"Jonas! Please!"

My brother and Mrs. Rimas came through the snow, their arms extended.

"Oh dear God, Elena!" said Mrs. Rimas.

We dragged Mother into our jurta. She lay facedown on a wood plank, Mrs. Rimas at her side, Janina peering over her.

"Lina, what is it?" said Jonas, terrified.

I stared blankly.

"Lina?"

I turned to my brother. "Papa."

"Papa?" His face fell.

I nodded slowly. I couldn't speak. A sound came out of my mouth, a twisted, pitiful moan. This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening. Not Papa. I had sent the drawings.

I saw Jonas's face rewind before me. He suddenly looked his age, vulnerable. Not like a young man fighting for his family, smoking books, but like the little schoolboy who ran into my bedroom the night we were taken. He looked at me, then at Mother. He walked over to her, lay down, and carefully put his arms around her. Snow blew through a crack in the mud, falling on their hair.

Janina wrapped her arms around my legs. She hummed softly.

"I'm sorry. So sorry," said the repeater.

76.

I COULDN'T SLEEP. I couldn't speak. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Papa's face, battered, peering down from the bathroom hole on the train. Courage, Lina, he said to me. Exhaustion and grief inched heavily into every fiber of my body, yet I was wide awake. My mind flickered as if on short circuit, spitting never-ending images of anguish, anxiety, and sorrow at me.

How did Kretzsky know? There was a mistake. It was another man, not Papa. It was possible, right? I thought of Andrius, searching the train cars for his father. He thought it was possible, too. I wanted to tell Andrius what had happened. I put my hand in my pocket and clutched the stone.

My drawings had failed. I had failed.

I tried to sketch but couldn't. When I started to draw, the pencil moved by itself, propelled by something hideous that lived inside of me. Papa's face contorted. His mouth pulled in agony. His eyes radiated fear. I drew myself, screaming at Kretzsky. My lips twisted. Three black snakes with fangs spurted out of my open mouth. I hid the drawings in Dombey and Son.

Papa was strong. He was a patriot. Did he fight? Or was he unaware? Did they leave him in the dirt like Ona? I wondered if Jonas had the same questions. We didn't discuss it. I wrote a letter to Andrius, but it became smudged with tears.

The storm raged. The wind and icy snow created a deafening roar of white noise. We dug a path out the door to collect our rations. Two Finns, lost in the blizzard, couldn't find their jurta. They squeezed into ours. One had dysentery. The stench made me gag. My scalp was crawling with lice.

On the second day, Mother got up and insisted on shoveling the door. She looked drawn, like a part of her soul had escaped.

"Mother, you should rest," said Jonas. "I can dig through the snow."

"It does no good to lie here," said Mother. "There is work to be done. I must do my part."

On the third day of the storm the man who wound his watch directed the two Finns back to their jurta.

"Take that bucket outside. Wash it out in the snow," the bald man told me.

"Why me?" I asked.

"We'll take turns," said Mother. "We'll all have to do it."

I took the bucket out into the darkness. The winds had retreated. Suddenly, I couldn't breathe. The moisture in my nostrils had frozen. This was only November. The polar night would last until the beginning of March. The weather would get worse. How could we withstand it? We had to make it through the first winter. I hurried with my bucket duty and returned to the jurta. I felt like Janina, whispering to Papa at night like she whispered to her dead doll.

November 20. Andrius's birthday. I had counted the days carefully. I wished him a happy birthday when I woke and thought about him while hauling logs during the day. At night, I sat by the light of the stove, reading Dombey and Son. Krasivaya. I still hadn't found the word. Maybe I'd find it if I jumped ahead. I flipped through some of the pages. A marking caught my eye. I leafed backward. Something was written in pencil in the margin on page 278.

Hello, Lina. You've gotten to page 278. That's pretty good!

I gasped, then pretended I was engrossed in the book. I looked at Andrius's handwriting. I ran my finger over his elongated letters in my name. Were there more? I knew I should read onward. I couldn't wait. I turned through the pages carefully, scanning the margins.

Page 300: Are you really on page 300 or are you skipping ahead now?

I had to stifle my laughter.

Page 322: Dombey and Son is boring. Admit it.

Page 364: I'm thinking of you.

Page 412: Are you maybe thinking of me?

I closed my eyes.

Yes, I'm thinking of you. Happy birthday, Andrius.

77.

IT WAS MID-DECEMBER. Winter had us in its jaws. The repeater had frostbite. The tips of his fingers were puckered, jet black. Gray, bulbous lumps appeared on the end of his nose. We wrapped ourselves in every piece of clothing and rags we could find. We tied our feet in old fishing nets that had washed ashore. Everyone bickered in the jurta, getting on each other's nerves.

Small children began dying. Mother took her ration to a starving boy. He was already dead, his tiny hand outstretched, waiting for a piece of bread. We had no doctor or nurse in camp, only a veterinarian from Estonia. We relied on him. He did his best, but the conditions were unsanitary. He had no medicine.

Ivanov and the NKVD wouldn't step inside our jurtas. They yelled at us to leave the dead outside the door. "You're all filthy pigs. You live in filth. It's no wonder you're dying."

