But you did.”
“She wouldn’t even tell me,” the man offered. “Not that I had difficulty finding out, but still, she’s rather cautious, don’t you think?”
“You have to explain yourself,” she said, and she paused for a breath. “Or I’ll leave you here. I can’t risk having an informer on my staff.”
Had the gun barrel not pressed against his spine, he would have laughed. He would have treated the setup as another one of Sonja’s tests. Treated the whole thing like the misunderstanding it was, because how could she mistake him for the man he had saved Havaa from? Havaa. The thought of her shucking the insulation from electrical wires reconnected his nerves. He couldn’t swallow. In the mouthful of warm saliva a pearl formed; an irritant hardened into white gleaming fury at the possibility that the war would end his life as indifferently as it had a hundred thousand others, that he was no more privileged. He didn’t want to die before an audience of stolen refrigerators. He had kissed Ula’s forehead in the early morning and felt the flutter of her lashes on his chin but when he raised his face she had already gone back in the gentle wash of wherever it was she went when she wasn’t with him. He hadn’t said good-bye.
“I saw your work before I ever met you,” he explained. “The rebels, they came to my village a few years back, and the field commander had a chest held together by the most magnificent dental-floss stitches. I was so impressed. The commander said it was the work of a Russian woman and I assumed they had kidnapped a Russian medic. But then, later on, I met a refugee from Volchansk who used to work at the hospital. She had stayed with Dokka when he was running a hostel for refugees.”
“What was her name?” Sonja asked, eyes as fixed as constellations. She stood close enough for him to hear her teeth grind. There was so much of her, right here, in his face, and he would have stepped back, had a gun not pushed him forward.
“I mentioned the dental floss and the Russian woman doctor. It was only in passing. I wanted to know if the hospital was hiring. And she looked up and said, ‘Sofia Andreyevna Rabina. Sonja.’ I tried to ask her more, but she didn’t want to talk about you. Your name was the only one I had when Dokka disappeared. I thought a doctor good enough to stitch a man with dental floss would be good enough to take in Havaa.”
“What was her name!” she demanded. He was afraid to answer, afraid even to exhale; the hope wrapped within the question was so small and flickering a breath could extinguish it.
“Was it Natasha? Was her name Natasha?”
CHAPTER
12
TALL, SWAN-LIKE, AND four years her sister’s junior, Natasha stood in the spotlight of her family’s affection. In his daybreak voice, cold from seven hours without the heat of a cigarette, her father would offer her good-morning first, even if she entered the kitchen two paces behind Sonja. Her mother treated her with the pride and envy of a woman who had fallen in love with sixteen boys in secondary school, none of whom reciprocated her affection. “My Natasha,” she would say, running her fingers through the girl’s long brown hair with a possessiveness suggesting the strands were an extension of her own. Natasha’s eyes were brown spattered with glimmers of emerald and uncut diamond. Hazel, technically. Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label. Natasha’s elevated station in the family left in her only the slightest scratches of arrogance. Better than anyone, she knew she had done nothing to deserve the beauty she was blessed with. Their parents’ plain features, replicated predictably in Sonja, had reacted violently in Natasha to create something as surprising as a dove hatching from a pigeon egg.
Within the variations of beige composing the corridors of State Secondary School No. 28, the spotlight of attention expanded. As an ethnic Russian she belonged to the national minority that ran the republic. Her ethnic status propelled her into the elite echelons of adolescent popularity, where a personality cult had arisen around her, fueled by the adoration of obsequious underclassmen. In Moscow, Gorbachev’s reforms barreled the Soviet Union toward the precipice, but in a far-flung city in