And as eighteen days turned to twenty, forty, sixty, the trauma ward became the capital of the reconstructed republic. Each day patients arrived with heart attacks and kidney stones, the lesser emergencies of peacetime. When a man limped in with a soccer injury she kissed his cheek; that man and his wife would create the plaque honoring the hospital staff of the war years, which was to be set into the sidewalk eleven years later to little official fanfare. The war was over; no one knew it was only the first. Still, the scarcity of medical supplies remained a constant problem.
She contacted the brother of a man with a mustache made of dead spider legs whose life she’d saved when a land mine had lodged eight ball bearings, four screws, and three ten-kopek coins in his left leg. The brother met her in the backseat of a Mercedes that drove in tight circles on a tennis court–sized slab of asphalt just outside his Volchansk garage, the only unbroken stretch of road worthy of such a fine Western automobile. He pinched a Marlboro filter between his manicured fingernails. She didn’t need to look past his first knuckle to verify his access to the smuggling routes snaking through the southern mountains.
“You saved Alu’s life,” the brother said, setting the cigarette between his delicate lips, moisturized nightly with aloe balm. “For that I owe you a favor. A small one, because of my six brothers, I like Alu the least.”
She handed him a list limited to easily procurable medical supplies: absorbent compress dressings, adhesive bandages, antiseptic ointment, breathing barriers, latex gloves, gauze rolls, thermometers, scissors, scalpels, aspirin, antibiotics, surgical saw blades, and painkillers. “It’s basic stuff. Any medical distributor will have it. You can find most of it in an average first-aid kit. I just need a lot of it.”
“Alu spoke highly of you,” the brother lamented. “I should have known you would be a bore. Anything else?”
“I thought I only had one favor?”
“Let me tell you a story,” the brother said, holding his cigarette like a conductor’s baton. “When I was a child I had a pet turtle, whom I named after Alu because they shared a certain—how can I put it—bestial idiocy. Once I went to Grozny with my father and five of my brothers for the funeral of my father’s uncle, and we left so quickly I hadn’t the time to provide food for Alu the Turtle. My brother, Alu the Idiot, had a fever and stayed home with my mother. In a moment so taxing on that little intellect that steam surely shot from his ears, Alu the Idiot remembered to feed my turtle. He caught grubs and crickets, likely tasting them before he gave them to my beloved crustacean. Since then Alu the Idiot has grown into a Gibraltar-sized hemorrhoid, but when he was a child he used the one good idea this life has allotted him to feed my turtle, and because of it, you get a second favor.”
“Turtles aren’t crustaceans,” she said.
“Excuse me, half crustacean.”
“They’re full-blooded reptiles.”
The brother gaped at her. “You should hear yourself. You sound ridiculous.”
“A turtle is one hundred percent reptile,” she said. “I imagine even Alu knows that.”
“Don’t insult me. Everyone knows a turtle is crustacean on its mother’s side.”
“Explain that to me,” she said, shifting in the seat as the car spun in circles.
“A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It’s called evolution.”
“I hope your biology teacher was sent to the gulag,” she said. She caught the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. The driver had grown up in a mountain hamlet where more people believed in trolls than in automobiles. The first war had catapulted him from the back of a mule to the inside of a Mercedes, and he would look back at that war as the one stroke of good fortune in a life otherwise riddled with disappointments.
“I can’t believe you’re allowed to operate on people with such an incomplete understanding of nature,” the brother said.
“Any other animals come about this way?”
The brother pursed his lips. “A whale.”
“Let me guess. A fish fucks a hippo?”
“Close, an elephant,” the brother said, laughing.
“Of course,” Sonja said. “How could I forget about the herds of elephants roaming the open ocean.”
“I would never dishonor my mother, but someone less noble might suggest that Alu is half monkey. So shall I include Darwin as your second favor?”
She wrote several titles on the list and passed it back.
“My god,” he said. “You’re worse than I could have ever imagined. No wonder you and Alu got on famously. Modes of Modern Psychological Inquiry. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment. From Victim to Survivor: Overcoming Rape. This is what you want? I was thinking cocaine and a prostitute or something.”
“Do I look like someone in need of a prostitute?”
The brother was all grins. “I’ve never met someone in greater need,” he said.
“Can you get them or not?”
“We’ll see. Guns, drugs, uranium, whores, hostages, no problem. But I’ve never been asked to find books or medical supplies. These will be a challenge.”
The Mercedes drove in dizzying circles. She wanted out of this spinning, nauseating contraption. What was wrong with Alu, anyway? Compared to this ridiculous man, who spoke as if he lived in a genie’s lamp, Alu was a model citizen. But what could she do? Those who have the bullets also have the bandages.
“Can you get them or not?”
“Don’t insult me,” he said. “I can steal the spots off a snow leopard.”
“Then thank you.”
“That’s it? Nothing else? Once you leave this car you’ll never see me again.”
Could she ask for it? Transport to Georgia? A plane ticket from Tbilisi to London? A visa stamp in the passport she still carried with her, in the money belt around her waist, each time she left her house?
