Natasha called to Sonja, asking for pain relief. The young man was incoherent, addressing his mother in a jar of cotton swabs. Across the room, the surgical saw paused, but Sonja didn’t look up from the half-severed arm. “You’ll have to get it yourself,” she said calmly. Given her history with the drug, Natasha never prepared or administered the heroin. Dreams of bent spoon handles persisted, and five years clean she was still afraid a cigarette lighter could reheat her cravings. But she peeled off the latex gloves and jogged to the canteen. Now wasn’t the time for caution, not with that boy on her hospital bed. In the cupboard, behind an armory of evaporated milk, she found it. It compacted in her grip, filling the corners of the plastic bag. Alu’s brother had claimed there wasn’t enough talc in the bag to powder a baby’s bottom. The Italian junk Sergey had shot into her had contained enough to service a nursery, and even that had laid electric lines where her veins had been. But this? Ninety-eight percent pure? She spat in the sink; she was salivating. You can control your reactions. You can control your reactions, she repeated. It took two minutes to cook. She only had to take one syringe to the trauma ward, but for the twenty-meter walk, when she was alone with it, she felt vastly outnumbered.
When it came time to treat the commanding officers, the last packets of surgical thread had already disappeared into the limbs of their subordinates. The field commander, the last to receive medical attention, lay on Sonja’s cot. The blood of his command soaked the sheets, and when his bare shoulders touched it, he sighed. Between his beard and his eyes, a slim band of soil-colored skin suggested many months of sunshine and malnutrition. Natasha watched while her sister treated him. A long, semicircular gash split his left pectoral. “My chest is grinning at me,” he observed.
Sonja flooded the wound with saline and iodine. With forceps she pinched through the gash for shrapnel fragments. It had begun to clot, but wouldn’t heal without stitches. The rebels looked on with reverent interest.
“We have a problem,” Sonja said. The commander nodded to the ceiling. “We need to get you stitched up, but we’re out of surgical thread. We simply don’t have the supplies on hand to treat so many field injuries.”
“He can have mine,” murmured a thin man, whose beard was half shaven to accommodate thirteen stitches on his left cheek. A chorus of offers followed. Even those without a single stitch vociferously pledged their surgical thread.
“It isn’t sanitary,” Sonja said with a finality that ended debate. None appeared too disappointed that his offer was declined. “Don’t you have field medical kits? Anything we can sterilize and sew into you?”
A junior officer appeared with a small green bag. Natasha sifted through it while Sonja held a compress to the wound. She pulled out a pink toothbrush with a fan of gray bristles, a small bottle of nonalcoholic mouthwash, a tube of fluoride whitening paste, five tubes of toothpaste, on which the five daily prayers were written in black marker, and three rolls of unwaxed dental floss.
“The floss,” Sonja said. “It might work.”
The field commander grimaced as the alcohol-wetted floss followed the needle through his skin. He refused the offer of pain relief. Natasha admired his abstinence.
“Have dentists begun enlisting?” she asked as Sonja slipped the needle in a fifth time. If he refused anesthetic, she could at least offer the distraction of conversation.
“No, it was a captain’s private supply.”
“Did he have fine teeth?”
“Yes,” the field commander said. His open mouth revealed a more relaxed philosophy toward dental hygiene. “They were beautiful, beautiful things. He brushed five times a day, always before prayer, as if performing an ablution on his mouth.”
“Was he conscious of his health in general?”
“Not really. He smoked no fewer than two packs a day.”
“He sounds like a strange man.”
“You get that way. In the first war I fought with a man who went through a roll of antacids every day.”
“That can cause an electrolyte disturbance: hypercalcemia. Stones, bones, moans, groans, thrones, and psychiatric overtones. That’s the mnemonic,” Natasha said, and repeated psychiatric overtones to herself. She wondered if Maali had a taste for antacids.
“I doubt it matters. He’s very dead now. Besides, we ate nothing but buckwheat kasha. No, he took antacids as a calcium supplement. He was terrified of osteoporosis.”
She nearly laughed. “How old was he?”
“Twenty-two.”
“You are all insane.”
The field commander winced as Sonja pulled the stitches tight. “It just becomes easy to convince yourself that caring for a small part of your body will act to protect the rest. As though Allah wouldn’t be cruel enough to steal the life from a man with perfect teeth.”
“Did it work?”
“We left his mouth open when we buried him so that in Paradise he can flaunt his teeth to the angels.”
The rebels spent the night in the ghost ward. None snored; even in sleep they were wary. In the morning they pointed the hospital beds of their wounded comrades toward Mecca. Natasha ladled a dense pulp of oats and powdered milk into their bowls. With Sonja and the nurses, she checked the bandaged burns, stitched lacerations, the broken bones splinted between sterilized wooden strips. Only the rebel with the amputated arm would be left behind. The field commander prayed for him, then rooted through the man’s rucksack for anything that might connect him with the insurgency.
“You’re a civilian now,” the field commander said. “Enjoy the peace you have fought for. We’ll take your arm for burial, but must leave you here. If you want to stay, the lady doctor said the position of security guard has recently opened.”
Complying with his insistence to be treated last, Natasha served him the final bowl of oats from the canteen. The surface had cooled to a carapace the field commander tapped twice with his spoon before breaking.
“Where are you going next?”
“South,” the field commander said. “To the mountains.”
“Try to find a doctor or veterinarian before then. If this gets infected, the Feds will be your smallest problem.”
“In our condition we probably won’t make it farther than Eldár today.”
Only two of the field commander’s shirt buttons matched the brown fabric, whose original color would be anyone’s guess. Natasha pulled the shirt past his shoulder and covered the stitches with a fresh bandage. The dental floss had worked. “I was in the mountains once,” she said. “I climbed right across the border.”
“In winter?”
“Spring.”
“The winter will be difficult. We need supply lines. Good middlemen. Maybe we’ll find someone in Eldár. You’re not looking for a new profession, are you?”
As his contribution to the hospital, the field commander left the bag of toothpaste. He stood stiffly by the door as his command shuffled out. Alone, he turned to the sisters.
“Thank you,” he said, bowing slightly. “You are kind, decent, and if I can risk impertinence, quite attractive. There must be some Chechen in you.”
“I have a favor to ask,” Sonja said. “Would you write us a letter of safe passage, so we can, should we need to, travel through rebel land?”