already sitting in on university classes, had heard every squeak, every warble, every pinched sharp through their shared, shadow-thin wall. She had paid Natasha, by the hour, not to practice. That same glint of easy opportunity returned to Natasha’s eyes.
“What promise?” she asked.
“Promise that you’ll come to the hospital with me tomorrow.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Just that. If you think you’re well enough.”
“What, you think I’m not?”
“No, no. I’m not saying that.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Natasha said. “Fine. I promise.”
Sonja went to her room and returned a minute later. “Close your eyes,” she said, and handed her a sturdy oblong object wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.
“What is this? A doll?” Natasha asked, pulling it from the bag. “I’m a grown woman.”
“It’s not a doll. It’s a nutcracker of a Buckingham Palace guard.”
“Who are they?”
“They stand outside the queen’s palace. They’re not allowed to laugh. They just stand there. They’re not very good at guarding, when you think about it. They just stand there. You could dress up a lamppost and get as good a guard.”
“Yes,” Natasha agreed, cranking the nutcracker’s mouth up and down. “A bad guard and worse souvenir. What should I call him?”
Sonja bit her lip. “What about Alu?”
“Alu the lousy, boring, worthless souvenir.”
“Yes,” Sonja said. “That is the perfect name for him.”
“I’m a little disappointed. You spent five years in London and all I get is a doll?”
“The real gift was my absence.”
Finally, a smile.
The next morning the hospital was quiet. The few patients Maali couldn’t scare off with promises of an amputation cure-all waited for her: a sprained ankle, a case of the common cold, nothing urgent. She took Natasha through the ghost wards of deserted laboratories and examination rooms. Pigeons roosted in split IV bags. A manhole cover, leading nowhere, lay in radiology. The rooms would look unchanged eight and three-quarter years later when Sonja led Akhmed through. The powdered heroin, provided by Alu’s brother, would still slouch against the canteen cupboard wall, but when she led him past she would do so without worry, without wondering if his veins, like her sister’s, might tingle from proximity.
“This was once among the foremost oncology departments in the U.S.S.R.,” she said, as they shuffled into a room relieved of its doorknobs and light fixtures. “Party officials came from as far as Vladivostok for treatment.”
They paused at a hulking MRI machine which the former hospital director had sacrificed his pension, his marriage, and all the black in his hair to procure. “It’s a shame we can’t use this, but a single scan would kill the generator.” A meter from her foot the bronze rim of a shell casing was silhouetted in dust. “Besides,” she added, “there’s so much embedded metal in here the magnetic field would turn the room into a shooting gallery.”
The tour ended on the fourth-floor maternity ward, where a woman who had given birth the previous night smiled at everyone in placid exhaustion. Her child had emerged with a collapsed lung but the doctor on call had acted quickly and the child had lived. The mother held the infant to her breast. Its little lips bent the nipple. She beamed as they approached.
“God is great. She will live,” the mother said in a slow cadence to make it clear that the two statements were logically dependent. She glanced up at Natasha, mistaking her white sweatshirt for scrubs. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“I’m no one,” Natasha said.
“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You save lives.”
Natasha crossed her arms, and Sonja couldn’t see it, couldn’t know it, but right then, when Natasha dipped her head, looked to her palm, to the floor, to Sonja and back, she believed that their body temperatures rose by some fractional degree, that this they shared. The baby finished suckling and tilted its square little face upward.
“Do you want to hold her?” the mother asked.
“No,” Natasha said, ratcheting her frown.
“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You want to hold her.”
“I need to go, but you stay here. There is a case of the common cold in need of my attention,” Sonja whispered as Natasha took the infant in her arms.
That morning, in the cavernous wards, Natasha’s brain finally hushed. When the newborn sniffed strangely at her chest, she stared into its eyes and saw a world only two days old. Those two and a half kilograms righted her, turned her vantage to a future kinder than experience had taught her to expect. The next morning she woke when Sonja woke, left when Sonja left,