“I wish you’d told me before I’d sewn shut my pockets.”
She smiled.
“Have you actually met these people?”
“Of course not. Most are from the man we’re going to see. He says he can steal the spots off a snow leopard.”
“A criminal?”
She shook her head and glared at him with complete disdain.
“Is common decency too much to ask?”
“Excuse me?” she said, but he knew she couldn’t claim affront. Common decency was the one thing he had that she didn’t, and he held on to it as a rare, improbable triumph.
“You said every doctor and nurse to ever work for you has left but Deshi. Do you think that might have something to do with the way you treat people?”
“I think you’d better have brought your boots, because you’re walking home.”
He spoke in a measured tone as her knuckles whitened on the wheel. “You think I’m an idiot. An embarrassment to your profession. You are probably right. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“I think you need to be quiet, Akhmed.”
“Why?” He didn’t dare turn to her.
“Because two days ago, I thought I was adding a competent doctor to my staff. Instead I’m babysitting a child who speaks in riddles and a man who couldn’t identify his own foot if he tripped over it.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to treat me dismissively. I’m trying to help you.”
“Actually that gives me every right to treat you dismissively. It gives me every right to dismiss you and the girl and fuck off back to London where even eighteen-year-old biology students know better than to give an unresponsive patient a questionnaire.”
“The Feds are looking for Havaa,” he said. “You’re this prodigy surgeon, right? Leaving London to come back and save lives? You are saving hers, Sonja. Each day. And you don’t even have to cut off her legs.”
“How do you even know they want her? Why would they care about some child?”
“An informer was waiting at my house yesterday.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll be quiet.”
“What could you possibly be sorry for?”
“I’m sorry for you. Something in you is broken.”
“Another razor-sharp diagnosis, Dr. Akhmed.”
“No, it isn’t that.”
“I’ve amputated one thousand six hundred and forty-three legs. You’ve done three, and you think you have the right to diagnose me?”
“I’m not diagnosing you.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing?” She turned fully from the road and he saw her pupils, as wide as kopek coins, for the first time that morning. He shook his head at the windshield. Brown fields were everywhere.
And Grozny appeared, gray on the horizon as the road devolved to a basin of broken masonry and trampled apartment blocks. Cigarette kiosks slouched on the sidewalk. Akhmed wished he had taken paper and a pencil with him to capture his first trip to the city. Sonja brought the jeep to a crawl as they tipped into a crater. The street rose and disappeared somewhere above them, the whole world of dark wet earth, the tires spinning and reaching the lip. No scent drifted through the open window but the engine burn. No sewage or raw waste. Nothing. A flattened bureau basked in the sun, knobs pried out. The flicker of an oil-drum fire three blocks out came as a small, welcome signal of human habitation. Behind the flame a man turned a rotisserie fashioned from clothes hangers and a gardening stake on which was impaled a pink fist of flesh. Two pigeon claws revolved over the fire. Behind the fire, wooden gangplanks connected pyramids of rubble. Some lay over craters, others were suspended two or three stories high, bridging alleyways. This is Grozny? He should have visited sooner.
“It’s like scaffolding,” he said, the first words in many kilometers.
“Built by the street kids that live in the ruins,” she said, and in a tone of apology added, “You were smart to bring her in.”
No faces peered from the yawning walls. The thought of his dreary, soul-crushingly backward village sent an unfamiliar flare of pride up his chest.
“How do they survive?” he asked, glancing at a building with more plank bridges than floors. An ingenious strategy; these young engineers were clearly ethnic Chechen. Collapsed floors would take construction crews years to lift and rebuild, but plank bridges could be reassembled in minutes.
“They sell the rubble back to the Russians. Construction has begun on defense and petroleum ministry buildings. They buy back the bricks at two rubles each.”
“More than I would have thought.”
“Bricks purchased at dawn are cemented by noon, so the kids have to chisel off any remaining mortar. You see those white rubber casings in the rubble?”
