A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



12





TALL, SWAN-LIKE, AND four years her sister’s junior, Natasha stood in the spotlight of her family’s affection. In his daybreak voice, cold from seven hours without the heat of a cigarette, her father would offer her good-morning first, even if she entered the kitchen two paces behind Sonja. Her mother treated her with the pride and envy of a woman who had fallen in love with sixteen boys in secondary school, none of whom reciprocated her affection. “My Natasha,” she would say, running her fingers through the girl’s long brown hair with a possessiveness suggesting the strands were an extension of her own. Natasha’s eyes were brown spattered with glimmers of emerald and uncut diamond. Hazel, technically. Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label. Natasha’s elevated station in the family left in her only the slightest scratches of arrogance. Better than anyone, she knew she had done nothing to deserve the beauty she was blessed with. Their parents’ plain features, replicated predictably in Sonja, had reacted violently in Natasha to create something as surprising as a dove hatching from a pigeon egg.

Within the variations of beige composing the corridors of State Secondary School No. 28, the spotlight of attention expanded. As an ethnic Russian she belonged to the national minority that ran the republic. Her ethnic status propelled her into the elite echelons of adolescent popularity, where a personality cult had arisen around her, fueled by the adoration of obsequious underclassmen. In Moscow, Gorbachev’s reforms barreled the Soviet Union toward the precipice, but in a far-flung city in a farther-flung republic, the old rules still applied. Ethnic Russians controlled all major positions of power, from headwaiters to heads of government, and the two-hundred-year history of imperial order reiterated itself within State Secondary School No. 28. With magnanimity, Natasha accepted her rank. She wasn’t nearly as vicious as the girls who, in florid Cyrillic on the inner flap of their homework planners, graded boys on a twelve-point scale. Nor did she hold herself above the roiling sea of lunchroom gossip by pushing others under. Years earlier, when she was still young enough to need a good-night kiss, her father would plant his chapped lips on her cheek and, in a whisper of sweet tobacco, say, “Sweet dreams, my sweet tsarina.” Even after she outgrew good-night kisses, she liked to imagine herself as the long-lost grandchild of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, and acted in a manner befitting a wise and humble monarch.

It was this—her ethnicity as a Russian, the stalwart minority defending the borders of Western civilization from the barbaric Muhammadans—that let her slip through her adolescent years with freedoms her Chechen classmates didn’t enjoy. She could harbor lascivious thoughts of Ivan Yakov—a man her sister would revive three times in the second war—who was far more handsome than any literature teacher had a right to be. She could shave her legs without worrying if a prudish deity would smite those parallel beams of smooth skin. Overnight, it seemed, electrical lines were laid in her veins as she realized that the awkward, self-conscious boys around her were growing into men. The complications of puberty weren’t further complicated by culture or religion. Only when comparing herself to her classmates, many of whom were subject to arranged marriages, did she come to understand that in Chechnya gravity pressed upon women with heavier hands. Her Russianness exempted her from its grip, and so yes, often she floated.


Though Russian, she’d never been north of the Chechen border. Her parents had been born in 1930s Moscow and had grown up in communal flats four blocks away from each other. They took the same buses, attended the same primary school, spoke an accent flavored by the same fog, ate eggs laid by the same chickens, watched the same setting sun impale itself on the bronze spire of the Central Pavilion of the All-Russia Exhibition Center. They each lost relatives to Stalin’s purges. NKVD agents wearing uniforms the blue of a cloudless summer sky would stride into the apartment block past midnight, and the next morning residents would strain their tea without mentioning the scream-pierced night. Her parents blamed Stalin personally for the purges, and Natasha’s state-approved history text confirmed that Stalin, and only Stalin, bore responsibility. But the terrible past of nighttime disappearances was locked within the pages of that history book; she never imagined she would one day disappear as easily as her forefathers.

In 1946 news spread of the deportation of Chechens and the need for ethnic Russians to resettle the empty republic. Her father was fourteen when he last drank a glass of rusty Moscow tap water. Her mother, eight. Trains carried them over the war-sickened land. They arrived in Grozny and stayed two weeks in a drafty university auditorium, sleeping on bleachers before receiving a residency assignment to Volchansk. They journeyed to the city by the same bus, two days apart. Natasha’s mother and father each felt so lonesome in this silent country. They didn’t believe they would ever find someone who had seen what they had seen, felt what they had felt. Twenty-one years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, they waited beside each other in a bread line. Their small talk surged to revelation. Neither could believe they had shared the same primary school, tap water, and sunset from adjacent apartment blocks. Neither imagined they would someday share two daughters: one beautiful, the other brilliant.


