in her hands. It is a noisy afternoon. Around her, announcements blares from loudspeakers, rock music plays somewhere, children knock on the windows of arriving buses. She sits there, not looking up, shaking her head silently. You can see her thoughts racing.

He had tried to escape before. Lviv is close to the Polish border. There are military checkpoints along the way.

At some point, she takes her phone and presses it to her right ear. In the back of her case is a cut-out heart covered with blossoms from flowers he gave her and a fortune-cookie-sized note that reads: “Find someone who looks at you the way you look at chocolate.”

She calls a school friend who is Ukrainian. She says, “Wait, wait, don’t speak! Listen to me. I’m in Ukraine, and he’s not here. He’s not fucking here. He’s not answering his phone. Something bad must have happened. Do you think they might have arrested him and he’s in prison?”

She says, “If he’s been arrested, is it just a matter of spending a night in prison? Or will they send him straight to the front line?”

She says, “But he isn’t texting back.” She sobs. “And I don’t understand why.”

A bus pulls into a stop. She rushes to the door to see if he gets off. He doesn’t.

She says, “I’m so scared.”

She says, “Why didn’t he just stay in Germany, like everyone advised him to?”

She says, “I don’t want to cry in public anymore. I’m so fucking tired.”

She wants to sleep now, in the hotel room he’d booked for the two of them.

An hour later, he calls. She says, “Oh my God, you’re alive.” He says, “I’m so sorry, my phone crapped out.”

Even in war, they remain teenagers, with all their teenage problems. Such as a dickey phone.

He says he’d sprinted from the bus station to the nearest shop and got himself a new one. She says, “Come to the hotel!”

She sits cross-legged on the steps in front of the entrance; next to her, a man smokes, holding on to crutches. Half his foot is missing. She hardly notices him. She rocks her leg nervously. The taxi pulls up.

Before the trip to Ukraine, she’d said, “I hope we haven’t grown so far apart that he feels like a stranger when he stands in front of me again.”

He’d said, “I’m afraid I’m no longer the person she met. I want to be exactly as she remembers me.”

She runs to the car. He gets out. In his left hand, he’s holding a large bouquet. She jumps into his arms, clinging to his neck, and he lifts her up and holds her briefly above the ground.

She presses her index finger against his chest. She says, “It feels strange. Who are you?”

They both laugh.

She says, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Room number 12, on the third floor. They notice that they have the same toothbrushes, only the colours are reversed: yellow handle, purple bristles and vice versa. When they lie down in bed, everything is as if it were preprogrammed. He on the right, she on the left, with her head on his chest. Just as they had always lain in bed in his flat in Düsseldorf. As if it had never been any different in the past few months. They will talk about this the next morning.

They have two days and no plan for what they actually want to do in Lviv. On the first morning, they feed each other croissants in a café. They wander through the streets, hand in hand, a little disoriented. They don’t really want to see anything except each other. Sometimes Lena starts dancing with joy, just like that. They giggle, pretty much the whole time.

He is wearing shiny brown leather shoes. She asks, “Did you polish them because I was coming?’ He says, “Yes, of course.” He carries her rucksack. In front of an ice cream parlour, he reads out all the flavours. She wants passion fruit. Once they walk past a picture of a dog and a cat cuddling. She points to it and says, “That’s us, in another universe.” Another time, he whispers to her, “You are the most wonderful and perfect woman there is.”

White t-shirts hang next to the door of a shop, souvenirs. They say: “FCK PTN”, fuck Putin. She says: “I want one!” He says: “Okay, let’s go!” They rush in, he walks to the cash register. She calls out: “Can I have an M, please?” He pays, it’s six euros, converted.

She asks, “Do you think I can wear this at school?”

At three o’clock in the night, the air raid siren goes off again. In the basement, they take a photo for Lena’s mother, with Ivan giving a thumbs up.

Lena has just spoken to her mother on the phone. They text all the time, too. She’d told her mother: Don’t worry, everything is fine.

Now they read on their phones that rockets have struck near Kyiv. Lena says, “What if they come our way? I don’t know what to do.” A man asks Ivan to turn off the light. He stands up silently, presses the switch, all goes dark. Children cuddle up next to their parents.

Lena lays her head on Ivan’s lap, and he strokes her shoulder. She says, “Waking up at night because of bombs is inhuman.” It is perhaps the first moment when she realises, or at least can no longer deny, where she is.

She counts the number of alarms on that day so far. There’d been four.

After Ivan went back to Ukraine, she says, many of her friends didn’t understand why she stayed with him. Why she put herself through all the grief and pain. She says, “No matter how our relationship develops, whether I stay with him forever or not, I think he deserves a better life. Better than the one he has in Ukraine. He is so smart, he has so much potential. And there is this fear inside me that if I don’t take care of him, no one will. And he might die.”

When she says things like that, she seems older than she looks.

It’s not easy to understand why Ivan left Germany in February. Why he left behind a life where he got Bs and Cs on his report card, where he might now be doing an apprenticeship at an insurance company or a bicycle shop, just like his German ex-classmates. Where he might even have made it to university in a few years, studying economics, his dream.