“Yes,” she said. The air hummed. The yellow clouds watched indifferently. “I’ll have one of your cigarettes.”
She took that cigarette and smoked it while walking to the bazaar, where several days later, on a trip in search of fabrics, she stumbled upon an industrial ice machine at the stand of a Wahhabi arms dealer. It was a great gray piece of machinery with a plastic interior the color of potato broth and fretwork ventilation at its back end. The steel lid held her unfocused reflection within the logo of the Soviet Intourist Hotel. Three half brothers, now sixteen, eleven, and eight, had been conceived on that steel lid, none yet aware of the others’ existence. A merchant with nicotine-stained fingernails, wire-rimmed glasses, and the long beard of a Wahhabi described the machine. “Gorbachev, Brezhnev, and the Bee Gees all had their drinks cooled with the ice produced by this magnificent machine. It is a celebrity among ice machines, envied and admired among its kind. All around Chechnya ice-cube trays have photographs of the Intourist Hotel ice machine pinned on their freezer walls, and they are all told that if they work hard, and believe wholeheartedly in the ideology of ice, they may someday rise to its ranks. And you might say, ‘But Mullah Abdul, I don’t need an industrial ice machine that can provide twenty cubic meters of ice an hour, when required.’ To that I counter, what about clean water? You see, pure flawless H2O freezes at precisely zero degrees, the temperature at which the carefully calibrated thermometer of this magnificent colossus is set. Water containing minerals and sediments and bacteria and parasites freezes at slightly lower temperatures, and thus remains liquid and flows out the drainage. The frozen water left behind is as pure as the virgins in Paradise, with whom I hope to soon be acquainted, should God see me fit.”
Sonja nodded, not unimpressed. On the card tables beside the freezer lay guns of all sizes and caliber, brass belts of ammunition, septic pipes fashioned into homemade Stinger RPG launchers, land mines, and VHS recordings of Baywatch.
“What are you looking for?” the merchant continued. “Fragmentation grenades? Hollow bullets? If you give me a few days, I could find a C-4 vest that would
fit you nicely.” She remembered him as the chemistry professor who had slapped her behind three times in as many months, and expected her—a first-year university student then—to thank him for saving her from the invisible bee that lived in his office. He’d been a different man back then, arriving to class each morning with freshly shaved cheeks and a stale-smelling corduroy jacket, but she recognized his delicate bee-swatting hands, now curled around the butt of a rifle. “Perhaps it would be better if I spoke to your husband,” he said. “I’d like to have a word with him about how he allows you to dress.”
“Fuck off, you disgusting little man,” Sonja said, in English.
“She speaks in tongues, too,” the merchant muttered to himself. “Another sign of the end times. Listen to me, woman. This is serious business. If you dress with your hair and your face uncovered for the devil himself to see, the Russians will come back, make no mistake, and you women will be responsible.”
Had he not had the contents of a small armory in arm’s reach, she might have kicked him squarely in his now-pious balls. Instead she shook her head and turned toward the fabric stand.
She returned home with sheets of green and purple cloth, and unfolded them across the floor of her bedroom. As a teenager, she had declined her mother’s offer to teach her to tailor her own clothes; even at that age, such a domestic skill had insulted her ambitions. Now, eyes downcast, glaring as though a pair of trousers might materialize from the cloth by force of her concentration, she felt like Sonja the Idiot. Only one idea came to her. She took her measurements with a ruler and drew them on the cloth and cut outlines of her legs with nail scissors. For the next half hour, she stitched together the two cutouts with the same stitch she used to close wounds. When finished, she examined her creation. The stitching held tight when she pulled the seams, and her pinky just fit through the holes of the button fly. She envisioned pockets, perhaps even belt loops. If this worked, she might design a jacket and a blouse. Perhaps she could even begin a clothing line—haute couture du guerre-zone, all proceeds to support the hospital—and export handmade fashions to the boutique-lined avenues of London, where she had been privy to the conscience-balming Western consumption of Third World charity art and cheeseburgers.
It wasn’t until she tried on the trousers that she realized her error. She had traced the exact measurements of her legs without allowing any extra wiggle room, and so she struggled with the trousers, falling onto the mattress and raising her feet toward the ceiling in the vain hope that gravity might pity her. An exhausting effort. It had been years since she had floundered this much without at least the prospect of an orgasm. When she finally pulled the trousers past her hips, she found Natasha’s hundred-watt smirk in the doorway. “How long have you been watching?” she demanded.
“Not nearly long enough.”
“You’re always fucking asleep! You’re always asleep when I’m making dinner or sweeping the floor or finding car batteries or crying or doing anything mature and useful, but then you always somehow wake up to witness me making a fool of myself. Do you have clairvoyance? If you do, you can see what I’m thinking; and if not, I’m thinking of a very rude gesture.”
