a farther-flung republic, the old rules still applied. Ethnic Russians controlled all major positions of power, from headwaiters to heads of government, and the two-hundred-year history of imperial order reiterated itself within State Secondary School No. 28. With magnanimity, Natasha accepted her rank. She wasn’t nearly as vicious as the girls who, in florid Cyrillic on the inner flap of their homework planners, graded boys on a twelve-point scale. Nor did she hold herself above the roiling sea of lunchroom gossip by pushing others under. Years earlier, when she was still young enough to need a good-night kiss, her father would plant his chapped lips on her cheek and, in a whisper of sweet tobacco, say, “Sweet dreams, my sweet tsarina.” Even after she outgrew good-night kisses, she liked to imagine herself as the long-lost grandchild of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, and acted in a manner befitting a wise and humble monarch.
It was this—her ethnicity as a Russian, the stalwart minority defending the borders of Western civilization from the barbaric Muhammadans—that let her slip through her adolescent years with freedoms her Chechen classmates didn’t enjoy. She could harbor lascivious thoughts of Ivan Yakov—a man her sister would revive three times in the second war—who was far more handsome than any literature teacher had a right to be. She could shave her legs without worrying if a prudish deity would smite those parallel beams of smooth skin. Overnight, it seemed, electrical lines were laid in her veins as she realized that the awkward, self-conscious boys around her were growing into men. The complications of puberty weren’t further complicated by culture or religion. Only when comparing herself to her classmates, many of whom were subject to arranged marriages, did she come to understand that in Chechnya gravity pressed upon women with heavier hands. Her Russianness exempted her from its grip, and so yes, often she floated.
Though Russian, she’d never been north of the Chechen border. Her parents had been born in 1930s Moscow and had grown up in communal flats four blocks away from each other. They took the same buses, attended the same primary school, spoke an accent flavored by the same fog, ate eggs laid by the same chickens, watched the same setting sun impale itself on the bronze spire of the Central Pavilion of the All-Russia Exhibition Center. They each lost relatives to Stalin’s purges. NKVD agents wearing uniforms the blue of a cloudless summer sky would stride into the apartment block past midnight, and the next morning residents would strain their tea without mentioning the scream-pierced night. Her parents blamed Stalin personally for the purges, and Natasha’s state-approved history text confirmed that Stalin, and only Stalin, bore responsibility. But the terrible past of nighttime disappearances was locked within the pages of that history book; she never imagined she would one day disappear as easily as her forefathers.
In 1946 news spread of the deportation of Chechens and the need for ethnic Russians to resettle the empty republic. Her father was fourteen when he last drank a glass of rusty Moscow tap water. Her mother, eight. Trains carried them over the war-sickened land. They arrived in Grozny and stayed two weeks in a drafty university auditorium, sleeping on bleachers before receiving a residency assignment to Volchansk. They journeyed to the city by the same bus, two days apart. Natasha’s mother and father each felt so lonesome in this silent country. They didn’t believe they would ever find someone who had seen what they had seen, felt what they had felt. Twenty-one years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, they waited beside each other in a bread line. Their small talk surged to revelation. Neither could believe they had shared the same primary school, tap water, and sunset from adjacent apartment blocks. Neither imagined they would someday share two daughters: one beautiful, the other brilliant.
Though she was the elder, Sonja was always thought of as Natasha’s sister, the object rather than subject of any sentence the two shared. She walked alone down the school corridors, head sternly bent toward the stack of books in her arms. To Natasha she was the Π-letter volume of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia: wide and filled with knowledge no normal person would ever need. On weekend nights, when Natasha returned from the cinema or discotheque, she would find a thin bar of light glowing beneath the door of her sister’s room, and if she put her ear against the closed door, she would hear