Chechnya

A Story
by Anthony Marra

After her sister, Natasha, died, Sonja began sleeping in the hospital. She returned home to wash her clothes a few days a
month, but those days became fewer and fewer. No reason to return, no need to wash her clothes. She only wears
hospital scrubs anyway.
She wakes on a cot in the trauma unit. She sleeps there intentionally, in anticipation of the next critical patient. Some
days, roused by the shuffle of footsteps, the cries of family members, she stands and a body takes her place on the cot
and she works on resuscitation, knowing she is awake because she could dream nothing like this.
“A man is waiting here to see you,” a nurse says. Sonja, still on the cot, rubs the weariness from her eyes.
“About what?”
The nurse hesitates. “He’s right out here.”
A minute later in the hallway the man introduces himself. “My name is Akhmed.” He speaks Russian without an accent,
but by now Sonja feels more comfortable conversing in Chechen. A short beard descends from Akhmed’s face. For a
moment she thinks he’s a religious man, then remembers that most men have grown their beards out. Few have shaving
cream, fewer have mirrors. The war has made the country’s cheeks and chins devout.
He gestures to a small girl, no older than eight, standing beside him. “My wife and I cannot care for her,” Akhmed says.
“You must take her.”
“This isn’t an orphanage.”
“There are no orphanages.”
The request is not uncommon. The hospital receives humanitarian aid, has food and clean water. Most important, it
tends to the injured regardless of ethnicity or military affiliation, making the hospital one of the few larger buildings left
untargeted by either side in the war. Newly injured arrive each day, too many to care for. Sonja shakes her head. Too
many dying; she cannot be expected to care for the living as well.
“Her father was taken by the rebels on Saturday. On Sunday the army came and took her mother.”
Sonja looks at the wall calendar, as if a date could make sense of the times. “Today is Monday,” she says.
Akhmed glowers. Sonja often sees defiance from rebels and occasionally from soldiers, but rarely from civilians.
“I can’t,” she says, but her voice falters, her justification failing.
“I was a medical student before the war,” Akhmed says, switching to Chechen. “In my final year. I will work here until a
home is found for the girl.”
Sonja surveys the corridor: a handful of patients, no doctors. Those with money, with advanced degrees and the
foresight to flee the country, have done so.
“Parents decide which of their children they can afford to feed on which days. No one will take this girl,” Sonja says.
“Then I will keep working.”
“Does she speak?” Sonja looks to the girl. “What’s your name?”
“Havaa,” Akhmed answers.

Six months earlier Sonja’s sister, Natasha, was repatriated from Italy. When Sonja heard the knock and opened the door,
she couldn’t believe how healthy her sister looked. She hugged her sister, joked about the padding on her hips. Whatever
horrors Natasha had experienced in the West, she’d put fat around her waist.
“I am home,” Natasha said, holding the hug longer than Sonja thought necessary. They ate dinner before the sun went
down, potatoes boiled over the furnace. The army had cut the electric lines four years earlier. They had never been
repaired. Sonja showed her sister to the spare room by candlelight, gestured to the bed. “This is the place you sleep,
Natasha.”
They spent the week in a state of heightened civility. No prying questions. All talk was small. What Sonja noticed, she did
not comment on. A bottle of Ribavirin antiviral pills on the bathroom sink. Cigarette burns on Natasha’s shoulders. Sonja
worked on surgeries, and Natasha worked on sleeping. Sonja brought food home from the hospital, and Natasha ate it.
Sonja started the fire in the morning, and Natasha slept. There were mornings, and there were nights. This is life, Sonja
thought.

Akhmed is true to his word. Five minutes after Sonja accepts the girl, he is washed and suited in scrubs. Sonja takes him
on a tour of the hospital. All but two wings are closed for lack of staff. She shows him the cardiology, internal medicine,
and endocrinology wards. A layer of dust covers the floors, their footprints leaving a trail. Sonja thinks of the moon
landing, how she saw the footage for the first time when she arrived in London.
“Where is everything?” Akhmed asks. Beds, sheets, hypodermics, disposable gowns, surgical tape, film dressing,
thermometers, IV bags, forceps—any item of practical medical use is gone. Empty cabinets, open drawers, locked rooms,
closed blinds, taped-over windowpanes, the stale air remain.
“The trauma and maternity wards. And we’re struggling to keep them both open.”
Akhmed runs his fingers through his beard. “Trauma, that’s obvious. You have to keep trauma open. But maternity?”
Sonja’s laugh rings down the empty hall. “I know. It’s funny, isn’t it? Everyone is either fucking or dying.”
“No.” Akhmed shakes his head, and Sonja wonders if he’s offended by her profanity. “They are coming into the world,
and they are leaving the world and it’s happening here.”
Sonja nods, wonders if Akhmed is religious after all.

