She felt Nitro watching her and said, “Will you stay here?”

“For a while,” he replied. “Need to keep an eye on her. Make sure she doesn’t stop breathing or go into shock.”

“Shock?”

“From loss of blood.”

“Oh…” Elizaveta hesitated, still wanting to help. “Is there anything I can do?”

He shook his head. “Go get some rest.”

2

Jesus and Pita were seated in the two rattan chairs at the table, speaking softly to one another, Pita smoking a cigarette and appearing agitated. Elizaveta let them be and went to the far side of the room, where she found a spot against the wall to settle down. Her clothes and undergarments clung wetly and miserably to her skin. A hearth would have been wonderful right then, the heat of the fire and the musky smell of burning wood divine.

At least there were candles, she thought. It would have been horrible to have to sit there in midnight blackness, the only sound the violent wind and rain, not knowing where the others were, not knowing whether someone had slipped into the cabin with them.

Elizaveta cleared her throat and reigned in her imagination. She lit a Camel, noting she only had four left in the pack. She took a drag, held the smoke in her lungs, almost as if this action would warm her up, then exhaled slowly, reluctantly.

Unlike the Spartan bedroom, the main room was filled with Solano’s personal belongings. Alongside the countless dolls, there were primitive-looking farming tools, miscellaneous items of the variety you might find in a homeless man’s shopping cart, an incongruous car seat, and wood carvings of, unsurprisingly, miniature dolls. These were colorfully painted and reminded her of matryoshka dolls, a popular toy of Russian children for much of the last century.

Elizaveta hated matryoshka dolls. They reminded her of the orphanage and of a man named Yevgeny Popov. Yevgeny had been part of the staff at the orphanage. At first Elizaveta liked him. The other care-workers were indifferent and cruel to her. They were trained to be like this, products of a cold-hearted system, for orphans were as stigmatized as the disabled and the elderly and femininity in the Soviet Union: a problem to be dealt with in the shadows far from the public eye. Yevgeny, however, always smiled and waved at her. Sometimes he would sneak her a piece of chocolate when no one was looking. He also told her lots of haunted stories concerning the orphanage, strange things that had happened to him, such as lights mysteriously turning on in certain rooms and footsteps sounding behind him, even though when he turned around nobody was there. These tales gave her nightmares, but she eagerly awaited the next one. Life then was bleak and routine, and they relieved the doldrums.