asked for a room. They nodded down the road.
A third of the houses were ruined by fire or explosions, or even by the former occupants themselves, who, like farmers sowing their fields with salt, believed destruction to be the final act of ownership. Portraits hung eerily from electrical poles and doors, their faces staring blankly at her. She asked an elderly man for a room and he directed her farther down the road to a house with a green door where a man named Dokka kept beds for refugees traveling toward the border.
The man named Dokka opened the front door with his foot. He regarded her suspiciously, and she worried her skin, paler since September, revealed her ethnicity. But then his hesitation burst into a firework of recognition. “Natasha!” he exclaimed, opening his arms in welcome. Attached to them were two hideous, fingerless hands. She stepped back. He knew her name, but they had never met. Those things at the ends of his wrists wouldn’t have slipped her mind.
He asked if she remembered him.
“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