Ten years earlier, on the morning of December 11, 1994, the day the Russian army crossed into Chechnya, Sonja woke in
the London City College graduate dormitory. She ate a quick breakfast of instant coffee and a day-old scone, the latter by
now her favorite British food. Gray clouds lined the horizon as she climbed the escalator at Holborn and walked across
Lincoln’s Inn Field to the Royal College of Surgeons. She attended a lecture by a nationally renowned neurosurgeon and
took pride in her ability to follow the snaking sentences of foreign academia. Attached to the Royal College was a
museum dedicated to the history of anatomy and pathology. After thanking the lecturer and pausing in the atrium for a
cigarette, she walked through the museum’s curious exhibitions. A display detailing the history of non-Egyptian
mummification. An alcove dedicated entirely to the tibia. One room remained stuck in her memory, or her memory in it.
The room exhibited a collection of the 1,474 skulls collected by nineteenth-century physician Joseph Barnard Davis. A
fractured skull of a Roman woman found in the ruins of Pompeii. The skulls of five stillborns, each collapsed just above
the temple. The skulls of nine Chinese pirates hanged in Ningpo. Aborigines from Tasmania. Congolese from Leopold’s
rubber mines. But the skull that Sonja remembered was that of a Bengali cannibal. Fully intact, the mandible still locked
against the temporal, the twenty-two bones that constitute the human skull all accounted for. The eight bones forming
the neurocranial brain case bathed in halogenated light. From the size of the plates, the prominence of certain supra-
orbital ridges and temporal lines, and overall size and solidity of the skull, Sonja could tell it belonged to a man. The skull
looked no different from those of the Chinese pirates, the Tasmanian Aborigines. The nose and eyes, which once gave
the man physical distinction, were dark cavities. She read the placard, written by a Victorian phrenologist. There are no
characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man.

Sonja shows Akhmed the new maternity ward, reconstructed in the oncology division after a stray shell leveled the
original maternity ward five months earlier. A doctor and several nurses tend to two postpartum mothers. One holds her
child, his head a bald bulb protruding from surgical gown swaddling. The other mother is unconscious. Her infant lies in
an incubator, looking more like a crushed bird than a human.
“Poor nutrition in utero?” Akhmed asks.
“No nutrition in utero. In the past few years, we’ve had only a dozen women healthy enough to give birth to healthy
children.”
“And I imagine their husbands are not civilians.”

It takes Akhmed more than two hours to reach the hamlet at the edge of the mountain. He rides a rusty three-speed,
the gears whistling against the wind. A kilometer before every checkpoint, he hoists the bike frame over his shoulder and
walks through the woods, circumnavigating the platoons of young Russian soldiers. It is as dark when he arrives home as
it was sixteen hours earlier, when he left with Havaa.
His wife lies in bed, beads of perspiration stippling her forehead despite the cold. He kisses her cheek and empties the
bedpan. She has only a few months left.
“Where were you?” she asks.
“Just checking the mail,” he says in explanation of his absence.
“Oh, has my sister written?”
“No, not today.”
In the kitchen Akhmed starts a fire in the wooden stove, brings a saucer of water to boil. He divides the cup of rationed
rice into two uneven servings, the larger for his wife. She has difficulty sitting upright. Akhmed takes off his coat and
folds it into a cushion for her head.
“Has anyone visited today?” he asks, knowing she wouldn’t remember anyway.
“Oh, no,” she says. “I’ve kept to myself.”
“You’re sure no one came by? Not Ramzan?” Before the war Akhmed spent Saturday afternoons playing chess with his
neighbors Ramzan and Dokka, Havaa’s father. Ramzan had been a trader, a middleman carrying goods from the city to
the mountains. The gratuities he awarded himself from every shipment provided their Saturday afternoons with
otherwise unaffordable luxuries. They ate and played chess in their hamlet at the edge of the mountain, far from the trail
of tank treads. Then the war came, and Akhmed no longer trusted his neighbor. Ramzan peddled information now, a far
more precious commodity than goat cheese and plum wine.
Akhmed waits for his wife to respond. The silence becomes an answer itself. He sits on the bed beside his wife and feeds
her rice. For years they tried to have children, with no success. Akhmed believed their marriage to be cursed. As he
brushes the crumbs from his wife’s lips and pulls the blanket to her chin, he thinks of just how wrong he was.