“Like snake skins.”
“It’s electrical wire insulation. They strip and sell the copper wire. Just about any metal is worth its weight. Most of these kids can’t read or write, but they’ve created metal-based currencies.”
“Scrap metal and disappearances,” Akhmed said, flat and without irony. “Our national industries.”
The warehouse stretched wider than a soccer field with half its windows stained tar-black and the other half blown out, and when Sonja nodded to it he knew something was wrong. They passed a toppled chemical drum, its top peeled back like a bean-tin lid; a glowing blue sludge, too thick to evaporate, pooled at the bottom. A guard blocked the warehouse drive. His bloodstained bandoliers intersected at the sternum, the only red cross Akhmed would see that day. A dull glint, less recognition than knowing, appeared in the guard’s face when he saw Sonja. “Only a fool would sit in a truck,” the woman had said; if only Akhmed had met her a day earlier. The vise tightening in his chest had been there since the morning, since Sonja had refused to acknowledge him. She parked the truck, went to find the snow leopard–thief, and he was alone, brought by a woman who didn’t trust him to a warehouse large enough to hold his village, a place where he shouldn’t have been, in a city unworthy of even an imaginary plane ticket. Three Mercedes sedans sat at the center of the warehouse floor, Scandinavian license plates hanging from shiny screws. The walls were Western department stores: racks of leather and fur coats, refrigerators and dishwashers with warranties dangling from plastic ribbons, cardboard boxes stacked two stories high. A folding chair sat open on the floor, pliers and duct tape on the seat. A faucet turned on in Akhmed’s mouth.
“It was the most remarkable thing I’ve seen in years. I couldn’t think. I was stunned. Do I bow? I didn’t know what to do.” The thin, excited voice belonged to the thin, excited man entering the warehouse beside Sonja. “I never thought I would meet someone from China.”
The two strolled with a familiarity—she touching his shoulder, he timing his footsteps to hers—that left Akhmed uncertain and unaccountably envious. The wide arc they walked around him drew a line of tension across the room. “What was he doing here? A journalist?” Sonja asked, avoiding his eye.
“An oil man. He wants to buy a refinery.”
“You’re selling refineries now?”
“Just the machinery,” the man said simply. He wore a beige summer suit and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to exhibit a triangle of voluminous chest hair. His loafers reflected the pale light. A man dressed like this would be stripped, hog-tied, and beaten within one city block, but he didn’t seem like the type of man that went anywhere alone. “Is this our friend?” the man asked, and nodded to the folding chair, pliers, and duct tape. “Have a seat, please.”
Akhmed pivoted sharply, but the guard was behind him, the gun barrel leveled to his chest. A tourniquet gripped the corridor between his brain and body, and directions came to his limbs in halting dribbles that wouldn’t save him. That morning Ula had been asleep when he left. He hadn’t said good-bye to her.
“You haven’t been honest, Akhmed,” Sonja said. The way she studied him he knew his skull was just another bone she co
uld amputate.
“I’m sorry,” he gushed. “I lied about being in the top tenth of my graduating class. I was in the bottom tenth. In the fourth percentile.”
No relief in her smile. “Do you think that’s what this is about?” she asked.
What else could it be? The only lie he had told was that he was a good doctor.
“You knew my surname and patronymic, Akhmed.” She had said his name twice now. The third time would be the last. “No one knows those. But you did.”
“She wouldn’t even tell me,” the man offered. “Not that I had difficulty finding out, but still, she’s rather cautious, don’t you think?”
“You have to explain yourself,” she said, and she paused for a breath. “Or I’ll leave you here. I can’t risk having an informer on my staff.”
