He helped her into a nightgown, pulled the covers to her chin, and lay beside her. “Any visitors today?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I was waiting for your father, but he never came.”
So much of his marriage was a disappointment — childlessness, ailing health — but they were blessings, now, in the end, when he had to let go. Yet he’d grown to depend on the act of longing. He performed his nightly ablutions and prayed, but the ritual was empty, mechanized, and he recited the words as he would a recipe. The pearl of faith had dissolved, and at its core was a sand grain of doubt, and he held on to it, knowing that doubt, like longing, could sustain him.
Later that night the wind carried the low rumble of approaching trucks. He was fully dressed, wearing thick wool socks and his fifty-eight-year-old coat, because wherever they took him would be cold. By the time the trucks pulled up to his house, he’d already loaded the syringe with enough heroin to stop the heart of a healthy man. Her long, slow breaths filled the room. He took the time to disinfect her skin. Outside, truck doors slammed shut. Praise Allah for her hallucinations. Without them he wouldn’t have the strength to push the plunger and forever numb that precious vein. But she was convinced that his ten-years-dead father had visited her this week, so even when her eyelids flashed open, and a bleary, misapprehending plea poured forth, he looked away, because a woman who spoke with ghosts was nearly one herself and would forgive him for taking her the rest of the way.
Her breaths slowed. Her eyes drifted to the left, to whatever came next. He held her hand. It stayed warm. Once, three months after their wedding, he had held that hand through two kilometers of sunshowers that had left them drenched and shining and purified to each other. He closed her eyes. He put a small bandage on the pulseless vein. This was it. God could ask no more of him. The fists of the security forces pounded at the front door. The manila envelope containing the two letters of safe passage lay on the floor, beside the bound pages of Khassan’s letter to Havaa. Would she ever read it? Would she ever know her father made furniture from his book boxes? The pounding grew to splintering. The underside of a corpse was the only place the security forces wouldn’t look, and he slid the manila envelope and Khassan’s letter beneath Ula’s body. He kissed her forehead. She was gone and he still couldn’t say good-bye. “We will never be dry,” Ula had said. The sky was pouring. She was there.
When the men broke through the door, he was on his knees. He prayed for his wife, that in Paradise Allah would give her a body that worked. He prayed for Sonja, that she would find companionship. He prayed for Havaa, that she would live to die a natural death. He prayed for Khassan, and for Dokka. But when the men started beating him, when they taped his mouth and threw him in the back of the truck, he prayed only for himself.
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.