A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



25





THE TUESDAY NATASHA departed had been the third warmest December day in living memory. Sonja’s coat still hung on the coat stand, where she had left it earlier that morning, after raising the window sash to test the air. The illness Natasha had claimed, when Sonja tapped on her door with fingers still warm from their reach into sunshine, was, in fact, withdrawal. Ever since Maali had fallen with the fourth-floor storage room, Natasha had numbed herself with pinches of heroin. Not counting the first dose, stolen from the syringe intended for Maali’s forearm, she only snorted the powder. No more than once or twice a month for the first year, infrequent enough for her to believe, with some justification, that she was in charge of the heroin rather than the other way around. But then there was the time she delivered three stillborns in one week, the time the winter freeze slid right into the third week of May, the time an ache crept its way into her left ankle and stayed for months, the time she woke feeling as rotten as sunken squash and twice as ugly. The world must have grown crueler, because soon she was finding reasons to snort on a daily basis. Maali’s fall, Sonja believed, was the cause of her malaise, as if Natasha had been tethered to the nurse, as if her regression could be so neatly explained. Even as Natasha broke her standards faster than she could lower them, one was immutable: she would never use a needle again. So late the previous night, when she had found herself planting a syringe in that familiar place between her toes, she had promised herself she would leave the next day. To her great surprise, she woke in the morning. To her greater surprise, she kept her promise.

She made her bed, cleaned her room as best she could, and packed what she needed in Sonja’s black Samsonite. Before leaving she sat at the kitchen table her father had built for them himself from ash wood. It was a rickety thing, with nails that kept falling out and matchbooks under two of the table legs, a table the poorhouse would refuse, but one she had eaten from her entire life because spilled tea and tetanus wouldn’t kill anyone as fast as a pride-wounded father. She tried to draft a note to Sonja but all alphabets failed her. What could she say? Wouldn’t any excuse read like an insult to the sister that had, she could now acknowledge, given up a decent life in London for her? No, better to say nothing for now. She would get word to Sonja from the camps, when she had gone too far to turn back. Had she known the heartache her wordless departure was to cause, she would have written down the sentence pounding in her head: Thank you, Sonja.

She marched down the service road away from the city, toward the border, on the trodden path of some fifty thousand previous refugees. Where would she go from the camps? Turkey, Armenia, or Azerbaijan most likely, but she would rather go to China or Hawaii, a country where no one could speak Chechen or Russian. She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency. The wet leaves paving the service road caught in the suitcase’s wheels. Such a warm day, but she was cold. By sunset she had walked only the eleven kilometers to Eldár.

The last time she passed through Eldár had been in the bed of a canvas-canopied truck with five women. She hadn’t known its name then. The service road widened into the trunk of the village road, from which unnamed side streets branched into the shadows. Even if the overhanging electrical lines carried a current, no streetlamps stood to light those crevices. She came to a porch where two women knitted and gossiped in the warm air and she asked for a room. They nodded down the road.

A third of the houses were ruined by fire or explosions, or even by the former occupants themselves, who, like farmers sowing their fields with salt, believed destruction to be the final act of ownership. Portraits hung eerily from electrical poles and doors, their faces staring blankly at her. She asked an elderly man for a room and he directed her farther down the road to a house with a green door where a man named Dokka kept beds for refugees traveling toward the border.

The man named Dokka opened the front door with his foot. He regarded her suspiciously, and she worried her skin, paler since September, revealed her ethnicity. But then his hesitation burst into a firework of recognition. “Natasha!” he exclaimed, opening his arms in welcome. Attached to them were two hideous, fingerless hands. She stepped back. He knew her name, but they had never met. Those things at the ends of his wrists wouldn’t have slipped her mind.

He asked if she remembered him.

“I’m sorry. How would I?’

He laughed, loud and brightly, while she stared at his hands. Those, at the very least, were no laughing matter. “I met you seven years ago in the maternity ward of Hospital No. 6. I’ll never forget you, not for the rest of my life. I am Dokka. You delivered my daughter, Havaa.”

