incompetent.”
He opened his hands. Not one callus.
“Don’t make fun of my lumberjack hands.”
“I’m not,” he said.
“You are,” she said.
He squinted across the parking lot to the armored truck, thinking of the previous day, perhaps, how she had ambushed him in Grozny, how repellant a woman she was for putting a gun to his head one day and her lips to his the next. When he asked for the keys to the truck, claiming he had forgotten his scarf in the passenger seat, she felt too relieved to dwell on the fact that he hadn’t worn a scarf the day before.
Their footsteps from the previous evening were still evident in the dust of the fourth-floor maternity ward. Natasha’s murals seemed to study her, as if she were their creation. Unsettled at the thought of standing alone among these ghosts, she went to the corridor and opened the storage room door for fresh air. The smashed city stretched to the frozen river. International law prohibited the targeting of medical facilities, which explained why, in a city where eighty percent of freestanding structures had been flattened, the hospital still stood. The shell that had crashed into this very room had been an act of reprisal rather than war. Natasha had collapsed with the walls, fallen with Maali, kept aloft by momentary updrafts, then plunged ever downward, until the earth had yawned open and she had entered it. Sonja knew the two had been coconspirators and confederates, sisters to ambitious, demanding women. She knew Natasha hadn’t been right after Maali’s tumble. She didn’t know that Maali, eighteen minutes Deshi’s junior, had lived her sixty-seven years in those eighteen minutes, finding room there for every dream, fear, and exasperation, setting her watch eighteen minutes ahead so she could pretend she had Deshi’s experience, always wondering what her life would have been like if she were just eighteen minutes older. Natasha had loved Maali for this as much as for her demented enthusiasm for amputation, but Sonja didn’t know it. In four months, when cleaning out a file cabinet, she would find municipal buildings drawn on the back of payroll forms. Long, uneven lines of Maali’s penmanship disfigured Natasha’s sketches, her critiques sometimes playful, sometimes damning, but always invested, and in those sketches, framed and hanging in the waiting room, as they would be within an afternoon, Sonja would see what the two younger sisters meant to each other.
The stairwell door slammed shut. They walked to each other until their silhouettes converged. In the darkness she found his eyebrows with her thumbs. They went to the third maternity bed, and she sat on the edge, and he stood between her legs. Her thighs clasped his hip bones. From the far side of the room the lantern dimly bathed them.
“I think there is a bee on my behind,” she said.
“You’re still hallucinating,” he said.
“You should slap it away, just in case,” she said.
She reached under his shirt, spread her hand across his abdomen, and tried not to think of which organ lay beneath which finger. “This is your stomach,” she said, mimicking his tenor. “Not your brother’s stomach, not Stalin’s stomach, but your stomach.”
“You make me sound like a serious man.”
“You certainly aren’t that.”
They undressed by degree, a button here, shirtsleeve there, making a show of their shortcomings, their bodies androgynous with deprivation. It was remarkable to trust someone enough to be silly like this. She lay back. It was dark. Her lips found his.
“Good night to you and your ugly nose,” Deshi told Akhmed as he was leaving. A buoyant confidence swelled in him and as he stepped into the navy twilight and trekked toward the village he finally felt part of the top tenth percentile. Never had he been so honored by being addressed in the second person.
But the radio antenna listing from the hood of Ramzan’s truck, parked before his house, punctured the sweet feeling inside him. Akhmed smiled sadly and trudged forward, balling his fists in his coat sleeves. The coat was fifty-eight years old, canvas military grade, about the only thing the Red Army had ever done right. It kept him as warm as it had kept his father and his father’s father and the idea of three generations sheltered by the same stiff, unyielding fabric gave him greater comfort than the coat itself ever could.
Again Ramzan questioned him, and again he claimed ignorance.
“You disappoint me, my friend,” Ramzan said. Ramzan’s coat was six months old. It would never warm another set