After Akhmed leaves, Sonja returns to the waiting room. The girl sits on a folding chair, slouching against the metal back.
Already Sonja has forgotten her name. She hands the girl a doll from the maternity ward. “What’s this?” the girl asks.
“A doll.”
The girl turns it over, not knowing what to do with it.
“Are you hungry? Eat this,” Sonja says. She hands the girl an energy bar designed for marathon runners, a new addition
to the humanitarian aid drops. The girl bends the bar, unsure what to do with it. “What is it?”
“Let’s go to sleep.” Sonja shows the girl to a cot in the trauma ward, then unfolds the sheets and spreads them across the
mat. “Are you comfortable?” Sonja asks.
Lying across the cot, the girl shakes her head. “The pillow is lumpy.”

Natasha slept for sixteen hours a day after returning from Italy. Sonja worried about her and didn’t need a medical
degree to know something was wrong. Natasha had been home for fourteen days and had spent ten of those asleep.
“You must do something, go somewhere,” Sonja said at breakfast. They never discussed Natasha’s time abroad.
“There is nothing to do, nowhere to go.”
“Go for a walk, then.”
“There’s a war going on.”
“There has always been a war. That shouldn’t get in the way of daily exercise.”
Sonja spent the day in surgery. Two children came in after stepping on a land mine. They didn’t have legs, and they didn’t
survive the surgery.
Natasha’s eyes were red when Sonja arrived home.
“Why are you crying?” she asked.
“I went for a walk and saw Sulim in the street. He looked at me and laughed.”
Sonja slapped her sister across the face. How could she shed tears for the past? Natasha stopped crying and didn’t seem
surprised. As they ate in silence, the bruise on her cheek grew to a crimson swell.
A constellation of vital phenomena, Sonja thought. Tomorrow it would look worse, but Natasha would live. Sonja
couldn’t pity the living.
Before she went to bed she broke an icicle from the roof, crushed it in a plastic bag, and placed it outside her sister’s
door. Sonja knocked and before the door opened went back to her room.

Natasha never forgot the admiration with which her sister had spoken of the West. Natasha applied to the same
universities as Sonja, but without Sonja’s superior test scores. After completing secondary school, Natasha had a job
bagging groceries, a steady boyfriend, Friday nights at the cinema or the dance club, Europop on the radio. Then came
war and the siege of the city, five hundred thousand land mines, massacres in distant Russian schools and theaters. What
remained was Natasha herself. When she had enough to eat, she was beautiful. Sonja may have once been the most
promising medical student in all of Chechnya, but no one had ever turned to watch her as she walked down the street.
Natasha reminded herself of this, used it to countervail her envy. Sonja was in London, and Natasha knew she wouldn’t
return. They hadn’t spoken in years, not since the day in December 1994 when Sonja called home after the army crossed
the border. The next day shelling severed the city’s central telephone server, making transcontinental communication
impossible. But Natasha tried not to think of her sister. Her ugly sister with her big brain. No one was paid per IQ point
when buildings fell. The war made everything physical: survival, retaliation, even comfort. Avenues existed for women
who could make themselves attractive without the benefit of a mirror or running water.
His name was Sulim. Two years above her at school and rumored to have a cousin in the obshchina, the Chechen mafia.
He had compressed features, as if as a child he’d been hit in the face with a frying pan. She sat with him in a bar that
served nothing. The owner was disappeared. The bar had no door, liquor, or employees, but the regulars still returned
each afternoon. Their lips were blue from drinking windshield wiper fluid. The city had no electricity, no plumbing, no
food, no cars. But there was no shortage of windshield wiper fluid.
“You want to get out. Who doesn’t?” he said.
“I know I can be successful in the West.”
Sulim pursed his lips. “Anyone can be successful when they are not dodging bullets.” He pulled a plastic soda bottle from
his jacket pocket and scanned the room before taking a quick sip. “Real vodka.”
“I will work off the debt.”
“Will you?”
“I know there are trafficking routes, ways of getting people from here to there.”
Sulim shook his head. “Those are for pretty girls in poor countries, not pretty girls in war countries. It used to be that a
woman who disappeared needed to reappear on the other side of the world to make money. Now, they just disappear.
Reappearance has too high an overhead. Kidnapping, abduction, this is our national industry.”
Natasha stood to leave. Money paled against the desire to simply leave this country. She didn’t care if a pot of gold sat at
the other side. She just wanted to get over the rainbow. “Wait,” Sulim said. He paused to light a cigarette. At this stage in
the war, Kazakh tobacco was considered a luxury. “You are a friend. We went to school together, no? Where do you want
to go?”
“London,” Natasha responded.
“Then in London you will be an au pair. Do you know what that is?”
Natasha shook her head.
“It’s a French word. It means you watch the children while the parents are at work.”
“So I will be a grandmother?”
Sulim smiled. “Yes, something like a grandmother.”
It was Sulim’s smile, more than his words, that Natasha mistrusted. “I’m not my sister, but I’m not a fool.”
“There may be other things. Dancing. Entertaining. Being, what’s the word, enticing.”
Natasha knew it meant prostitution. Some repatriated women called it slavery. Even if it’s true, Natasha thought, so
what? Does he think I am afraid of it?
“Okay,” she said. “Make me au pair. Make me reappear.”