“Try to stand up,” Natasha suggested, far too cheerfully. Sonja would rather have amputated her legs with the nail scissors than further humiliate herself, but what could she do? Refuse? Admit failure? No. She placed her palms on the edge of the bed. She pushed forward. Arms flailing, legs inflexible, she would have let the prurient chemistry professor slap invisible bees from her behind all afternoon for a pair of trousers that fit. At the apex of her ascent, when she saw Natasha, her eyes burst into coals, because was it really too much to be thanked? To be appreciated? To be assured that all the scones in England were worth less than all the potatoes and onions with one’s own sister? Yes, apparently that is too much to ask, Sonja told herself, or at least too much to ask from you, my potato-eating friend, you who believe you are the only person in the world to understand loss, and even that you’re unwilling to share with me.
But her glare broke with her balance. The wooden planks of her trouser legs pitched her forward and, arms flapping, she reached for Natasha. There was no one else to help her.
And Natasha caught her. The impact shimmied down Sonja’s spine, loosening the tension coiled between each vertebra. How had they descended so far? How had they become so embittered that Natasha preventing her from falling on her face felt like an act of tremendous sisterly love? Tears squeezed through Sonja’s closed eyes. A plug was pulled from the center of the floor through which the tension drained.
“Those are the ugliest trousers I’ve ever seen,” Natasha said, still holding her. It was the first time they had hugged since she returned. Two and a quarter years would pass before it happened again. “They look painted on.”
“I can’t feel my toes,” Sonja cried. “I don’t think my blood is circulating past my knees.”
“You should use them as tourniquets at the hospital.”
“I don’t want to be here, Natasha. I’m so fucking unhappy. I want to be back in London.”
“It’s okay. They’re only trousers. Here’s what we do.” Clasping the waistline, Natasha halved them in one clean flourish. Sonja pulled the ends over her heels and stretched her sore thighs. She picked up the sheet of fabric stenciled with the silhouette of her legs, and tilted her head to see Natasha through the cutout.
“I think this is my knee.”
“It is a lovely knee.”
“What should I do with it?”
“I don’t think you’ve ever asked my opinion before.”
“I won’t make a habit of it.”
“You could.”
“Tell me what to do.”
Natasha looked to the fabric. “I could use a new pair of trousers, too.”
Sonja smiled and gave Natasha the nail scissors.
Despite their moment of reconciliation, they soon returned to a policy of polite avoidance. When, after work, Sonja wanted less complex company, she visited Laina next door. Laina never looked particularly pleased to see Sonja, but she never looked particularly pleased about anything these days, and Sonja didn’t take it personally. The old woman received daily visitations from ghosts, angels, prophets, and monsters, and some evenings, Sonja wondered if she herself was, to this old woman, a trivial hallucination.
“I saw an ice machine at the bazaar the other day,” she said. Laina didn’t look up from the scarf she was knitting, afraid to raise her eyes with so many visions crowding the air. “It once cooled the glasses of the Bee Gees, or so said the freezer merchant. Never turn your back to him, Laina. There is no bee.”
“You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man,” Laina said, without lifting her eyes from the needle tips.
“You know that song?”
“Of course. People used to recite it in the war. I didn’t know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur’an.”
Sonja smiled, glad she could still be surprised. “I never knew the Bee Gees were so profound.”
“I saw six chariots in the sky today. I would have rather seen an ice machine.”
For the next hour Laina described abounding supernatural phenomena. The angel Gabriel had fluttered into a rooster-less henhouse in Zebir-Yurt, and the next morning a farmer found eight immaculately conceived eggs. A boy in Grozny defeated his grandfather, a chess master third class, ranked one thousand six hundred and eighty-fourth in the world, after a game lasting thirty-nine sleepless days and nights that left the grandfather so bewildered, proud, and exhausted he promptly died. A band of corpse-devils rose from the earth at the Dagestan border to hijack three Red Cross cargo trucks, leaving the drivers hog-tied and blindfolded and magically suspended three meters in the air.
“Stalin has been resurrected,” Laina said.
“I know,” Sonja replied. “He’s the prime minster of Russia.”
On her way to work a week later, when the black Mercedes
found her, she was sure she’d wandered into one of Laina’s deliriums. The Mercedes braked sharply, drawing a curtain of dust along the street. The tires—before so dainty they could only drive in circles on a tennis court—were replaced with those of an armored jeep, raising the body of the car by a half meter. Swedish license plates, she noted, were still attached. The window descended and those gorgeous fingernails beckoned her.
“I thought we wouldn’t see each other again,” she said, pulling the door closed.
“And I keeping saying I’ll never see Alu again and he keeps on being my brother. You intrigue me. You lived in London for several years, if my information is correct, which it always is. Had you stayed, you would be eligible for citizenship now. Even I can’t get my name into one of those beautiful maroon passports. And yet you returned.”
“I have family here,” she said uneasily.
“I hide the toilet paper when my family visits so they won’t stay too long.”
“Could you get me back to London?”
“You could ask. But then who would I have to talk to? No one with your intelligence would return from London, which means you are either one of those idiot savants, light on the savant, or something entirely different. The only people who return are people like me, people who know how much money can be made.”
Through the window, the city limits gave way to brown fields tilled by tank treads. They were on the road to Grozny. “I’m not here to make money.”