“Do you remember who I am?” he asked, but she had already fallen asleep.
“You know how those things were invented?” Sonja asked with a nod to the stethoscope the girl was using to listen to her own heartbeat. “It was invented by a French physician who had a very fat patient. The patient was so fat that the French physician couldn’t hear the heartbeat through his chest. So he invented a stethoscope.”
“That’s weird,” the girl said, shifting the bell like an indecisive chess piece. “I’ve never seen a fat person before.”
“Never?”
“Never. But in my souvenirs I have the autograph of a man who used to be fat.”
The girl noted her heart rate on the chart Sonja had given her. Overcome by an inexplicable interest in medicine, the girl, draped in a lab coat that swished against the linoleum, had been following Sonja since dinner. It took the better part of an hour before Sonja realized the girl was imitating her. Her raw exasperation softened to a more delicate displeasure when the girl began scolding the air for carrying contagions. Poor child, she thought, let’s hope she finds a better role model.
The girl held the stethoscope bell like a microphone and, while kicking a drooping tail of bedsheet, began interviewing Sonja. “What’s it like being a surgeon?” she asked.
“Wonderful. Next question.”
“Why don’t you have kids?”
“They ask too many questions.”
“Who did you bribe to get into medical school?”
“Surprisingly, no one at all.”
“And are you the only woman surgeon in the world?”
“It feels like it.”
“What’s your favorite disease?”
“Chlamydia.”
“If they let you become a surgeon instead of a wife, would they let me become an arborist instead of a wife?”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“You know.”
“Tell me.”
The girl’s face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger than the weakest boy, and with those ideas crowding your head no wonder subordination was the only inevitable outcome. She sat on the hospital bed beside the girl, remembering what it was like to have that face, and pitying it. “Listen, Havaa,” she said, summoning as much generosity as she could muster at this hour of night, “you can be exactly the person you want to be, okay? It may not seem that way, but things change when you get a little older. If you work hard, and give up certain things, and yes, resort to bribery now and then, you’ll be an arborist, or a sea anemonist, or anything else you want.”
And they kept talking, passing the stethoscope bell back and forth.
“Do you have any questions for me?” the girl asked at the end of the interview.
Since Akhmed had left that evening, Sonja had held the question as she would a long-awaited letter, terrified of what the envelope contained. “Did a Russian woman ever stay at your house?”
“Which one? Lots of people stayed with us.”
“Her name was Natasha.”
“Probably thirty Natashas at least.”
“She looked like me.”
Havaa gave her an appraising look. “Then no.”
“Like me only beautiful.”
The girl tilted her head. “I can’t imagine that.”
And it struck her. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? Akhmed’s sketch. She was upright and out of the room before Havaa could ask where she was going. Why had she asked him to take the portrait? Where would he have put it? She climbed to the fourth floor and worked her way back to her room, checking the new and old maternity wards, the land-mine man’s room, the empty administrative offices, the waiting room. While searching, her mind flashed to the day she had purchased the Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker. True to form it had endured flights across Europe, every bump of the Samsonite, and even the shame of Alu’s name, without once breaking composure.
She had found the nutcracker in a convenience store sticky with the residue of spilled soda, where she stopped for cough drops before attending a lecture. It was four weeks to Christmas. The first war wouldn’t officially begin for twelve more days. She had bought it without once thinking of Natasha, on a whim, because Buckingham Palace was what foreigners thought of when they thought of London and she, Sonja with a j, was nothing if not foreign. Gray clouds lined the horizon as she climbed the escalator at Holborn and crossed Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the Royal College of Surgeons. There, at a neurosurgery lecture, she transcribed the snaking syntax of British academia in a bright pink notebook she had found in a fifty-pence bin. 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 and cough drop, she strolled through the museum’s curious exhibitions. There was a display detailing the history of non-Egyptian mummification. An alcove devoted to the tibia. One room exhibited the 1,474 skulls collected by nineteenth-century physician Joseph Barnard Davis. A fractured skull of a Roman woman found at Pompeii. The skulls of nine Chinese pirates hanged in Ningpo. Congolese from Leopold’s rubber plantations. But the skull that haunted her was that of a Bengali cannibal. Fully intact, the mandible still locked against the temporal, the twenty-two bones that constitute a 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 the supraorbital ridge and temporal lines, as well as the overall size and solidity of the skull, she knew it belonged to a man. The skull appeared no different from those of the Chinese pirates, the Congolese plantation workers. She read the placard written a century and a half earlier by a Victorian phrenologist. There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man.
That morbid association between the cannibal and the nutcracker, one which she never mentioned to Natasha, was all she thought of while searching for the portrait. She finally found the notebook on the canteen counter, beneath a stack of folded linens. From the last page Natasha observed her calmly, through eyes unclouded by judgment or resentment, her hair held back with a headband she had never owned, her ears heavy with earrings that didn’t exist. Clearly Akhmed hadn’t met her.
Her footsteps, slowing to a processional as she neared her room, tapped like the last drops falling from a stopped faucet. She wanted to know and didn’t want to know; the two were always there, always tearing at her, a tug-of-war in which she was the rope. But that was okay, she told herself. The truth was one more rumor passed along the refugee lines, another hallucination she could freely disbelieve. When she entered the room the girl was already asleep. She slid the portrait into one of the drawers, thankful to postpone the answer for one more night.