An associate of Sulim’s cousin transported Natasha with six other women to the Georgia border. From there they crossed
the Black Sea, arriving to port sixty kilometers south of Odessa as local fishing trawlers caught the morning’s breeze. Two
of the women stayed with the Chechen handler. Natasha and the three others went with two Ukrainian men in a
transport truck. The back door slammed shut. When it opened again, they were in Serbia. She spent the first night in a
stone cellar with ten other women, half still girls, the youngest no older than twelve. “Where am I?” she asked the
closest one. The woman responded in Bulgarian. Natasha had difficulty comprehending the distant Slavic tongue. “The
breaking grounds,” the woman said. Natasha didn’t understand. What ground was to be broken? They were in a cellar,
already underground. She looked at her dirty clothes, the soil rubbed against her palms, and understood. She was the
ground.

When there’s work to do, Sonja takes amphetamines to stave off sleep. There’s always work to do. A man is carried in, a
piece of shrapnel lodged in his chest. He’s dead before reaching the surgery table, but Sonja still treats the wound. She
undresses him, pulling the shard of aluminum casing from between his ribs, then cleans and bandages the gash. The
man’s right elbow is calloused from hours spent lying on the ground, pointing a rifle. His chest and shoulder are bruised
from the kickback. Sonja knows by the size and location of the bruises that this man was a sniper. A tumor protrudes
from the man’s thigh. Benign, a buildup of fatty tissue, but it’s unsightly. She cuts out the lump, four stitches to close the
incision.
“You must return in ten days so I can remove the stitches,” Sonja says aloud. “If you see any pus, any sign of infection,
you must return at once.”
She examines the ankles, shakes powder on the toes to alleviate his athlete’s foot. “You must wear sandals when you go
to the banya. You must not wear other people’s shoes. If you do, you risk becoming the victim of foot fungus.”
She works her way back up the body, pausing at the torso to ask the man’s weight, quizzing him on his diet. She cradles
the man’s cheeks between her palms and speaks to his deadened eyes. “There are no characteristics to distinguish the
cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man,” she says. “But from the length of the supraorbital ridge, I can
ascertain that you are most certainly an asshole.”
Two hands on her shoulders gently pull her away from the corpse.
“Come,” Akhmed says. His breath is warm against her neck, his flesh a few degrees warmer than the dead sniper’s. “Rest
for a moment.”
Akhmed takes her to the waiting room, pushing her into a chair when she resists.
“You must rest,” he commands.
“Don’t tell me what to do. I’m not tired. You have worked here for three days. Who do you think you are?”
“I think I am someone who slept last night.” He goes to the book closet, scans the disordered stack, and picks a thick
volume. “Read this if you need help falling asleep,” he says, handing her a medical dictionary.
Alone in the waiting room, Sonja lifts the dictionary. The binding creaks like rusty hinges as she opens the cover. The
book closet is rarely opened, and she’s surprised Akhmed even knows of its existence. Surgeons don’t consult the
medical textbooks. They learn their craft as a glasscutter learns his. Most lessons from medical school have proven
irrelevant. Lectures at the Royal College didn’t cover car bombs.
Five months earlier, a stray shell fell on the old maternity ward. Fortunately, no expectant mothers or newborns were
present, and only one person died. The water pipes burst, flooding the entire first floor. After the fire exits had all been
opened to drain the water, a centimeter of water remained. A doctor slipped, dislocating his shoulder. Sonja directed a
nurse to carpet the hallways with towels and then with paper when the towels ran out. “There is none,” a nurse said.
“None?”
“None,” the nurse replied.
Looking back, Sonja wonders if the nurse was in shock. Sonja wonders if she was in shock herself, because she thought
nothing peculiar in the absence of paper in the hospital. “Then go to the textbook closet, tear out the pages.”
“Which books?”
Sonja was exasperated but too tired for anger. “All of them. Wait,” she called after the nurse. “Not the medical
dictionary.”
The medical dictionary was one of the few texts to survive the day intact. Sonja flips through it: the names of internal
arteries, the average length of a human rib, the definition of a foot. Then halfway through the book, at the bottom of a
page, there’s a word followed by a one-sentence explanation. Life: noun; a constellation of vital phenomena—
organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
Sonja dozes off with the dictionary open on her lap. The sleep isn’t real, isn’t slumber, only a fitfulness exacerbated by
the comedown from amphetamines. Dehydration, exhaustion, poor nutrition, a depletion of serotonin. She knows the
symptoms but can’t explain them in her dreams.

