When I went to dinner one night, the book left hidden under my pillow, the duplicity of my life—both who I was inside and who I was to others—struck me as surreal. The book and you had brought it hurling back, and I decided never to be that vulnerable again, never to feel that panic again, never to depend on anyone else. So I avoided your eyes when you walked past our table that night, fixed my eyes on the bloodred borscht instead. And I didn’t come to the river in the days that followed. The end of the camp was in sight. I stayed in the hut and read and avoided you, hoping the days would slip by unnoticed and I could just go home to my old life. During the breaks in the field, I’d sit in the shade, leaning against the boards of the wooden toolshed while you’d join some of the guys by the water pump, smoking, joking with them, trying to catch my eye. I pretended I didn’t see.

By then the uniform had adapted to my body, yielded to its shape, and my body had adapted to the land. We knew what we were doing now, and all one could hear for most of the day was the thud of the beets falling into baskets. The mountains of them grew more quickly, until there were almost no rows left. At one point, during the last week, I was working away, lost in the repetition of my movements, when I saw you standing above me. You looked like you’d been there for a while, watching me work.

“Did you finish reading the book?” Your question sounded like a challenge.

“Yes,” I said, into the earth, feeling my jaw clench, continuing to work.

“Do you still want to lend it to me?”

I stopped digging. My heart was galloping. I looked up at you, and I don’t know what made me do it—maybe it was the sincerity with which you asked, which was drawn on your face, or maybe it was a sense of resignation—but I nodded. I decided I had nothing to lose. Our paths would never cross again, and I didn’t want to be like David, afraid of himself and devoured by regrets.

“I’ll bring it round to you at dinner,” I heard myself say.

That night I waited for you by the canteen exit, in the half-dark where people smoked and gossiped before they went to bed. I waited for you until late, until the streams of people leaving had dried up and I thought I had missed you. I was thinking about returning to my hut when finally you came through the door. The girl was right behind you. She looked poised. Her eyes, like her hair, were dark and intense, but her skin was light, pale even, as if she hadn’t been in the sun at all for all these weeks. You exchanged a look with her that I couldn’t see, and then she glanced at me with a vague smile and walked off into the dark.