He talks about violence from his parents, about beatings and blows, with their hands, with crockery. How his father once shaved Ivan’s head: he was angry and threatened to send him to the front. He also says that throughout his childhood, his parents had been telling him: family is all. Without your family, you are nothing.

He says he went back out of guilt. And out of fear. You can see it in his eyes when he talks about his parents. He says, “Going back was the stupidest decision of my life. But I didn’t want to disappoint my parents.”

During his days in Lviv, his phone rings repeatedly. It’s his mother. He doesn’t answer. Once, she even calls the hotel reception. He doesn’t call back.

Their last evening together in Lviv. They are on a swing, back and forth, atop a hill. Below them lies the city. They laugh loudly, like teenagers who can forget all their worries for a moment, swinging.

She says, “We can’t sleep tonight, on our last night! Let’s just watch Barbie films the whole time!”

The bus back to Poland leaves at half past five in the morning. The sun has not yet risen. He hoists her suitcase into the hatch. She presses her head into his chest. They stand there for a moment, frozen, as if unable to let go of each other. The bus driver checks the tickets.

Sirens, again. They kiss quickly, then she hurries onto the bus. She calls out, “Write back to me this time, that would be nice.” He stands below and waves.

The bus slowly makes its way through the streets towards the border. Outside, military trucks drive by, and she looks out of the window. Almost all the nail polish on her thumb has been scratched off. At some point she says, “It’s so strange. These days have felt like something special. Like a holiday or something. But six months ago, this was my life. In Germany, we saw each other every day, at school, after school. And then he was gone. Just like that. And now I’m going back. And next week, I’m returning to school. And every break, I’ll sit on the floor in the hallway, in the place where we always sat together. And I’ll wait there, like I always waited for him there after class. But he isn’t coming anymore.”

Ivan, 4:59: We can do this. I will never give you up.

Lena, 5:35: I’m so afraid of losing you.

Ivan, 5:35: I won’t disappear. I won’t be gone. I won’t leave you alone again.

Ivan, 5:35: Okay?

Lena, 5:38: Okay... I love you.

At the airport in Krakow, she buys a book. She puts the blossoms of the flowers with which he’d met her between the pages to dry. Then she flies back to Germany.

Two weeks later, she says they almost broke up. She writes: “I’m so exhausted. When I came back from Ukraine, I felt like I was in a coma. I couldn’t get out of bed. Summer is beginning, but it doesn’t feel like that to me. For me, it feels as if it’s still February. I don’t know what to do to make it all stop.”

She hasn’t stuck the leaves from the flowers from Lviv onto one of her cards yet. She says: “I thought they might be the last ones I ever get from him. And I wanted to wait for the right moment.”

This is where their story could end. A teenage love, broken by war and a stupid decision, by parents who brought their son back from safety to Ukraine. But it doesn’t end there.

On 23 August, a Friday, at 23.49, Lena writes: “Vanya is trying to cross the border right now.”

25 August, a Sunday. The ICE train arrives before she does. She runs up the stairs, platform 17, Düsseldorf Central Station, past pensioners with wheeled suitcases and tourists with large backpacks.

And there he is. 

Ivan lifts her up again, like he did in front of the hotel in Ukraine, she puts her hand on the back of his head, her chin on his shoulder. She asks, “Are you okay?” He says, “Yes!” He has white bandages wrapped around both arms. His legs and face are covered in scabs and scratches. His black t-shirt is dotted with holes. There are thorns stuck in his upper arms. Later, he tells her what happened.

He says he ran away from his parents and first tried to cross the border legally. The men sent him back: he wasn’t allowed to leave the country. Just a few hundred metres from the border checkpoint, he threw away his suitcase and simply ran, through chest-high bushes, for minutes on end, with only a rucksack on his back, containing little more than his German school reports, his birth certificate, headphones, a laptop, his passport and a small tool, a sort of a pocket knife. He used it to cut holes in barbed wire fences and squeeze through. When he heard a car starting, he pressed himself to the ground and held his breath. And when he saw on his phone that he had actually made it across the border, he immediately called Lena. “I’m in Slovakia!”, he shouted into the phone. “I’m running. I’m covered in blood.”

She says that after they hung up, she was so afraid that he would die.

Slovakian police officers noticed him not far from the border, took him to the station, photographed him, and handed him a piece of paper. He still has it in his rucksack. It is a residence permit. He says they simply let him go. And then he travelled on, to the next town, and from there to Košice. Bratislava. Berlin.

On a German train, a man looked at him and asked if he was Indiana Jones. He replied, “No, it’s only that I just fled Ukraine.”

At 15:09, after more than 40 hours, he has arrived. There he is, standing in front of Lena on this platform at Düsseldorf Central Station. He grins as if he still can’t believe it himself. She says, “Hey, this is the first time I’ve seen you without braces!”

They drive to Lena’s mother’s flat, where she waits for them with champagne and cake. After the first night, he slips out secretly. He buys Lena a bouquet of flowers.