Sonja wakes up to an amphetamine hangover: headache, dry mouth, accelerated heart rate. She goes out for a smoke,
pulling a white filtered Marlboro from the pack. She received a carton as largesse from a warlord’s wife, whose child she
delivered. A few deep inhalations, the carbon soaking into her capillaries. Cancer is not a concern. Akhmed walks out a
few minutes later, his hands wrapped around a cup of tea.
“I overheard you on the satellite phone earlier,” he says. “You were speaking English.”
“A Scottish friend of mine. He said Chechnya was in the British news today.” Sonja smiles. “Al-Qaeda has come to our
mountains. Now the West pays attention.”
“How is it you know someone from Scotland?”
“I went to medical school in London. I stayed for six years.”
“In London.” Akhmed seems impressed. “And you came back?”
Sonja nods. “I had left my sister here. She was sixteen when I left. I spoke to her on the day the army crossed the border
but couldn’t reach her after that. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. It was like she had been disappeared. But she
hadn’t. I was the one who had disappeared. So I came back.”
“Family is a good thing, an important thing to come back to.”
“She wasn’t here when I returned.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She reappeared, eventually.”
“She’s one of the lucky ones.”
“Was,” Sonja corrects him.
An army convoy rumbles over the asphalt, personnel carriers and armored trucks. Ten minutes later an elderly woman
passes down the street in the opposite direction. She pushes a cart of tin scraps, pausing every few meters to massage
her wrists. Sonja lights another cigarette, gives it to Akhmed.
“Tolstoy once traveled here,” Akhmed says. “He wrote a book about us.”
“What did he have to say?”
Akhmed shrugs. “I don’t know. I never read it.”
“I don’t even think about it ending.”
Akhmed shrugs again. “When Tolstoy came to the Caucasus, the war was already fifty years old.”
“It won’t end.”
“Let me tell you a story,” Akhmed says, flourishing his cigarette like a baton. “It is more beautiful than anything Tolstoy
ever wrote because it is true. It is a story about an imam and a mosque.”

When Akhmed reaches home, Ramzan is waiting.

“Good evening, friend,” he says as Akhmed chains his bicycle to a tree trunk. “It is tragic what happened to Dokka.”
Akhmed nods.
“First Dokka, then his wife. And I’m told that even Havaa has disappeared?”
War did not change Ramzan, Akhmed notices. It merely changed what he traded.
“By soldiers or insurgents?” Akhmed asks.
“Neither. She’s been disappeared by someone else entirely.” Ramzan studies Akhmed, without pretense of friendship.
“Though I hear both are eager to speak with her.”
“Why? She’s only a girl.”
“Who knows.” Ramzan shrugs. “Perhaps she saw something, heard something, or they just think she did. It doesn’t
matter why.”
Ramzan muses, pulls a Marlboro from his pocket, and lights it against the wind. “I heard you walked out of town with her
the other morning.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Ramzan warns, but Akhmed is already walking away. He locks the door behind him and goes to the
bedroom. He kisses his wife on the cheek, and she stirs but sleeps on. From his coat pocket he takes a hypodermic
syringe and a bottle of morphine, stolen from the hospital trauma unit, and places them under the bed.

The morning after Sonja hit her sister, she made excessive noise while brewing tea. She banged pots into each other,
dropped one pan then another. She wanted to make sure Natasha was awake before she knocked.
“Natasha,” Sonja called quietly through the cracked door. “You must wake up.”
Natasha’s face had swollen overnight, a patch of deep purple stitched to her cheekbone. She didn’t meet Sonja’s eyes.
“You must come to the hospital,” Sonja said. “There is a little open wound by your eye, and this flat has enough dust to
infect a paper cut.”
“I am not afraid of dust.”
“You should be.”
Natasha glared. For a moment Sonja worried Natasha would invoke the past. The brothels, the pimps, the beatings. And
to be struck by her own sister. Was Sonja no better? She dismissed the question as soon as she asked it. There was no
question. She returned from London, leaving a second-year residency, a Scottish fiancé, and a land unbroken by war. She
left that all to return to her sister. And why? She dismissed the question. Because blood is thicker than water, and guilt is
thickest of all.
“Fine,” Natasha said. “Let’s go.”
At the hospital Sonja dressed the wound with antiseptic ointment. She softly rubbed the cream across the flesh, blowing
it dry. That was her apology. A few patients waited for treatment, but nothing urgent. A case of the common cold. A
sprained ankle. Sonja had heard no gunfire, no explosions all morning. It was a good day. She decided to take Natasha on
a brief tour of the hospital. They walked through the ghost wards, the empty hallways and deserted laboratories. “This
was once one of the foremost oncology departments in the entire USSR,” Sonja said as they passed through rooms
stripped of all purpose and function. “Party officials from as far away as Vladivostok came for treatment.” They paused at
a hulking MRI machine. “It is a shame we can’t use this, but it requires too much electricity. Our generator would shut
off, or at least shut off the lights, if we tried to scan.” The tour ended at the maternity ward. A woman had given birth the
previous night. Her child was born with a collapsed lung, but the doctor on call acted quickly and the child lived. The
mother held the infant to her breast. She beamed as Natasha and Sonja approached.
“She will live,” the mother said, shaking her head with disbelief. She looked at Natasha, taking her for a nurse. “I’m so
glad you are here.”
Natasha glanced at Sonja. “I am just walking through.”
“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You save lives.”
Natasha smiled. The baby finished suckling and looked upward.
“Do you want to hold her?” the mother asked.
“No.”
“Nonsense,” the mother said. “Of course you want to hold her.”
“I must go, but you stay here,” Sonja whispered as Natasha took the infant in her arms. “There is a common cold in need
of my urgent attention.”

