By the time I encountered her decades later in the camp, Sophie was already in bad shape. Malnourished, weak, tubercular, she moved only between her pallet and the crossroads—the makeshift center of camp where distributions happened and lines were formed. I was more mobile, searching out what I could find or use or trade or eat, working my connections among formal and informal associations, still strong enough to keep busy so that my mind skipped and skimmed on the surface of grief and didn’t get sucked under. In my comings and goings through the camp I would pass the medical station, the hall with broken windows where weddings were still performed, the guy who cut hair and the one who hawked containers, and the handyman in a turban who worked in the shade of an arch-way, who would take a broken gas burner or heater and, with a little sideways nod of his head, would always say “Tomorrow is good” to the owner impatient to know when he or she could return for it. Sometimes parts of the camp became flooded, and when the water was gone, there would be impassable mud. But I would always come back again to check on Sophie, and bring to her what I could. It felt good to be useful, good to be able to make things a little bit easier for her. When she ceased being able to move at all, or no longer cared to, I would sit with her, dipping a rag in water and laying it on her feverish head, or just holding her hand, and sometimes when she was a little better she would look out into the middle distance with her gray-violet eyes and unspool for us a part of some movie. Once she did all of E.T., from the opening when the alien spaceship lights blink through the silhouette of pine needles, and those two long, knobby, supraprehensile brown fingers reach up and pluck down a branch for a better view, and you just know that one’s not going to make it back on board in time, all the way until the crushing goodbye. When Sophie got to the end, this little elfin kid under a floppy hat with his arms wrapped around his knees started to weep, the tears making clean tracks down his dirty face until he windshield-wiped it all away with his hoodie sleeve.