“What would you say?”
Akhmed smiled, shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The shadow of a fresh crater darkened the road. At the bottom an arm reached upward. The rest of the body lay there and there and there. Lavender tatters, caught in an updraft, twisted in a wide ocean of sky. “We offered her a ride,” Sonja said, meaning I told her so, meaning this isn’t my fault.
Snow sprayed from the tires, cresting in the rearview. What would she do if the war ended? Of all the possibilities and permutations she had played out in her mind, peace was never among them. What would she do? The war that turned lieutenants into colonels, and unemployed men into jihadists, also turned residents into chief surgeons.
“Tolstoy was here two hundred years ago,” Akhmed said. “There was a war then. He wrote a novel about it.”
“I don’t care for fiction.”
“Hadji Murád it’s called,” he said. “I’ll bring it for you tomorrow.”
“Why aren’t you angry at me?” she asked. The question had been burning in her all afternoon.
Akhmed folded his hands, but said nothing.
“I had you interrogated at gunpoint. If you were deceiving me I would have had you shot.”
“If I were deceiving you, I would have been another man.”
“You’re a decent man,” she said, and smiled. “A terrible physician, but a decent man.”
“I know. I shouldn’t spend so much time with you. You’ll turn me into a first-rate surgeon and boor.”
“I think it’s the other way around,” she said. A gauze of afternoon cloud cover had wrapped around the sky and she looked up and into it. “I’m overcome by the inexplicable desire to speak to you with common courtesy.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“I’m sorry I called you an idiot.”
“You only implied it. Do you want to make it up to me?”
“Not really,” she said.
“Then tell me who Ronald McDonald is.”
“Very soon I’ll have to apologize for calling you an idiot again.”
“Imply,” he reminded.
“No, this time I’ll likely come out and say it.”
“I already know he isn’t the American president.”
“I think you’ll be disappointed.”
“I almost always am.”
“He’s a clown.”
“A clown?”
“A clown who sells hamburgers.”
“Does he cook the hamburgers?”
“Does it matter?”
“I may be an idiot,” he said gravely, “but I would never eat a hamburger cooked by a clown. Anyway, you were telling me about your sister. When she returned from Italy.”
CHAPTER
16
IN THE WEEKS after she returned, Natasha traveled no farther than the three meters of gray carpet to Laina’s flat. She drank weak tea, interpreted hallucinations, and returned, that fourth meter sealed behind an invisible wall of terror. Sonja watched distantly, wanting to take Natasha’s hand and pull her down the hallway like a petulant child. Laina’s flat—where, three weeks earlier, she had crouched at the door, a glass of ice melting in her grip, and heard Natasha’s voice inside—seemed like the first step on recovery’s staircase. But that step had stretched into a landing, then a floor, and Natasha couldn’t have disappeared, not then.
Sonja, more talented as physician than as sister, withheld her diagnosis as long as she could. Then one Tuesday, Sonja returned from the hospital with feet swollen and shoulders heavy, too tired, really, to begin tending to her most difficult patient of the day. Natasha sat on the divan, a stack of books propped on the cushion beside her. Origins of Chechen Civilization, The Third Soviet Guide to Ornithology, Life and Fate. A yellowed tome covered her lap. The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians.
“I can define any words you don’t understand,” Sonja offered, and immediately regretted it. Not the right tone to take. “Looking up anything particular?”
Natasha shrugged, of course.
“I hope you didn’t read that all day.” She turned to the bare wall. Her open mouth, pointed at Natasha, invariably projected condescension. “Surely there are more exciting books on the shelves.”
“I don’t want to be excited,” Natasha said flatly. “I want boredom. I want to be lobotomized by boredom.”
“Listen, Natashechka, something is wrong,” she said, and hated her lack of specificity. Something? Wrong? How could a surgeon diagnose with such imprecision? “Have you heard of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?”
Natasha nodded without looking up from the page.
“What is it, then?”
