The metro tunnels in Ukraine, built in the 1960’s and 70’s by the USSR to double as bomb shelters, are the deepest in the world. Brightly lit with working toilets, sinks and drinking fountains, the stations were designed to be artful -- as well as practical -- palaces for the people.

Hundreds of feet below the surface of the world, Nina opens her eyes. She’s stretched across two metro seats, the flannel lining of her sleeping bag soft against her face. She tastes the inside of her mouth, swallows, closes her eyes. She wants to stay inside her dream. She’s spreading soft butter and honey on thick bread. Sunlight soaks into the unpainted wood of the porch, her grandparents’ wooden chairs side by side. Her dog, Borys, dazed by the heat, stretches out on the wooden planks, drinking the sun through his fur, reaching for it with his outstretched paws. Remembering summer with her grandparents makes her think about being on holiday. She can almost believe she’s on a trip if she keeps her eyes shut.                            

It’s late spring and still cold outside, but it's always the same temperature in the metro car. Not cold or warm. Tepid, like a cup of tea left out on the kitchen counter. She knows she needs to pack her things and return to the upper world.  She’d left Borys, her nervous little dog, with her childhood friend, Yulia. Nina could have slept on the floor of Yulia and Artem’s tiny living room, but Artem makes her nervous. She sees how he licks his lips when he greets her. He looks at Nina like she’s a plate of meat and potatoes. 

It was hard to leave her dog on a night loud with shelling. She thought about it and made a decision: she knew Borys would have to pee during the night. He was so anxious he might even have to poo. He’d bark and whimper and keep other people awake. Yulia was like his second mom, so she left him with her sweet-tempered friend and her pig of a husband.

Yulia met her at the door with her arms outstretched to take Borys.  Borys whimpered and wagged his stubby little tail.

“Borrie!  Borrie!  Come to Auntie Yulia,” she crooned.  She picked him up and he squirmed into her arms. Nina kissed her friend’s cheek.  She could smell meat cooking in the oven.  She knew Yulia would want her to stay and eat with them.

“Yulia!” She heard Artem calling from the kitchen. “The roast is done. Come on, let’s eat.”

Yulia, with Borys still in her arms, sighed.  She whispered to Nina, “He’s always hungry, that guy.” The women laughed. They knew everything about one another, down to Artem’s stinky farts and Nina’s last messy breakup. But she never told her best friend about how Artem would swoop in to kiss her or try to grab her ass. She’d learned to stay as far as possible from this man.

Nina put a paper shopping bag down in the open doorway. “I packed his favorite blanket and his food.  I put in poop bags too. I’ll get him tomorrow -- if it’s safe to come back. Thank you, Yuli.”

Yulia looked at her hard:  “You’re really going to sleep in the metro tonight?”

Nina bit her lip thinking about what she planned to do next. She’d never slept in the subway before tonight. “Yeah, last night the shelling came so close.”

She blew Yulia a kiss, mouthed “I love you” and nodded in the direction of the kitchen towards Artem. Then she remembered she was leaving Borys ― maybe for good.  She stroked his bony little head. “Oh, my baby boy. I love my boy. I’ll be back soon, I promise.” She kissed him over and over, hugged her friend, and ducked out the door before Yulia could pull her back inside.

Nestled down into her sleeping bag, Nina smells something rank. Across from her a man is slicing a fat sausage. The knife cuts easily through the pink flesh and cold fat.  He piles thick slices on a paper towel and hands them to a tired looking woman. She sighs and passes the meat to an old man and woman sitting behind her.

She should move, Nina thinks. She can’t stay in her sleeping bag forever. She closes her eyes. She’d arrived after dark and found two empty seats next to one another. Some people were already asleep, curled in their caves of blankets and sleeping bags. A woman was reading a story to a child. Cellphone lights glowed like candle flames.

Nina thinks about her phone, turned off to save the battery. Last night she’d stuffed it into her purse and pushed it with her feet to the bottom of her sleeping bag. Feeling her purse tucked next to her toes made her feel safe. They’d have to unzip me to get it, she’d thought. Then she’d wrapped her arms around herself and tried to sleep.

Burble of voices. She smells an orange being peeled. It smells like being happy. School girl days, a big round orange waiting in her lunchbox. Nina presses her eyelids down tighter to keep the day away. Not yet, she thinks. She wants a few more minutes inside her dream. Her grandparents setting dishes of food on the kitchen table. Borys sniffing for scraps at their feet, making little sighing sounds of contentment.

