“What’s an escalator?”
“It’s a moving staircase.”
“Like a children’s ride?”
“No, it’s not a ride. It’s just a staircase that moves. That’s all.”
“Then this is a broken escalator.” In three years that staircase would become the first escalator in Chechnya. On weekends families from as far away as Lake Kezanoiam would bring their children to play on it.
She descended on the right side; even in a choice as arbitrary as which side to walk on she strove for order. At a brown door at the end of the basement corridor she knocked to the beat of an Umar Dimayev song. The deaf boy opened the door, and the blind man, his father, stood just behind him. Two spoonfuls were missing from his face.
“It’s Sonja,” she said. The blind man reached for his son, who tugged his left index finger in confirmation, then, looking at Akhmed, tugged the blind man’s right middle finger.
“Yes, I’ve brought a friend. His name is Akhmed.”
The blind man nodded to his son and reached for Akhmed’s face. The first time the blind man had touched Sonja’s cheeks she had known by his fingers that he would have made a great surgeon. “Don’t make a face,” she said, as the blind man parted Akhmed’s beard. “You don’t want to be remembered as a sourpuss.”
Lightbulbs dangled from a brown electrical cord held by rusty staples to the ceiling. Somewhere a generator was humming. Card tables with rotary telephones sat evenly across the room. The whispers of five callers overlapped. She gave the deaf boy three hundred rubles and stepped over the braided wires to her telephone.
“City University Slavic Department,” said the voice on the other end once she dialed.
“Good morning, Janice. It is Sonja. May I speak to Brendan?” Wrapped in the formality of proper English, her request sounded insincere to her.
“Hang on a mo’, Sonja. He just left his office, but I’ll see if I can’t fetch him.”
In the static hold she saw his chest, pale as a tadpole; she could have stood him before a bright light and seen his organs. Eights years on and he would have filled out, perhaps a paunch to accompany his promotions to Assistant Department Director, perhaps even a tanning salon gift token. When she backed out of the engagement he had spent three days on hold with the airlines and paid for part of the ticket when the cheapest, most circuitous route exceeded her savings. Going through her medicine cabinet, he had made a list of her favorite toiletries and purchased a half dozen of every tube, bottle, and canister for her to take home. She said she would come back. He said she would come back. The morning she left he wheeled the Samsonite, another parting gift, to the curb outside the international student dormitory, and sat beside her in the taxi, a cool perspiration on his palm, the city gliding past. When she said, half jokingly, as they reached the Heathrow turnoff, that he must be glad to be rid of her, because why else had he made it so easy for her to go, he buried his face in the crook of her shoulder and twelve hours later, in a lavatory twenty-five thousand feet over Ukrainian wheat fields, she found a streak of his hardened mucus and for a moment mistook it for her first gray hair.
“Sonja?” Janice said. “Brendan’s left for a meeting. Can I take a message?”
They hadn’t spoken since the previous month. He had contacts at Memorial and the Red Cross and if Natasha’s name were to be typed into a computer he would know of it. Usually the moments before the call went through were honed with the hope that this month, this time, he would have an answer. But today was different. Today she just wanted him to know she was still alive. “Just tell him I called.”
“And you spell your name with a j, yeah?”
She had asked him about it once, on their third or fourth coffee after classes. She wanted to know why Raskolnikov’s love was transliterated as Sonia or Sonya but never Sonja. “Because that’s how you spell it in English,” Brendan had said. “Only Swedes spell it with a j.” “Swedes are foreigners, too,” she said, and held that j as the one letter in her name that was hers.
“Oh, and Sonja?” Janice said. “Is there a number where he can call you back?”
“How do the Swedes spell Natasha?” she had asked, but Brendan didn’t know.
