Natasha rubbed the girl’s back through a towel, then tilted her head to open the airway. She stroked the girl’s nose, dried the girl’s mouth, suctioned residue through a plastic syringe, tickled her feet, but still the girl hadn’t cried. Should she run downstairs for help? Could she perform CPR on a newborn? She pushed her fingers into the child’s soft, soggy soles, and begged them to kick back. At the ends of her feet the protruding toes seemed in error, so curled and delicate they might sink back into the doughy flesh. These are the feet of a human being you brought into the world. She will not die.
She didn’t. Lips drawn to the pink edges of her toothless gums. A sharp gulp.
“She’s breathing.”
“I can hear,” the father said. The girl wailed. “She breathes like her mother.”
She placed the girl on the mother’s bare skin. The mother stared through a frame of damp hair and recognized her daughter; they were both breathing. Pink liquid trickled from the girl’s mouth, striping the incline of her mother’s still swollen stomach. With a fresh towel Natasha wrapped the two together.
“You should start nursing as soon as you feel able,” Natasha said. She didn’t need to borrow their confidence. It was hers. “It will help the placenta come out and stop the bleeding.”
The mother nodded weakly, happily. Her voice was unfamiliar when she spoke. Natasha had only heard it in screams. “This is my daughter?”
“Yes,” Natasha said, finally allowing herself a smile. “She’s yours.”
The older man approached as she washed her hands under the sputtering tap. There was much yet to clean, but first, her hands. He thanked her.
“The mother did most of the work,” she said. In his wrinkles she recognized his face as she might a photograph crumpled and flattened. “I’ve seen you before.”
“Have you been to Eldár?”
In a truck, with five other women. “In passing.”
“What about the city university? I taught there. Or the Café Standard? I enjoyed their bebop nights. Do you like bebop?”
“I don’t like trumpets.”
“But what if a trumpet is playing the music you like?”
She thought of loose screws trembling on the Nightclub dance floor.
“The music I like can’t be played on a trumpet,” she said.
“If it can’t be played on a trumpet, it’s not music.”
“My name is Natasha,” she said, smiling.
“Khassan Geshilov.”
Repeating the name aloud, she saw the black-and-white dust jacket photo. “I’ve read your book.”
He gave a bashful laugh. “You’re the one?”
“It ended before the Russians arrived. A stupid decision, if you ask me.”
“If only you had been my editor! Origins of Chechen Civilization,” he said fondly, as if he had also forgotten the title. He turned to the boarded windows. “This is the whole city, isn’t it?”
“As much as can be seen from the window.”
He strolled the ash-shaded streets and verdant leaves, reading the city so he might later remember. He lingered at an intersection between City Park and the university library, hesitated, then pressed his finger into the street. “The love of my life was nearly killed by a bus here. She had been following me, and I only found out then, with the screech of bus tires.”
“You have stalkers? No wonder you didn’t have time to write about the Russians.”
“That’s a story for another day.” He glanced back to the newborn. “Let’s introduce ourselves.”
The father and the historian embraced, all gratitude and congratulations silently locked between their arms. The father lifted the girl from the mother. His long fingers held her.
“What will you call her?” Natasha asked.
“Havaa,” the father said. “Havaa.”
CHAPTER 17
HAVAA’S FATHER NEVER again played chess after returning from the final trip to the mountains with Ramzan in January 2003. He spent his days caught like a coin between the divan cushions. Sweat seeped into his shirt collar, leaving a rim the color of crushed mustard seed. His fingers had, well, healed wasn’t the right word. The stumps had hardened into pink lumps rising from the webs of his palms. He struggled to button his shirt, open the door, eat, tie his shoes, and Havaa, insistent and unrelenting, became his hands.
The heat of the following summer weighed so much it would take an extra autumn to fully lift. Her mother kept her waistline hidden beneath wide skirts and aprons, refusing to wear maternity clothes. She still slept in her parents’ bedroom on a mattress so thin she felt the pattern of nail heads in the floor. Refugees still arrived, still overdressed and bewildered, and her father still took them in.