She doesn’t believe in heaven or hell.  She’s not sure what she believes in, but it’s not that. Hell is the ripe smell of cold sausage, she thinks. Heaven a peeled orange. In her dream, bowls of soup and a basket of bread pass from hand to hand. Her grandmother’s worn hands clasp her cheek, touch her hair. Where do we go when we’re no longer on the earth? Last night, breathing with the rhythms of the others in the metro car, she asked herself that question. Maybe she got an answer.  She’d seen a set of small waves rolling onto the shore, scooping up tangles of seaweed, broken shells, bits of glass. Then, one by one, the waves pulled back, sliding across the sand to join the shifting ocean. Maybe this is where they are.

Is this a blessing? Nina wasn’t sure. It’s better than trying to visualize nothing. The precise things that make us who we are – her grandmother’s soft lips pressed to Nina’s forehead when she was sick, the way her grandfather kicked off his boots at the end of a work day and let out a big “Ah.” These never leave.

She’s hungry and she has to pee.  She thinks of Borys waking up on his special blanket on Yulia’s floor. “O-kay!” Nina says to herself in her mother’s matter-of-fact voice. “O-kay, Nina!” Her mother always said that before making her do things she didn’t want to do.

She’d slept in her sweater and leggings.  She didn’t think people wore their nightgowns or pajamas when they slept in the metro cars. Maybe children did. The cars aren’t dirty, but they aren’t clean either. So many shoes trudge through, carrying the street with them. She shakes off the smells of sleep.

Nina rolls up her sleeping bag, ties it with a piece of rope and stuffs it into a large cloth bag with the logo of the grocery store where she used to shop. Printed on the front of the bag is a child’s drawing of a happy family holding hands. The grocery was one of the first targets of the bombs.  She checks her purse for her wallet, phone, keys. A plastic bag with a small bar of soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste. Everything is there. She takes a deep breath. That’s how we are now, she thinks. We don’t trust anything will stay in place.

Mumbled good mornings as she clambers out of the car. Nods. Tight smiles. Our smiles are weary, she thinks. Like sighs. Not like happiness. More like forbearance. Survival smiles. She joins the line to use the bathroom, clenching her pee-muscles tight, forcing herself to move her mind from her bladder to her stomach. Filling herself with pictures of food makes her hungrier, but it takes her mind away from the pressure down below. She can’t take the chance of peeing her pants. “First things first,” her mother always said. “O-kay Nina!” she whispers to herself. She sees a huge chocolate layer cake and a bowl of real whipped cream. She spreads the cream on the cake and makes a big peace sign on top with plump red raspberries. Nina laughs at herself and smiles a smile no one can see.

An old man in front of her in line turns around slowly. She waits to see what he wants.  He clears his throat and speaks: “Where do you live, young lady?” he asks. She startles.  Live? “I have a place by the steel factory. If it’s still there.”

The man nods, makes a grunting sound in his throat. His eyes are watery. He blinks and she thinks of her grandmother’s eyes, wet like this old man’s. He looks at her and nods again. Nina thinks about all the things he must have seen in his long life. He looks past her to the end of the line, then turns back to face the bathroom door. She should have asked him something, like where he lives, she thinks.  She should have tried harder. 

She finally gets her turn. Grateful there’s still toilet paper on the roll and warm water in the faucet. When she comes out, the old man is sitting near the escalator on a big brown suitcase. She wonders about him but doesn’t ask. She waves her hand, locking into his eyes for a moment. He picks up his right hand and holds it there, like one of her students raising a hand in class. Nina breaks out a large, pre-war-smile she hasn’t used much lately. She’d always gotten compliments about her smile. The old man on his suitcase stares at her, and a flicker of something in his eyes tells her he saw it.

She adjusts her purse and the big cloth bag on her shoulder and steps onto the escalator. It’s a long slow ride up to the station. As she gets close, she sees light pooling on the cement walls. All she can think about is hot sweetened tea and toast with butter. She won’t allow herself to think about the deep yellow yolk of an egg spilling onto the bread.  It’s too much. Her stomach is knotted with hunger. She finds a piece of gum at the bottom of her purse, unwraps the wrinkled foil and chews until the sugar releases in her mouth. It’s something.

While she was curled up underground, a cold rain had fallen. She walks out into the plaza in front of the station and she can smell it. Rain on pavement. She remembers walking to school in the morning with Yulia and Yana, her best friends.  Their backpacks bumping against their small bodies. Lunches their mothers or grandmothers had packed for them in plastic containers. The rain-moistened sidewalk makes her feel like herself again. A girl who spent afternoons on her bed reading. Cookies and tea on a little table beside her. Her grandmother singing an old song in the kitchen.