She repeated the name, but couldn’t match it to the several hundred newborns in her memory. Behind him stood a little girl with almond-brown hair, green eyes, and ten fingers, all there. Natasha began to ask about the refugee beds, but Dokka cut her off. “Come inside. You can stay as long as you’d like.”

The rooms themselves appeared amputated at waist height; nothing stood out of a child’s reach. Dokka, politely declining her offers of assistance, used his hands like forceps as he bustled around the kitchen. He pinched a matchstick between his teeth, struck it against the wall, and spat it into the open stove. Over four years he had brewed tea for perhaps two thousand refugees, but there had been no pot he wanted to taste finer than this one. Again she offered help, but he had brewed tea for two thousand without faltering, and only needed her help drinking it.

“You’re going to the refugee camps?” he asked. She nodded. She’d heard stories of overcrowded camps, where a single spigot left running would supply water for three thousand souls, but the blessing of rumor was its boundlessness, and she could disbelieve what she wanted. Despite all that had happened, Sonja’s description of London lured her. She wanted to live there.

“You shouldn’t be traveling alone. There are soldiers and bandits, often the same people. You should travel in a group with at least one man.”

She couldn’t help smiling. “I’ve done that before. It didn’t work out.”

“And you’re ethnic Russian? No, no, no.” After a moment Dokka gave a knowing nod to the empty seat beside Natasha. “Before you leave, we will think of something.”

When the girl returned a half hour later with a treasure trove of pinecones, bird feathers, and dried leaves divided by color, her father, in a tone of familiar exasperation, asked her to remove her muddy boots. She carefully placed her findings on the kitchen table and followed them into the bedroom. She still hadn’t said a word to Natasha. Standing before the open closet, Dokka explained that his wife had died that spring. He missed her greatly, not least because her passing had left the household with only one pair of functioning hands, still too small and weak to chop firewood, but he had a closet full of her clothes, which the moths would feast upon before Havaa could grow into them, so she should, he said while walking out, in short, have at it. As she undressed she turned to hide her burn scars, but the girl had seen worse and studied her without judgment or disgust. Without a mirror, she had to ask the girl’s opinion of each dress. The girl shook her head no, no, no. She had seen her mother in this dress and that dress, each one of which pained her to see worn by a stranger, and she nodded yes only when Natasha put on a maternity dress, the only one in the closet she hadn’t seen her mother wear.

After dinner, Dokka gave her a clean bedsheet and showed her to the room that had been his daughter’s. In the world beyond were two thousand and eighteen souls who had slept in that room, and remembered that room, and would harbor it in their thoughts for no fewer than ninety-nine years, when a little girl that Havaa had once watched sleep, the last living of the two thousand, closed her eyes for the last time.

Havaa lay on the bottom bunk of the bed beside Natasha’s, and, propped on her elbows, peering into Natasha’s upside-down eyes, asked to see Natasha’s hands. “You still have yours,” she said, bending Natasha’s fingers.

“I intend to keep them.”

“My mother kept hers and she still died.”

“They usually don’t play much of a role in that.”

The girl wasn’t so certain. “My father said your hands were the first to hold me.” She had stopped flexing Natasha’s fingers and was now holding them, squeezing them, firm.

“I helped your mother give birth. I made sure she was clean and comfortable. When you popped out, I made sure you were, too.”

“I saw baby rabbits once,” the girl said proudly. “Did I look like that?”

“No, not at all. You were beautiful.”

A grimace crowded the girl’s face. “I wanted to look weird.”

“You did look weird,” Natasha said, a beat too quickly.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Your legs were growing out of your shoulders, arms came out of your knees, and you were breathing out of your bottom. I had to fix everything. I missed lunch that day because of you.”

The girl beamed above her. “Are you going to help children in the camps?”

“It’s been a long day. Let’s talk about that tomorrow.”