Dysentery, typhus, and scurvy crawled into camp. Lice feasted on our open sores. One afternoon, one of the Finns left his wood chopping to urinate. Janina found him swinging from a branch. He had hanged himself with a fishing net.

We had to trek farther and farther to find wood. We were nearly five kilometers from camp. At the end of the day Janina clung by my side.

"Liale showed me something," she said.

"What's that?" I said, stuffing twigs into my pockets for our stove and my paintbrushes.

Janina looked around. "Come here. I'll show you."

She took my hand and walked me down the edge of the tree line and into the snow. She reached out her mitten, pointing.

"What is it?" I asked. My eyes scanned the snow.

"Shh ..." She pulled me closer and pointed.

I saw it. A huge owl lay in the snow at the edge of the trees. Its white feathers blended so well that at first I didn't see it. Its body looked to be nearly two feet long. The large raptor had tiny brown speckles on its head and trunk.

"Is he sleeping?" asked Janina.

"I think it's dead," I replied. I took a stick from my pocket and poked at the wing. The owl didn't move. "Yes, it's dead."

"Do you think we should eat him?" asked Janina.

At first I was shocked. Then I imagined the plump body, roasting in our barrel, like a chicken. I poked at it again. I grabbed its wing and pulled. It was heavy, but slid across the snow.

"No! You can't drag him. The NKVD will see. They'll take him away from us," said Janina. "Hide him in your coat."

"Janina, this owl is enormous. I can't hide him in my coat." The thought of a dead owl in my coat made me shiver.

"But I'm so hungry," cried Janina. "Please? I'll walk in front of you. No one will see."

I was hungry, too. So was Mother. So was Jonas. I leaned over the owl and pushed its wings against its belly. It was stiff. Its face looked sharp, menacing. I didn't know if I could put it against my body. I looked at Janina. She nodded, her eyes wide.

I glanced around. "Unbutton my coat." Her little hands set to work.

I lifted the dead raptor and held it against my chest. Shivers of revulsion rolled through my body. "Hurry, button me up."

She couldn't button the coat. The owl was too large. I could barely get my coat around its body.

"Turn him around, so his face doesn't stick out," said Janina. "He'll blend in with the snow. Let's hurry."

Hurry? How was I supposed to walk five kilometers, pregnant with a dead owl, without the NKVD noticing? "Janina, slow down. I can't walk fast. It's too big." The horned beak poked at my chest. Its dead body was creepy. But I was so hungry.

Other deportees looked at me.

"Our mamas are sick. They need food. Will you help us?" explained Janina.

People I didn't know formed a circle around me, sheltering me from view. They escorted me safely back to our jurta, undetected. They didn't ask for anything. They were happy to help someone, to succeed at something, even if they weren't to benefit. We'd been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean. I realized that if we boosted one another, maybe we'd get a little closer.

Janina's mother plucked the owl. We all crowded around the makeshift stove to smell it cook.

"It smells like a duck, don't you think?" said Jonas. "Let's pretend it's duck."

The taste of warm meat was heavenly. It didn't matter that it was a bit tough; the experience lasted longer because we had to chew. We imagined we were at a royal banquet.

"Can't you just taste the gooseberry marinade?" sighed Mrs. Rimas.

"This is wonderful. Thank you, Lina," said Mother.

"Thank Janina. She found the owl," I said.

"Liale found him," corrected Janina.

"Thanks, Janina!" said Jonas.

Janina beamed, holding a fistful of feathers.

78.

CHRISTMAS CAME. We had made it halfway through winter. That was something to be grateful for.

The weather continued, relentless. Just as one storm passed, another queued at its heels. We lived the life of penguins, freezing under layers of ice and snow. Mrs. Rimas stood outside the bakery. The smell of butter and cocoa made her cry. The NKVD made cakes and pastries in their bakery. They ate fish, drank hot coffee, and enjoyed canned meats and vegetables from America. After a meal, they'd play cards, smoke cigarettes, maybe a cigar, and drink a snifter of brandy. Then they'd light the fire in their brick barracks and cover themselves with their fur blankets.

My drawings became smaller. I didn't have much paper. Mother didn't have much energy. She couldn't even sit up for the Kucios Christmas celebration. She had lain too long. Her hair was frozen to a board. She drifted in and out of sleep, waking only to blow a kiss when she felt us near.

The lice brought typhus. The repeater fell ill. He insisted on leaving our jurta.

"You're such nice people. It's too dangerous for you all. Dangerous," he said.

"Yes, get out of here," said the bald man.

He moved to a jurta where people had similar symptoms-fever, rash, some delirium. Mrs. Rimas and I helped him walk.

Four days later, I saw his naked body, eyes wide open, stacked in a heap of corpses. His frostbitten hand was missing. White foxes had eaten into his stomach, exposing his innards and staining the snow with blood.

I turned and covered my eyes.

"Lina, please take those books off the table," said Mother.

"I can't stand to see such ghastly images, not at breakfast."

"But that's what inspired Edvard Munch's art. He saw these images not as death, but as birth," I said.

"Off the table," said Mother.

Papa chuckled behind his newspaper.