That summer the leaves drooped in the heat. Decay baked at her feet and in it crawled little insects that made homes in her boot prints. She hiked as if the forest were a fragile thing, careful to sidestep saplings so slender they bowed with the breeze. Her father told her that Soviet timber interests had controlled the forest before the wars, but she couldn’t find a tree stump on her side of the forest, and rust-chewed saw belts, buried like relics of a prior civilization, were the only evidence of past industry.
Flocks of migrating birds clutched shaded branches. Lizards hid in dewy deer tracks. Once, she saw a wolf slaloming between the birch trunks; its pink tongue lolled from its open mouth and the sunlight glimmered on its fangs. When the wolf spotted her, half hidden behind a hornbeam, its ears snapped skyward. It found her eyes amid the leaves and studied them, questioningly, and she stared back, unnerved but not quite afraid, until they came to an understanding, and the wolf continued its saunter through the long, lovely shadows. Despite her sprinting pulse, she had only pity for the wolf, sweltering, as it was, under that heavy silver coat.
She visited Akim often that summer. His portrait survived the February frosts and March thaws, but even the varnish, smeared like sunblock across his cheeks, couldn’t save him from the summer heat. His face slumped and faded. How the summer aged him. In life he had preferred the cold and dreamed of visiting the North Pole. In eighteen years his oldest brother, a geologist, would bury what remained of Akim’s portrait in Arctic snow, not quite at the North Pole, but close enough to make a compass needle spin in circles.
The sight of Akim’s half-erased face left Havaa crestfallen, but an hour’s trek from the village, she found the solution guarding a fallow field. The scarecrow wore a burlap sack and sun-bleached blue trousers, its straw-stuffed waist wider than that of any villager. A faceless cloth crammed with dead leaves sat where the head should be. Crows perched on its brim and mice nested in the sags of its shirtsleeves. Her parents warned her against venturing into the fields, but the chance to extend Akim’s life, once again, outweighed her fear. Each step planted with cautious deliberation, she reached the scarecrow. A wooden post, rooted in the soil, impaled the limp straw body. She kicked the post, then excavated its base. The dirt scratched her knees and she scratched the dirt back. The scarecrow tilted with the post, arms and legs hanging back like a refugee collapsing into bed. Mice scurried from the sleeves when they at last brushed the ground. The whole glaring sky focused on her as she tied a rag around the splintered post end, gripped, and pulled. The scarecrow’s head nodded as it fell along the furrows. His arms stretched across the dry soil as if searching for mines.
It took three afternoons before she joined the straw body to Akim’s head. When the sun set on the first evening, she left the scarecrow to sleep in the driest part of a roadside ditch. The next evening she hid him in the shadow of a fallen tree. Finally, she had the wilted torso leaning against the tree, and taking gardening shears by their blue rubber handles, she decapitated the faceless cloth head with a few rusty snaps. She dug a small hole, slid the post in, and the scarecrow stood. Browned straw jutted from the scarecrow’s neck, bearding Akim, but another few clips shaved him. Though the scarecrow looked better, it was still no more than a lax, lifeless body propped up beneath a fading portrait, requiring resuscitation. She snipped her hair with the gardening shears and pasted the clippings on Akim’s crown. She pricked her finger with a sewing needle and rubbed her warm blood onto Akim’s cheeks. Reenacting Akhmed’s movements, she thumped on the scarecrow’s chest, as he had thumped on the boy’s chest, and when the breath of life erupted — her own — she stood back and wiped the sweat-sting from her eyes. The air was clean. Her hands brown with dirt. Pride surged through her, raw and immense; she had believed happiness to be an absence — of fear, of pain, of grief — but here it roared in her as powerful as any sadness. She looked at her fingers and loved them. They had carried the scarecrow for three kilometers of field, road, and forest without setting off a single mine. They had saved Akim for a second time.