The girl snuffed out the lamp and thin, tapering smoke unwound from the wick, drifting into Natasha’s yawn. She could count the bed slats through the limp mattress. The heavy blankets, gray, coarse enough to clean a skillet, smelled of every body they had ever warmed. Where was her sister right now? And was she asking the same question? There would be time for guilt, for second guesses, for turning back, but this was the time for rest, and as she slipped into sleep, a sleep so deeply peaceful not even the long fingers of dreams would reach her, she heard the girl say, “I’m glad you have yours. Otherwise I would have fallen.”

At breakfast Dokka urged her to stay for another night or two. Another group of refugees might pass through, one she might join. It was wisdom a child might summon, but coming from him, from his kindness and hospitality, she decided to stay, even though she was only a dozen kilometers from home. The girl hid her smile behind a spoonful of kasha. Havaa wanted to show her the forest, and after washing their dishes they returned to the bedroom to dress.

“Do you want to see my souvenir collection before we go?” Havaa asked. “I have a collection of all the people who’ve stayed here.”

She opened the drawer before Natasha could suggest they see it when not dressed in enough layers to roast themselves alive. There was a pressed flower head, plucked from Ukrainian soil twenty-two years earlier, the only entry in an otherwise empty journal. Three brass buttons that had fastened the blazer of a thrice bankrupted businessman, who, in Hoboken, New Jersey, had already put in the paperwork to open the collection agency that would make him a millionaire in eight years’ time. A key ring with two keys that opened the front door to a house that no longer existed.

“You have to give me something before you go,” the girl said.

“I’ll give you the teeth from my mouth if we can just go outside now. There is a wetland forming in my underwear. I can feel tadpoles.”

Taking her by the hand, the girl led Natasha through the undergrowth until the forest forgot the service road and the birch trunks blocked out the village chimneys. The loose soil felt odd under her boots. When was the last time she’d lost the texture of asphalt, concrete, or linoleum beneath her toes? When she hiked over the border with five woman whose names she still didn’t know. This was nicer.

In piles of wet, rotting leaves they found maggots and larvae and crustaceous creatures, which they both agreed were better suited to oceanic depths. They found a mountain range of deer dung scaled and mined by a brigade of red ants. The sun was burning a hole in the middle of the sky, and Natasha was wondering if Dokka’s hands were capable of making siskal for lunch, when the girl stopped suddenly. “What’s wrong?” Natasha asked.

The girl nodded to a parting, twenty meters away, where two lengths of aquamarine lay like misplaced strips of sky. As they edged forward, Natasha saw the aquamarine didn’t belong to the sky, but rather to the legs of straw-stuffed blue trousers.

“A scarecrow?” Natasha asked. A faded Red Army–issue shirt languished above the trousers. Nine soldiers had lived and died in that shirt. The scarecrow, drunk, judging from its borrowed birch-trunk backbone, had been decapitated. Nailed to the tree, where the head should have been, was a moss-devoured board.

“No,” the girl said. “It’s Akim.”

“Who’s Akim?”

Too young to explain in words, the girl’s face was old enough to show the loss that was that name. Natasha, not understanding what this meant, was briefly annoyed, believing it profligate to expend pity on a scarecrow when there were more deserving life forms, but of all people, who was she to judge how a girl disburses her empathy. She wrapped her arm around Havaa. The whole of the girl’s bony shoulder fit in the cup of her palm, and the girl reached up and held on to her fingers. If Akim could have seen the two of them, he would have taunted them for weeks.


After dinner that evening they were joined by a man, tall, slender, and bearded, in whose presence Dokka grew aloof. His name was Akhmed. He asked about the hospital, showing particular interest in the hiring process. The hospital hadn’t adhered to those formalities since before she arrived—she had never even taken a first-aid course, she confided—and if he still wanted to work there Sofia Andreyevna Rabina would surely hire him. The brilliance building behind his eyes faded when she added that no hospital employee had received a salary in many years. And then he asked a peculiar question: had she ever used dental floss for stitches? Natasha was questioning his sanity when he described a rebel field commander who, two years earlier, had arrived in the village with his chest held together by dental floss. That would be Sonja, Natasha said, she could stitch a lion to the back of a wildebeest. He had never seen finer stitching of any other material, much less dental floss, and could vividly recall the twenty-three stitches curving along the crescent wound, which the commander had called the grin on his chest, and the memory had haunted him, reminding him of the unexpected wonders a capable mind might conceive. Natasha wholeheartedly agreed, and encouraged his misconception that Sonja worked miracles, not from malice, but from a budding pride that stretched all eleven kilometers home.

