Текст книги "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"

Автор книги: Anthony Marra

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

CHAPTER 22

THE VILLAGE CHIMNEYS were sending up smoke among the birch trunks when Akhmed heard a low whistle from the trees. Khassan, surrounded by his guard of feral dogs, stepped into the road with an orange hand cupping the flashlight. The dogs, watchful, ears erect, studied him warily.

“I didn’t want Ramzan to see me waiting for you,” Khassan said. His fingers glowed.

“He was waiting for me last night, asking about Havaa.”

“I spoke with him today. For the first time in two years. My own son. I begged him.”

The statement knocked Akhmed a step back. Surprised, honored, grateful that the man would break the silence for Havaa’s sake, his sake, he set his palm on those radiant fingers and the road was dark again. “It’s all right.”

“I’m sorry, Akhmed, I’m—” A sob halved the old man’s voice and Akhmed gripped his fingers. When his mother died, Khassan wept at the burial. When Akhmed’s father died, Khassan provided the shroud. Akhmed had always remembered this, how Khassan had shared his mourning as if he were family. Dog paws pattered in the undergrowth.

“So they will come for me.” For years he’d lived with the fear of murder, torture, or disappearance, as all men of his age did, and it was the senselessness that truly frightened him; that the monumental finality of death could come arbitrarily was more terrifying than the eternity to follow. But if his death severed the connection between city and village, it would be neither futile nor insignificant, and he would be more fortunate than many thousands of his countrymen.

“I don’t know,” Khassan said. His hands shook under Akhmed’s.

“And Ramzan doesn’t know where I’ve been these past three days?”

“I don’t think he wants to know. So long as the burden of disclosure is on you, some small corner of his conscience can stay clean.”

He imagined her right then, annoying Sonja, asking her to explain why feces are brown, why ears bend, so young and silly and smart. She was a child without parents, and he was a man without children. Ten years earlier he couldn’t have imagined claiming her, but the rules of that society had broken. There was no one left to say whom you could love.

“I won’t say a word,” Akhmed whispered.

“Im sorry.”

“Havaa is my only allegiance.” The moon outlined Khassan’s face. Tears rimmed his eyelids, and his lips pressed into a tight frown, but he didn’t appear contrite. If Akhmed hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was an expression of overwhelming pride.

“Do you remember in the first war, Dokka carried a book with him everywhere?” Akhmed asked. “Whenever the Feds passed, Dokka would open his book and start reading.”

Khassan gave a relieved grin. “The Feds thought the rebels were illiterate, so by reading a book he proved he wasn’t a rebel.”

“But it wasn’t even a book, was it?”

“No, a journal. All the pages were blank. But they couldn’t tell that.”

They laughed and the flashlight beam tore hoops in the shadows.

“And he wasn’t shot,” Khassan mused.

“No, not then.”

Khassan pulled a manila envelope from his overcoat and passed it to Akhmed. The exchange, Akhmed thought, was the nearest thing to a postal service in many years. “I was hoping you could give this to Havaa. It’s a letter, some memories of Dokka before he became a father. So she’ll have something to look to when she’s older.”

“I’m glad you’re optimistic,” Akhmed said.

“What do I do? I know what honor requires, but that? To my own son? With my own hands? Am I expected to do that? Tell me what to do, Akhmed. You know that your name is the next he’ll give the Feds. You tell me, what should a father do?” Khassan had leaned forward, his stale, quick breaths warming Akhmed’s cheek, his hands reaching for Akhmed’s shoulders. It was a peculiar sensation. They had never hugged before.

“I don’t know,” Akhmed said. There was no right answer and he was too tired, too cold, and too close to home to sift through all the wrong ones. “I’ve never been a father. I don’t know what you should do.”

“I’m not asking for your approval. I’m asking for your advice.”

Akhmed nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

Khassan stepped back and his face, paled in moonlight, shifted violently. He opened his mouth, but for a moment only his eyes spoke. Akhmed would have filled the fragile space between them with gratitude. He would have thanked Khassan for the advice, the stories, the meals, the cigarettes, the silences, everything, even the interminable history lessons, they had shared over the years. He would have said that Khassan had been like a father to him, in the ten years since his own father had passed. He would have said it, but Khassan spoke first. “I feel fortunate to know who you are, Akhmed. I’ve wanted to say that for a long time.”

