The best way to understand how Vasyl Tokarchuk’s life has been going for a month, he says, is to see the movie Trapped in Time. “I feel like Bill Murray waking up every morning in the same hotel bed and repeating the same situations every day,” says this executive of a multinational information technology company from kyiv. Tokarchuk and his family have been staying at the Deja Vu hotel in Berdichev since March 9, a municipality of 75,000 inhabitants just 130 kilometers from the Ukrainian capital. He intends to reside in his room, 301, until it is safe to return to the city.
Neither the Tokarchuks nor the other nine families staying with no departure date at the Deja Vu had fallen for the irony of the hotel’s name. They all fled from the war front in kyiv province. Every day they greet each other when they enter the dining room, when they pass each other in the corridors, smoking at the entrance to the building or at the grocery store across the street, where they sell dried fish, bread and cheese, and where they can refill bottles of water or buy cheap beer. bulk. Every day they greet each other, but the interaction does not go further, they do not even make an attempt to introduce themselves, as confirmed in their interviews with EL PAÍS.
Little do they know about each other. Some barely leave the room, like a young woman with a punk aesthetic traveling alone, secluded with her cat. “Perhaps we have not fraternized with other guests because we are computer engineers and we are rather introverted, or perhaps it is because the circumstances are not ideal for making friends,” reflects Denis Makarov, 36, the father of the youngest of the displaced from the hotel, Leonid, two years old.
By Christian Segura from Berdichev (Ukraine)
PHOTO: From left to right, Oleksander, Andrii, Svitlana, Yurii and Vasyl Tocharuk, residents of kyiv and guests of the Deja Vu hotel, on March 31 in Berdichev. / Albert Garcia (El País )
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