CHAPTER
14
THE WINTER BRENDAN and Sonja fell in love, all of Volchansk became homeless; even those like Natasha, whose homes hadn’t been hit, found the cold easier to sleep through than the fear of falling rubble. She spent the winter in City Park, a twelve-square-block refuge of brown grass and barren trees, designed, it was said, by the dimwitted fourth cousin of Boris Iofan, where the tallest man-made edifice was a corroded jungle gym. The homeless, insane, and alcoholic reigned in this world. Trained and experienced in the art of surviving a winter outdoors, the city pariahs were inundated by professors and lawyers and accountants whose degrees were worth the five seconds of warmth they could fuel. Natasha and her cohort took direction from the City Park Prophet. The great bib of gnarled hair, now reaching mid-thigh, shook indignantly when he reminded them of his prophecy. No one had listened when he predicted the fast-coming day when the sky would split open and God would fall upon the indecencies of man. Natasha remembered passing the madman each evening as she returned from the oil ministry, and he remembered the coins she had given him. “I told you I would remember you,” he said when she first moved into the park; soon she realized that all of the City Park Prophet’s flock had been daily alms-givers the Prophet now felt obligated to protect. He taught them to camouflage their tents and to scavenge for pinecones buried in the frost; to hunt feral dogs with cudgels and bait pigeon traps with the viscera; to pray five times a day and perform the proper ablutions, and Natasha, who had never stepped in a church, let alone a mosque, praised Allah because she knew better than to challenge a man who spent his life preparing for the apocalypse. In fourteen years those accountants and lawyers would collectively purchase for the City Park Prophet a studio apartment in a newly rebuilt apartment block. They would search for Natasha, hoping she would contribute to the considerable down payment, or at least be there when they led the Prophet into his new home, but the combined brainpower of six lawyers, three accountants, and eight PhDs couldn’t solve the mystery of the former secretary’s whereabouts.
By spring, when the Feds took the city, the bombing ceased and the siege settled into occupation. The City Park refugees dispersed to ancestral villages and auls scattered throughout the highlands, where they could count on the hospitality of distant family and clan. But Natasha had no family left. Her apartment block still stood, now the tallest building on the street. The windows had blown out but the bathroom mirror was still intact. She hadn’t seen herself in months. Her options dwindled to subsistence and scavenging. Her reflection said she wouldn’t last long in a city of drunken, vengeful, sex-starved soldiers. But avenues of escape still existed for women who could make themselves attractive without the benefit of running water.
Against the ringing of her last two kopeks of common sense, she found Sulim. He lived in the open now, in business with both Feds and rebels, and occasionally with the smuggler Sonja would later know as Alu’s brother. They met in a bar that served nothing. No door, no liquor, no employees, no windows, but the regulars still returned each afternoon. Their lips were blue from drinking windshield wiper fluid.
In comparison to them, Sulim looked well. His eyes, unclouded by exhaustion, scanned her approvingly. The Parkinson’s that would turn him into a quivering jelly mold in eleven years was already fermenting in his midbrain, but his hands didn’t shake when he went to light his cigarette. War served him well. From mountain hideaways Dudayev’s economic and police chiefs issued statements praising an economy and a police force that no longer existed, and in the vacuum of legitimate authority, organized crime provided the only meaningful order. He offered her a cigarette.
“You want to get out,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”
“I can do well in the West.”
“Anyone can do well when they aren’t
dodging bullets.” He scanned the ghost drinkers; those with the bluest lips had gone blind, and they reached out, touching the faces of their drinking partners. Sulim reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a vodka bottle. “I don’t know how they got it in their heads that we smuggle it in barrels of windshield wiper fluid.”
“I’ll work off the debt.”
“Will you?” he asked.
“You know how hard I worked at Grozneft. I’m productive.”
“Are you?” he asked.
“Please.” He took a small sip from the bottle, savoring it as he watched her. He hadn’t forgotten how she had denied him at her door, his skin sallow in the daylight. He crossed his legs, leaned back, waiting for her to beg. “I know there are trafficking routes,” she said. “I know you can get me out. Please, Sulim.”
“Under the Soviets, women who disappeared had to reappear on the other side of the world to make money. Now women can turn a profit simply by vanishing. Reappearance has too high an overhead. Chechen families will pay a higher ransom for the body of their daughter than they will for her alive. I’ve looked at the numbers.”