Their eyes met and broke away. Such naked acknowledgment of their relationship embarrassed them both, and nodding, turning toward the village, Akhmed said nothing.

He entered the musty blindness of the living room and crept toward the bedroom’s lantern light. “It’s me,” he said, in the doorway. “How are you?”

Beneath the blankets, Ula turned and smiled lazily. “Oh, just fine. Fine and fine. Your father came again. He told me a bedtime story.”

He prepared a dinner of lentils and canned apricots, pulled a chair beside the bed, and ate with her. His poor Ula. She really was losing her mind. Her health had improved in recent months, but this insistence that she spent her days with his ten-years-deceased father dispelled hope for recovery. Just as well. Her mind was one less thing she had left to lose. In a cigar box beneath the bed he hid a hypodermic needle and a vial of heroin he had swiped from the hospital.

After cleaning the dishes, he found his copy of Hadji Murád, steadying the wobbling dresser leg, and set it by the door. He secured the living room blackout curtains before opening Khassan’s envelope. Brass fasteners bound forty or fifty sheets. He parted the pages at random. Your father loved your mother’s nose. It was a big, ungainly thing, and he said it was still growing, and was slowly taking over her cheeks and forehead, so her entire face would soon submerge beneath her nose. He couldn’t start, not now, and slid the sheets back into the manila envelope.

In bed he cupped Ula’s bony hip. It wasn’t the hip he’d held on their wedding night as he fumbled and grunted, so self-conscious about his performance he wasn’t prepared for the embarrassment that accompanied the turn of her nose to the open window. But he loved it more, would miss it more. They used to argue about everything, quarrels that left them both hoarse the next morning, and they forgave each other in silence, with a cup of tea, a hand on the shoulder, unencumbered by the voices that divided them. He missed her scorn more than anything. How she looked at him as if he weren’t there. How she knew what the whole village suspected: that he was an incompetent physician, a worse bookkeeper, a romantic, a man who was never happier than when sketching birds in the woods. How she knew that and still loved him. He ran his fingers through her hair. Days since he had last washed it, and still so clean. Praise Allah she is speaking with my father. If she is looking so far over the horizon, she won’t see what’s in front of her.

“Do you remember who I am?” he asked, but she had already fallen asleep.

“You know how those things were invented?” Sonja asked with a nod to the stethoscope the girl was using to listen to her own heartbeat. “It was invented by a French physician who had a very fat patient. The patient was so fat that the French physician couldn’t hear the heartbeat through his chest. So he invented a stethoscope.”

“That’s weird,” the girl said, shifting the bell like an indecisive chess piece. “I’ve never seen a fat person before.”

“Never?”

“Never. But in my souvenirs I have the autograph of a man who used to be fat.”

The girl noted her heart rate on the chart Sonja had given her. Overcome by an inexplicable interest in medicine, the girl, draped in a lab coat that swished against the linoleum, had been following Sonja since dinner. It took the better part of an hour before Sonja realized the girl was imitating her. Her raw exasperation softened to a more delicate displeasure when the girl began scolding the air for carrying contagions. Poor child, she thought, let’s hope she finds a better role model.

The girl held the stethoscope bell like a microphone and, while kicking a drooping tail of bedsheet, began interviewing Sonja. “What’s it like being a surgeon?” she asked.

“Wonderful. Next question.”

“Why don’t you have kids?”

“They ask too many questions.”

“Who did you bribe to get into medical school?”

“Surprisingly, no one at all.”

“And are you the only woman surgeon in the world?”

“It feels like it.”

“What’s your favorite disease?”

“Chlamydia.”

“If they let you become a surgeon instead of a wife, would they let me become an arborist instead of a wife?”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“You know.”

“Tell me.”

The girl’s face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger than the weakest boy, and with those ideas crowding your head no wonder subordination was the only inevitable outcome. She sat on the hospital bed beside the girl, remembering what it was like to have that face, and pitying it. “Listen, Havaa,” she said, summoning as much generosity as she could muster at this hour of night, “you can be exactly the person you want to be, okay? It may not seem that way, but things change when you get a little older. If you work hard, and give up certain things, and yes, resort to bribery now and then, you’ll be an arborist, or a sea anemonist, or anything else you want.”

And they kept talking, passing the stethoscope bell back and forth.

“Do you have any questions for me?” the girl asked at the end of the interview.

Since Akhmed had left that evening, Sonja had held the question as she would a long-awaited letter, terrified of what the envelope contained. “Did a Russian woman ever stay at your house?”

