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reverberatedthrough her, tingling her skin. She lit the candle and the small glow fluttered across the egg-white walls. No receipts or envelopes or letters remained, nothing light enough for the wind to carry through the empty frames, nothing on which a good-bye might be written. The furniture was as she remembered: the divan against the right living room wall, still stained where Natasha had dropped an entire pot of borscht; the black-and-white Ekran television set perched on a milking stool; the wooden kitchen table leveled by three matchbooks. This had been her home. This had been her life. That had been her divan. She was returning to it, burying her face in the cushions and weeping into fabric that all these years later still held the scent of beets.
    The next morning she went to the doors of the adjacent units. She couldn’t recall the names of her neighbors, and judging from her unanswered knocks, they had fled from their flats as from her memory. On the fourth day footsteps came from the hallway. Sonja found a hunched woman wearing a green raincoat even though the sun was shining. The woman carried a dozen plastic shopping bags layered inside each other and tied at the straps.
    “Who are you?” the woman asked, with enough suspicion to flatten the question to an accusation. Laina had been on the far side of middle age when Sonja accepted the London fellowship. She had worked the cosmetics counter at the Main Department Store and had gorgeous skin, skin that a thirty-year-old would envy, skin that her supervisor correctly cited as the cosmetic counter’s most effective advertisement, skin plied with every moisturizer and emulsion stocked within the glass display case, skin that Sonja and her mother and even her sister had admired, that now looked like the skin of a peach left for many days in the sun.
    “I’m Sonja.” Laina’s fingertips scrutinized her, holding her wrists, bending her ears. “I see,” Laina said, at last convinced of Sonja’s corporeal form. “You lived here.”
    “I heard you in the hall,” Sonja said a few minutes later, as they drank tea in Laina’s flat. “I thought you were someone else.”
    “You shouldn’t open the door when you hear strangers. It’s never a good idea.”
    “It was this once.”
    “This is the one in a million.”
    “Then I’m very, very lucky.”
    “No, you are very, very stupid.”
    “Why are you wearing a raincoat? There isn’t a cloud for kilometers.”
    Laina went to the empty window frames, through which she could see what was left of the city, a view that stretched sixteen blocks farther than it had two years earlier. “I don’t trust God. Who knows what he’s planning up there.” The bazaar had gradually been repopulated with vendors and sheet-metal kiosks and elderly women like Laina for whom war was no hindrance to a good haggle. She had just bartered a jar of engine oil for sandals that bore the blackened imprints of forty different toes. Once she had had a husband, now dead, whom she could trust not to cheat on her in a brothel. Once she had had a son, now missing, whom she had threatened to marry to Sonja if he misbehaved. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin smiled on the face of the clock hanging over the stove, and Sonja studied him as she gathered the breath to dislodge the question that for one and a half years had been wedged in her voice box. When the hour hand fell into the cosmonaut’s outstretched palm, she inhaled and asked, “Do you know where Natasha is?” Laina bit her lip and shook her head. “I don’t know where anyone is.”
    No one could answer the question. Days turned to weeks and Sonja accosted the few remaining tenants as they left for work, food, battle or better shelter, but she never received more than a shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulders, an apology. There was no sign of forced entry and the made bed in Natasha’s room suggested a deliberate departure. In the bottom dresser drawer Sonja found the burgundy