After she was broken, the handlers sold Natasha to a brothel just outside Kosovo, which catered to the UN peacekeeping
forces stationed nearby. Breaking—the hypodermic of heroin, the gang rape, the auction block.
A month passed, and an Albanian purchased her with three others, took them south through the cinder-block city of
Tirana, then across the Adriatic by speedboat. Natasha’s passport traveled with her, but never in her possession. It was
her deed, carried by whoever owed her. She was sold three more times, but certain things remained constant. Each
morning she was injected with heroin. By afternoon she was itching. By evening she was willing to perform as required to
ensure a shot later that night. She knew: she would be killed if she fled, she would be arrested if she went to the police,
she would be found by Sulim’s cousin if she went home. She did not know where she was, what language was spoken,
where to get money, how to get her passport back, how to get home.
It felt like autumn, but maybe it was spring. She once saw ancient ruins, great stone pillars, walls without roofs. Days
passed without distinction. Time was marked not by minutes but by men. Eight one night, eleven the next. Each felt like
a porcupine between her legs. Men from Rome, Naples, and Palermo. Men from Scotland, Luxembourg, and Germany.
American men. Australian men. They called her Natasha, and she didn’t understand how they knew her name. Then
another woman told her: That’s what any girl from Eastern Europe is called. We’re all Natashas. An average day consisted
of ten men, three cheeseburgers, four glasses of tap water, and two shots. A toothbrush, no toothpaste. Weeks without
tasting fresh air. The repatriated women had been right. Modern-day slavery, but there was nothing modern about it.
The days passed, but they were all nights. The fifteenth floor of an apartment high-rise, locked doors and windows. Eight
Natashas in total. Four bunk beds crammed into the bedroom. Fucked on a king-sized bed, falling asleep on a lower
bunk. One Natasha died. Seven Natashas left. A new Natasha arrived to fill in the eighth bunk. They were all
interchangeable. All replaceable and all disposable. The pimp was Russian, said his brother had lost his legs in the siege
of Grozny. The belt around the bicep, the two taps on the syringe, the blood pulled into the barrel, the push of the
plunger, the moment of peace. The threat of being beaten with electrical wires. The meals from Burger King and KFC, the
slices of pizza. The junkie dreams crowding into daylight.

