“Do you want to see my souvenir collection before we go?” Havaa asked. “I have a collection of all the people who’ve stayed here.”

She opened the drawer before Natasha could suggest they see it when not dressed in enough layers to roast themselves alive. There was a pressed flower head, plucked from Ukrainian soil twenty-two years earlier, the only entry in an otherwise empty journal. Three brass buttons that had fastened the blazer of a thrice bankrupted businessman, who, in Hoboken, New Jersey, had already put in the paperwork to open the collection agency that would make him a millionaire in eight years’ time. A key ring with two keys that opened the front door to a house that no longer existed.

“You have to give me something before you go,” the girl said.

“I’ll give you the teeth from my mouth if we can just go outside now. There is a wetland forming in my underwear. I can feel tadpoles.”

Taking her by the hand, the girl led Natasha through the undergrowth until the forest forgot the service road and the birch trunks blocked out the village chimneys. The loose soil felt odd under her boots. When was the last time she’d lost the texture of asphalt, concrete, or linoleum beneath her toes? When she hiked over the border with five woman whose names she still didn’t know. This was nicer.

In piles of wet, rotting leaves they found maggots and larvae and crustaceous creatures, which they both agreed were better suited to oceanic depths. They found a mountain range of deer dung scaled and mined by a brigade of red ants. The sun was burning a hole in the middle of the sky, and Natasha was wondering if Dokka’s hands were capable of making siskal for lunch, when the girl stopped suddenly. “What’s wrong?” Natasha asked.

The girl nodded to a parting, twenty meters away, where two lengths of aquamarine lay like misplaced strips of sky. As they edged forward, Natasha saw the aquamarine didn’t belong to the sky, but rather to the legs of straw-stuffed blue trousers.

“A scarecrow?” Natasha asked. A faded Red Army — issue shirt languished above the trousers. Nine soldiers had lived and died in that shirt. The scarecrow, drunk, judging from its borrowed birch-trunk backbone, had been decapitated. Nailed to the tree, where the head should have been, was a moss-devoured board.

“No,” the girl said. “It’s Akim.”

“Who’s Akim?”

Too young to explain in words, the girl’s face was old enough to show the loss that was that name. Natasha, not understanding what this meant, was briefly annoyed, believing it profligate to expend pity on a scarecrow when there were more deserving life forms, but of all people, who was she to judge how a girl disburses her empathy. She wrapped her arm around Havaa. The whole of the girl’s bony shoulder fit in the cup of her palm, and the girl reached up and held on to her fingers. If Akim could have seen the two of them, he would have taunted them for weeks.

After dinner that evening they were joined by a man, tall, slender, and bearded, in whose presence Dokka grew aloof. His name was Akhmed. He asked about the hospital, showing particular interest in the hiring process. The hospital hadn’t adhered to those formalities since before she arrived — she had never even taken a first-aid course, she confided — and if he still wanted to work there Sofia Andreyevna Rabina would surely hire him. The brilliance building behind his eyes faded when she added that no hospital employee had received a salary in many years. And then he asked a peculiar question: had she ever used dental floss for stitches? Natasha was questioning his sanity when he described a rebel field commander who, two years earlier, had arrived in the village with his chest held together by dental floss. That would be Sonja, Natasha said, she could stitch a lion to the back of a wildebeest. He had never seen finer stitching of any other material, much less dental floss, and could vividly recall the twenty-three stitches curving along the crescent wound, which the commander had called the grin on his chest, and the memory had haunted him, reminding him of the unexpected wonders a capable mind might conceive. Natasha wholeheartedly agreed, and encouraged his misconception that Sonja worked miracles, not from malice, but from a budding pride that stretched all eleven kilometers home.

Dokka didn’t say a word to Akhmed, not even in greeting or farewell, and when the man left, Natasha asked if he had come invited.

“He comes once a week,” Dokka explained. “Usually when travelers are staying. He likes talking to people, getting news from the outside.

And he helps with the tasks Havaa’s hands are too small to perform. Chopping firewood and the like.”

“But you don’t care for him?”

Dokka gave a sad smile. “He was my closest friend once. It pains me that I can’t decline his assistance.”

In the bedroom, Natasha undressed under the girl’s inquisitive stare. “Did they take you to the Landfill, too?”

“No,” Natasha said.

“Then why are there marks on your shoulders?”

Instinctively she reached back and covered the knotted scars. Some three dozen stippled her left shoulder and neck, and had Sergey not switched to nicotine gum, there would have been some three dozen more. “It’s nothing,” she said, quick to throw on a nightdress. “I fell asleep in the sun once. I couldn’t sleep on my back for months after. Just a reminder of my foolish younger self.” After she brushed her teeth, she asked, “Did the scarecrow walk into the woods by itself?”

“I helped him,” the girl boasted.

“He must have been heavy.”

“It took me three days. I dragged him along the road and hid him each night so no one would take him.”

“Why?” Natasha asked.

“For Akim.”

“You mentioned him earlier. Who is he?”

“No one really.”

“Is he like an imaginary friend? My sister and I, when we were children, we pretended we had an imaginary sister.”

“No!” the girl said, horrified by the suggestion. “Akim’s not imaginary.”

“I’m sorry, I was just asking.”

“You’re mean.” Natasha felt like she had stepped into a foreign country whose customs and manners she didn’t comprehend, where her gestures of concern were taken as affronts. The Samsonite was still unzipped from when she had retrieved her wool sleeping socks, and through the opening she saw the black fake fur hat of the Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker. Without pausing to consider the thousands of kilometers the souvenir had already traveled, or that she might need this totem to draw strength in the uncertain days, she pulled the toy from the suitcase and presented it to the girl in appeasement.

“Here,” she said. “A souvenir.”

The nutcracker was as wide as the girl’s hand and twice as long. As she studied it, her curiosity consumed her anger. “Who is this?” she asked.

What was the name they had given this little wooden man that never laughed? She lay back, more afraid of losing the name than the nutcracker itself, but there it was, years since she last spoke it and it was right there.

“Alu,” she said.

Five nights and the refugees Dokka promised still hadn’t come; on the morning of the sixth day, she announced she was leaving. After breakfast Dokka asked her to join him in the bedroom. Six ribbons looped around the six dresser drawer knobs, and Dokka fit his wrist into the first, opening a drawer that contained jewelry, foreign coins, wristwatches, and billfolds, a more extravagant version of his daughter’s collection. “Right there,” he said. “You see the red bandanna? Take it.”

The bandanna wrapped around an L-shaped object. Its weight substantiated her fear the moment she lifted it.

“It’s a Makarov semiautomatic pistol,” he said. “You simply unlatch the safety, point at the target, and shoot.”

But for the beige handgrip, the gun was silver; a passing cloud dulled its luster. She had seen guns on television and at the bazaar, in the hands of rebels, soldiers, and gangsters, pointed at her in City Park and the Breaking Grounds, but she had never stood on this side of the barrel before.