Had the gun barrel not pressed against his spine, he would have laughed. He would have treated the setup as another one of Sonja’s tests. Treated the whole thing like the misunderstanding it was, because how could she mistake him for the man he had saved Havaa from? Havaa. The thought of her shucking the insulation from electrical wires reconnected his nerves. He couldn’t swallow. In the mouthful of warm saliva a pearl formed; an irritant hardened into white gleaming fury at the possibility that the war would end his life as indifferently as it had a hundred thousand others, that he was no more privileged. He didn’t want to die before an audience of stolen refrigerators. He had kissed Ula’s forehead in the early morning and felt the flutter of her lashes on his chin but when he raised his face she had already gone back in the gentle wash of wherever it was she went when she wasn’t with him. He hadn’t said good-bye.
“I saw your work before I ever met you,” he explained. “The rebels, they came to my village a few years back, and the field commander had a chest held together by the most magnificent dental-floss stitches. I was so impressed. The commander said it was the work of a Russian woman and I assumed they had kidnapped a Russian medic. But then, later on, I met a refugee from Volchansk who used to work at the hospital. She had stayed with Dokka when he was running a hostel for refugees.”
“What was her name?” Sonja asked, eyes as fixed as constellations. She stood close enough for him to hear her teeth grind. There was so much of her, right here, in his face, and he would have stepped back, had a gun not pushed him forward.
“I mentioned the dental floss and the Russian woman doctor. It was only in passing. I wanted to know if the hospital was hiring. And she looked up and said, ‘Sofia Andreyevna Rabina. Sonja.’ I tried to ask her more, but she didn’t want to talk about you. Your name was the only one I had when Dokka disappeared. I thought a doctor good enough to stitch a man with dental floss would be good enough to take in Havaa.”
“What was her name!” she demanded. He was afraid to answer, afraid even to exhale; the hope wrapped within the question was so small and flickering a breath could extinguish it.
“Was it Natasha? Was her name Natasha?”
CHAPTER
12
TALL, SWAN-LIKE, AND four years her sister’s junior, Natasha stood in the spotlight of her family’s affection. In his daybreak voice, cold from seven hours without the heat of a cigarette, her father would offer her good-morning first, even if she entered the kitchen two paces behind Sonja. Her mother treated her with the pride and envy of a woman who had fallen in love with sixteen boys in secondary school, none of whom reciprocated her affection. “My Natasha,” she would say, running her fingers through the girl’s long brown hair with a possessiveness suggesting the strands were an extension of her own. Natasha’s eyes were brown spattered with glimmers of emerald and uncut diamond. Hazel, technically. Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label. Natasha’s elevated station in the family left in her only the slightest scratches of arrogance. Better than anyone, she knew she had done nothing to deserve the beauty she was blessed with. Their parents’ plain features, replicated predictably in Sonja, had reacted violently in Natasha to create something as surprising as a dove hatching from a pigeon egg.
Within the variations of beige composing the corridors of State Secondary School No. 28, the spotlight of attention expanded. As an ethnic Russian she belonged to the national minority that ran the republic. Her ethnic status propelled her into the elite echelons of adolescent popularity, where a personality cult had arisen around her, fueled by the adoration of obsequious underclassmen. In Moscow, Gorbachev’s reforms barreled the Soviet Union toward the precipice, but in a far-flung city in a farther-flung republic, the old rules still applied. Ethnic Russians controlled all major positions of power, from headwaiters to heads of government, and the two-hundred-year history of imperial order reiterated itself within State Secondary School No. 28. With magnanimity, Natasha accepted her rank. She wasn’t nearly as vicious as the girls who, in florid Cyrillic on the inner flap of their homework planners, graded boys on a twelve-point scale. Nor did she hold herself above the roiling sea of lunchroom gossip by pushing others under. Years earlier, when she was still young enough to need a good-night kiss, her father would plant his chapped lips on her cheek and, in a whisper of sweet tobacco, say, “Sweet dreams, my sweet tsarina.” Even after she outgrew good-night kisses, she liked to imagine herself as the long-lost grandchild of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, and acted in a manner befitting a wise and humble monarch.
