Chapter 11 — The Match
11.3 — The Years They Did Not Share
“For a long time, I measured distance by how much I could leave out of a telephone call.”
— Oksana Hrytsenko, Rooms We Shared, 2047
Germany and Ukraine — 2022–2030
The first photograph Oksana sent from Ukraine showed a table.
On it were three damaged aircraft, an open laptop, a mug without a handle, and a packet of biscuits weighed down by a screwdriver.
No faces.
No windows.
Amira enlarged the image.
You’re using the wrong connector, she wrote.
The reply came two hours later.
Hello to you too.
Amira smiled at her phone.
Then she wrote:
Did you eat the biscuits?
They’re structural.
At first, they tried to speak every Sunday.
Oksana chose a time. Amira kept it free.
Sometimes the call connected immediately. Sometimes Amira watched her own reflection in the dark screen until the appointment had passed.
She learned not to send a second message too quickly.
Then she learned that waiting did not become easier merely because she had decided to do it.
When Oksana answered, she usually began with something ordinary.
A broken printer.
A man who borrowed tools and returned different ones.
A kettle that required persuasion.
Only occasionally did she describe her work.
They repaired small aircraft, adapted civilian equipment, and helped teams interpret images of damaged roads and buildings. Some days Oksana worked at a bench. Other days she trained people who had never expected to need those skills.
“Do they listen?” Amira asked.
“Some.”
“And the others?”
“Think a louder motor means a better machine.”
“Does it?”
“Not if you want it to come back.”
Oksana spoke lightly.
Amira let her.
One Sunday, the video connected while Oksana was sitting against a wall with her eyes closed.
“Bad time?”
“No.”
“You look tired.”
“That’s because the camera is accurate.”
Amira moved her laptop onto the kitchen table.
Behind her, the empty bedroom door was open.
Oksana noticed.
“Have you rented it?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“I like the desk space.”
“You complained about my desk space.”
“That was different.”
Oksana opened her eyes.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Oksana asked about an examination Amira had taken.
Amira told her.
She described the room, the questions, the professor who had interrupted her answer to ask for a definition he had not used correctly himself.
Oksana laughed.
Amira kept talking.
Only later did she realize that she had spent twenty minutes describing a day she would ordinarily have summarized in one sentence.
Southern Ukraine — June 2023
After the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, the messages changed.
There were fewer photographs of equipment.
More questions about water.
Oksana’s team was helping assess access routes and damaged infrastructure. Images could show flooded streets, a broken pumping station, the roof of a building where people were waiting.
They could not show whether the water in a container was safe to drink.
One evening, she sent Amira a photograph of a row of sample bottles.
All collected. All labeled. Waiting for transport.
How long? Amira asked.
For transport or results?
Amira looked at the question.
Both.
There was no answer until the next morning.
Too long.
The aircraft came back without its sample carrier.
Oksana sent no photograph that day.
On their next call, she described it without looking at the camera.
The aircraft had completed the flight. Its navigation record was intact. The carrier had failed somewhere along the route.
“We recovered the aircraft,” she said.
“That’s something.”
“Yes.”
Amira heard the mistake as soon as she had made it.
Oksana rubbed a hand across her face.
“The people waiting didn’t need the aircraft.”
“I know.”
“They needed the result.”
Amira said nothing.
On the desk beside her lay a page of calculations for a laboratory instrument. She turned it facedown.
“What happened?”
“They used the reserve supply. Someone drove new samples out the following day.”
“And the families?”
“I don’t know all their names, Amira.”
The answer was sharper than either expected.
Oksana looked away.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“Yes,” Oksana said. “Sometimes I do.”
Their conversations became less regular.
Amira moved.
Oksana changed teams.
They learned of important events after they had already happened.
An examination passed.
A colleague killed.
A grant refused.
A town reached by road again.
Sometimes Amira sent a photograph of something that had no practical value: sunlight across a wall, a badly translated notice, bread that had collapsed in the oven.
Oksana once replied with a picture of a cat sleeping inside an empty equipment case.
New supervisor.
Qualified?
Refuses all meetings.
Amira saved the photograph.
The illness reached her as a message from an unfamiliar number.
Oksana is in hospital. She asked me to tell you she cannot call today.
Amira read it standing outside a lecture room.
Then she called.
No answer.
She called again.
By the time someone picked up, the corridor had emptied.
The woman on the phone spoke careful English. Oksana was receiving treatment. She was awake. There had been a severe illness, dehydration, and concern about her kidney function.
“Can I speak to her?”
“She is resting.”
“Does her father know?”
“Yes.”
“Her mother?”
“Yes.”
Amira pressed her palm against the wall.
“What can I do?”
The woman paused.
“I can tell her you called.”
Oksana’s first message was a complaint.
Someone has packed my charger in a bag I cannot reach.
Amira sat down on the edge of her bed.
Are you all right?
I need the charger.
Oksana.
The reply took several minutes.
I’m receiving treatment. They’re watching the kidneys. I don’t know more yet.
Amira typed three questions.
Deleted them.
Do you want me to call?
Not yet.
So she sent a photograph of the kitchen table.
Two cups.
No explanation.
Recovery did not happen in a straight line.
There were better weeks. Then another appointment. Medication. Instructions Oksana resented and followed.
She returned to work, though not always to the same tasks.
At first, she said the change was temporary.
Later, she stopped describing it that way.
Amira began reading about kidney disease at night.
She did not tell Oksana.
Then one evening she asked a question too precisely, and Oksana understood.
“Please don’t.”
“I only wanted to know—”
“I know what you wanted.”
Amira closed the page on her laptop.
Oksana’s voice softened.
“I have doctors.”
