“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.
CHAPTER 26
THE HOUR HAND reached eight, eight and a half, nine, nine and a half hours in the morning, and still no sign of Akhmed. The girl asked for him as soon as she woke, but Sonja had sidestepped his name as if it were a puddle on the road, and they hadn’t spoken of him since. “Talking accomplishes nothing,” Natasha had said, and for once, in her heart, Sonja knew her sister had been right. It was the fifth day after Dokka had disappeared.
When the hour hand reached eleven, Sonja went to the canteen for a glass of ice to calm her nerves, and found a slip of white paper on the counter. If you find my body, it said, return it for burial. She crushed the note into her pocket but then took another look. The full address was 38 Eldár Forest Service Road. Akhmed’s village. Was this what he had kept stitched in his trousers? Sixteen hours earlier they had lain on the narrow maternity ward bed and held each other so neither would roll off. When he stood and hitched up his trousers, she had noted a small tear near the knee, which he had blamed on a stray line of razor wire, even though she didn’t ask. She ironed out the wrinkled slip of paper with her thumb. It was the penultimate message she would receive from him. In a shoebox in the canteen cupboard, atop six dozen others, his ID card was to be the final message, though she wouldn’t find that for another five days.
With the note now folded in her jacket pocket, she drove to Eldár. Bereft of leaves, the trees looked skeletal. This was the road Akhmed marched down to and from the hospital. The one he marches down, she corrected, careful to keep him alive while she still could. Clouds veined the sky. Grain stalks swayed with what little breeze there was. The forest had overtaken much of the farmland, but as the road curved through a field, she came upon the frozen carcass of what had been a wolf.
Eldár was no more than a saucer beside Volchansk, the type of village one would only stumble upon when lost. Save for the street portraits, its name was all that distinguished it from a thousand other ruined villages. She tracked the addresses, no small feat when so few doorways stood, and parked in front of number 38. Across from Akhmed’s house, frozen ash stretched beyond the charred foundations of a house, across the field, and into the woods. It had been Havaa’s home, and the realization pulled a wire of grief straight through her stomach. Havaa and Akhmed had only become real when they were plucked from nowhere and deposited in her life. She knew what had happened to Havaa’s father and her home, but here the girl materialized in her mind as she hadn’t before. She turned her back on the ruin.
The door to number 38 hung from its top hinge. As she entered her stomach clenched, as it did each time she stepped into the operating theater knowing she couldn’t save the life before her.