Though she was the elder, Sonja was always thought of as Natasha’s sister, the object rather than subject of any sentence the two shared. She walked alone down the school corridors, head sternly bent toward the stack of books in her arms. To Natasha she was the Π-letter volume of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia: wide and filled with knowledge no normal person would ever need. On weekend nights, when Natasha returned from the cinema or discotheque, she would find a thin bar of light glowing beneath the door of her sister’s room, and if she put her ear against the closed door, she would hear the whisper of a page turned every forty-five seconds. She believed Sonja to be a genius in the classical mold: a single great streak of lightning in an otherwise muddled sky. In all likelihood, Sonja had more academic journal subscriptions than friends. She could explain advanced calculus to her fifth-form algebra teacher but couldn’t tell a joke to a boy at lunch. Even in the summer months, she had the complexion of someone who spent too much time in a cellar.

Everyone knew Sonja was destined for great things, but no one knew what to do with her until then. Even in academia, her natural habitat, she was an exotic species. Though her Russianness gave her certain dispensations, the idea that a young woman of any ethnicity could so excel in the hard sciences was a far-fetched fantasy. Their parents encouraged her at a distance. Neither understood the molecular formulas, electromagnetic fields, or anatomical minutiae that so captivated her, and so their support came by way of well-intentioned, inadequate generalities. Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja’s gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable. Natasha was beautiful and charming. They didn’t need MDs to know how to be proud of her.

Sometimes, while struggling to earn average marks, Natasha thought herself the only person in Volchansk who understood and envied Sonja for the wonder she was. Her existence was so narrow, her energies so focused, she lived like a nail driving through the surface of daily routines and disappointments. When, in May 1989, Natasha needed to receive a three on her final chemistry exam to graduate from secondary school, she forced herself to ask Sonja for help. They sat at the kitchen table. Sonja opened the textbook and frowned at the landscape of unhighlighted text. She didn’t comment, didn’t put her sister down in any way, but simply said, “Let’s start at page one.” Natasha would always remember that.

She passed the exam, but she wasn’t admitted to a single university in Chechnya—probably because she didn’t apply. She wasn’t stupid, not even academically—she received top marks in history class, and at that point knew more English than Sonja—but after nineteen years living next to the searchlight of her sister’s intellect, Natasha felt ready to point her own little torch in a different direction. Instead of a university acceptance letter, she received a secretarial position at the Volchansk office of Grozneft, the Chechen branch of the Soviet Oil and Gas Ministry, working for a leering, bloated man who assured her that fifteen typed words per minute were more than sufficient. Natasha kept the nails of her index fingers filed a half centimeter shorter than the others, and from eight in the morning to five at night she punched out reports on a black-ribboned typewriter. She worked in an office painted the color of cloud cover, but even in the ministry’s somber shades, she felt all the exhilaration and uncertainty of the restructuring world. The Berlin Wall collapsed and soon the Soviet Union began to follow. Autonomous republics fell like pebbles from a crushed boulder. Anesthetically dull oil reports suddenly pulsed with significance. Chechen fields produced a relatively modest thirteen million barrels per year, but most of the region’s oil ran through the republic’s refineries. Ninety percent of Soviet aviation fuel was refined in Chechnya, along with much of the automotive-grade petroleum. With shortsightedness typical of a country whose first step in building an economy was to kill all the economists, the U.S.S.R. had built its energy production infrastructure on the far side of Russia’s borders. When Azerbaijan declared independence, Moscow lost its oil-drilling-equipment assembly. When Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan left, they took extensive oil and natural-gas reserves. The sunken treasure of the Caspian could have lit Moscow for a thousand years, and that too was lost. In the urgent memos crossing her desk, Natasha read estimates of the Caucasus’ total recoverable reserves that varied between twenty-five and a hundred billion barrels, the majority of which resided in the newly independent states, and the only available pipeline to convey Caspian oil from Baku to European markets ran straight through Chechnya. Then, a miracle. She began to enjoy her work. She read records of pipeline efficiency, the crude production rates, reducing the aggregate data into easily digested summaries, and, like an oracle that envisions but cannot intervene, she saw the prosperity of an independent Chechnya.

