spend the whole day and night there. On his final trip, in January 2003, I slept in his bed for three nights. Of course I couldn’t have known that he and Ramzan had been detained and sent to the Landfill. I couldn’t have known that his fingers were snipped off with wire cutters while I was at his house, sleeping with his wife, eating with his daughter, because I thought his life was perfect. Whatever we were to each other was lost then. I’m not sure if Esiila told him or not, but he knew. Never said anything but he knew. I would go over and talk to the refugees staying at his house when I wanted to talk to him. He didn’t say a word to me last year when I spoke to the woman who told me your name. If I saw Dokka again, I wouldn’t apologize or try to make it right. That isn’t what I would say.”
“What would you say?”
Akhmed smiled, shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The shadow of a fresh crater darkened the road. At the bottom an arm reached upward. The rest of the body lay there and there and there. Lavender tatters, caught in an updraft, twisted in a wide ocean of sky. “We offered her a ride,” Sonja said, meaning I told her so, meaning this isn’t my fault.
Snow sprayed from the tires, cresting in the rearview. What would she do if the war ended? Of all the possibilities and permutations she had played out in her mind, peace was never among them. What would she do? The war that turned lieutenants into colonels, and unemployed men into jihadists, also turned residents into chief surgeons.
“Tolstoy was here two hundred years ago,” Akhmed said. “There was a war then. He wrote a novel about it.”
“I don’t care for fiction.”
“Hadji Murád it’s called,” he said. “I’ll bring it for you tomorrow.”
“Why aren’t you angry at me?” she asked. The question had been burning in her all afternoon.
Akhmed folded his hands, but said nothing.
“I had you interrogated at gunpoint. If you were deceiving me I would have had you shot.”
“If I were deceiving you, I would have been another man.”
“You’re a decent man,” she said, and smiled. “A terrible physician, but a decent man.”
“I know. I shouldn’t spend so much time with you. You’ll turn me into a first-rate surgeon and boor.”
“I think it’s the other way around,” she said. A gauze of afternoon cloud cover had wrapped around the sky and she looked up and into it. “I’m overcome by the inexplicable desire to speak to you with common courtesy.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“I’m sorry I called you an idiot.”
“You only implied it. Do you want to make it up to me?”
“Not really,” she said.
“Then tell me who Ronald McDonald is.”
“Very soon I’ll have to apologize for calling you an idiot again.”
“Imply,” he reminded.
“No, this time I’ll likely come out and say it.”
“I already know he isn’t the American president.”
“I think you’ll be disappointed.”
“I almost always am.”
“He’s a clown.”
“A clown?”
“A clown who sells hamburgers.”
“Does he cook the hamburgers?”
“Does it matter?”
“I may be an idiot,” he said gravely, “but I would never eat a hamburger cooked by a clown. Anyway, you were telling me about your sister. When she returned from Italy.”
CHAPTER
16
IN THE WEEKS after she returned, Natasha traveled no farther than the three meters of gray carpet to Laina’s flat. She drank weak tea, interpreted hallucinations, and returned, that fourth meter sealed behind an invisible wall of terror. Sonja watched distantly, wanting to take Natasha’s hand and pull her down the hallway like a petulant child. Laina’s flat—where, three weeks earlier, she had crouched at the door, a glass of ice melting in her grip, and heard Natasha’s voice inside—seemed like the first step on recovery’s staircase. But that step had stretched into a landing, then a floor, and Natasha couldn’t have disappeared, not then.
Sonja, more talented as physician than as sister, withheld her diagnosis as long as she could. Then one Tuesday, Sonja returned from the hospital with feet swollen and shoulders heavy, too tired, really, to begin tending to her most difficult patient of the day. Natasha sat on the divan, a stack of books propped on the cushion beside her. Origins of Chechen Civilization, The Third Soviet Guide to Ornithology, Life and Fate. A yellowed tome covered her lap. The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians.
“I can define any words you don’t understand,” Sonja offered, and immediately regretted it.