“Which one? Lots of people stayed with us.”

“Her name was Natasha.”

“Probably thirty Natashas at least.”

“She looked like me.”

Havaa gave her an appraising look. “Then no.”

“Like me only beautiful.”

The girl tilted her head. “I can’t imagine that.”

And it struck her. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? Akhmed’s sketch. She was upright and out of the room before Havaa could ask where she was going. Why had she asked him to take the portrait? Where would he have put it? She climbed to the fourth floor and worked her way back to her room, checking the new and old maternity wards, the land-mine man’s room, the empty administrative offices, the waiting room. While searching, her mind flashed to the day she had purchased the Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker. True to form it had endured flights across Europe, every bump of the Samsonite, and even the shame of Alu’s name, without once breaking composure.

She had found the nutcracker in a convenience store sticky with the residue of spilled soda, where she stopped for cough drops before attending a lecture. It was four weeks to Christmas. The first war wouldn’t officially begin for twelve more days. She had bought it without once thinking of Natasha, on a whim, because Buckingham Palace was what foreigners thought of when they thought of London and she, Sonja with a j, was nothing if not foreign. Gray clouds lined the horizon as she climbed the escalator at Holborn and crossed Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the Royal College of Surgeons. There, at a neurosurgery lecture, she transcribed the snaking syntax of British academia in a bright pink notebook she had found in a fifty-pence bin. Attached to the Royal College was a museum dedicated to the history of anatomy and pathology. After thanking the lecturer, and pausing in the atrium for a cigarette and cough drop, she strolled through the museum’s curious exhibitions. There was a display detailing the history of non-Egyptian mummification. An alcove devoted to the tibia. One room exhibited the 1,474 skulls collected by nineteenth-century physician Joseph Barnard Davis. A fractured skull of a Roman woman found at Pompeii. The skulls of nine Chinese pirates hanged in Ningpo. Congolese from Leopold’s rubber plantations. But the skull that haunted her was that of a Bengali cannibal. Fully intact, the mandible still locked against the temporal, the twenty-two bones that constitute a human skull all accounted for. The eight bones forming the neurocranial brain case bathed in halogenated light. From the size of the plates, the prominence of the supraorbital ridge and temporal lines, as well as the overall size and solidity of the skull, she knew it belonged to a man. The skull appeared no different from those of the Chinese pirates, the Congolese plantation workers. She read the placard written a century and a half earlier by a Victorian phrenologist. There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man.

That morbid association between the cannibal and the nutcracker, one which she never mentioned to Natasha, was all she thought of while searching for the portrait. She finally found the notebook on the canteen counter, beneath a stack of folded linens. From the last page Natasha observed her calmly, through eyes unclouded by judgment or resentment, her hair held back with a headband she had never owned, her ears heavy with earrings that didn’t exist. Clearly Akhmed hadn’t met her.

Her footsteps, slowing to a processional as she neared her room, tapped like the last drops falling from a stopped faucet. She wanted to know and didn’t want to know; the two were always there, always tearing at her, a tug-of-war in which she was the rope. But that was okay, she told herself. The truth was one more rumor passed along the refugee lines, another hallucination she could freely disbelieve. When she entered the room the girl was already asleep. She slid the portrait into one of the drawers, thankful to postpone the answer for one more night.

CHAPTER 23

THE SECOND WAR, when it came to Volchansk, came without bomb blasts or mortar rounds, tracer bullets or tank treads. It came through the bazaar at first, a few more kopeks per gram of cardamom, a few more rubles per carrot, the deprivation subtle enough to blame on currency inflation, or global markets, or natural disasters. Then the electricity went. But the municipal power lines, restrung after the first war, never had carried a current for more than two hours at a stretch anyway, as likely to come at daybreak as midnight, fifteen or twenty minutes for Natasha to charge her batteries, pull news from the airwaves, hop in the shower and blow-dry her hair before the lights flickered and the city collapsed back into darkness. The tap water went next. With the remaining civilians she drew buckets from unboarded wells and strained the water through pillowcases before boiling it. Then food shortages. No milk, then no plums, then no cabbages, then no corn meal. Even the feral animals quieted, the dogs stopped howling, the songbirds stopped singing. And though Federal forces invaded Chechnya in August 1999, the second war didn’t begin for Natasha until the afternoon in 2001 when it marched through the doors of Hospital No. 6.

