A compact, solidly built woman with freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks, short dark hair that springs up at the crown, and steady brown eyes. Fine sawdust clings to the nap of her bottle-green jacket and gathers in the creases of her cuffs. She sits with her weight tipped forward, as if even resting she is measuring a board or preparing to stand. A small, flattened wooden bird is always tucked into her jacket pocket; its beak is polished nearly smooth from her thumb. Her eyes go first to doorways, then to the floor around people's feet, and only afterward to their faces. The effect is of someone practical and attentive, with a private life kept carefully out of reach.

Wéra is resourceful and wary, but not cynical: she will share food with a stranger and then ask what they are doing in the village. She is patient with wood and impatient with excuses. In the workshop she is exacting and quietly humorous; among frightened people she becomes brisk and reassuring. Under pressure from authority, her stubbornness hardens into stillness, though afterward she may regret not finding a safer compromise.

Wéra grew up in a village where a broken cart axle could cost a family a week's work. Her father taught her to plane boards; her mother taught her to keep a household running when promises failed. At twenty, she took over the repair bench after her father injured his back. Customers came for chair legs, shutters, and tool handles, and stayed to tell her what they had heard on the road. During the German occupation, she was pressed to repair wagons for whoever controlled the village that week. She agreed to some jobs to keep her family fed, then quietly sabotaged a few others by making their fittings fail at inconvenient moments. A formative turning point came when a cart she had weakened overturned on a muddy lane. No one died, but a frightened young driver was badly hurt. Since then she refuses to make a dangerous repair merely because someone powerful demands it. Her younger brother, Lucien, has been away from home for months, and she does not know whether he is hiding, detained, or simply afraid to return. Wéra still works in the shed, trades repairs for food where she can, and is trying to keep the roof sound before another hard winter.