She stood to leave.
“But you aren’t Chechen,” he continued. “You have no family to pay for your corpse. You have no afterlife for which your body must be prepared. You can have another cigarette.”
He lit it for her with a bent match. She had kissed those knuckles. She had loved them.
“Will you help me or not?”
He was holding her index finger and he nodded it up and down. Crippled by tremors, unable to control his limbs, an embarrassment to his family, he would spend his final years in a windowless room with a television set for companionship. “You didn’t really think I would deny you? Where do you want to go?”
“London.”
“Then in London you will be an au pair. Do you know what that is? It’s a French word. It means you will watch the children while the parents are at work.”
“So I will be a grandmother?”
“Yes, something like that.”
“I’m not my sister but I’m not a fool.”
“There may be other things. Dancing, entertaining. Being, what’s the word, enticing.”
It meant prostitution. Waitressing, nannying, those were for pretty girls from poor countries, not pretty girls from war countries. Some repatriated women called it slavery, but even if it was true, so what? Paid sex with London civilians couldn’t be worse than forced sex with Russian soldiers. And in London, Sonja would find her other work. Sulim watched her from across the table. His lips twisted into a slight smile, a challenge. Did he think she was afraid of him? Did he think he could possibly scare her?
“London,” she said. “Make me an au pair. Make me reappear.”
A young man with a soft, round face transported Natasha and five other women to the Dagestan border. They sat on crates in the near-darkness of a Federal supply van. The wind pulled against the olive canvas awning, and occasionally, a sliver of sunlight slipped through and was gone. She wanted to ask their names, where they were from, if they, too, were au pairs. Conversation seemed possible a moment after the round-faced man, looking like their younger brother, hoisted them into the truck bed. But the air clotted with doubt too thick for any words to pass.
Some hours later the van shuddered to a standstill and the round-faced man unlatched the back. Natasha shielded her eyes against the bright burn of noon and the light warmed her hands. A smock of dark evergreens wrapped around the nearest mountain. The round-faced man led them a hundred meters down a gravel path to a jeep flying the flag of national independence. Wooden benches replaced the backseats. They crowded in.
The jeep carried them up ravines of dried creek beds, along an unending jawline of pale stone. Conifer cones hung from drooped branches. The landscape appeared on the precipice of collapse. In the glens below, trickles of silvery light wound through empty pastures, glittering ribbons tied off at the horizon. It wasn’t fair. She hated the outdoors. A sex worker was one thing, but a weekend hiker? The sun silhouetted wide circling wings. A pigeon, she first thought, grown to fit the monstrous proportions of this habitat.
The round-faced man parked the jeep when the incline became too steep. When she stood straight her hair hung off her shoulders, held back by the invisible hands of gravity. Sick, dizzied, she wanted a patch of asphalt she might sit on and feel whole. Pretty Woman wasn’t anything like this. The round-faced man began climbing the rock-ridden slope and called for them. No, no, no, she wanted to say, the carabiner in my purse is only a keychain. But what could she do? The top was closer than the bottom. No threat or command, just his finger beckoning, and following it, she left Chechnya.
Dagestan was three unbearable hours of hiking, then another hour by jeep. The nod of the border guard’s chin stubble was the only official record of their crossing into Georgia. Time was measured by bathroom breaks until they reached the water. The Black Sea was blue. They boarded a fishing trawler and the wind swept the scent of salt through her hair. Condominiums stood like dominoes on the coast, the white dots of lit windows numbering into the hundreds. When the sun fell below the water line the sea at last went black. She lay on the driest bit of deck she could find, used her duffel bag as a pillow, and fell asleep as the boat rocked on the water.