The skies of the maternity ward mural were as placid as on the day she had drawn them when she mistook the first crack for thunder. Gunshots followed as quickly as her footsteps as she ran downstairs. In trauma, Sonja and the nurses huddled by the aluminum filing cabinets.

“We could evacuate them to a village,” Sonja suggested. “We have a truck.”

“No,” Deshi said. “We keep them here. This is a hospital. They belong here.”

Maali assented. “Let’s use them as human shields.”

Natasha tried to wedge herself into the conversation, but as usual the triangle wouldn’t widen into a square. She took a deep breath and turned. This isn’t about you, she told herself. Your reaction is the only thing you can control. Who would have thought those books Sonja had brought with her the day she found ice were worth reading? In the five years she had worked here her emotional spectrum expanded beyond the monochromatic depression that had tinted her early days of recovery. Recovery. What a strange, wondrous word. None better defined her gradual reintegration into humanity. Nearly nine months of confinement, forced prostitution, beatings and heroin addiction, but she had come back. No one was more surprised than she herself, and no one was happier than Sonja. When Natasha was a teenager she once fell asleep on the roof and woke the color of borscht. The following week all the popular girls at school came in sunburned, and a week later the girls that wanted to be popular, until the principal, in an impromptu assembly, explained that girls had been known to roast alive while sunbathing. The memory was still there, tucked away in folds of time, and she found it again, with a smile, on the afternoons she climbed to the hospital roof to lie in the sun. Entire hours passed without her once thinking of Italy.

The nurses didn’t want to hear from her, but the patients did. An elderly woman, Xenia, patient number 29395, repeatedly asked what is happening, more confused and hesitant with each reiteration, as her neighbor, her first cousin, begged her to shut up because her insufferable voice would kill him faster than any bullet or bomb. When the Whites had swept through Volchansk eighty-one years earlier, Xenia had asked her cousin the same question and her cousin had answered. Xenia had been six, her cousin seven. Her voice had been lovely then.

“We’re figuring it out,” Natasha said. “Don’t worry. Can I get you some ice?”

Xenia gave her cousin a smug smile and nodded.

“Bring me the tongue depressor!” the cousin shouted after Natasha.

Two days earlier, when Xenia had arrived with pneumonia, Sonja had treated her lungs with the respect a plumber shows to blocked septic pipes. Her sister’s work was undeniably good, but its execution bothered Natasha. To work in these circumstances a surgeon must reduce each patient to her body, but this was an attitude shared by the traffickers, pimps, and johns populating Natasha’s private perdition. So while Sonja examined a cracked pelvis without once meeting the patient’s eye, or addressed the patient by placard number rather than by name, Natasha sequestered herself in the fourth-floor maternity ward, where whole days passed without their paths crossing, where the wails of newborns reminded her that life is louder than its pulse. While Sonja debated the merits of evacuation, Natasha fed Xenia crushed ice with a plastic spoon and told her exactly what was happening.

Boot fall, echoing down the corridor, ended the debate. The security guard ran through the double doors, his arms pumping, his shirt-tail flapping behind him. “They’re here,” he called. He ran right past Sonja and out the back door, announcing his immediate resignation in a breathless shout.

“Who?” Sonja called after him. “Feds or rebels?” No answer. Xenia held an ice cube in her mouth, afraid to break it. No one spoke. The shuffle of military boots paused at the closed double doors. The air was stretched so taut Natasha could have walked across it. A sharp kick, initially mistaken for a gunshot, jolted them all and flung open the double doors. Four bearded men entered with machine guns raised.

“I retired seven years ago,” Deshi said to no one in particular.

“We hereby liberate this hospital for patriotic use for the glorious campaign for national independence,” the shortest rebel declared. Dirt powdered his cheeks. Blood stained his shirt and trousers. He glared at the room, daring them to blink. “Who’s in charge?”

Across the room, with an exasperated roll of her eyes, Sonja raised her hand.

“I am the field commander of the fourth brigade of the National Military of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,” the shortest rebel said. He lowered his gun and took small, plodding steps to Sonja. “There are forty of us. Most need medical attention. Everyone needs food and water.”

