on freshwater microorganisms, Sonja would briefly consider sleeping in the hospital. But the world had long since stopped shaking, and no one would tolerate such eccentricity, not even from the distinguished head of surgery.
“Probably to a refugee camp.”
“But where, which camp?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think hard. Where?” In twenty years Sonja would find Natasha’s name beside her own, in the final sentence of the acknowledgments of Havaa’s dissertation. The dissertation would be published to some acclaim, and on dusty university bookshelves in a half dozen countries, the two sisters would share an afterlife in that final sentence, one comma away from Akhmed and Dokka.
“I don’t know.”
“Was she alone?”
“Yes, she was alone.” In twenty-eight years and seven months, at a limnology conference in Cologne, the girl would meet the man she was to marry nine years later. At the age of forty-six she would have her one and only child in the same maternity ward she was born in, a boy to carry her father’s name; hers would be the second hands to hold him. At the age of sixty-eight she would hold her first grandson, also to carry her father’s name; hers would be the third hands.
“And she left your house?”
“I said good-bye and she left.”
“What direction, then? What direction did she go?”
“Down the road. There’s only one direction you can go.” The girl would outlive her husband, her son, one grandson, and every soul she had met before the age of eleven. She would outlive twenty-three of her teeth, three of her toes, one of her kidneys, and all the brown of her hair.
“Then where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you saw her.”
She would die at the age of one hundred and three, in the geriatrics ward of Hospital No. 6, in a room that had been the director’s office, then Sonja’s bedroom, and finally a regular hospital room, a room Havaa would remember as many thousands of refugees remembered her own childhood bedroom, a room that had been there when it was needed.
“Where is she? Please, Havaa. Please.”
The girl wrapped her fingers around Sonja’s. She looked up. Her eyes were green. “We don’t know where she went,” she said.
They never would.
CHAPTER
29
THE MEN IN Pit B would remember him as a quiet man, if they remembered him at all. They would remember how he fastened his shirt buttons with his toes, how he had learned to live without his fingers. He was anxious, hungry, and scared, but they all were. At night they slept in the brown snow on sheets of carpet, slabs of plywood, whatever they could find. Though they all had nightmares, some would remember how the fingerless man kept repeating is she … is she … is she … is she … is she … before another man shook him awake.
Four nights after the fingerless man arrived, another man climbed down from the sixty-first rung. He curled near the side of the wall and slept. In the morning, the new arrival scanned the prisoners. His eyes found those of the fingerless man through the small crowd. It was clear that they had known each other from their past lives on the sixty-first rung, but whether they were brothers, or friends, or rivals, or enemies, none could say. The men, those who had been there for months, had seen how the Landfill could twist one’s sense of honor and obligation, how in this underworld even a hated face was a welcomed one.
The new arrival examined their wounds, and though he didn’t do a very good job, they called him the doctor. He was quiet. By night he neither screamed nor snored, and by day he rarely answered questions with more than a nod or shake of his head. When they commented on his reticence, he said he was practicing for his interrogation. The men, those who would leave without their fingers, their mental health, and parts of their souls, but would leave, might remember the carving of epitaphs on the clay wall. Though surprisingly self-sufficient, the fingerless man was unable to write his name. The doctor helped. The two epitaphs were carved so close together they looked like one.
A few days later, the fingerless man and the doctor were summoned to the sixty-first rung. The fingerless man had difficulty climbing. The doctor helped. For the following day and night, the men at the bottom of Pit B, those who would survive and those who would not, prayed at the epitaph of the fingerless man and the doctor. Twenty-four hours after