The ministry offices were housed in a six-story building bordering City Park, and each evening, on her way home, she passed a homeless man whose wispy beard reached his belt line. The man, a resident of the park, was known to most of Volchansk as the City Park Prophet. She gave him a few rubles each evening, and asked, half in jest, that he remember her poor tired feet in his prayers. The City Park Prophet’s eyes would lower in gratitude, and he would promise to remember her when the end came.

She spent her Fridays at a nightclub called Nightclub, situated in what had been an aviation assembly plant. The floor spread across the eight-story hangar, wide enough to contain the gyrations of half of Chechnya. Nightclub never had reached, and never would reach, capacity. After downing drinks at the bar, Natasha and her friends shimmied their way to the center of the hangar. There, red velvet ropes created a ten-square-meter dance floor where the young, well-dressed, and secular could press against each other, shrieking and shaking in epileptic spasms of floodlight, freedom found in the ruins of empire. Natasha lost all elegance when dancing. Her heels hindered movement, but she couldn’t take them off—no matter how often it was swept, loose bolts and rust-resistant rivets appeared on the floor, gently throbbing with the bass—so she listed. The majority of her dance moves consisted of attempts to stay upright. And one Friday night, in March 1991, with her hair, heels, and three-shot tilt no different from the previous dozen Fridays, she wobbled into Sulim’s arms.

His 1990 black BMW convertible had been stolen in Belgium and driven across all of a European winter to reach him. He had three missing teeth—and one so black it was clearly on the way out—because for all his money, he still couldn’t afford a decent dentist. He had the habit of raising his voice at the ends of his sentences, turning declarations into questions, as though when he whispered her name he wasn’t really sure to whom he was talking. He had a bed the size of Natasha’s bedroom, two Soviet pistols, his great-great-grandfather’s kinzhal still brown with the blood of Imperial infantrymen, a short beard that never grew, eleven toes, and a long white curve of scar tissue on his pelvis that, in the seven months they saw each other, Natasha learned to desire and despise in equal measure. He had a cousin in the upper air of the obshchina, the Chechen mob. The cousin, educated at the London School of Economics, a man whose occupation reduced his life expectancy to that of a gulag laborer, had taught Sulim to open new markets with a crowbar. Their first month together was perhaps the happiest of Natasha’s life. The following six, perhaps the most miserable.

The cancer in her mother’s liver metastasized and she spent the last ten weeks of her life in the chlorinated air of Hospital No. 6. Through Sonja’s connections, her father was allowed to spend the nights on the floor beside her bed, cocooned in his olive Red Army sleeping bag. Natasha gave Sulim a key to the flat. She fit her fingers in the furrows between his ribs, thought of them as rungs. The whole world was falling, but here was someone strong enough to hold on to. The two men with whom she’d been intimate previously had treated her like a slight, fragile thing, as if trying to f*ck a Grecian urn. Sulim held her as if unafraid of crushing her kidneys. In her shoulders, he left perfect molds of his imperfect teeth that would turn red in the morning. He asked her to scratch him and her longer nails drew a tiger’s coat on his back. Her body by itself seemed a beautiful but useless instrument. Sulim’s grip on her wrists, his canines gnawing at her clavicle, this pressure in her chest, this flushed flesh.

But Sulim never stayed until morning. At two A.M., he began to yawn. He stood and ran his fingers across his stomach, pinching the skin. He had more money hidden in his mattress than the entire apartment block had in the bank, yet he had the waistline of a pauper. His navel had stretched to the shape of an almond. The waxen light of the corner lamp wrapped around his chest as he turned. His spine curved into a thin ridge when he reached for his socks, and she counted the rises of vertebrae. He wore wide-collared Hawaiian shirts. He fumbled with the spare button, slightly too big for his trousers’ buttonhole. At times it felt like trying to build a meaningful relationship with a tooth fairy. He came at night, leaving behind presents, but always left by two. By the second month, he was leaving at one-thirty. Then one. He shrugged when she demanded to know why he hadn’t introduced her to his family, why he didn’t dance with her at Nightclub, why he dressed her as a mistress rather than a partner. “Because that’s what you are,” he said, and walked out the door.

