She went to Sonja’s bookshelf. Extra brackets supported the heavy textbooks, and her index finger brushed past the spines of books too heavy to hold in one hand. How had civilization survived long enough to accumulate the knowledge contained in these books? The slimmer volumes stood on the upper shelf, a yellowed Red Army field manual the most useful of the bunch. Scanning the shelf, she recalled how Sonja always read the last page of a book first, how her sister had to know what would happen, where the story led, to see if it was worth the effort. She didn’t open the torrid romance novels at the end of the shelf. The worn bindings had an intimacy absent from the rest. She imagined Sonja lying in bed, reading melodrama with an ache in her chest she couldn’t quantify or explicate, and thus couldn’t understand. Instead, she took a slender volume entitled Origins of Chechen Civilization: Prehistory to the Fall of the Mongol Empire by Khassan Geshilov.
She read by the slow burn of candlelight. Folklore said God had scattered ethnicities across the earth with a saltshaker; the shaker had slipped from his fingers when he reached the Caucasus, and a few grains of every nation had landed in its valleys. Other origin theories: the Chechens had descended from Scythian hordes, from the daughters of Genghis Khan, from a penal colony established by Alexander the Great, from a lost Roman legion. After finishing the first chapter, she flipped to the dust jacket. According to the three-sentence biography, Khassan Geshilov taught at Volchansk State University and lived in Eldár. This book was the first of a proposed multivolume history of the Chechen lands. In his photo he had clear brown eyes, a thick mustache silvered with gray hair, and a smile suggesting he was thinking of a flaky pastry or a woman’s smooth calves rather than ancient hordes. Until the candle died, she read of ancient invasions: the Scythians in 850 B.C., the Greeks two centuries later, the Romans in the first century B.C., the Baltic Goths in A.D. 240, the Asian Huns in A.D. 370, the Avars, Khazars, Circassians, Mongols, and finally, ultimately, the Russians.
Without electricity or gas, the kitchen became a twilight mausoleum of dead appliances. One day, Natasha had an idea. Wearing latex gloves she found in Sonja’s room, she scrubbed the innards of the oven and refrigerator with steel wool and bleach. She cut a broomstick to the width of the refrigerator compartment, jammed it in below the thermostat control, and pulled out the plastic shelves. In her bedroom, she gathered clothes from the floor in sweeping armfuls and deposited them before the refrigerator and the oven. Ever since she had begun working for the shuttle trader, her wardrobe exceeded her closet space. She hung silk evening dresses and cashmere sweaters on the broomstick bar, set folded jeans and blouses on the oven rack. When finished, she opened the doors to her new closet and bureau and felt pleased with her ingenuity. This is how you will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space.
Smoke turned the days into twelve-hour twilights. In the afternoons, when the chance of aerial bombing was the greatest, she wandered through the suburbs. She thought of her sister often. In their weekly conversations, Sonja described her boyfriend, Brendan, a Slavic Studies PhD candidate from Scotland, whose Russian was worse than Sonja’s English. She described the international dormitory, which housed students from thirty-four different countries, none of whom tried to kill each other. She described pubs and monuments, black taxies that looked like bowler hats on wheels, a massive obelisk supporting the statue of a tiny man in Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace guards who wouldn’t shoot her even if she openly mocked them, supermarkets with entire aisles devoted to breakfast cereal and salespeople who actually seemed pleased by the presence of customers. That first year, for the first time, the sisters had become friends. We are all the other has, Natasha had thought, but she knew Sonja had so much more. Sonja promised to find a way to bring her to London, promised to plead her case with the university, the Home Office, the goddamn queen, but nothing came of it, and Natasha wanted to flee but couldn’t, didn’t know how to, had heard horror stories of what happened to lone women refugees, and so their conversations grew shorter as civil society disintegrated. Teenagers with stolen firearms replaced policemen on the streets. Hand grenades cost less than jars of Nescafé at the bazaar. She didn’t want to hear about the scones, and decided Sonja didn’t want to feel guilty for eating them.
