Chapter 11 — The Match
11.1 — The Other Bed
“We learned each other first through small inconveniences: the window left open, the missing spoon, the light beneath a door. The important things came later.”
— Oksana Hrytsenko, Rooms We Shared, 2047
Heidelberg, Germany — May 2020
The first thing Oksana brought into the apartment was a wheel.
It came through the doorway ahead of her, attached to a suitcase that had lost its other three.
“Please don’t help,” she said. “I’ve developed a relationship with it.”
Amira stepped aside.
Oksana pulled the suitcase over the threshold. Something inside struck the floor with a metallic clunk.
“Books?” Amira asked.
“Some.”
“And the rest?”
“Things that looked useful.”
Amira glanced toward the balcony.
Oksana followed her gaze.
Between the drying rack and a chair stood the remains of Amira’s lockdown project: a lamp, a sensor enclosure, and a tangle of disconnected leads. The fuel-cell components had been packed away after her father insisted that producing light once did not establish that a system was safe.
Oksana set down the suitcase.
“Does it work?”
“Mostly.”
“That means no, but you like it.”
Amira looked at her.
Oksana smiled for the first time.
The accommodation office had called it a shared apartment, although Amira had lived alone in it since arriving. The second bedroom had remained empty through the first weeks of university closures. She had begun using its desk for books.
Now those books were stacked against her own wall.
Oksana stood in the spare room, inspecting the narrow bed, the wardrobe, and the window overlooking the courtyard.
“It’s good,” she said.
“The wardrobe sticks.”
“So does mine at home.”
“The hot water takes a minute.”
“Luxury.”
“The woman downstairs complains if we move chairs after ten.”
Oksana considered this.
“Then we must decide where the chairs belong before ten.”
She opened her suitcase.
There were clothes, textbooks, a tin of tea, and a padded case containing a small aircraft with its propellers removed.
Amira pointed.
“That explains the noise.”
“A university project.”
“What does it do?”
“At present? Takes up space.”
Oksana lifted it carefully onto the desk.
“Eventually, it will inspect places I don’t want to climb into.”
“Like what?”
“Damaged roofs. Towers. My supervisor’s expectations.”
Amira laughed before she could stop herself.
Oksana looked pleased, but did not comment.
They were both twenty.
Oksana studied electrical engineering. She had arrived in Germany with a scholarship, a collection of badly translated family recipes, and strong opinions about the placement of electrical sockets.
Amira discovered the opinions first.
Within three days, Oksana had rearranged the kitchen extension leads, labeled the unreliable charger, and declared that neither of them was permitted to put a wet spoon beside her circuit boards.
“You’ve put your circuit boards beside the sink,” Amira said.
“There is a difference between accepting a risk and inviting it.”
Lectures played from their laptops behind closed doors. Sometimes the connection froze and a professor remained suspended on the screen with one hand raised, waiting to finish a sentence neither woman would ever hear.
They ate lunch at different times until Oksana began knocking on Amira’s door.
“Are you working?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You can stop.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“You were in the middle of something yesterday. It survived.”
They ate at the small kitchen table, one of them moving a notebook whenever the other needed room for a plate.
At first, they spoke about assignments.
Then about professors.
Then, carefully, about home.
Oksana’s home was Kharkiv.
She described a courtyard where she had learned to ride a bicycle, a music teacher who considered every missed practice a personal betrayal, and a grandmother who sent visitors away with enough food to suggest they were beginning a long expedition.
She had not liked school sports. She had liked dismantling things other people wanted repaired.
“My father once gave me a broken radio.”
“Mine gave me a broken fuel cell.”
“Did he pretend it was a present?”
“He called it an opportunity.”
Oksana nodded.
“They know one another spiritually.”
Her father was Professor Mykola Hrytsenko.
Amira recognized the surname later, when she saw it on a paper Oksana had left open on the kitchen table.
“Your father?”
Oksana looked at the screen.
“Unfortunately.”
“I’ve read this.”
“Then you’ve spent more time with it than I have.”
“He works on sensory processing?”
“And rehabilitation. And correcting the terminology people use at dinner.”
“Why didn’t you say?”
Oksana stirred her tea.
“Because I wanted you to meet me first.”
Amira closed the laptop.
“All right.”
That evening, she asked Oksana about her aircraft.
Oksana talked for forty minutes.
Amira told her about Beirut while they were washing dishes.
Not all at once.
First the afternoon school shift. Then Karim’s drawings. Then her father repairing the building’s generator while neighbors stood around offering advice he had not requested.
Oksana laughed at that.
“An international engineering tradition.”
Later came Damascus.
Amira spoke about the hallway where they had slept away from the windows, and the teacher who insisted on continuing mathematics.
She did not describe the worst things. She was tired of watching people prepare their faces for them.
Oksana listened without interrupting.
When Amira stopped, she rinsed the plate in her hands.
“Do you want me to ask anything?”
“No.”
“All right.”
They finished the dishes.
A week later, Oksana told her about 2014: the television always on, adults ending conversations when she entered, relatives calling from other cities.
“We were fourteen,” she said. “People kept explaining things as if understanding them would make us less frightened.”
“Did it?”
“No.”
Amira dried her hands.