Dokka didn’t say a word to Akhmed, not even in greeting or farewell, and when the man left, Natasha asked if he had come invited.

“He comes once a week,” Dokka explained. “Usually when travelers are staying. He likes talking to people, getting news from the outside.

And he helps with the tasks Havaa’s hands are too small to perform. Chopping firewood and the like.”

“But you don’t care for him?”

Dokka gave a sad smile. “He was my closest friend once. It pains me that I can’t decline his assistance.”

In the bedroom, Natasha undressed under the girl’s inquisitive stare. “Did they take you to the Landfill, too?”

“No,” Natasha said.

“Then why are there marks on your shoulders?”

Instinctively she reached back and covered the knotted scars. Some three dozen stippled her left shoulder and neck, and had Sergey not switched to nicotine gum, there would have been some three dozen more. “It’s nothing,” she said, quick to throw on a nightdress. “I fell asleep in the sun once. I couldn’t sleep on my back for months after. Just a reminder of my foolish younger self.” After she brushed her teeth, she asked, “Did the scarecrow walk into the woods by itself?”

“I helped him,” the girl boasted.

“He must have been heavy.”

“It took me three days. I dragged him along the road and hid him each night so no one would take him.”

“Why?” Natasha asked.

“For Akim.”

“You mentioned him earlier. Who is he?”

“No one really.”

“Is he like an imaginary friend? My sister and I, when we were children, we pretended we had an imaginary sister.”

“No!” the girl said, horrified by the suggestion. “Akim’s not imaginary.”

“I’m sorry, I was just asking.”

“You’re mean.” Natasha felt like she had stepped into a foreign country whose customs and manners she didn’t comprehend, where her gestures of concern were taken as affronts. The Samsonite was still unzipped from when she had retrieved her wool sleeping socks, and through the opening she saw the black fake fur hat of the Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker. Without pausing to consider the thousands of kilometers the souvenir had already traveled, or that she might need this totem to draw strength in the uncertain days, she pulled the toy from the suitcase and presented it to the girl in appeasement.

“Here,” she said. “A souvenir.”

The nutcracker was as wide as the girl’s hand and twice as long. As she studied it, her curiosity consumed her anger. “Who is this?” she asked.

What was the name they had given this little wooden man that never laughed? She lay back, more afraid of losing the name than the nutcracker itself, but there it was, years since she last spoke it and it was right there.

“Alu,” she said.


Five nights and the refugees Dokka promised still hadn’t come; on the morning of the sixth day, she announced she was leaving. After breakfast Dokka asked her to join him in the bedroom. Six ribbons looped around the six dresser drawer knobs, and Dokka fit his wrist into the first, opening a drawer that contained jewelry, foreign coins, wristwatches, and billfolds, a more extravagant version of his daughter’s collection. “Right there,” he said. “You see the red bandanna? Take it.”

The bandanna wrapped around an L-shaped object. Its weight substantiated her fear the moment she lifted it.

“It’s a Makarov semiautomatic pistol,” he said. “You simply unlatch the safety, point at the target, and shoot.”

But for the beige handgrip, the gun was silver; a passing cloud dulled its luster. She had seen guns on television and at the bazaar, in the hands of rebels, soldiers, and gangsters, pointed at her in City Park and the Breaking Grounds, but she had never stood on this side of the barrel before.

“I’m just as likely to shoot off my own head as anyone I aim at,” Natasha said. She didn’t want the gun and told him as much, but he insisted, saying Comrade Makarov would keep her safe on those dangerous roads. “Do you arm all your guests?” she asked with a smile.

“You’re our first.”

“Why?”

“After I lost my fingers, I thought Havaa should learn to shoot. But when I think about her shooting at the Feds, and what would come after that … She knows to run. It’s better if we don’t have the gun.”