Golden lamplight outlined the text as she flipped the pages. “It is a psychological reaction that occurs after experiencing a highly stressing event outside the range of normal human experience, which is usually characterized by depression, anxiety, flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, and avoidance of reminders of the event.”
Natasha hadn’t spoken a complex sentence in months, and even recited, the clause-heavy bluster made her sound alive again. “Sound familiar?” Sonja asked.
“The Italian head doctors went through this already. I don’t want your help.”
Help was the last thing Sonja knew how to give her sister. “Can you remember the last time you went outside?” she asked. Natasha could have lit a cigarette off the end of that glare. “I’ll tell you when. When you were repatriated. You haven’t set a toe outside this apartment block since you returned to it.”
“You weren’t there,” Natasha said, shrugging. “So you don’t get to tell me what to do.”
For months she’d withheld, stopped herself, thought better, bitten her tongue to shreds. “I’m right here. Now. Here I am.” She spread her arms, not to embrace her sister, but to show how wide she was, how much of her was here. “Do you know why? Do you have any idea?”
Natasha didn’t move. She couldn’t unlock the cellar door, not for Sonja, not for anyone. What had happened down there was still happening inside her, and she wouldn’t let anyone, least of all her sister, into what she was still trying, still failing to escape from.
“Because of you. Because I was afraid you were here alone. Everything was so good in London. I was happy there. But I came back for you and that entitles me to your respect. You can hate me and think I’m a self-righteous bitch, but you will treat me with respect, because I came back here for you.”
Again, that fucking shrug! Sonja couldn’t imagine, then, with exasperation surging inside her, that one calm morning, eight and a half years away, after her sister had disappeared for a second time, she would wake on a hospital bed with her shoulders as stiff as her collarbones, and shrugging once, twice, failing to relax them, she would remember Natasha’s shrugs, how fluid, how easy, and that would be the first definitive, the first known, that wherever Natasha was she would be shrugging.
“Do you want me to feel sorry that you left your nice life in London? Are you the victim here, is that what you’re saying? Maybe you should talk with a psychiatrist about it, Sonechka. No, you made a mistake returning here for me,” Natasha stated, as simply as if still reading from the dictionary. “Just as I made a mistake leaving here for you.”
A window might have opened; a breeze might have slid across the walls, clearing the air, because Sonja smiled, and said, “We’re sisters. In that way, at least, we’re sisters.” She took a clean breath, now that they had each said what they had to say. “I bought you a souvenir,” she said, surprising even herself. “In London.”
Exhibiting great restraint, Natasha didn’t shrug. “What sort of souvenir?”
“I’m not telling you. I’m keeping it for myself.”
“It’s not a souvenir if you keep it.”
“Of course it is. It’s a gift to myself. I deserve it.”
“Why didn’t you give it to me?” Natasha had sat up and cocked her head to Sonja.
“Because,” Sonja said,
picking up the dictionary and fanning the pages with her thumb, “you’re always on my nerves.”
“All the time?”
“Stampeding on my nerves.”
“I wouldn’t want it even if you were giving it to me,” Natasha said.
“Good, because I’m not.”
“I bet it’s a book about intestines.”
“You know I’d keep that for myself,” Sonja said. “I’ll give it to you right now.”
“Why?”
“How many intestines books does a woman need? I’ll trade it to you for a promise,” Sonja said. Natasha had taken up the clarinet when she was twelve, and Sonja, sixteen at the time, already sitting in on university classes, had heard every squeak, every warble, every pinched sharp through their shared, shadow-thin wall. She had paid Natasha, by the hour, not to practice. That same glint of easy opportunity returned to Natasha’s eyes.
“What promise?” she asked.
“Promise that you’ll come to the hospital with me tomorrow.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Just that. If you think you’re well enough.”
“What, you think I’m not?”
“No, no. I’m not saying that.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Natasha said. “Fine. I promise.”
Sonja went to her room and returned a minute later. “Close your eyes,” she said, and handed her a sturdy oblong object wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.