“Sometimes it made me more frightened.”
Oksana nodded.
Neither tried to make the two stories equivalent.
Their first serious argument concerned a graph.
Oksana had examined the results from Amira’s air sensor and circled six points.
“You’ve discarded these.”
“They were inconsistent.”
“With what?”
“The surrounding measurements.”
“That might make them interesting.”
“They were probably interference.”
“Probably.”
Amira turned the laptop toward herself.
“I checked.”
“How?”
She explained.
Oksana listened, then shook her head.
“That tells you they were unusual. It doesn’t tell you they were meaningless.”
Amira was silent.
Oksana leaned back.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong.”
“You sound as though you are.”
“I’m saying I can’t follow you.”
The irritation lasted through dinner.
Afterward, Amira returned to the data.
At eleven, she knocked on Oksana’s door.
“You were right about two of them.”
Oksana sat up in bed.
“Only two?”
“Do you want to see?”
“Yes.”
They worked at the kitchen table until the courtyard lights went out.
The next morning, beside the kettle, Amira found a note.
You find the pattern. I’ll find where it breaks.
Below it, Oksana had drawn a small, unpleasantly accurate portrait of Amira arguing with a laptop.
Amira kept it.
Heidelberg — 24 February 2022
The knocking began before dawn.
Amira opened her door to find Oksana barefoot in the hallway, holding her phone.
“They’re bombing.”
For a moment, Amira did not understand.
Then she saw Oksana’s face.
They sat at the kitchen table beneath the light they usually left off to save electricity.
Oksana called her mother.
No answer.
Her father.
No answer.
Then her mother again.
Amira filled the kettle. She switched it off before it boiled because the noise made Oksana flinch.
When the call finally connected, Oksana stood so abruptly that her chair struck the floor.
She spoke Ukrainian, quickly at first, then slowly.
Amira understood none of the words.
She recognized the questions.
Where are you?
Who is with you?
Can you stay there?
Afterward, Oksana remained standing beside the table.
“They’re in the corridor,” she said.
Amira looked at the phone in her hand.
“At home?”
Oksana nodded.
“Away from the windows.”
Amira pulled out the fallen chair.
Oksana did not sit.
For several days, the apartment filled with unfinished actions.
Tea cooled beside the sink. Lectures began and ended without either woman noticing. Oksana packed a bag, unpacked it, and called people whose names Amira had never heard.
An engineer she knew had joined a volunteer technical group in Ukraine. They needed people who could repair equipment, work with aerial imagery, and keep small aircraft operating.
“I can do that,” Oksana said.
Amira was sitting on the floor sorting cables.
“I know.”
“I’m not going because I think I can stop it.”
“I know.”
“I can do something there.”
Amira wound a cable around her hand.
She wanted to ask about transport, shelter, medicine, all the practical things that could disguise the question she did not want to ask.
Instead, she held up two chargers.
“Which one?”
Oksana pointed to the heavier one.
They packed it.
On the last evening, Oksana cooked too much.
Neither of them was hungry.
They sat across from each other, eating slowly while a tram passed outside.
“Your father called,” Oksana said.
“Mine?”
“I answered your phone while you were in the shower.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked whether I’d checked the batteries.”
Amira almost smiled.
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’ll approve.”
After dinner, Oksana washed the dishes. Amira dried them.
The kitchen looked exactly as it had the week before.
That seemed unreasonable.
At the doorway to Oksana’s room, Amira finally said it.
“I don’t know how to ask you to stay.”
Oksana lowered the shirt she was folding.
“Then don’t make me answer.”
Amira nodded.
She went to fetch the last of the cables.
Oksana’s suitcase had four wheels now.
They had repaired it together the previous summer, using a replacement that was slightly too large.
It clicked against the floor as she pulled it toward the door.
She checked her pockets twice.
Phone. Documents. Keys.
At the threshold, she looked back.
“Don’t let anyone take my desk.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t remove data because it annoys you.”
“I don’t.”
Oksana raised an eyebrow.
“All right,” Amira said. “Not without checking.”
They embraced awkwardly at first, the bag between them.
Then Oksana let it fall.
For a few seconds, neither moved.
After she left, Amira stood in the hallway until the sound of the suitcase faded down the stairs.
She returned to the kitchen.
There were two cups beside the kettle.
She washed one and put it away.
The other she left where it was.
Historical Notes
During the COVID-19 pandemic, German higher-education institutions moved extensively to virtual teaching for the 2020 summer semester, establishing a widespread shift toward digital lectures, virtual laboratories, and remote collaboration tools across universities.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, expanding a conflict ongoing in eastern Ukraine since 2014. In response, thousands of Ukrainian women joined the technical defense effort—assembling and customizing First-Person-View (FPV) drones, operating remote-strike and reconnaissance systems, and managing electronic warfare units on the front lines.
Archive Note
From the Heidelberg Student Accommodation Archive, 2020–2022:
The apartment’s second room was assigned to O. Hrytsenko in May 2020. A subsequent notice recorded her departure for Ukraine in early March 2022. Her co-tenant, A. Nour, requested that the remaining belongings not be removed pending collection. The inventory listed textbooks, a desk lamp, and an empty equipment case. No collection date was entered.
