But her glare broke with her balance. The wooden planks of her trouser legs pitched her forward and, arms flapping, she reached for Natasha. There was no one else to help her.
And Natasha caught her. The impact shimmied down Sonja’s spine, loosening the tension coiled between each vertebra. How had they descended so far? How had they become so embittered that Natasha preventing her from falling on her face felt like an act of tremendous sisterly love? Tears squeezed through Sonja’s closed eyes. A plug was pulled from the center of the floor through which the tension drained.
“Those are the ugliest trousers I’ve ever seen,” Natasha said, still holding her. It was the first time they had hugged since she returned. Two and a quarter years would pass before it happened again. “They look painted on.”
“I can’t feel my toes,” Sonja cried. “I don’t think my blood is circulating past my knees.”
“You should use them as tourniquets at the hospital.”
“I don’t want to be here, Natasha. I’m so fucking unhappy. I want to be back in London.”
“It’s okay. They’re only trousers. Here’s what we do.” Clasping the waistline, Natasha halved them in one clean flourish. Sonja pulled the ends over her heels and stretched her sore thighs. She picked up the sheet of fabric stenciled with the silhouette of her legs, and tilted her head to see Natasha through the cutout.
“I think this is my knee.”
“It is a lovely knee.”
“What should I do with it?”
“I don’t think you’ve ever asked my opinion before.”
“I won’t make a habit of it.”
“You could.”
“Tell me what to do.”
Natasha looked to the fabric. “I could use a new pair of trousers, too.”
Sonja smiled and gave Natasha the nail scissors.
Despite their moment of reconciliation, they soon returned to a policy of polite avoidance. When, after work, Sonja wanted less complex company, she visited Laina next door. Laina never looked particularly pleased to see Sonja, but she never looked particularly pleased about anything these days, and Sonja didn’t take it personally. The old woman received daily visitations from ghosts, angels, prophets, and monsters, and some evenings, Sonja wondered if she herself was, to this old woman, a trivial hallucination.
“I saw an ice machine at the bazaar the other day,” she said. Laina didn’t look up from the scarf she was knitting, afraid to raise her eyes with so many visions crowding the air. “It once cooled the glasses of the Bee Gees, or so said the freezer merchant. Never turn your back to him, Laina. There is no bee.”
“You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man,” Laina said, without lifting her eyes from the needle tips.
“You know that song?”
“Of course. People used to recite it in the war. I didn’t know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur’an.”
Sonja smiled, glad she could still be surprised. “I never knew the Bee Gees were so profound.”
“I saw six chariots in the sky today. I would have rather seen an ice machine.”
For the next hour Laina described abounding supernatural phenomena. The angel Gabriel had fluttered into a rooster-less henhouse in Zebir-Yurt, and the next morning a farmer found eight immaculately conceived eggs. A boy in Grozny defeated his grandfather, a chess master third class, ranked one thousand six hundred and eighty-fourth in the world, after a game lasting thirty-nine sleepless days and nights that left the grandfather so bewildered, proud, and exhausted he promptly died. A band of corpse-devils rose from the earth at the Dagestan border to hijack three Red Cross cargo trucks, leaving the drivers hog-tied and blindfolded and magically suspended three meters in the air.
“Stalin has been resurrected,” Laina said.
“I know,” Sonja replied. “He’s the prime minster of Russia.”
On her way to work a week later, when the black Mercedes found her, she was sure she’d wandered into one of Laina’s deliriums. The Mercedes braked sharply, drawing a curtain of dust along the street. The tires — before so dainty they could only drive in circles on a tennis court — were replaced with those of an armored jeep, raising the body of the car by a half meter. Swedish license plates, she noted, were still attached. The window descended and those gorgeous fingernails beckoned her.
“I thought we wouldn’t see each other again,” she said, pulling the door closed.
“And I keeping saying I’ll never see Alu again and he keeps on being my brother. You intrigue me. You lived in London for several years, if my information is correct, which it always is. Had you stayed, you would be eligible for citizenship now. Even I can’t get my name into one of those beautiful maroon passports. And yet you returned.”
“I have family here,” she said uneasily.
“I hide the toilet paper when my family visits so they won’t stay too long.”
“Could you get me back to London?”
“You could ask. But then who would I have to talk to? No one with your intelligence would return from London, which means you are either one of those idiot savants, light on the savant, or something entirely different. The only people who return are people like me, people who know how much money can be made.”
Through the window, the city limits gave way to brown fields tilled by tank treads. They were on the road to Grozny. “I’m not here to make money.”
“That’s why you are so intriguing.”
They reached the Grozny garage two hours later. Two dour-faced men met them at the door holding Kalashnikovs, one still three weeks from killing the other in an argument that would begin over driving directions, and Sonja feverishly hoped that the smuggler’s love for Alu the Turtle still surpassed his loathing for Alu the Unluckiest Younger Brother in History. Three trucks sat at the end of the concrete tarmac. The brother led her to the first truck, whose shot-off lock clung by a half-broken, glimmering grip. He lifted the door and shined a flashlight into the trailer. A Red Cross first-aid kit sat in the circle of yellowed light. The circle spread to illuminate torn cardboard boxes and hundreds, no, thousands of first-aid kits. “These were stolen,” she said.
“Of course they were, and not without some headache, I’ll have you know. But as you said, nearly all of what you asked for can be found in a first-aid kit.”
“What happened to the drivers?”
“Why do you care?”
She could feel him testing her, ready to blunt the slightest edge of moral outrage with a lecture on relativism in war, or maybe with another example of his contempt for Alu. She unsnapped the first-aid kit and surveyed the contents. Four absorbent compress dressings, eight adhesive bandages, a tube of antiseptic ointment, a breathing barrier, two latex gloves, a gauze roll, a thermometer, a packet of aspirin, and a scissors. She closed the lid, refastened the clips, had nothing but gratitude to give him. For all she cared, the drivers could be hog-tied and beaten, since she now had the ointment to disinfect their cuts, the gauze to bandage their wounds, even scissors to cut through whatever magical threads held them three meters off the ground.