“But why give it to me?”

“Because I want to protect the person who gave me Havaa.” She could think of no refutation. He insisted she keep it on her person, and it pressed against her left breast as she hugged Havaa good-bye. The girl clung to Natasha’s fingers, and Natasha shook them both away, with gratitude, and hurried into the cool daylight before their affirmations of goodwill crippled her. Her boot heels bit into her ankles but she wouldn’t stop to slip on extra socks before she had traveled far enough from Dokka’s house to preclude the possibility of returning. The wood, brick, and cinderblock dwellings grew smaller as she reached the village’s southern end. A stubble of dead grass filled the ungrazed fields. The forest closed around the road. Hanging from a tree was a final portrait, a woman with long, dark hair and an aquiline nose, whom Natasha recognized but couldn’t identify. Of all the village portraits, this was the most detailed and closely observed. In the center of the otherwise serene portrait, the woman’s lips opened, just a centimeter, revealing no more than a sliver of her tongue, the forty-second portrait, if Natasha were to count, the only one whose subject opened her mouth in speech or sigh, a word spoken and heard for eternity, or an expression of longing, though whether it belonged to the woman or the artist, Natasha couldn’t say. She stared at the portrait for several minutes before understanding, belatedly, why the woman looked so familiar. Perhaps those chestnut-sized eyes recognized her. Natasha was, after all, wearing the woman’s maternity dress.

She made it twenty kilometers by the time the sun set. She had hoped to come to a village where she might enjoy a morsel of Dokka’s hospitality, but the scavenged remains of logging encampments were the only signs of prior habitation. All else was woodland. She went deep enough into the trees that not even the glimmer of a campfire could be seen from the road. Recalling the lessons of the City Park Prophet, she built a fire from dried branches and dead leaves. Dokka had given her a G-4 humanitarian aid ration: three cans of evaporated milk and one tin of processed meat. The Feds who doled out the G-series aid claimed it was enough food to support a man of average height and build for three days, thus corroborating her long-held suspicion that everyone in Russia was either a midget or a f*cking idiot. She cut the evaporated milk with canteen water, shaking the concoction until it came out in glossy, fire-soaked dribbles that beaded the canteen lip like golden roe. When it came time to sleep, she extinguished the flames and, as the City Park Prophet had taught her, spread her sleeping bag across the charred ground so it would pleasantly toast her backside as she drifted away.

The next day she hiked ten or twenty or forty kilometers. The following day, maybe more, maybe less. A thousand times she considered turning back but the huff of every cloud in Chechnya was no bleaker than another afternoon in the hospital corridor, fighting the ten steps to the canteen cupboard. And my god, the Samsonite suitcase, why had she thought this was a good idea? Gravel and dirt caught in the wheels as it slowed from a rolling suitcase to a dragging suitcase to an anvil with a retractable handle. What sort of lunatic shows up to a refugee camp with a Samsonite? She packed so much emotional energy into that suitcase she had none left to consider what she had done to Sonja.

Each day the mountains grew taller. Filtration points and checkpoints abounded, most manned by young soldiers too timid to investigate movement in the woods. But on the evening of the fourth day, carrying on her shoulders all twenty-eight weary kilometers, Natasha came to a filtration point larger and better lit than the others. The chain-link fence, crowned with razor wire and stretching along the pasture and into the woods, prevented the usual circumnavigation. Had she arrived at the checkpoint when the sun warmed her bones, she might have turned back and taken the connecting road she had passed two hours earlier. Had it been summer, and the ground hadn’t needed to be warmed and dried by fire, she might have bedded in the woods and waited for the morning to illuminate her options. But it was neither earlier that day nor earlier that year. It was night; it was cold; her bones hated her; she just wanted to get to the other side, warm the ground, and sleep and sleep and sleep. Besides, she was a refugee destined for a refugee camp, and in her exhaustion she believed the soldiers would honor the international law guaranteeing her safe passage.