“What is this? A doll?” Natasha asked, pulling it from the bag. “I’m a grown woman.”
“It’s not a doll. It’s a nutcracker of a Buckingham Palace guard.”
“Who are they?”
“They stand outside the queen’s palace. They’re not allowed to laugh. They just stand there. They’re not very good at guarding, when you think about it. They just stand there. You could dress up a lamppost and get as good a guard.”
“Yes,” Natasha agreed, cranking the nutcracker’s mouth up and down. “A bad guard and worse souvenir. What should I call him?”
Sonja bit her lip. “What about Alu?”
“Alu the lousy, boring, worthless souvenir.”
“Yes,” Sonja said. “That is the perfect name for him.”
“I’m a little disappointed. You spent five years in London and all I get is a doll?”
“The real gift was my absence.”
Finally, a smile.
The next morning the hospital was quiet. The few patients Maali couldn’t scare off with promises of an amputation cure-all waited for her: a sprained ankle, a case of the common cold, nothing urgent. She took Natasha through the ghost wards of deserted laboratories and examination rooms. Pigeons roosted in split IV bags. A manhole cover, leading nowhere, lay in radiology. The rooms would look unchanged eight and three-quarter years later when Sonja led Akhmed through. The powdered heroin, provided by Alu’s brother, would still slouch against the canteen cupboard wall, but when she led him past she would do so without worry, without wondering if his veins, like her sister’s, might tingle from proximity.
“This was once among the foremost oncology departments in the U.S.S.R.,” she said, as they shuffled into a room relieved of its doorknobs and light fixtures. “Party officials came from as far as Vladivostok for treatment.”
They paused at a hulking MRI machine which the former hospital director had sacrificed his pension, his marriage, and all the black in his hair to procure. “It’s a shame we can’t use this, but a single scan would kill the generator.” A meter from her foot the bronze rim of a shell casing was silhouetted in dust. “Besides,” she added, “there’s so much embedded metal in here the magnetic field would turn the room into a shooting gallery.”
The tour ended on the fourth-floor maternity ward, where a woman who had given birth the previous night smiled at everyone in placid exhaustion. Her child had emerged with a collapsed lung but the doctor on call had acted quickly and the child had lived. The mother held the infant to her breast. Its little lips bent the nipple. She beamed as they approached.
“God is great. She will live,” the mother said in a slow cadence to make it clear that the two statements were logically dependent. She glanced up at Natasha, mistaking her white sweatshirt for scrubs. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“I’m no one,” Natasha said.
“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You save lives.”
Natasha crossed her arms, and Sonja couldn’t see it, couldn’t know it, but right then, when Natasha dipped her head, looked to her palm, to the floor, to Sonja and back, she believed that their body temperatures rose by some fractional degree, that this they shared. The baby finished suckling and tilted its square little face upward.
“Do you want to hold her?” the mother asked.
“No,” Natasha said, ratcheting her frown.
“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You want to hold her.”
“I need to go, but you stay here. There is a case of the common cold in need of my attention,” Sonja whispered as Natasha took the infant in her arms.
That morning, in the cavernous wards, Natasha’s brain finally hushed. When the newborn sniffed strangely at her chest, she stared into its eyes and saw a world only two days old. Those two and a half kilograms righted her, turned her vantage to a future kinder than experience had taught her to expect. The next morning she woke when Sonja woke, left when Sonja left, and the next morning and the next.