The state police arrested him in November 1991 for fraud. An informer had linked him to the notorious vosdushniki—“air men,” they were called, for their ability to draw billions of rubles from the air. Using falsified promissory notes, they authenticated bank transfers from an invented company in Chechnya to an invented company in Moscow. Enough paperwork went through for the obshchina men to withdraw the forged transfer in cash from Moscow banks. A bribe from Sulim’s cousin released him from custody within two days, but the government still had enough thump in its baton to force him into hiding. He arrived at Natasha’s flat at five in the afternoon. The living room curtains were drawn open and the smog-filtered sunset bathed his cheeks in ochre. She had never before seen him in natural light. In his left hand he held a blue nylon duffel bag. He explained the situation, drained of the swagger that had so entranced and infuriated her. He couldn’t stay with family or friends, no one with whom he had a known relationship. He would stay here with her. She’d never seen him so in need. For the first time in their relationship, she realized that she had more power than he, and this was all she needed to let him go. He kept glancing to his feet. She would miss his eleventh toe. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You need to leave.”

Her mother passed a few weeks later. Natasha was at work, her sister at school, her father at the dessert counter in the hospital cafeteria. No one was there to see what the dying woman saw, in her final moments, when her uncle, the man who had disappeared when she was no more than twelve centimeters of fetal tissue in her mother’s belly, emerged from the yellow wallpaper and led her the rest of the way. Ten days after the funeral, Natasha’s father took a lorry job in Turkmenistan. On the morning he left, he wore a red sweater with golden diamonds woven across the chest. He had never filled it out, as her mother had predicted he would when she had given it to him five Christmases earlier. He would be wearing that sweater two and a half years later, just north of the border, when a stolen cement mixing truck would slam into his lorry cabin, cutting short his life, his final haul, and his five-week odyssey to return home to his girls.

Natasha went to work but couldn’t pay attention to the reports she copied, collated, and conveyed. She lost her job soon after the declaration of national independence, when all essential oil ministry personnel were transferred to Moscow, her bloated boss included. She drifted, a kelp rope on the tide that washed away her country, family, and future. She made dinner one night, Sonja the next. Having graduated university at the top of her class, Sonja was now in her third year of medical school. She studied while they ate, paying more attention to diseases of the digestive system than to her dinner. Natasha tried to construct conversation with scraps of the day: Did you see the car accident on Lenin Square? What classes did you have today? But Sonja didn’t believe in small talk and answered in monosyllables, a fact Natasha would remember when, sitting at the same table four and three-quarter years later, Sonja tried to convince her of its therapeutic qualities.

In the six months she lived without Sulim, without her mother or father, only one dinner was shot through with enough excitement to make her forget the awful cooking. Just before they were to eat, Sonja returned from the mailbox with a brown manila envelope riddled with international postage, and flung her arms around Natasha, panting and screaming joyous gibberish, with more life in her face than Natasha had thought possible. “London,” Sonja finally said, and the word would remain with Natasha, its six letters stretching to accommodate every conceivable hope. “I’ve been given a full fellowship to finish medical school in London.”

Natasha tried to smile, tried to pretend her tears were of joy rather than dread, but when Sonja threw her arms around her, when they embraced, Natasha held her sister tightly, so scared of letting her go.



Though Natasha had learned to sleep through the screech of tires, the curses, the celebratory gunfire, the explosions, the cries, the laughing, the whole hell of the street below, she stayed awake that night and watched speeding taillights stretch into crimson bars across the asphalt. The young men leaning on the hoods of European cars were gangsters and mercenaries and gamblers. They made dangerous bets with safe foreign currencies, laying on the dash the annual wages men of their education would earn in a lawful society. Some nights they tried to jump the decapitated Lenin statue in the square. That night was a simple drag race. Four cars looped through the city center along a course marked by trash-can fires. Reports of aerial bombing in Grozny had filtered in, leaving the city flushed and agitated. In the morning, she would take the bus to Grozny to meet with Lidiya Nikitova, a shuttle trader who flew through Tbilisi to Hamburg once a week and returned with suitcases packed with Western electronics and clothing. Natasha would fill two duffel bags with clothes, but also Walkmen, Game Boys, satellite phones, portable televisions, and the increasingly popular noise-canceling headphones to sell in the city bazaar. The Feds blocked the border, the airport looked like another shuttered factory along the Baku-Rostov motorway, yet the bazaar was flush with Japanese electronics, Burmese silk, Belgian chocolate, Brazilian liquor, Indian spices, and American currency. Only three cars came past on the next lap. She breathed against the glass of her bedroom window, summoning from the fog a smiling, finger-drawn face. It was November 1994. She hadn’t seen her sister in more than two and a half years. She hadn’t seen her father in more than three. She wondered if it would snow.

