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.
She was studying her city when the nurses arrived on the morning she was to perform her third solo delivery. “It’s going to get busy,” Maali said, with no small amount of glee. With her rain jacket, windbreaker, and overcoat hung on different pegs, the coat stand suggested a fully staffed ward. “We heard land mines on the way in.”
Deshi wagged her head. “You enjoy this job too much, sister. I worry your head has broken.”
“It’s too bad you can’t amputate a head.”
“You can. It’s called a decapitation.”
Maali noted it excitedly on her clipboard.
“We’re all working trauma today,” Deshi said.
“What if there are deliveries?” Natasha asked.
“Then you’ll do them, Natashechka. It doesn’t take much to deliver a child. The mother does most of the work.”
The first casualties arrived a half hour later; red heat radiated from their skin. Natasha disinfected the ropy ends of a calf when Deshi came calling. “We have a delivery. Go.”
The patient lay gowned and supine on the maternity ward bed. Her face throbbed against the white sheets, as flushed and anguished as those four floors below. Two men stood beside her, each holding one hand. She recognized the cleft in the older man’s chin, but now wasn’t the time for pause, for reflection; now was the time to act. She stood between the woman’s pale open legs, trying not to look down.
“The contractions are three minutes apart,” the younger man volunteered. He spoke with the halting formality of an outsider.
It was all she needed in order to remember what to do. “Lasting how long?”
He didn’t know. Sweat grew heavy on the woman’s forehead and trickled toward her temples. After washing her hands to her wrists, rubbing sanitizer to her elbows, she snapped on a fresh pair of gloves. Another contraction came; they all heard it.
“Do you feel like you have to shit?” she whispered into the woman’s ear, afraid of embarrassing her in front of her husband.
The woman nodded.
“What did you ask?” the younger man asked. “Is she okay?”
“The child is in the birth canal, putting pressure on the rectum, that’s all.” These people knew nothing of her, and she drew enough confidence from what they did not know to keep her voice level. They didn’t know that her name was Natasha; that she had performed only two solo deliveries, one and three weeks earlier; that six months earlier, as she detoxed in a Rome psych ward, God had pulled her through a needle’s eye so narrow that this thread in front of them was all that remained.
She told the woman to lift her pale little legs, place her feet in the stirrups, and the woman did. She pulled the woman’s dress into a crumpled hoop around her stomach. They thought she knew what she was doing and she made their faith hers.
“My chest hurts,” the woman said.
“You need to breathe.”
“My eyes hurt,” the woman said.
“You need to blink.”
She set two pillows on the floor, beneath the woman’s open legs, just in case. The vise of the woman’s grip crushed the older man’s fingers to squirming scarlet tendrils. “I’ve seen you before,” Natasha said, but was swallowed within the woman’s wail. “Push,” Natasha said. “Push.”
A mat of damp hair ringed by pubic curls began to crown.
“Gently,” she said, extending her hands as the mat of hair became a head. “Take deep breaths. Slow breaths. Imagine you are inflating a balloon. Your breaths are slow and deep. Blow through your mouth at the most painful point of each contraction. Try to whistle.”
She steadied her hands beneath the crowning skull. Instinct told her to palm the back of the child’s head so its first sensation was of warmth and comfort, but she kept a finger’s width between the child’s skin and her own. Maali had warned her never to touch a child’s head before seeing its face; doing so could cause the child to inhale amniotic fluid. But