Days passed without speaking, then weeks. The telephone lines went weak from electrical shortages, but the central telecommunications exchange hadn’t been hit. Natasha left the phone off the hook for days and the soft throb of the dial tone became the voice of stability in her solitude. When she wanted to speak with her sister, she went to the bookshelf instead. She read Origins of Chechen Civilization twice in one month, focusing on the last pages of each chapter, where the ancient invasions ended. After she wrung from Khassan Geshilov’s words all the consolation she could, she returned the book to the top shelf, beside the romance novels, and kneeling on the floor, tugged at the largest reference book. A massive thing, a dining room table’s worth of pulped wood. The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians. She rested the book on her thighs and its weight soon put her legs to sleep. The four thousand eight hundred and eighty-four translucent pages held the most arcane and useless information. The names of buried blood vessels in Latin, Russian, and the official languages of the fourteen Soviet republics. The weight ranges of internal organs: 117 to 170 grams per kidney, 1.4 to 1.6 kilograms for a liver, 250 to 350 grams for a heart. She flipped through the book and found answers to questions no sane person would ever ask. The definition of a foot. The average length of a femur. Nothing for insanity by grief, or insanity by loneliness, or insanity by reading reference books. What inoculation could the eight-point font provide for the whisper of Sukhois in the sky? Based on the average life expectancy of a Soviet woman, she could expect to live for another forty-eight years, but the Soviet Union had died, and she hadn’t, and the appendices couldn’t explain this discrepancy in data, when the subject outlasted its experiment. Only one entry supplied an adequate definition, and she circled it with red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
If she stood on the stool in the southwestern kitchen corner and pointed the radio antenna due south, she could occasionally pick up Russian-language news broadcasts from Nazran or Tbilisi. From there, she gleaned what information she could from the outside world. Porous enough to allow luxury cars, American cigarettes, and Russian firearms, the borders remained too dense for objective journalism. A Georgian accent raised the newscaster’s Russian by half an octave and from that lilting, disembodied tenor she learned that Yeltsin had an eight percent approval rating and an election eighteen months away. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the primary opposition party, denounced him for losing the vast territories of the former Soviet Union. She understood precisely that this wounded pride would lead to punishment, would lead a crippled country to start a war to prove itself more powerful. On December 9, 1994, Yeltsin issued a statement ordering the Federal army to execute the disarmament of all illegal armed units in Chechnya, or, as they were known locally, the government. On December 10, 1994, he went to a hospital for a nose operation. On December 11, 1994, upon hearing reports that the first of the forty thousand troops amassed at the northern border had crossed the Terek River, she realized that the war had only just begun.
On the evening of December 11, 1994, when Natasha returned the receiver to its cradle, and the ringer burst into a tinny tremble, she let it ring for twenty seconds before lifting the receiver to her ear. “Hello,” she said. “Finally, finally, finally,” Sonja cried. “I’ve been calling you for days, weeks, all afternoon.”
CHAPTER
13
“I DON’T KNOW,” Akhmed said softly. He watched her with such compassion it seemed he had forgotten the gun against his back. “I didn’t ask,” he said.
“You didn’t ask? How could you not ask? How could you not ask her name?”
“Hundreds of refugees stayed at Dokka’s house. I stopped asking their names.”
“Where was she going? Didn’t she say? She must have said something. Some hint or reference or mention. She must have said something. She must have. How could you not ask? How could you?”
“I didn’t think I’d be asked to remember.”
Her entire reflection fit in his widened eyes. Had Natasha’s reflection once fit in his pupils? Drawn by light? Disappeared by a blink? “What did she look like?” she asked.
Akhmed could have filled a dozen lungs with that sigh. “Dark-haired and malnourished,” he said.
The description would fit half the world. “Her eyes, what color?”
“Brown.”
“But brown with shards of green and emerald? More hazel than brown?”
“Maybe. I can’t remember.”
“And her face?”
“She reminded me of Zakharov’s portrait of the niece of Nicolas I.”
“Nicolas I? What are you talking about? I need to know what happened. Where is she?” She felt nauseous. She had to know but he would not tell her. What had happened to her sister? When she died, this one need, so near to eternal it could be her soul, would survive her. “I need to know, I need to know,” she repeated. “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”
“As beautiful as the Nicolas’s niece, yes,” Akhmed said. “She was probably headed to the refugee camps. They all were. Probably Ingushetia. Maybe the Sputnik or the Karabulak camp?”
He spoke, it seemed, as if he had been speaking to her for years, as if she was expected to follow the arcs of his cadence, landing on the period before he reached it. She was afraid to look down. “She was wearing traditional maternity clothes,” he was saying. “And a green headdress.”
“Where is she?”
Her hands tightened on his shoulders. She didn’t remember putting them there. The loose handcuffs of his fingers raised them and held them and slowly placed them by her sides. She would remember this; with a gun to his back he was gentle. “I don’t know,” he said.
Far away Alu’s brother nodded and the guard stepped back. “Our friend may be a terrible doctor,” Alu’s brother said, “but I don’t think he’s informing.”
They walked to the supply crates shoulder-to-shoulder to avoid seeing each other. Akhmed helped her load the cardboard boxes into the truck and later she would remember him mopping his forehead with a gray handkerchief, asking if she needed help with a box of surgical saw blades, his poise as unsettling as any ruin she had seen that day.