“We could amputate all their legs,” Maali suggested, but the limping entrance of thirty-six more rebels made permission a formality. Sonja agreed to treat the wounded provided they removed their boots. They corralled the rebels in one of the ghost wards, sharing an unspoken consensus that the quicker the work was done, the better for all involved. The rebels asked for treatment by ascending order of rank, rather than by triage. The lower ranks were first into battle, the commander explained in a clipped northern accent, and thus had suffered the longest. Natasha’s throat tightened as she cut through the trouser leg of a curly-haired private. Nothing but pale down on his cheeks and pink clouds in his eyes. She hadn’t touched a man’s trousers in five and a quarter years.

“What are you doing?” he asked, supine on the hospital bed.

“Giving you shorts. You have lovely legs.”

“Where are my legs?”

“Still here. Don’t worry.”

She tried to be gentle, but shrapnel had cratered his left calf. “Hold on,” she said. “Just hold on.” Her sweat-slickened bangs stuck to her forehead. She wanted to ask his name, but what if he died and she was left here with his name? The name Natasha wouldn’t learn was Said. He came from a Grozny suburb, where his mother, a veterinary’s assistant, brought home the litters abandoned on the clinic doorstep. The war had already taken his mother, but he would live to return home to her cats, which had multiplied to the population of a village during the war years, feasting, as they did, on the burgeoning estate of rats and mice. Working odd jobs and sacrificing the comforts of wife and family, he would spend his life caring for the descendants of his mother’s cats. Eight hundred and eighty-two, all named for his mother, though he would never know that exact figure. In sixty-six years, on his deathbed, he would remember that distant afternoon, when the fingers of a beautiful nurse had mined metal from his legs. He would remember it as the moment of greatest intimacy he ever had had with a woman. Then he would remember his cats.

Natasha called to Sonja, asking for pain relief. The young man was incoherent, addressing his mother in a jar of cotton swabs. Across the room, the surgical saw paused, but Sonja didn’t look up from the half-severed arm. “You’ll have to get it yourself,” she said calmly. Given her history with the drug, Natasha never prepared or administered the heroin. Dreams of bent spoon handles persisted, and five years clean she was still afraid a cigarette lighter could reheat her cravings. But she peeled off the latex gloves and jogged to the canteen. Now wasn’t the time for caution, not with that boy on her hospital bed. In the cupboard, behind an armory of evaporated milk, she found it. It compacted in her grip, filling the corners of the plastic bag. Alu’s brother had claimed there wasn’t enough talc in the bag to powder a baby’s bottom. The Italian junk Sergey had shot into her had contained enough to service a nursery, and even that had laid electric lines where her veins had been. But this? Ninety-eight percent pure? She spat in the sink; she was salivating. You cancontrol your reactions. You cancontrol your reactions, she repeated. It took two minutes to cook. She only had to take one syringe to the trauma ward, but for the twenty-meter walk, when she was alone with it, she felt vastly outnumbered.

When it came time to treat the commanding officers, the last packets of surgical thread had already disappeared into the limbs of their subordinates. The field commander, the last to receive medical attention, lay on Sonja’s cot. The blood of his command soaked the sheets, and when his bare shoulders touched it, he sighed. Between his beard and his eyes, a slim band of soil-colored skin suggested many months of sunshine and malnutrition. Natasha watched while her sister treated him. A long, semicircular gash split his left pectoral. “My chest is grinning at me,” he observed.

Sonja flooded the wound with saline and iodine. With forceps she pinched through the gash for shrapnel fragments. It had begun to clot, but wouldn’t heal without stitches. The rebels looked on with reverent interest.

“We have a problem,” Sonja said. The commander nodded to the ceiling. “We need to get you stitched up, but we’re out of surgical thread. We simply don’t have the supplies on hand to treat so many field injuries.”

“He can have mine,” murmured a thin man, whose beard was half shaven to accommodate thirteen stitches on his left cheek. A chorus of offers followed. Even those without a single stitch vociferously pledged their surgical thread.

“It isn’t sanitary,” Sonja said with a finality that ended debate. None appeared too disappointed that his offer was declined. “Don’t you have field medical kits? Anything we can sterilize and sew into you?”

A junior officer appeared with a small green bag. Natasha sifted through it while Sonja held a compress to the wound. She pulled out a pink toothbrush with a fan of gray bristles, a small bottle of nonalcoholic mouthwash, a tube of fluoride whitening paste, five tubes of toothpaste, on which the five daily prayers were written in black marker, and three rolls of unwaxed dental floss.

“The floss,” Sonja said. “It might work.”

