I’ve searched through language after language to try and find the magic words to get you back

The girls like to dance together when their parents aren’t home

Their mom still works half-time but now with meetings in the afternoons and sometimes little trips to places like Owasso, and their dad has started taking teaching gigs. One day the girls see an ice-skating routine on TV set to swing dance music, and the next time they know it’s going to be on they tape it so they can watch it again and practice. Zoe likes the part where Amy picks her up and swings her around. Zoe picks the dog up and swings it around, too.

The ice skaters they like all come from the former Soviet Union. In Europe the countries can change sometimes depending on the politics, they already know this from their dad. Now the girls learn that some of the people from the former Soviet Union use a different kind of alphabet, and they ask their mom to take them to the library so they can learn it. They find out that the Russian alphabet has five letters more than the English alphabet. Amy practices writing out the new shapes. Amy, having invented numerous alphabets that her sister has consistently failed to learn, thereby precluding the exchange of private communications, now gets hopeful that a real foreign language might really be the way to go.

The only downside is the Soviets have jumbled up their many letters, and z is in the middle, not at the end. Alphabetical order has always been Amy’s favorite, better than chronological and better than order of importance. Zoe, on the other hand, has long complained at the injustice of an alphabet that always puts her last. She considers this new system at least a partial vengeance of the Zs upon the As: now z is seventh, as though it’s catching up.

Zoe wants to learn a language, too, but isn’t sure if what she wants to learn is Russian because by now the girls have learned that Zoe’s favorite ice skaters are from Ukraine which has recently turned into a separate place from Russia.

Their parents are astonished to discover a true feud arising between their daughters; more astonishing still is that the source of the feud is a question of sovereignty in Eastern Europe. The girls build separate forts in the living room now with their octopuses posted as sentries at the entry flaps and reproductions in crayon of their respective nations’ flags, Russia meticulous red and navy stripes, Ukraine some yellow ovals floating over light blue zigzags. No one in the family has a passport; it has never occurred to anyone to learn another language. But their parents are pleased to find them motivated to learn, and so they try to broker a truce between them by finding someone who can tutor them in both languages.

This only intensifies the fighting.

5

Amy gets kicked off her train to Moscow in the middle of the night in Minsk. Pleased by her own savvy, unwilling to fall asleep in case some Slavic passenger attempts to steal the approximately two hundred dollars she still has left, she flicks back and forth through her hand-me-down Rough Guide to Europe, her gaze alighting now and then on unfamiliar names: Évora, Plungë, Ermoupolis, Zwolle. All places now fall within the realm of the possible, and Amy wants to take them all.
            But her reverie is interrupted by the hulking woman who appears to run the train. Amy smiles as she hands over her ticket and her passport, awaiting the same response she always received from her elementary school teachers when she turned in her Kumon packets and symmetrically stickered worksheets and her butterfly travelogue.

But this is not the response Amy receives. Because while Amy has obtained her Russian visa she had no idea she also needed one to pass through Belarus, which it only now occurs to her is where they are.

Now she is told she can’t get to Russia, and as this news sinks in the woman says something like Don’t cry, or There’s no reason to cry, or Stop crying, which Amy is too horrified to fully comprehend.

So she winds up in Warsaw. In advance of the impending cold she tries to buy new clothes but gets shooed out of the changing room for reasons she can’t understand. At the grocery store, as she checks out, she gets yelled at for putting her fruit and yogurt inside a plastic bag. At a hair salon she tries to ask for just a trim, speaking rusty Russian modified to sound how Polish sounds to her: slurred and confusing. They misunderstand and shave her head. But it’s okay because she’d always wondered what it would be like, or what it was like for her sister.

What it’s like is weird. Everybody stares at her as she walks by, almost paper-thin, and hairless.

Amy buys hats. She gets a Polish cell phone. Her Polish cell phone gets stolen one afternoon from the table where she’s sitting having fuchsia soup. She gets another Polish cell phone. She studies Polish. She teaches English. She gets thrown off a bus for not having a ticket for her backpack, which she’s propped up like a person in the seat next to hers. She pays her first bribe. She can’t remember the Polish symbols for men and women and accidentally sees a man standing over a urinal with his penis in his hand. She forgets to pick up a basket when she walks into the grocery store and gets yelled at, although all she wanted was some gum.

Amy sees and does not see Warsaw, but she takes pictures.

The brownish black walls of her dorm room seem to hold the cold, and the quiet’s so intense sometimes she can’t think straight when she wakes up. Then one April day it gets so slippery along the sidewalks that Amy stops to break her walk up. She ducks inside a coffee shop and sees a sunflower head the size of a wall clock flat atop a table. A girl hovers over it, effaced by a burst of curls. As Amy stands dripping in the doorway the girl snatches seed after seed out, devouring them one by one.