Nina puts down her bag and stands next to the tall statue of a woman, doves of peace flying out of her hands. She’d always liked this statue. She looks around. The streets are quiet. The sky is quiet too. She’s afraid to turn on her phone, to find out what might have happened last night to her place or to Yulia’s. Nina’s parents had escaped to Poland weeks before. They might even be in Germany now. They don’t have cell phones, and Nina tells herself she needs to call their friends who live near Hamburg, who’d offered them a room. The important thing is they’d gotten out.

Nina’s thinking about her next move. Yulia’s apartment is closer and she could pick up Borys. Her place is a long walk or a smelly bus ride from here. She should turn on her phone to read the texts she knows must be there. Everyone is texting nonstop these days. Sometimes she can’t take it, the chatter, the pinging. She needs to know but she doesn’t want to know. Nina looks up at the statue, at the face of the woman. She looks almost angry. Maybe she’s meant to look determined as she tries to release the peace doves into the sky. Doves that never leave, suspended from her hands. That’s how peace is, Nina thinks. It’s hope stuck in place. A beautiful image going nowhere. Still, it soothes her that someone had the idea and made this statue. And that it’s still standing. None of the bombs have turned the woman and her handful of doves into a pile of gravel, yet.

She sees a kiosk across the street that looks open.  She remembers they used to serve pastries and hot drinks. Nina crosses and pays for black tea and a stale croissant. She chews and swallows, takes long sips of tea, closing her eyes. It’s something.

It’s so quiet.  No planes shredding the sky. No gunfire. No soldiers.  She hesitates for a moment, then looks into the eyes of the woman behind the counter, “Uh, excuse me. Would you let me plug in my phone charger?  My battery is dead.” She smiles a small tight smile.

The woman has red cheeks and a web of little veins on her nose. She nods, takes the cord, and plugs it in under the counter. “It will be fine here,” she says, patting the phone with her thick hand. “I’ll watch it.” 

Nina thanks her and feels tears form in her eyes. A small kindness. She’s so emotional these days. Little things get to her. She and the kiosk-tender don’t say much. Everyone is tired of comparing losses. She asks for more hot water in her Styrofoam cup and the woman slides a fresh teabag across the counter. A gift. She thanks the woman and gives her a real smile. The woman behind the counter flicks her hand as if to say, it’s nothing. But it is something.

Nina walks a few feet away and leans against a light pole. She sets her bag on the ground against her leg and clasps the hot cup of tea with both hands, tips the cup to her lips and sips. The small white bag that held the croissant is full of crumbs. She considers pouring them down her throat, but scatters them on the pavement for the blackbirds instead. They flutter down from the trees, pecking at the crumbs.

She used to love taking solo trips when she was in university. Ukraine was big and there were places she wanted to see. Her parents scolded her and showed her news articles about women getting raped and left in ditches. Their worry wore her down and she stopped taking trips. “When you’re married, you’ll go with your husband,” they would say. She told them that wasn’t her plan, but they didn’t listen. They couldn’t imagine it.  Something about this morning feels like being on a getaway. Unattached. On her own. As soon as she looks at her phone, everything will change.  

She’s fuzzy-headed from not enough sleep but alert, on the lookout for trouble. An attack from the sky or the rooftops, soldiers filling the narrow avenue that winds off to her right. She makes a slow 360-degree turn. Nothing. Then there’s something. A group of five or six boys, twelve or thirteen years old. Gawky, in that stage of growth between boy and man. They’re walking toward the entrance of the metro. She checks them carefully. No weapons. Normal schoolboy clothes. They’re each carrying a tall stack of hardback books in their arms. She remembers her weekly trips to the library when she was a girl. Every Saturday she’d carry a stack of books back to the library and pick out eight new ones.

Nina wonders if they’re saving books from the bombs, taking them somewhere where they’ll be safe. Did they pick out their favorites? Or did someone else, a grown up, a teacher or librarian, choose for them?  She feels an itch deep inside her. She’d brought two books to the metro last night – a slim volume of poetry and a fat novel by an American. Books have always kept her company, but she didn’t read last night. Too jangled. Too tired. Most of the people who were still awake were staring at their phone screens.