As children Sonja and Natasha played hide-and-seek in the dust-thick catacombs of the apartment cellar. Light streamed through the high windows in long diagonals. On the floor each semicircle was a pool of lava, and light-caught dust motes were the remains of children who had stumbled into those incandescent rays. Natasha would drape a filthy curtain over Sonja and Sonja would count to fifty and the beat between each number would shrink as she neared that moment when she shouted “Fifty!” and sprang from the curtain and into that otherworldly place. Natasha was slender enough to hide behind a broomstick, but Sonja always found her. She always did.
“Who is she?” Akhmed asked as the warehouse shrank in the rearview. Ten minutes earlier she had told him they would stop at a phone bank and had said nothing else until she was behind the wheel and facing the mud-streaked windshield.
“My sister,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Nothing could have made her feel worse.
“I’m the one who should be apologizing,” she said to the gravel.
“Why does he help you?”
“Just after the first war I fixed up his brother Alu.”
“And he still supplies the hospital?”
She nodded.
“He must cherish his brother.”
She smiled. Poor, berated Alu, whose name was beaten more than a donkey’s ass. Six months after they first met she had learned his brother’s name was Ruslan, but she would always think of him as Alu’s brother. She knew he had amassed a small fortune smuggling arms, heroin, and luxury goods for warlords, and had used that small fortune to rebuild his ancestral village after the first war. She knew his pet turtle was still alive, still named Alu, and housed now in the largest terrarium in the northern Caucasus. When his ancestral village was destroyed again in the second war, she knew he had paid passage to Georgia for his parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, thirty-seven in total, even the oft-cursed Alu, plus the neighbors on either side of every uncle, cousin, and in-law, one hundred and seventy-four in total, where they lived in the Tbilisi apartment block he had purchased for the occasion, neighbor by neighbor, his ancestral village saved for a second and final time. She knew all this of him and more, but still didn’t know why he didn’t like Alu. “You may be right,” she said, finally. “I think he just might cherish Alu above all.”
The ruins opened onto what was once a central square filled with importunate street vendors, veiled mothers, and squirming toddlers. Pigeons missing eyes and wings hobbled on the granite stone like portents of a war still years away. There had been the statue of a Chechen, an Ingush, and a Russian poised in comradely unity, officially called “The Brotherhood of the People,” but known locally as “The Three Idiots.” Someone had dumped a few goldfish into the fountain and they had multiplied until the water thickened to a squirming orange mass. Rockets had demolished the five-story buildings that had floated on arcades of equilateral arches, the tree-lined pedestrian paths, the wooden benches dedicated to Party bosses, the fountain where in winter children ice skated over the suspended carcasses of two thousand goldfish. The ruins had been bulldozed to an uneven field of rock. She parked the car. Akhmed frowned. “I don’t see any telephones,” he said.
“We’ll stop on our way back,” she said. They climbed out. “You said you’ve always wanted to go to Grozny, so I wanted to show you the central square.” She didn’t look at him. It was the nearest to reconciliation she was able to go.
He smiled, nodded, held his hands behind his back. She exhaled. “Is that what this is?” he asked.
She shielded her eyes with a salute to the afternoon sun. “Right there, where the ground is blackened, just to the left of that cloud, that’s where the Presidential Palace stood.” Rotating in a slow circle, her index finger pressed the past into the empty panorama. The market selling Levi’s two decades before any licensed clothing store. The music college, where some years earlier a prodigy had learned to play the viola by listening to the two-hundred-year history of chamber music lilting through those open windows. She reconstructed the square for Akhmed—her voice raised every edifice from the dust, replanted every linden tree—because that was easier than apology.
“Thank you. I’ve always wanted to see Grozny.”
They passed through two more checkpoints before reaching a clean, freshly paved street. The anomaly of unmarked asphalt never failed to surprise her. A gray stone building filled most of the block. The sheet-glass windows, intact and absent of fractures, proclaimed the building’s significance more eloquently than the Petroleum Ministry sign hanging over the entranceway. Armed soldiers stood at ten-meter intervals along the perimeters, as tall and broad as doorframes.
“I’m not going in there,” Akhmed said, arms folded, refusing to leave the truck.
“Don’t worry. All the letters in the glove box wouldn’t get us in. We’re going over there,” she said, pointing down the block to what had been a shopping center. “The Petroleum Ministry has working international lines. Some clever entrepreneur tapped the outbound line and set up a phone bank in the basement.”
The shopping center was a cave of broken storefronts, empty shelves, and stalagmitic glass. Even the plastic flowers had been looted from the planters. She led the way by her cigarette lighter.
“In London this would be an escalator,” Sonja said as they descended a staircase.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Page 18
