He never again tried to coerce Ula into health. It would end. Everything did. But when he emptied the bedpan in the backyard, or brushed her teeth despite her protestations, the afterglow of resentment still smoldered. She was gone but still there, the phantom of the wife the war had amputated from him, and unable to properly mourn or love her, he cared for and begrudged her. And so the previous day, when he had offered to work at the hospital until other accommodations could be found for Havaa, he had hoped Sonja would agree for his sake as much as the girl’s. That morning, when he left Ula alone with four glasses of water and a bowl of lukewarm rice on the nightstand, he double-locked the door and entered the dawn chill with the confidence that Havaa’s future meant more than his wife’s, and he trudged eleven kilometers through a broken obligation that only a child’s life could justify.
When he folded the last sheet he ducked beneath the clotheslines and opened the cupboard. His trousers lay folded on the bottom shelf. Along the left leg inseam he found a familiar bulge in the stitching. If he were to die away from home, he hoped a kinder soul than Deshi would find him.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to Grozny,” Sonja announced as she strode through the canteen doorway, stopping at the counter to inspect the scalpels he’d boiled.
“Did Deshi tell you that?” he asked, unable to mask the panic building behind his eyes. “I was only kidding. Of course I’d use the plane ticket to go somewhere else. Tbilisi, even Istanbul.”
“You boiled these for ten minutes?”
“You’re joking, right?”
She gestured toward him with the scalpel blade, a little too casually for Akhmed’s comfort. “About ten minutes in boiling water? I’ve never been more serious.”
“No, about Grozny.”
“Did you or did you not boil these for ten minutes?”
“Yes, but are we going to Grozny?”
She frowned, seeming to think he was the one talking in circles. “You don’t get to ask any more questions,” she said. “A question mark in your mouth is a dangerous weapon.”
“So are we?”
She gave a defeated sigh. “Yes.”
“Why?”
She pulled a cigarette lighter from her pocket. “Do you smoke?”
“I am an excellent cigarette smoker.” It had been seven weeks since his most recent cigarette, and two months more since the one before that, and technically those had been papirosi, capped with a filterless cardboard tube and jammed with coarse tobacco that left him violently nauseous for the rest of the day.
Perhaps inspired by his earlier display of professionalism, she waited until they reached the parking lot before lighting up. She passed him the square pack. He knew the Latin alphabet, but hadn’t used it in years. “Duh …”
“Dunhill,” she said.
He selected one from the two erect rows and leaned it into Sonja’s lighter. The first drag slid into his lungs without the paint-scraper harshness of his two most recent cigarettes, and he stared at the slowly burning ember, admiring the quality of the tobacco and the quality of the flame, pleasantly surprised that he didn’t feel ill. “Where did you get these?” he asked.
“Grozny.”
“We’re going there to get cigarettes?”
She smiled. “I can’t believe you’d really use that plane ticket to go there.”
“I’ve never been.”
“It’s something else.”
“So why are we going?”
Farther down the street the side of a building had crushed all the cars in a parking lot. He was thirty-nine years old and had hoped to own a car by this age.
“I go once a month to pick up supplies,” Sonja said. “Not just cigarettes. About everything in the hospital comes through a man I know in Grozny with connections to the outside. I also call a friend of mine who lives in London and updates me on what’s been going on in the world.”
“What’s happening out there?” he asked. By now the wider world was no more than a rumor, a mirage beginning at the borders. Thirty-two years earlier, in the rancid air of his primary school — built on a block bookended by a sewage treatment facility and a lumberjack brothel — his geography teacher had expected him to believe that the world was the same shape as a soccer ball. He had been the first of his classmates to accept it, not because he knew anything about gravity, but because the air was more nauseating than usual that afternoon, and he wanted to leave. For the rest of her career that geography teacher would pride herself on being the first to recognize Akhmed’s aptitude for the sciences.
“Last month he told me that George Bush had been reelected,” Sonja said.
“Who’s that?”
“The American president,” Sonja said, looking away.
“I thought Ronald McDonald was president.”
“You can’t be serious.” There it was again, condescension thick enough to spread with a butter knife. His mother was the only other woman to have spoken to him like that, and only when he was a child — and only when he wouldn’t eat his cucumbers.
“Wasn’t it Ronald McDonald who told Gorbachev to tear down the wall?”
“You’re thinking of Ronald Reagan.”
“English names all sound the same.”
“That was fifteen years ago.”
“So? Brezhnev was General Secretary for eighteen.”
“It doesn’t work like that over there,” she explained. “They have elections every few years. If the president doesn’t win, someone else becomes president.”
“That’s ridiculous.” The wind lifted the ash from his cigarette and scattered it across the empty parking lot.
“And you can only be president for ten years,” she added.
“And then what? You become prime minister for a bit and then run for president again?”
“I think you just step down.”
“You mean Ronald just stepped down after ten years?” he asked. She had to be putting him on.
“He just stepped down and George Bush became president.”
“And then George Bush shot Ronald Reagan to prevent him seizing power?”
“No,” she said. “I think they were friends.”
“Friends?” he asked. “It makes me wonder how we lost the Cold War.”
“Good point.”
“And so George Bush has been president since Ronald Reagan?”
“There was another guy in there. Clinton.”
“The philanderer. I remember him,” he said, pleased. “And then George Bush became president again?”
“No, the George Bush who is president now is the first George Bush’s son.”
“Ah, so that’s why they don’t shoot the previous president. They’re all related. Like the Romanovs.”
“Something like that,” she said distractedly.