In Odessa they were divided. Three went with the round-faced man and as they disappeared into a Yugo something small and sharp panged through her; she didn’t know their names. She and two others followed the man who had purchased their passports into the back of a delivery van. The door slammed shut. When it opened they were in Serbia. They stayed with eleven other women in a stone cellar. Manacles looted from the Sarajevo archaeology museum lay coiled on the floor, the implicit threat more constricting than the rusted cuffs. A tin pail tilted in the far corner; when one approached it, the rest turned away. Slurred voices seeped through the damp wooden ceiling. An argument over whether fire hydrants were a good idea. She touched the cheeks, forehead, and lips she had once gazed at in the mirror, proudly. Now she wanted scar tissue, missing limbs, cheeks buckshot with acne, teeth pointing every which way.
“What is this?” she asked.
No one spoke.
“Does anyone know where we are?” she asked again.
The girl sitting next to her, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, was the only one who answered. “The Breaking Grounds.”
CHAPTER
15
“SHE NEVER TALKED about how it happened,” Sonja said, thirty minutes outside Grozny’s outer suburbs, ten since she had begun telling him. “How she got to Italy. If they took her on a plane or in a car or what. She never even told me who took her there, when she left, how she survived the first war. Nothing. She probably just didn’t want to think about it, but I always thought it was her way of punishing me for leaving her.” Akhmed had set the radio to 102.9. She barely knew him and that was the only reason she told him; he was, himself, static. She couldn’t explain her confession any more than the calm that followed.
“War is unnatural,” Akhmed said. “It causes people to act unnaturally.”
“Even you?”
“Of course,” he said. “I was never this charming.” He stretched his hands in front of him; brown fields wedged between his fingers. “In the first war Dokka began classifying everything. He was an arborist by training, so he was used to dividing plants into species and genera and family, and one day he began doing that with everything else. With people. Everyone was a pacifist or an imperialist or a fascist or a classicist or any other number of -ists, and anyone who criticized his system was an anarchist.”
“Havaa speaks in more -isms than a philosophy PhD.”
“Yes, she really does take after him. She began making up her own and I remember hearing them discuss mustachism and shearistry and they were so excited. I had no idea what any of it meant. It was like a language they created to speak to each other more fully.” He paused. He was breathing hea
vily. The flush of his cheeks had seeped to his neck. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“She plans to be a sea anemonist.”
He laughed. “I bet. We were friends for years, Dokka and I and Ramzan. Every other Sunday we played chess, Havaa watching. Ramzan was the one who was waiting for me yesterday. The informer. We played chess every other Sunday for over a decade.”
“What happened?”
“Ramzan began running guns for the rebels. He would invite Dokka on his expeditions, pay him well. I never understood why. He didn’t need Dokka’s help to drive a jeep into the mountains. The same way you thought Natasha was punishing you by her silence, I always thought Ramzan was punishing me with those trips. He never invited me along even though I needed the money as much as Dokka. We were friends, Ramzan and I, but I always felt Ramzan resented me for something I had done. Now I think it’s more complicated than that. He was detained in the Landfill in ninety-five, and I think he resents me because I know what happened to him there.
“I was jealous of Dokka. Of his trips to the mountains with Ramzan. Of the money he made. Of his wife. Mine has been bed-bound and senile for nearly three years while his had more vitality, more urgency in her little finger than most men have between their legs. I was jealous of his daughter. We tried for years but …” His voice trailed away. Beyond him a single smokestack rose a hundred meters into the sky, no building in sight. “Dokka was my closest friend and yet I wanted his family, his opportunities, his life. He and Ramzan would go to the mountains for a week or two and I would eat dinner with Esiila and Havaa. I would spend the whole day and night there. On his final trip, in January 2003, I slept in his bed for three nights. Of course I couldn’t have known that he and Ramzan had been detained and sent to the Landfill. I couldn’t have known that his fingers were snipped off with wire cutters while I was at his house, sleeping with his wife, eating with his daughter, because I thought his life was perfect. Whatever we were to each other was lost then. I’m not sure if Esiila told him or not, but he knew. Never said anything but he knew. I would go over and talk to the refugees staying at his house when I wanted to talk to him. He didn’t say a word to me last year when I spoke to the woman who told me your name. If I saw Dokka again, I wouldn’t apologize or try to make it right. That isn’t what I would say.”