News came third-, fourth-, fifth-hand. Fact was indistinguishable from hearsay, so all was believed and all was disbelieved and all were right. Grab as much sovereignty as you can swallow, Yeltsin had urged, and Chechnya had opened its mouth. The president was still named Dzhokhar Dudayev, and he still had a fountain pen–drawn mustache. He was the first Chechen to make general rank in the Red Army and ten years earlier he had served in Afghanistan, where Russian bombs had fallen on Muslim civilians for neither the first nor final time. In bed Natasha listened to his radio address, his voice a lullaby compared to the screech of car tires. The fantastical marked his presidency. The government needed money, and so, after minting its own currency, Estonia sent its entire reserve of Soviet rubles to Grozny rather than to Moscow. The government needed an army, and, the previous year, when the Feds had abandoned their Chechen bases, they had left behind stockpiles of heavy artillery, ammunition, guns, armored jeeps, and more tanks than there were licensed Chechen tank drivers. She set the radio beside her pillow. The drag race had finished. She lowered the volume and rolled toward the black mesh speaker, imagining the voice of revolution to be the whispers of a friend talking her to sleep.

The rumors proved true; in Grozny, bombs fell. On the weekly trips to the capital, she paid attention to the crowds. The density of sidewalk debris ensured they only lifted their eyes at the murmur of planes. The traffic lights went out and policemen, still wearing the blue uniforms of Soviet road police, directed traffic with the tips of their cigarettes. She stood in a clogged avenue and scanned the skies. Only once did she see them fly over. Five planes in tight formation. She craned her neck while all down the avenue commuters left their car doors open as they fled. Five parallel lines of exhaust striped the empty sky. Kilometers above, men who didn’t know her name wanted to kill her. A man in a bright purple suit grabbed her shoulder, shaking her, and asking if she was deaf or stupid or both. Following him down the line of abandoned vehicles, she pushed the driver doors closed, and in this simple act restored order to the world. He took her to the basement of a party supply store. They sat on sacks of inflatable plastic balloons. The man kicked over a box and whoopee cushions, Slinkies, and glasses with fake noses toppled out. “I can’t believe I’m going to die somewhere so stupid,” the man said, and began weeping. She asked how he knew this place. The man held on to his purple lapels. “This suit,” he said, “I’m returning this stupid suit.” He was thirteen years into what would be a forty-eight-year career as a clown; he had an IQ of 167.

When the bombing stopped, she left the sobbing purple-suited man and went to Lidiya Nikitova’s flat. She found Lidiya packing a suitcase on the unmade bed. Natasha expected to find it filled with Prada handbags, Gucci blouses, Ferragamo neckties, but instead found coarse woolen sweaters, baggy sweatpants, gray socks, a photo album. For ten minutes Lidiya shook her head in despair. Natasha worried the poor woman’s head would fall off. “Chechens have family,” Lidiya said, as she pulled out a pair of boots buried beneath a mound of toeless shoes. “They have their teips and their ancestral homes in the highlands to flee to. The barbarians. It’s nearly the millennium and they still live in clans. Even now, in the middle of all this, they don’t believe orphans or vagrants can ever exist because the teip will provide. The barbarians. What do we ethnic Russians have? No teip. Our countrymen are dropping bombs on us. No, back north for me. I’ve never been to Petersburg, but my cousin says it’s much more civilized.” After Lidiya Nikitova left, Natasha spent an hour browsing her apartment. She took a pair of high-heeled leather boots, cashmere sweaters, and silk evening gowns. She wouldn’t have an opportunity to wear them, but beautiful things were so rare it seemed wrong to leave them behind.

