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. Not the right tone to take. “Looking up anything particular?”
Natasha shrugged, of course.
“I hope you didn’t read that all day.” She turned to the bare wall. Her open mouth, pointed at Natasha, invariably projected condescension. “Surely there are more exciting books on the shelves.”
“I don’t want to be excited,” Natasha said flatly. “I want boredom. I want to be lobotomized by boredom.”
“Listen, Natashechka, something is wrong,” she said, and hated her lack of specificity. Something? Wrong? How could a surgeon diagnose with such imprecision? “Have you heard of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?”
Natasha nodded without looking up from the page.
“What is it, then?”
Golden lamplight outlined the text as she flipped the pages. “It is a psychological reaction that occurs after experiencing a highly stressing event outside the range of normal human experience, which is usually characterized by depression, anxiety, flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, and avoidance of reminders of the event.”
Natasha hadn’t spoken a complex sentence in months, and even recited, the clause-heavy bluster made her sound alive again. “Sound familiar?” Sonja asked.
“The Italian head doctors went through this already. I don’t want your help.”
Help was the last thing Sonja knew how to give her sister. “Can you remember the last time you went outside?” she asked. Natasha could have lit a cigarette off the end of that glare. “I’ll tell you when. When you were repatriated. You haven’t set a toe outside this apartment block since you returned to it.”
“You weren’t there,” Natasha said, shrugging. “So you don’t get to tell me what to do.”
For months she’d withheld, stopped herself, thought better, bitten her tongue to shreds. “I’m right here. Now. Here I am.” She spread her arms, not to embrace her sister, but to show how wide she was, how much of her was here. “Do you know why? Do you have any idea?”
Natasha didn’t move. She couldn’t unlock the cellar door, not for Sonja, not for anyone. What had happened down there was still happening inside her, and she wouldn’t let anyone, least of all her sister, into what she was still trying, still failing to escape from.
“Because of you. Because I was afraid you were here alone. Everything was so good in London. I was happy there. But I came back for you and that entitles me to your respect. You can hate me and think I’m a self-righteous bitch, but you will treat me with respect, because I came back here for you.”
Again, that fucking shrug! Sonja couldn’t imagine, then, with exasperation surging inside her, that one calm morning, eight and a half years away, after her sister had disappeared for a second time, she would wake on a hospital bed with her shoulders as stiff as her collarbones, and shrugging once, twice, failing to relax them, she would remember Natasha’s shrugs, how fluid, how easy, and that would be the first definitive, the first known, that wherever Natasha was she would be shrugging.
“Do you want me to feel sorry that you left your nice life in London? Are you the victim here, is that what you’re saying? Maybe you should talk with a psychiatrist about it, Sonechka. No, you made a mistake returning here for me,” Natasha stated, as simply as if still reading from the dictionary. “Just as I made a mistake leaving here for you.”
A window might have opened; a breeze might have slid across the walls, clearing the air, because Sonja smiled, and said, “We’re sisters. In that way, at least, we’re sisters.” She took a clean breath, now that they had each said what they had to say. “I bought you a souvenir,” she said, surprising even herself. “In London.”
Exhibiting great restraint, Natasha didn’t shrug. “What sort of souvenir?”
“I’m not telling you. I’m keeping it for myself.”
“It’s not a souvenir if you keep it.”
“Of course it is. It’s a gift to myself. I deserve it.”
“Why didn’t you give it to me?” Natasha had sat up and cocked her head to Sonja.
“Because,” Sonja said, picking up the dictionary and fanning the pages with her thumb, “you’re always on my nerves.”