The field commander grimaced as the alcohol-wetted floss followed the needle through his skin. He refused the offer of pain relief. Natasha admired his abstinence.

“Have dentists begun enlisting?” she asked as Sonja slipped the needle in a fifth time. If he refused anesthetic, she could at least offer the distraction of conversation.

“No, it was a captain’s private supply.”

“Did he have fine teeth?”

“Yes,” the field commander said. His open mouth revealed a more relaxed philosophy toward dental hygiene. “They were beautiful, beautiful things. He brushed five times a day, always before prayer, as if performing an ablution on his mouth.”

“Was he conscious of his health in general?”

“Not really. He smoked no fewer than two packs a day.”

“He sounds like a strange man.”

“You get that way. In the first war I fought with a man who went through a roll of antacids every day.”

“That can cause an electrolyte disturbance: hypercalcemia. Stones, bones, moans, groans, thrones, and psychiatric overtones. That’s the mnemonic,” Natasha said, and repeated psychiatric overtonesto herself. She wondered if Maali had a taste for antacids.

“I doubt it matters. He’s very dead now. Besides, we ate nothing but buckwheat kasha. No, he took antacids as a calcium supplement. He was terrified of osteoporosis.”

She nearly laughed. “How old was he?”

“Twenty-two.”

“You are all insane.”

The field commander winced as Sonja pulled the stitches tight. “It just becomes easy to convince yourself that caring for a small part of your body will act to protect the rest. As though Allah wouldn’t be cruel enough to steal the life from a man with perfect teeth.”

“Did it work?”

“We left his mouth open when we buried him so that in Paradise he can flaunt his teeth to the angels.”

The rebels spent the night in the ghost ward. None snored; even in sleep they were wary. In the morning they pointed the hospital beds of their wounded comrades toward Mecca. Natasha ladled a dense pulp of oats and powdered milk into their bowls. With Sonja and the nurses, she checked the bandaged burns, stitched lacerations, the broken bones splinted between sterilized wooden strips. Only the rebel with the amputated arm would be left behind. The field commander prayed for him, then rooted through the man’s rucksack for anything that might connect him with the insurgency.

“You’re a civilian now,” the field commander said. “Enjoy the peace you have fought for. We’ll take your arm for burial, but must leave you here. If you want to stay, the lady doctor said the position of security guard has recently opened.”

Complying with his insistence to be treated last, Natasha served him the final bowl of oats from the canteen. The surface had cooled to a carapace the field commander tapped twice with his spoon before breaking.

“Where are you going next?”

“South,” the field commander said. “To the mountains.”

“Try to find a doctor or veterinarian before then. If this gets infected, the Feds will be your smallest problem.”

“In our condition we probably won’t make it farther than Eldár today.”

Only two of the field commander’s shirt buttons matched the brown fabric, whose original color would be anyone’s guess. Natasha pulled the shirt past his shoulder and covered the stitches with a fresh bandage. The dental floss had worked. “I was in the mountains once,” she said. “I climbed right across the border.”

“In winter?”

“Spring.”

“The winter will be difficult. We need supply lines. Good middlemen. Maybe we’ll find someone in Eldár. You’re not looking for a new profession, are you?”

As his contribution to the hospital, the field commander left the bag of toothpaste. He stood stiffly by the door as his command shuffled out. Alone, he turned to the sisters.

“Thank you,” he said, bowing slightly. “You are kind, decent, and if I can risk impertinence, quite attractive. There must be some Chechen in you.”

“I have a favor to ask,” Sonja said. “Would you write us a letter of safe passage, so we can, should we need to, travel through rebel land?”

The field commander had two sisters of his own, older by one and three years, who teased and chided and always took care of him. He kept their names written on the sheet of paper stitched in his trouser seam. He trusted them with the name of his first crush and would trust them with his eternity. He smiled and searched for a pen.

When the field commander departed, and the double doors swung closed, Natasha returned to the maternity ward almost believing the war had left with him. Six days later the Feds would enter the city. They would launch a single mortar round at the hospital in retaliation for sheltering rebels. That round would hit the fourth-floor storage room. Maali would be searching for clean sheets. She would land atop the rubble, four floors below, her pulse slowing in her wrist. A syringe would be prepared and half injected, but death would relieve Maali’s pain before the drug took effect, and the senseless, screaming world would go quiet when Natasha slipped that same syringe between her toes, and with a push of the plunger, sent Maali’s blood into her own.