The Picture Show

Maksim Manakhov, 23, and Lilya Lohyna, 22, fell in love after Russian forces encircled their home of Kharkiv and it became the site of near constant shelling for months.

Natalie Keyssar for NPR

Lilya Lohnya, 22, and Maksim Manakhov, 23

When Lilya Lohyna, 22, got the call from her mother that the war had started, she thought it was just hysterics. She hung up. She was accustomed to paranoia about an invasion. On her way to work that morning, the metro was already free, but she didn’t notice. She got to the debt collections office where she worked and found it empty. She called her coworkers to ask why they weren’t there, and she didn’t believe them either.

She bought a bag of chips and some lemonade and went home to watch anime. She didn’t believe it until around 2 p.m., when the bombardment of Kharkiv began. She hid in her first floor bathroom and cried. She called her mother, then her friend Maksim, an Azerbaijani student who’d come to Kharkiv to attend university. He made a couple of jokes to calm her down, which only served to make her furious. Sitting on their bed in the apartment they now share, they laugh at the memory.

She’d asked him to stay with her so she wouldn’t have to sleep alone, and during the long nights of shelling, they fell in love. Together, they pass the time watching movies and collecting a menagerie of animals left behind by evacuees. Lilya cooked often, waiting in long lines for scarce groceries. Their tiny one-bedroom apartment is now home to two cats and a chinchilla that Lilya thought was a rat until she got him home.

Maksim’s student visa is set to expire, which will force him to leave the…