Ilieva moving over the ocean:
It is dark, but dark isn’t a strong enough word. It is ink, purest black, purest absence-of-light. The air is dense and still. There are fifteen girls in a small room squared out of the middle of a shipping container. They sit shoulder-to-shoulder with their backs to the walls, as they have since the ship left Lithuania. If you want to lie down you have to move to the center, but they can’t all lie down at once, there isn’t room, so they often fall asleep sitting upright and wake up disoriented with numb legs and painful backs. Time comes to a standstill. They long for fresh air. The ship is so enormous that they feel no movement of waves; there is only a faint steady vibration of engines that surrounds them in their metal room. Their imagined lives in America are heady and bright but when they drift off to sleep with their backs to the walls they have nightmares. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between being awake and being asleep.
The captain lets them out at intervals, when it’s safe, but the intervals are too rare and the claustrophobia is pure agony. There’s a girl from Kiev who will do nothing but sit in the corner and weep. The others try to comfort her, but none of them happen to speak Ukrainian and the girl from Kiev speaks neither Russian nor English. Ilieva closes her eyes in the stifling darkness and thinks the same thought over and over again: I will never go home again. She draws her knees to her chest and tries to vanish into memories. The girl from Kiev sobs once beside her, and Ilieva takes her hand. The hand is hot and fevered, and the girl is shaking. She’s sick and has been for days now. She won’t eat or drink. She whispers something through her tears.
“I’m sorry,” Ilieva murmurs, in Russian and then in English. “I don’t speak Ukrainian. I don’t understand.”
But the girl keeps whispering, and after a while Ilieva does understand her, even though the girl’s delirious, even though they have no language in common. I miss my family. I am so afraid. It takes so much to come here, and I’ve left so much behind.