Three women fight over a loaf of bread found lying on the street. Before any of them can reach the loaf, they are clawing
at each other’s hair, drawing blood and screaming imprecations. One of the women slips through, sprinting to the bread.
She lifts the loaf, triggering the land mine beneath it. She loses her arms and dies of blood loss on the way to the
hospital. The two other women still bring her in.
“It’s like they think we are magicians,” Sonja tells Akhmed. They share a cigarette in the evening air.
“Medical miracles are the only miracles most of us will ever see.” He strokes his beard as he speaks, a nervous tic that
gives him the appearance of a man in great thought and trouble.
“Did you have the beard between the wars?”
Akhmed shakes his head.
Darkness shrouds the distant rubble, the fields where buildings once stood. The hospital generator produces the only
electricity for miles, and the two doctors stand in the island of floodlight. Sonja looks at her fingers. Calluses, bitten nails.
She blushes and drops them, but Akhmed catches her hands in his own.
“These belong to a lumberjack,” he laughs. “Big, strong woodsman hands.”
His hands are warm. She doesn’t know what the morning will bring.
His hands move to her forearms. He has a delicate touch, a surgeon’s sensitivity and patience.
“I keep thinking in Latin,” she says. “The names of bones. Radius. Ulna.”
“This is your arm,” Akhmed says. “This is your shoulder.” He touches her chin, her cheeks. “And lips,” he says and leans to
her. “Our lips.”
A moment and she pulls away. She understands transgressions of the flesh. A kiss, a falling embrace, these are not
transgressions. Akhmed has a wife, but touch that does not cause pain is a small violation.
Later that night when Sonja returns to the waiting room the girl says, “You disappeared.”
“But I came back.”
They eat energy bars, drink lukewarm tea. The girl has developed a taste for the chocolate flavor. Sonja wipes the crumbs
from the girl’s cheeks, tells her to brush her teeth. They go to the trauma ward to sleep. All but one hospital cot is still
wet with the blood of the day. Sonja pulls the curtain around the cot, and the girl doesn’t see what surrounds her.
“We must share a bed tonight, okay?”
The girl nods, takes off her shoes, and climbs in. The sheets feel clean against Sonja’s skin. The girl wraps her arms
around Sonja’s neck.
“I forgot your name,” Sonja says, not a question but a point of fact.
“I’m Havaa.”
“Havaa. That name is nice.” They lie together on the cot, Sonja’s breaths shallower than the girl’s. She thinks of Akhmed.
“I want to go home.”
“A home is nothing more than the place you sleep.”
This quiets the girl for a moment. Then she speaks again. “I’m not tired. Tell me a story.”
Sonja yawns, tries to think of a story that will give the girl pleasant dreams.
“This is a story of an imam and a mosque,” she begins.

Ramzan again approaches Akhmed as he chains his bicycle to the tree trunk. Again he questions Akhmed, and again
Akhmed claims ignorance.
Ramzan shakes his head. “You disappoint me, friend. I know you took the girl away. You’re a doctor, think logically. You
have a sick wife to think about. Your silence is reckless.”
“I don’t have anything to tell you.”
“We’re in the wilderness,” Ramzan says, patting the trunk with his gloved hand. “A wilderness without Moses, without
prophets or angels to guide us. We are a forest at the edge of the earth. But you don’t see this. You only see this
particular tree.”
“A forest is what,” asks Akhmed, “if not a collection of particular trees?”
Later that night Akhmed lies awake beside his wife as the wind carries the murmur of approaching trucks. He’s fully
dressed. He’s prepared. When the trucks pull up to his house, he has already loaded the syringe with enough morphine
to stop the heart of a healthy man. Some men are cannibals and some are angels, he thinks, but most are merely men.
His wife remains asleep, unaware of any reality beyond her dreams. He takes the time to disinfect her forearm before
piercing the skin. A sigh as the drug hits her bloodstream, her eyelids flashing open, her heart rate slowing to silence. The
men outside pound on the front door, but the sound of fists on wood reveals neither ethnicity nor allegiance. Akhmed
puts a small bandage on the pulseless vein, then draws his palm across her face, closing her eyes. The pounding against
the door grows louder as the men outside switch from fists to feet. There’s innocence in the world, Akhmed believes,
and it is possessed not only by the young and naive. When the men break through the door, Akhmed is on his knees. He
prays for his wife, that Allah may welcome her in paradise. He prays for Havaa, that she might live to have a natural
death. But when the men start beating him, when they throw him into the back of the waiting truck, Akhmed prays only
for himself.

Natasha went with Sonja to the hospital each morning. She worked in the maternity ward. The head of pediatrics gladly
put her to work. She fed newborns and disinfected instruments. She scrubbed bedpans, washed sheets. When a birth
coincided with a bombing, the nurses all rushed to the trauma ward, and Natasha alone assisted the doctor with the
delivery. She slept less and began keeping the same schedule as Sonja. During downtime, Sonja dropped by the
maternity ward and always found Natasha busy. She could not sit still, could not not be working. When she completed
everything asked of her, she asked to do more. Sonja didn’t know if Natasha could bear children, if she could ever again
let a man touch her. But she could do this, Sonja thought, peeking through the door as Natasha hushed a newborn to
sleep. The infant in her arms would learn to live in this world, and so too would Natasha. Sonja believed this, and she
shut the door and returned to the trauma ward.
Two days later Sonja was smoking a cigarette outside when a shell crashed into the hospital’s east wing. A whistle in the
afternoon air, then the detonation. She ran inside as others ran out. The ceiling fixtures went dark. Blue light flashing
from fire alarms. No fires, only water spreading across the floor. She ran. She slipped and fell. She ran. Nurses wheeled
the bedridden into the hallways, toward the emergency exits. The hopeless cases were left to die. A passing doctor
grabbed Sonja by the collar, tried to drag her with him. “We’re under attack,” he cried. She shook him off and kept
running. She ran against the water, against the bewildered infirm.
In the maternity ward she stumbled over the rubble. Water pipes had turned to cataracts. Cotton ball islands and sheet
gauze archipelagoes floated across the flood. Daylight fell through the open walls. Sonja dropped to her knees. She felt
through the water. A piece of brick. Broken cinder. When she had returned from London, she did everything she could;
she met with officers in both army and insurgency; she asked in Russian and Chechen where is and do you know and how
can I.
Later, Sonja stands over her sister’s body in the trauma ward. On Natasha’s cheek a hint of bruising remains.

