Hero enters this scene eager to be useful. But then, as Pol, a former doctor himself, observes, “Hands were more complicated than the people attached to them. … Hearts heal. They even improve. Hands are never the same.” The theme of the contrast between hearts and hands — feelings and deeds — is threaded delicately throughout the book, as Hero’s aching hands become a constant reminder of the parts of life from which she is now excluded. Surgery tops the list, of course, but masturbation is also out of the question, a lack that sends her on a jaded quest for sex: “Hero had no truck with people for whom the heart was a dreamed-up thing, held together by divine saliva, a place where gods still made their beds. A heart was something you could buy on the street, six to a skewer or piled on a square of foil, served with garlicky rice and atsuete oil.”