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Six-year-old Linka kneels beside her bed, trembling in the cold, hands clasped together tightly.
She whispers hastily, cold and tired. The wind roars around the house. The candle by the bed gutters in the path of a ghostly breath of air from beneath the door.
Bless Mama, and Papa, bless Grandmother and Mishka.
When her mother dies, Linka thinks it's because she hasn't prayed hard enough.
Linka stands behind the church, her hands deep in the pockets of her coat, which feels too small across the shoulders and under the arms.
"America," ten-year-old Boris says. His eyes glitter with the cold and with excitement. "Can you imagine it, Linka? I could become a movie star!"
Linka scoffs, jealous and hurt. Boris is her best friend now that Mishka is too old to play her games. And now he's leaving.
"I will write to you every day," Boris promises solemnly.
"You can't spell," Linka says crossly. "How will I be able to read anything you send?"
Boris stomps home in a bad temper, and Linka kicks the side of the church wall, hard.
She figures maybe praying will keep Boris around.
She goes inside and lights a candle for her mother, before she sends a quick, pleading thought to God.
Please don't take Boris from me. I'll be so lonely.
Boris and Uncle Dimitri leave for America, and another loss, another scar, threads itself through Linka's heart.
Dampf.
Linka has always feared the damp. Sometimes she can smell it on her papa's coat when he comes home. It sends shivers down her spine. She pictures it as a thing, like a blanket moving through the mine, clamping to the men's faces and dragging them into shadow and death.
Sometimes it smells. Sometimes it doesn't.
She prays for Papa.
Please, do not give him sickness. Please, take care of him in the mine.
She goes to church with him, and Mishka and Grandmother. She clenches her jaw when she prays, so determined is she that her willing, her prayer, will make a difference.
Papa dies when the dampf explodes.
Linka cries, and begs Mishka not to take their father's place.
"It is dangerous," she sobs. "I'll work too. I'll get a job in the town square, in one of the shops, Mishka. You won't have to work in the mine."
He says she has to finish school.
School is a joke. She's already so far ahead of the other children her teacher merely lets her read what she wants.
She stops going to school, but she's still too busy to find a job.
Grandmother needs help at home.
When Grandmother falls ill during the winter Linka turns fourteen, Linka makes a conscious effort not to pray. Her anger at God is threaded through her.
Part of her fears him. Part of her thinks that rejecting her faith will result in consequences beyond being abandoned – due to America, or death.
When Grandmother recovers, and when she is strong again, Linka promises herself she will remain true to herself, first and foremost. True to her mind, to logic and reasoning.
She goes to bed without prayer.