Time no longer marched forward. The giant clocks hanging from office buildings began to confuse the minutes for the hours. They displayed June dates in November, August weather forecasts in December. Dudayev changed the national clock in an independence declaration from the imperium of Moscow time. His supporters set their watches an hour back, everyone else remained in the standard zone, and no one knew what time it was. At first, Natasha ate at preplanned points in her day to maintain the illusion of structured time, then only when she was hungry, then only when she had food. The phone lines trembled with static. The debilitated independence government promised at least five hours of daily electricity, but the five hours usually came in the middle of the night. The crumbling infrastructure turned time back farther than any presidential mandate. When had you last lived a day with the starting bell of your alarm clock? With breakfast djepelgesh? With news from Moscow and New York and Beijing beamed on the back of television waves? With the heat of that first cigarette in your throat and the Route 7 bus turning the corner, unfailingly three minutes behind schedule, just like you? With truant children pegging construction crews with snowballs, and the steam curling from the Main Department Store corner, filling your skirt, a convection tingling your thighs? With morning drunks, lining the sidewalks of City Park, switching from liquor to mouthwash? With a midmorning coffee break, sipping Nescafé that has probably a dozen actual beans per kilo, huddling within the yellow fluorescent wash of a bathroom stall, the only place you can be alone? With lunch? With a pause taken from work for the length of an afternoon cigarette? With the soft pinging of five-thirty streetlamps, coming to life as you pass, and the City Park Prophet waiting for you, his beard tucked into his trousers, his hand outstretched and humble, and you with ten rubles to press into his palm? With a home to come home to? With electricity in the wiring as you flick the lights, and heat humming from the radiators, and water in the tap, showerhead, and toilet tank, and voices saying hello and how was your day and shut the f*cking door it’s freezing out there, and you hearing them in your ears rather than your head, they who know your name? With a meal that is actually that, a meal, with family, both of which sustain in ways you will only understand in their absence? With soapsuds coating your forearms, the bubbles blinking out against your fingertips and rinsing away as you pass the plate for your sister to dry? With evening television, your parents on the divan, and you’ve never seen them hold hands, but they kick off their slippers, and on the floor their little toes touch? With your father’s snores turning the hall into an echo chamber you walk through to reach the bathroom, warm enough you don’t think of wrapping yourself in a blanket when you get out of bed? With toothpaste? With your sister’s pencil scratches coming through the shadow-thin plaster walls, the mumble of rote memorization, her nightly prayers to a god you neither know nor comprehend? With your belief that no matter how badly you f*ck up, you will always belong to these people, and that they will never let you disappear?

She went to Sonja’s bookshelf. Extra brackets supported the heavy textbooks, and her index finger brushed past the spines of books too heavy to hold in one hand. How had civilization survived long enough to accumulate the knowledge contained in these books? The slimmer volumes stood on the upper shelf, a yellowed Red Army field manual the most useful of the bunch. Scanning the shelf, she recalled how Sonja always read the last page of a book first, how her sister had to know what would happen, where the story led, to see if it was worth the effort. She didn’t open the torrid romance novels at the end of the shelf. The worn bindings had an intimacy absent from the rest. She imagined Sonja lying in bed, reading melodrama with an ache in her chest she couldn’t quantify or explicate, and thus couldn’t understand. Instead, she took a slender volume entitled Origins of Chechen Civilization: Prehistory to the Fall of the Mongol Empire by Khassan Geshilov.

She read by the slow burn of candlelight. Folklore said God had scattered ethnicities across the earth with a saltshaker; the shaker had slipped from his fingers when he reached the Caucasus, and a few grains of every nation had landed in its valleys. Other origin theories: the Chechens had descended from Scythian hordes, from the daughters of Genghis Khan, from a penal colony established by Alexander the Great, from a lost Roman legion. After finishing the first chapter, she flipped to the dust jacket. According to the three-sentence biography, Khassan Geshilov taught at Volchansk State University and lived in Eldár. This book was the first of a proposed multivolume history of the Chechen lands. In his photo he had clear brown eyes, a thick mustache silvered with gray hair, and a smile suggesting he was thinking of a flaky pastry or a woman’s smooth calves rather than ancient hordes. Until the candle died, she read of ancient invasions: the Scythians in 850 B.C., the Greeks two centuries later, the Romans in the first century B.C., the Baltic Goths in A.D. 240, the Asian Huns in A.D. 370, the Avars, Khazars, Circassians, Mongols, and finally, ultimately, the Russians.

Without electricity or gas, the kitchen became a twilight mausoleum of dead appliances. One day, Natasha had an idea. Wearing latex gloves she found in Sonja’s room, she scrubbed the innards of the oven and refrigerator with steel wool and bleach. She cut a broomstick to the width of the refrigerator compartment, jammed it in below the thermostat control, and pulled out the plastic shelves. In her bedroom, she gathered clothes from the floor in sweeping armfuls and deposited them before the refrigerator and the oven. Ever since she had begun working for the shuttle trader, her wardrobe exceeded her closet space. She hung silk evening dresses and cashmere sweaters on the broomstick bar, set folded jeans and blouses on the oven rack. When finished, she opened the doors to her new closet and bureau and felt pleased with her ingenuity. This is how you will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space.