“I’m not trying to replace them.”
“No. You’re trying to arrive before the bad news does.”
Amira looked toward the window.
Outside, someone was locking a bicycle.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she admitted.
“Neither do I.”
They stayed on the call without speaking until Oksana became tired.
Ukraine — 2029
When the ceasefire came, Oksana did not call immediately.
Amira watched the announcements, then waited.
The message arrived late that evening.
Please don’t ask whether it’s over.
Amira sat at her kitchen table for a long time.
Then she wrote:
What do you need?
Sleep.
Then sleep.
Oksana called the following afternoon.
There was traffic behind her. Someone nearby was arguing about a delivery.
“I thought it would feel different,” she said.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Quieter inside.”
Amira understood that too well to answer quickly.
“Where are you?”
“Outside an office. Waiting for a signature.”
“Of course.”
Oksana gave a small laugh.
“Apparently reconstruction begins with a missing stamp.”
Her fellowship application was forty-two pages long.
Amira received it with a message.
Do not correct the English first. Tell me if the work is worth doing.
The proposal concerned portable environmental testing and the delays between collecting a sample, obtaining a result, and acting on it.
Oksana had recorded failures.
Equipment that required consumables no one could replace.
Devices that functioned in demonstration rooms but not in cold shelters.
Results delivered without instructions.
Warnings that assumed an alternative water source existed.
Amira read the document twice.
At the end, Oksana had written:
The person holding the instrument must be able to understand what it does not know.
Amira called her.
“I want you on the project.”
“You haven’t asked what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“A laboratory that lets me say no.”
“To what?”
“A design that shouldn’t leave the building.”
Amira looked at the instrument drawing on her screen.
“All right.”
“And a salary.”
“That too.”
“And you don’t get to call this helping me.”
Amira leaned back.
“I was going to call it hiring you.”
“Good.”
Near Munich — 2030
Professor Mykola Hrytsenko arrived with a small bag, a coat too warm for the weather, and several opinions he had evidently been saving for his daughter.
Oksana met him outside the institute.
He embraced her, held her at arm’s length, and looked at her face.
“I’m eating,” she said before he could ask.
“I said nothing.”
“You inhaled.”
At lunch, he asked about the work.
Oksana explained the instrument while Amira listened.
Her father interrupted twice.
The third time, Oksana placed her fork on the table.
“Do you want to hear the answer?”
“Yes.”
“Then allow me to reach it.”
He lifted his hands in surrender.
Amira liked him for accepting the rebuke.
Afterward, they walked through the laboratory.
The prototype was still too large, its sampling system too delicate. Oksana demonstrated the user interface, deliberately choosing an ambiguous result.
The screen requested another test.
Her father nodded.
“Better than pretending.”
“Thank you,” Oksana said. “I’ll put that on the funding application.”
Amira showed him the underlying measurements.
He studied them carefully.
“How did you select this relationship?”
Amira indicated the relevant traces.
“They changed together across samples. Not consistently in magnitude, but in timing.”
“Your software found it?”
“Not initially.”
“You did.”
“I thought there might be something there. Then we tested it.”
He looked at her.
“What made you think so?”
Amira considered the question.
“The mismatch repeated.”
“That’s what you measured. I asked what drew your attention.”
Oksana closed a drawer behind them.
“Papa. It’s a visit, not an examination.”
“I’m interested.”
“He’s always interested,” she told Amira. “It’s how he gets away with it.”
Amira smiled, but the professor was still waiting.
“Sometimes,” she said, “it feels as though I recognize something before I can explain why.”
His hand rested on the edge of the bench.
“Has it always felt like recognition?”
The question was quiet.
Amira thought of Karim’s notebook. A generator on a roof. Numbers in a classroom she had struggled to remain in.
“As far back as I remember.”
Oksana came to stand beside them.
“You see?” she said to her father. “She finds a suspicious line, and then I spend three weeks proving whether she’s allowed to like it.”
He smiled.
A little late.
“An important division of labor.”
That evening, Amira helped Oksana carry the lunch dishes into the kitchen.
“Your father is kind.”
“He can be.”
“He asks difficult questions.”
“He thinks that’s the same thing.”
Oksana opened a cupboard.
“Did he annoy you?”
“No.”
“Good. He likes you.”
“How can you tell?”
“He forgot to tell you about his latest paper.”
Amira laughed.
In the other room, Mykola stood beside the window with his phone in his hand.
He was not making a call.
When Oksana asked whether he wanted tea, he put it away.
After he returned to Ukraine, an email arrived.
The subject line contained no greeting.
Early medical history.
Amira opened it between meetings.
He thanked her for the visit. He asked whether she had ever undergone a specialist assessment of her hearing or vision.
Then, at the end:
If you retain any childhood medical records, they may be worth keeping together. Families lose more documentation than they realize.
Amira read the message again.
She thought of asking Oksana.
Instead, she opened a reply.
Is there something in particular you think I should be looking for?
She sent it.
Then she returned to work.
Historical Notes
- The destruction of the Kakhovka dam on 6 June 2023 caused extensive flooding and disrupted drinking-water supplies, sanitation, and health services in southern Ukraine. Humanitarian organizations responded with drinking water, treatment supplies, and support for damaged water systems.
- The resulting water crisis continued beyond the initial flooding. A year later, the United Nations reported that humanitarian organizations had delivered around 20 million litres of potable water and supported nearly seventy local water enterprises.
Archive Note
From the Reconstruction Research Fellowship Register, 2030:
Hrytsenko’s application was submitted during the first year following the 2029 ceasefire. Its supporting material included equipment-failure reports, sample-transport delays, and recommendations for portable testing.
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