Deshi and Maali, her superiors, were nurses and twins. Deshi, on the eleventh of her twelve loves, reminded her of Sonja, and she preferred Maali, the younger by eighteen minutes, who treated illness and injury as the practical jokes of a God wheezing with laughter, and suggested amputation for every cough, chest cold, ulcer, and eye infection that had the misfortune of seeking her counsel. In the maternity ward, Natasha cleaned towels, bedsheets, the linoleum floor, plastic tubes and hoses, bottles, baby bottoms, and bedpans. Her fingertips reddened in the bleach, and in this good hurt and those clean bottles, she found herself warmed by the small suggestions of her agency. In her day’s rare pauses, she restored the view to the boarded windows. It began with a few right angles penciled on the plywood. She hadn’t known what she was drawing until it took shape. Two squares, one atop the other. In the pencil’s descent a stray line became a downspout, the pulsing overhead fluorescence became a blue afternoon sun, and a small curl of wood grain became a secretary’s brown hair blown back by a desk fan. Drawing by division on the plywood, she parceled the building into floors, floors into windows, windows into panes. Familiar, but it still floated a centimeter off her memory; she placed a Soviet flag over the arched entrance, placed pigeons on the flagpole, placed a strong westerly breeze so the flag caught every squirt of pigeon shit. Pencil lead smudged on the thick of her palm as she dredged the building from its ruins. When finished she wrote its name in block Cyrillic above the awning. The Volchansk State Bureau of Vehicular Licensing and Registration. Of course it looked familiar; it had once stood on the other side of the window.
Over weeks and months, as spare minutes became hours and the hours days, she added linden and poplar trees, rusted streetlamps, drooping electrical lines, shingled roofs, a skyline of television antennae, clotheslines curved by wet laundry, smoke ribbons unwinding from tailpipes, the sidewalks and cigarette kiosks and everything she could remember. She added no fire hydrants.
Behind her back, and later to her face, Deshi and Maali opined.
“A dreadful thing,” Deshi said when she thought Natasha had gone to the parking lot for a cigarette.
“Completely inaccurate,” Maali concurred. The nurse understood what it was like to be the younger sister, if only by eighteen minutes, and her criticism hurt Natasha the most. “The perspective is skewed. It isn’t possible to see so much of City Park from this window.”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard,” Deshi said. “She’s never actually seen the view from this room.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? She’s
drawing something she’s never seen.”
“She isn’t even Chechen.”
“Her greatest shortcoming.”
“She deserves pity rather than scorn.”
“We retired three years ago,” Deshi lamented. “What are we even doing here?”
The unlit cigarette somersaulted from her fingers as she pushed open the door, dashed between her critics, and closed the curtain over the boarded windows. She had felt more humiliated before, but never by people whom she trusted. She grabbed her lighter from the counter and pushed past the nurses, but Maali’s grasp, surprisingly firm on her wrist, held her.
“Let me guess,” Natasha said. “The only way to fix the mural is to amputate the hand that drew it.”
Maali smiled. “It’s not quite so serious.”
“Really?” She felt strangely honored that Maali didn’t want to chop off her hand.
“It’s just that there was never a bus stop at the intersection of Lenin Prospect and City Bureaucrat Street. I know because I stared at that corner for thirty years.”
“We’ll help you,” Deshi added, and under the combined guidance of eyes that had spent some sixty years in front of the maternity ward windows, she erased and redrew, swept up the eraser lint, erased and redrew again. Deshi and Maali argued over every signpost and streetlamp, every tree in City Park, every storefront, kiosk, and traffic light; they had stared from different windows onto different cities, and in trying to bring back both, she created her own. She shaded the buildings with ash and coal, sliced advertisements from unread magazines still stacked in the waiting room and pasted slivers of color across the plywood. The blue waves of a Black Sea resort became sky. Mint gum became linden leaves. Some afternoons the nurses would become lost in the mural, pointing to the distant corners and alleyways like faded pictures in a photo album. The finely detailed ventilation grate that had once suspended a thousand-ruble note in its draft, where Deshi plucked three months’ rent from the air. The aboveground gas pipes from which their mother had hung laundry and their father a hammock. Or the schoolyard blacktop, where Maali’s son had played soldiers years before the war took him. In sixteen years, when glass replaced the plywood boards, Natasha’s murals would find their way to Sonja’s bedroom closet, where they would remain a private treasure for some sixty-three years, until Maali’s great-great-grandson, an art historian, put them on display in the city art museum.