Smoke turned the days into twelve-hour twilights. In the afternoons, when the chance of aerial bombing was the greatest, she wandered through the suburbs. She thought of her sister often. In their weekly conversations, Sonja described her boyfriend, Brendan, a Slavic Studies PhD candidate from Scotland, whose Russian was worse than Sonja’s English. She described the international dormitory, which housed students from thirty-four different countries, none of whom tried to kill each other. She described pubs and monuments, black taxies that looked like bowler hats on wheels, a massive obelisk supporting the statue of a tiny man in Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace guards who wouldn’t shoot her even if she openly mocked them, supermarkets with entire aisles devoted to breakfast cereal and salespeople who actually seemed pleased by the presence of customers. That first year, for the first time, the sisters had become friends. We are all the other has, Natasha had thought, but she knew Sonja had so much more. Sonja promised to find a way to bring her to London, promised to plead her case with the university, the Home Office, the goddamn queen, but nothing came of it, and Natasha wanted to flee but couldn’t, didn’t know how to, had heard horror stories of what happened to lone women refugees, and so their conversations grew shorter as civil society disintegrated. Teenagers with stolen firearms replaced policemen on the streets. Hand grenades cost less than jars of Nescafé at the bazaar. She didn’t want to hear about the scones, and decided Sonja didn’t want to feel guilty for eating them.

Days passed without speaking, then weeks. The telephone lines went weak from electrical shortages, but the central telecommunications exchange hadn’t been hit. Natasha left the phone off the hook for days and the soft throb of the dial tone became the voice of stability in her solitude. When she wanted to speak with her sister, she went to the bookshelf instead. She read Origins of Chechen Civilization twice in one month, focusing on the last pages of each chapter, where the ancient invasions ended. After she wrung from Khassan Geshilov’s words all the consolation she could, she returned the book to the top shelf, beside the romance novels, and kneeling on the floor, tugged at the largest reference book. A massive thing, a dining room table’s worth of pulped wood. The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians. She rested the book on her thighs and its weight soon put her legs to sleep. The four thousand eight hundred and eighty-four translucent pages held the most arcane and useless information. The names of buried blood vessels in Latin, Russian, and the official languages of the fourteen Soviet republics. The weight ranges of internal organs: 117 to 170 grams per kidney, 1.4 to 1.6 kilograms for a liver, 250 to 350 grams for a heart. She flipped through the book and found answers to questions no sane person would ever ask. The definition of a foot. The average length of a femur. Nothing for insanity by grief, or insanity by loneliness, or insanity by reading reference books. What inoculation could the eight-point font provide for the whisper of Sukhois in the sky? Based on the average life expectancy of a Soviet woman, she could expect to live for another forty-eight years, but the Soviet Union had died, and she hadn’t, and the appendices couldn’t explain this discrepancy in data, when the subject outlasted its experiment. Only one entry supplied an adequate definition, and she circled it with red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

If she stood on the stool in the southwestern kitchen corner and pointed the radio antenna due south, she could occasionally pick up Russian-language news broadcasts from Nazran or Tbilisi. From there, she gleaned what information she could from the outside world. Porous enough to allow luxury cars, American cigarettes, and Russian firearms, the borders remained too dense for objective journalism. A Georgian accent raised the newscaster’s Russian by half an octave and from that lilting, disembodied tenor she learned that Yeltsin had an eight percent approval rating and an election eighteen months away. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the primary opposition party, denounced him for losing the vast territories of the former Soviet Union. She understood precisely that this wounded pride would lead to punishment, would lead a crippled country to start a war to prove itself more powerful. On December 9, 1994, Yeltsin issued a statement ordering the Federal army to execute the disarmament of all illegal armed units in Chechnya, or, as they were known locally, the government. On December 10, 1994, he went to a hospital for a nose operation. On December 11, 1994, upon hearing reports that the first of the forty thousand troops amassed at the northern border had crossed the Terek River, she realized that the war had only just begun.

On the evening of December 11, 1994, when Natasha returned the receiver to its cradle, and the ringer burst into a tinny tremble, she let it ring for twenty seconds before lifting the receiver to her ear. “Hello,” she said. “Finally, finally, finally,” Sonja cried. “I’ve been calling you for days, weeks, all afternoon.”