“We have to get him to a hospital,” she yells as she gets up, but Andrei keeps lifting his legs in a frantic dance, rubbing his ears, as though trying to knead the sound back in. She thinks of a sled Grandpa made for her a few years ago, a sled still hanging on the wall of their shed back home, and she pulls Andrei by the sleeve of his coat toward a big fir tree, not far from where Marik lies on the snow. Together they tug at the lowest bough, up and down and right and left until it becomes loose and crunches off the trunk. The bough is thick and long, a little bigger than Marik’s height, and they pull him onto this fir sled, Andrei and Sasha, because Marik is heavy and limp and doesn’t help them at all.

It is no use asking Andrei what has happened. He has stopped jumping and beating his ears, and now he does nothing but twitch his shoulders in rhythmic shrugs.

They pull Marik out of the woods on this makeshift sled, trudging silently through the snow, like the tired dogs tugging at their load in a grainy film about the Arctic they all saw at school. When the forest ends, they walk across the field and onto a road that leads to the hospital where her mother works. It is harder to pull Marik over the rough surface of iced pebbles and frozen dirt, and Andrei is not much help, slapping his head as if he’d forgotten something, his shoulders still twitching. Sasha’s winter coat padded with cotton feels as hot on the inside as their black stove, and she unbuttons it, letting the wind gush onto her chest, something Grandma would be horrified to see, certain that Sasha will get pneumonia. They pass the tracks where the streetcar turns around to go back to town; they drag Marik past wooden houses squatting on the outskirts of town under roofs that have been ravaged by the winter; and finally, as her arms begin to quiver and she is afraid she won’t be able to take one more step, the hospital arranges itself in front of her, as if magically lowered from the pewter sky.

Two women in white gowns run out of the door from behind a counter and carefully transfer Marik onto a stretcher. They wave for Andrei and Sasha to follow them into the bowels of the hospital, into a room where a doctor with a thin neck and a pimply face plugs a stethoscope into his ears and bends over Marik. He pulls apart Marik’s eyelids, wraps his fingers around Marik’s wrist, and then tells the two women with the stretcher to take Sasha and Andrei out of the room and close the door.

“So what did you hooligans do?” demands the older woman, as thick and round as the pot warmer Grandma pulls over their teakettle.