A halo of floodlight surrounded her; whether it guided or followed her, she couldn’t say. A bullhorn demanded she keep her hands in plain sight. Fatigue and haste had clouded her judgment, and only now, as she walked in that brilliant circle with one arm raised, the other pulling the suitcase, did she begin to worry. She’d imagined that homesick boys a year out of school would man the filtration point as they had the others. But when she saw the prison tattoos on their hands, when the bespectacled official frowned at the fifty-ruble note she presented in lieu of a passport, she saw her mistake beyond all doubt. These were kontraktniki, and this was the front line rather than a checkpoint. The Makarov weighed more every second it went undiscovered. The men found her sanitary napkins suspicious enough to inspect, yet hadn’t searched her. They gathered around her portable alarm clock like uncomprehending tribesmen. All the while the gun grew heavier on her breast.

She drew her mind to the Rome women’s clinic, which, despite every aspersion she had cast at it, was in memory another term for rescue. Her blood had been drawn and filtered through a vending machine that flickered with red and yellow numbers. She had tested positive for a half dozen sexually transmitted diseases, all of which sounded like geometry terms. In group, listening to the confessions of women who missed their pimps, who were terrified of what their families would say, who didn’t sleep for fear of waking up in the brothel, she had nodded in recognition. Strangers from Poland and Turkey and Siberia had spoken with her breath. Her hope of rescue had taken so long to die. It had survived the Breaking Grounds, Kosovo, the beatings, rapes, and heroin. It had survived longer than denial and indignation, longer than three of her teeth. It had survived until the day a john’s wallet had fallen from his trousers, opening on the floor. The transparent plastic sleeve had held a portrait of a boy and girl dressed in matching sweaters and smiling uncomfortably. She had begged him, a father, a family man, to rescue her. But he had just looked at her as if she’d asked him to staple feathers to her arms. When her turn had come, she told the other women and they had looked at her and nodded.

But rescue was another country, and she didn’t know if she would make it there. The soldiers kept unpacking and unfolding, unraveling and unwrapping, while on her chest the Makarov grew to a Kalashnikov, then a Katyusha rocket launcher. The soldiers were ripping the wheels from her suitcase and still hadn’t touched her. As she tightened her headscarf, she finally understood. The soldiers thought she was a traditional Chechen woman.

An older officer, fragranced with enough aftershave to inebriate lesser men, emerged from the camouflaged outhouse that constituted the checkpoint office. Golden stars glimmered from his epaulets. A double-headed-eagle perched on his tie clip. His hair parted above his left ear and was plastered across his balding crown. Nothing escaped his wide blue eyes. The soldiers addressed him as colonel.

“I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said, in round-bodied Russian. “You will be on your way shortly.”

He spoke a hushed order to the soldiers. She had no reason to doubt him when the soldiers obligingly began to fold her clothes and tie her suitcase back together with twine.

“This way,” the colonel said. Guiding her by the arm as a gentleman might, he walked her toward the forest. “You need to sign a few pieces of paperwork before we can let you through. Unfortunately, it’s located at an outpost a half kilometer west of us.”

She didn’t know at which step the truth crystallized in her mind, whether it was the fifth step or the sixth, the eighth or eighteenth, but long before they reached the woods she knew what this man would do to her. The colonel, a man who blamed the wars on the fact that his first wife once lived here, still hadn’t decided.

The whole way the colonel spoke in the honeyed, empathetic tone of one every bit as frustrated by bureaucracy as she was, who would, of course, let so sweet a refugee pass through unhindered were such a decision his to make. He didn’t slur his words. His arm held her so gently she wanted to believe they really were walking toward an outpost in the middle of a forest filled with paperwork. Every so often, he smacked his bubblegum.

When they reached the edge of the woods, he told her to stop. The light of the filtration point shone in his eyes, but they were beyond even that questionable society. He untied her headscarf and slithered his fingers through her hair. His first wife had been the first of five. Each one met the others after her divorce and with each other they pieced their lives together. His five wives would be bridesmaids at each other’s second weddings. Their children by second husbands would be christened together, and much later, two of their thirty-nine grandchildren would join in a marriage that would not end in divorce. The friendship of his ex-wives was the one decent thing the colonel had created in his forty-seven years.

