“Really?” I smiled, feeling pleasure, an ounce of power. “I would have suspected you of being more of a rebel.”

It surprises me that I shared the book’s existence with you so early. But I felt a strange trust there by the bank. There was something about the way you looked at me that made me feel as if you didn’t judge. There are only so many people we meet in life who give us that feeling. And yet that night, as I lay in bed reading after the others had gone to asleep, I was scared. Scared about the hole I had made by trusting you, scared by the vulnerability it had created. And the more I read, the more scared I became: the immensity of the truth and the lies I’d been telling myself all those years lay before me, mirrored in the narrator’s life, as if someone were pointing a finger at me, black on white, my shame illuminated by a cold, clear light. In the brightness I could examine it with almost scientific clarity, and suddenly the narrator’s pain didn’t soothe my pain anymore. His fear fed my fear. I was like him, David, neither here nor there, comfortable in no place, and with no way out.

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.