If she left it like that it would be hard to brush tomorrow. At the end of the day Alena would often lie like this, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Janoz, that she had never told him she was going, that the years had passed, that she could still feel his arms and longed to be held again; it would only be for a few months, then she would come back to him, to Janoz, then they’d get married, later.

Lydia stood still. She looked at Alena’s nakedness and thought about her own body, the one she had to hide in baggy clothing afterwards – she knew that was what she was doing, hiding. She looked and she compared and she wondered how Alena could bear to lie in the same bed without clothes on, and she realised she was looking at her opposite, someone who somehow let things linger, who didn’t hide it, who almost clung to it.

Alena pointed at the bed, the side that was empty.

‘Sit down.’

The room was just like hers – same bed, same set of shelves and nothing else. She sat down on the rumpled sheets. Where someone else had just been. For a while Lydia stayed inside the red wallpaper, watching its swirling little velvety flowers. Then she reached out for Alena’s hand, squeezed it and spoke in a near whisper.

‘How are you?’

‘You know… as usual.’

‘Just the same?’

‘Yes.’

They had met on the boat, so they had known each other for more than three years. Back then, they had laughed together. They were on their way. The frothing white water in their wake. Neither of them had ever been at sea before.

Lydia pulled her friend’s hand closer, still holding it tight, caressing it, interlocking her own fingers with her friend’s.

‘I know. I know.’

Alena lay very still. Her eyes were closed.

Her body wasn’t bruised, not like Lydia’s, at least not in the same way.

Lydia lay down beside her, and in the shared silence their minds wandered, Alena’s thoughts drifting back to Janoz, and Lydia’s back to Lukuskele prison, to the shaven-headed men who coughed their lives away in the shabby prison hospital.