It was this—her ethnicity as a Russian, the stalwart minority defending the borders of Western civilization from the barbaric Muhammadans—that let her slip through her adolescent years with freedoms her Chechen classmates didn’t enjoy. She could harbor lascivious thoughts of Ivan Yakov—a man her sister would revive three times in the second war—who was far more handsome than any literature teacher had a right to be. She could shave her legs without worrying if a prudish deity would smite those parallel beams of smooth skin. Overnight, it seemed, electrical lines were laid in her veins as she realized that the awkward, self-conscious boys around her were growing into men. The complications of puberty weren’t further complicated by culture or religion. Only when comparing herself to her classmates, many of whom were subject to arranged marriages, did she come to understand that in Chechnya gravity pressed upon women with heavier hands. Her Russianness exempted her from its grip, and so yes, often she floated.
Though Russian, she’d never been north of the Chechen border. Her parents had been born in 1930s Moscow and had grown up in communal flats four blocks away from each other. They took the same buses, attended the same primary school, spoke an accent flavored by the same fog, ate eggs laid by the same chickens, watched the same setting sun impale itself on the bronze spire of the Central Pavilion of the All-Russia Exhibition Center. They each lost relatives to Stalin’s purges. NKVD agents wearing uniforms the blue of a cloudless summer sky would stride into the apartment block past midnight, and the next morning residents would strain their tea without mentioning the scream-pierced night. Her parents blamed Stalin personally for the purges, and Natasha’s state-approved history text confirmed that Stalin, and only Stalin, bore responsibility. But the terrible past of nighttime disappearances was locked within the pages of that history book; she never imagined she would one day disappear as easily as her forefathers.
In 1946 news spread of the deportation of Chechens and the need for ethnic Russians to resettle the empty republic. Her father was fourteen when he last drank a glass of rusty Moscow tap water. Her mother, eight. Trains carried them over the war-sickened land. They arrived in Grozny and stayed two weeks in a drafty university auditorium, sleeping on bleachers before receiving a residency assignment to Volchansk. They journeyed to the city by the same bus, two days apart. Natasha’s mother and father each felt so lonesome in this silent country. They didn’t believe they would ever find someone who had seen what they had seen, felt what they had felt. Twenty-one years after the end of the Gre
at Patriotic War, they waited beside each other in a bread line. Their small talk surged to revelation. Neither could believe they had shared the same primary school, tap water, and sunset from adjacent apartment blocks. Neither imagined they would someday share two daughters: one beautiful, the other brilliant.
Though she was the elder, Sonja was always thought of as Natasha’s sister, the object rather than subject of any sentence the two shared. She walked alone down the school corridors, head sternly bent toward the stack of books in her arms. To Natasha she was the Π-letter volume of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia: wide and filled with knowledge no normal person would ever need. On weekend nights, when Natasha returned from the cinema or discotheque, she would find a thin bar of light glowing beneath the door of her sister’s room, and if she put her ear against the closed door, she would hear the whisper of a page turned every forty-five seconds. She believed Sonja to be a genius in the classical mold: a single great streak of lightning in an otherwise muddled sky. In all likelihood, Sonja had more academic journal subscriptions than friends. She could explain advanced calculus to her fifth-form algebra teacher but couldn’t tell a joke to a boy at lunch. Even in the summer months, she had the complexion of someone who spent too much time in a cellar.
Everyone knew Sonja was destined for great things, but no one knew what to do with her until then. Even in academia, her natural habitat, she was an exotic species. Though her Russianness gave her certain dispensations, the idea that a young woman of any ethnicity could so excel in the hard sciences was a far-fetched fantasy. Their parents encouraged her at a distance. Neither understood the molecular formulas, electromagnetic fields, or anatomical minutiae that so captivated her, and so their support came by way of well-intentioned, inadequate generalities. Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja’s gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable. Natasha was beautiful and charming. They didn’t need MDs to know how to be proud of her.