“Take off your clothes,” the colonel instructed wearily, as if this were one more duty the bureaucrats asked of him.

“No,” she said. She had never denied a man like that. Her mouth had gone dry and her whole body hummed as she said it again. “No.”

“Take them off,” the colonel repeated.

“No.”

The back of his hand crossed her cheek with a violent crack. He massaged his knuckles. Had he been angry or lustful, she might have surrendered, but his face revealed no emotion, nothing to suggest either of them was human. In four brothels she had met every shape of desperation God had given testicles, and the only men she couldn’t forget were those who needed to impart pain rather than receive pleasure. The colonel’s backhand burned against her cheek. Beneath that cemented hair, the colonel was every man in the Mediterranean she still remembered.

“Okay,” she said. “I will.” Even her surrender didn’t stoke a flicker in his eyes. She reached for her coat buttons. A marching band had taken residence in her chest. Her veins vibrated. She unbuttoned her overcoat but would not then, or ever, shrug it off. It took all her strength to lift the Makarov from her inner coat pocket. Her palm held the burden of battalions, the mass of a hundred thousand lost limbs, and her hand didn’t tremble. She unlatched the safety and aimed the pistol at the bridge of his nose. Judging from the colonel’s expression, she might have been aiming a pastry. He smiled. Had she not walked through all of Hell’s flames, she might have believed she could forfeit her dignity. But she knew better, and then he knew she knew better, and her glare crushed the air between them and in it was, for him, finally, the understanding that he would never return from here.

“I—” he began, and she squeezed the trigger without hesitating. More than anger or fear or hate, she felt a deep disappointment in the colonel for speaking. He should have known words wouldn’t lead them from the woods. She was a poor shot. Though she aimed at the man’s forehead, the bullet raked the left side of his skull. His ear yanked off as if held by wet clay. Mucus ran from his nose and melted into sweat, blood, tears, and whatever else pasted the moonlight to his skin. He shrieked, and she smiled at the great bellows he had hidden in his chest. His pain broke the register of adult expression, exiting his lips in the high-pitched and familiar wail of an infant. She knelt beside him. She leaned to his face. His screams rose in bursts of hot steam from his lips. So this is what it’s like. This is just how much you can make a person feel. She didn’t know she was the deepest wish come true of five women a half continent away. She pressed the pistol to his temple and stared into the wide wound of his eyes with the righteousness of one rendering a service to a stranger. She was patient. He stared at her and she waited until the terror of what was to come dissolved the stones of his eyes. Blood gurgled from the opening that had been his ear, but his hair, parted just above it, was unmoved.

“You’ll have to walk into the forest alone,” she said. He thrashed his arms before three squeezes of the trigger forever stilled them. A silence followed. She closed her eyes. Her hands finally began to tremble.

Then sprinting footsteps, shouts of colonel, parabolas of torchlight scanning the ground. The bare branches gestured welcomingly. She could flee, but how long would she last? A few hours? A day or two at most until tracking dogs pulled her scent by the lungful from the Samsonite and found her? No, she was done hiding, done bargaining. She had known that from the moment she reached for the pistol. To live with dignity meant a premature death. One of the roving circles of torchlight caught the fingers of the colonel’s outstretched arm. A few minutes later another flashlight fell upon them, and this time Natasha and the colonel were not overlooked. The shouts of shahidka, shahidka, made her smile. She stood firm, steadying herself against an oak tree, and managed to fire twice more before a machine-gun round opened her stomach and dropped her to her knees. It was supposed to hurt, but this much? The first-time mothers said it hurt more than they had ever imagined. And was it worth it, she would ask. Oh yes, they would say. Oh yes. The torchlight fell upon her again. The second bullet put a hole in her chest, and she felt her breath leave, but neither the third, nor fourth, nor fifth, nor sixth, nor seventh, nor eighth, nor ninth, nor tenth, nor eleventh, nor twelfth, nor thirteenth, nor fourteenth, nor fifteenth, nor sixteenth, nor seventeenth was seen, or felt, or heard.