She feels with her free hand along the inside of her cloth bag. There. The narrow poetry book. She touches the spine. The big one she can feel at the bottom, under her sleeping bag. She’d told herself to leave it behind and at the last minute grabbed it from the bookshelf. Now she regrets bringing it, it’s so heavy. She’d started reading it and then stopped. Not because it was hard to read. It was. But because she was working two jobs and reading, her greatest pleasure, had to wait on a shelf.  She liked that about books. They waited for you. They didn’t hurry you. 

Another group of boys, their arms carrying towers of heavy books, walks slowly toward the station. They’re not chirping and laughing, the way kids do. They’re looking straight ahead, shuffling the books slightly to keep from dropping them. Like totems rising from their arms. She feels her eyes fill up and her throat tighten. She keeps watching as the parade of books crosses the plaza. The serious faces of the boys, not joking or carousing, their eyes fixed on the entrance to the metro. They pass the statue of the woman with peace doves flying from her hands, but they don’t look up.

Nina’s cup is empty. She walks back to the kiosk, to the woman behind the counter.  “You’re finished?” the kiosk-tender asks. 

“Yes, it was very good. Thank you again. You are very kind. And my phone – how is it?” Nina looks into the woman’s eyes, seeing them for the first time. They’re large, faded blue, set deep into her face.

The woman removes the cord from the phone and places it on the narrow counter – really a board, not even sanded or painted.  Her battery is at 42%.

“Is this enough?” the woman asks her.

“Yes. It has to be. Yes. Thank you.” Nina puts the cord back in her purse and leaves her phone on the counter near her hand.

Standing so close and looking at each other’s faces, the kiosk-tender seems familiar.  “Do I know you?” Nina strokes the face of her phone with her fingers, feeling a little shy. It’s hard to know anymore how to act. They’ve shared an intimacy. Her phone sucking in life-blood inside the dimly lit kiosk.

The kiosk-tender smiles, showing her teeth. “Maybe?” She shrugs, then turns her back and rummages in the stacks of boxes and bags behind her. A single wooden chair holds a thick quilt and a pillow. Not a safe place to sleep, Nina thinks, still stroking the face of her phone, still not typing in her password.

“Here. For you.” The kiosk-tender places a plump navel orange, Nina’s favorite, on the wooden counter between them.

“Oh!” She wants to break into its perfumed skin, acid and sweet combined. Her mouth fills with saliva, imagining the juice of the orange. It sits between them on the wooden counter. Their eyes fix on the bright fruit, doting on it. “Oh!” Nina says again. It’s like the sun, she thinks. Then she says it out loud.

“Hmmm,” the kiosk-tender looks at the orange and then at Nina. Then she nods. “Take the sun,” she nudges the orange closer to Nina, and her pale blue eyes are the color of the sky on a good day.

“Look!” Nina breaks the moment as a third procession of boys crosses the plaza, their arms piled high with hardback books. “Maybe this will be a better day,” she says to no one in particular. The older woman shrugs and opens her palms.

Nina isn’t ready to make a move. She’s holding onto this moment. Whatever it is, it’s something. Nina quickly peels the orange and breaks it into two halves. She passes one half to the kiosk-tender who gives them each a thin paper napkin. The orange is sweet and juicy. They use the napkins to wipe the juice from their chins and hands.

An air-raid whistle goes off and Nina waits while the kiosk-tender locks the wooden door. They head for the station, stopping to look up at the statue of the woman.

“Do you like her?” Nina asks her new friend.

“Yes, I like her.” The kiosk-tender looks up, leaning her head back to see the spray of doves. “She’s something we have. Something we need to see. Peace, even if it never comes.”

Nina stares up at the statue’s stone face. She’s doesn’t look like any woman she’s ever seen, yet she recognizes something in that face.  I need to be more like her, she thinks.

The kiosk-tender is pulling on her arm. “We have to go down into the tunnel now, my child. Come on.” On the long escalator ride to the bottom, Nina taps in her password and the texts roll across the screen. Yulia has sent photos on WhatsApp. Borys curled on his blanket. Borys eating from his little bowl. Then a video she watches over and over.  Borys curled in Artem’s hammy arms, his face tilted up as Artem sings to him, an old Ukranian lullaby her grandfather sang to her when she was a child. She remembers Yulia and Artem had tried to have a baby, but it didn’t work out. Nina’s heart makes a space for Artem, a small one, well-protected, but still an opening. She and the kiosk-tender descend to the bottom. Nina smells the last of the orange on her fingers. She hopes they will sit together in the metro.