“I’m sorry. How would I?’
He laughed, loud and brightly, while she stared at his hands. Those, at the very least, were no laughing matter. “I met you seven years ago in the maternity ward of Hospital No. 6. I’ll never forget you, not for the rest of my life. I am Dokka. You delivered my daughter, Havaa.”
She repeated the name, but couldn’t match it to the several hundred newborns in her memory. Behind him stood a little girl with almond-brown hair, green eyes, and ten fingers, all there. Natasha began to ask about the refugee beds, but Dokka cut her off. “Come inside. You can stay as long as you’d like.”
The rooms themselves appeared amputated at waist height; nothing stood out of a child’s reach. Dokka, politely declining her offers of assistance, used his hands like forceps as he bustled around the kitchen. He pinched a matchstick between his teeth, struck it against the wall, and spat it into the open stove. Over four years he had brewed tea for perhaps two thousand refugees, but there had been no pot he wanted to taste finer than this one. Again she offered help, but he had brewed tea for two thousand without faltering, and only needed her help drinking it.
“You’re going to the refugee camps?” he asked. She nodded. She’d heard stories of overcrowded camps, where a single spigot left running would supply water for three thousand souls, but the blessing of rumor was its boundlessness, and she could disbelieve what she wanted. Despite all that had happened, Sonja’s description of London lured her. She wanted to live there.
“You shouldn’t be traveling alone. There are soldiers and bandits, often the same people. You should travel in a group with at least one man.”
She couldn’t help smiling. “I’ve done that before. It didn’t work out.”
“And you’re ethnic Russian? No, no, no.” After a moment Dokka gave a knowing nod to the empty seat beside Natasha. “Before you leave, we will think of something.”
When the girl returned a half hour later with a treasure trove of pinecones, bird feathers, and dried leaves divided by color, her father, in a tone of familiar exasperation, asked her to remove her muddy boots. She carefully placed her findings on the kitchen table and followed them into the bedroom. She still hadn’t said a word to Natasha. Standing before the open closet, Dokka explained that his wife had died that spring. He missed her greatly, not least because her passing had left the household with only one pair of functioning hands, still too small and weak to chop firewood, but he had a closet full of her clothes, which the moths would feast upon before Havaa could grow into them, so she should, he said while walking out, in short, have at it. As she undressed she turned to hide her burn scars, but the girl had seen worse and studied her without judgment or disgust. Without a mirror, she had to ask the girl’s opinion of each dress. The girl shook her head no, no, no. She had seen her mother in this dress and that dress, each one of which pained her to see worn by a stranger, and she nodded yes only when Natasha put on a maternity dress, the only one in the closet she hadn’t seen her mother wear.
After dinner, Dokka gave her a clean bedsheet and showed her to the room that had been his daughter’s. In the world beyond were two thousand and eighteen souls who had slept in that room, and remembered that room, and would harbor it in their thoughts for no fewer than ninety-nine years, when a little girl that Havaa had once watched sleep, the last living of the two thousand, closed her eyes for the last time.
Havaa lay on the bottom bunk of the bed beside Natasha’s, and, propped on her elbows, peering into Natasha’s upside-down eyes, asked to see Natasha’s hands. “You still have yours,” she said, bending Natasha’s fingers.
“I intend to keep them.”
“My mother kept hers and she still died.”
“They usually don’t play much of a role in that.”
The girl wasn’t so certain. “My father said your hands were the first to hold me.” She had stopped flexing Natasha’s fingers and was now holding them, squeezing them, firm.
“I helped your mother give birth. I made sure she was clean and comfortable. When you popped out, I made sure you were, too.”
“I saw baby rabbits once,” the girl said proudly. “Did I look like that?”
“No, not at all. You were beautiful.”
A grimace crowded the girl’s face. “I wanted to look weird.”
“You did look weird,” Natasha said, a beat too quickly.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Your legs were growing out of your shoulders, arms came out of your knees, and you were breathing out of your bottom. I had to fix everything. I missed lunch that day because of you.”
The girl beamed above her. “Are you going to help children in the camps?”
“It’s been a long day. Let’s talk about that tomorrow.”
The girl snuffed out the lamp and thin, tapering smoke unwound from the wick, drifting into Natasha’s yawn. She could count the bed slats through the limp mattress. The heavy blankets, gray, coarse enough to clean a skillet, smelled of every body they had ever warmed. Where was her sister right now? And was she asking the same question? There would be time for guilt, for second guesses, for turning back, but this was the time for rest, and as she slipped into sleep, a sleep so deeply peaceful not even the long fingers of dreams would reach her, she heard the girl say, “I’m glad you have yours. Otherwise I would have fallen.”
At breakfast Dokka urged her to stay for another night or two. Another group of refugees might pass through, one she might join. It was wisdom a child might summon, but coming from him, from his kindness and hospitality, she decided to stay, even though she was only a dozen kilometers from home. The girl hid her smile behind a spoonful of kasha. Havaa wanted to show her the forest, and after washing their dishes they returned to the bedroom to dress.
“Do you want to see my souvenir collection before we go?” Havaa asked. “I have a collection of all the people who’ve stayed here.”
She opened the drawer before Natasha could suggest they see it when not dressed in enough layers to roast themselves alive. There was a pressed flower head, plucked from Ukrainian soil twenty-two years earlier, the only entry in an otherwise empty journal. Three brass buttons that had fastened the blazer of a thrice bankrupted businessman, who, in Hoboken, New Jersey, had already put in the paperwork to open the collection agency that would make him a millionaire in eight years’ time. A key ring with two keys that opened the front door to a house that no longer existed.
“You have to give me something before you go,” the girl said.
“I’ll give you the teeth from my mouth if we can just go outside now. There is a wetland forming in my underwear. I can feel tadpoles.”
Taking her by the hand, the girl led Natasha through the undergrowth until the forest forgot the service road and the birch trunks blocked out the village chimneys. The loose soil felt odd under her boots. When was the last time she’d lost the texture of asphalt, concrete, or linoleum beneath her toes? When she hiked over the border with five woman whose names she still didn’t know. This was nicer.
In piles of wet, rotting leaves they found maggots and larvae and crustaceous creatures, which they both agreed were better suited to oceanic depths. They found a mountain range of deer dung scaled and mined by a brigade of red ants. The sun was burning a hole in the middle of the sky, and Natasha was wondering if Dokka’s hands were capable of making siskal for lunch, when the girl stopped suddenly. “What’s wrong?” Natasha asked.
The girl nodded to a parting, twenty meters away, where two lengths of aquamarine lay like misplaced strips of sky. As they edged forward, Natasha saw the aquamarine didn’t belong to the sky, but rather to the legs of straw-stuffed blue trousers.