The Italian vice police shut down the brothel, arresting everyone who spoke Russian, as if a common language made
them complicit. Natasha spent a week in jail on prostitution and indecency charges before being transferred to a clinic
specializing in victims of human trafficking.
The woman psychiatrist sat behind a desk and spoke Russian in a lilting Italian accent. Her syllables seemed in danger of
fluttering away. The questions she asked sounded simple but could not be answered.
“What happened?”
“How did you get here?”
“Are you okay?”
Natasha tried to respond but kept stumbling over her words.
“It’s fine. Everything is fine,” the Italian woman said. “Just start at the beginning.”
“The beginning?” Natasha laughed. There was no beginning. “My sister won a scholarship to study in London, and
everyone was so fucking proud of her.”

Within two months Natasha had finished her program of methadone maintenance treatment. She still took Ribavirin
antiviral, still needed it for another thirty-six weeks to wipe out the hepatitis-C. She hadn’t opened the envelope
containing the results of the HIV test. Her request for refugee status was denied. The only refugees from the conflict
given amnesty had names like Nurbiika, Nurishat, and Nazha, not Natasha. She was ethnic Russian, and even though she
had never been north of the Chechen border, though the land shelled by the Red Army belonged to her as much as
Nurbiika, Nurishat, and Nazha, she was not the war’s refugee. The psychiatrist said she would speak with the
immigration officials and would give a strong recommendation for amnesty, but in the end all she could secure for
Natasha was a six-month supply of Ribavirin.
On the way to the airport, Natasha clutched her passport. She didn’t let go of it when asked by the customs official. Her
arm stretched across the kiosk, her fingers pinching the corner of the passport as the official stamped and scanned the
document. She had no luggage. The planes looked like big metal birds. Graceful creatures incapable of harm. She had
never been on a plane, never seen a plane that did not drop bombs.
A voice came over the intercom in a language she didn’t understand. The cabin doors shut and the plane taxied to the
runway, the hum of the turbines going to a growl. The landscape smeared across the window, then liftoff. She watched
the ground. The plane gained altitude, and the men on the streets below shrank to pinpricks, then they were gone
altogether. She exhaled. The earth fell away. She was free.

On Friday Sonja spends the day in surgery and doesn’t see Akhmed. She has only one surgery on Saturday, none on
Sunday, but she does not see him. On Monday she asks one of the nurses.
“I heard he disappeared, was disappeared.” the nurse says. “Three men came to his house on Thursday night.”
Sonja nods and turns away. She does not need to hear the rest, whether the three men were soldiers or insurgents, what
they wanted, what they would do.

That evening Sonja sees the girl curled up on the sofa. Sonja holds her palm to the girl’s forehead, her index and middle
fingers to the girl’s wrist.
“Am I sick?” the girl asks.
“No. You are in perfect health.” And after she says the words, it seems like a small miracle. A person with perfect health,
a body physically capable of living. “I have an idea,” Sonja says. “You said that pillow is lumpy, didn’t you?”
The girl nods.
An hour later they are walking to Sonja’s flat. Block after block, the only change is the location of craters, the dispersion
of brick. Sonja tries to remember what the street used to look like. She gives up after a block. This is what it is. Scorch
marks fanned out across the concrete. Clouds gathered on the horizon. Her hand. The girl’s hand. This is what it is.
Sonja unlocks the door. “I have not been here in a few months,” she says.
They eat dinner before the sun goes down, potatoes boiled over the furnace. Later, Sonja shows the girl down the hall by
candlelight. She opens the door to Natasha’s room and gestures to the bed. “This is where you sleep.”

A story circulated throughout the city during the war. Somewhere in the city center, a mosque remained standing. No
one knew with certainty the name of the mosque, the name of the street or neighborhood. The siege had remapped the
city, obliterating all prior designations. Months of continual shelling had leveled the rest of the block, but the mosque
remained standing. Ruins all around. But still standing, four untouched spires and a turquoise dome. Each morning the
imam stood at the entrance and sang the call to prayer. Some said the hand of God shielded the mosque. Sonja knew the
story was apocryphal, but even after the city’s last mosque collapsed, she continued to tell it.