The girl nodded. They stood at the front door. “I haven’t been here in many months,” she said. She unlocked the door. Dust covered everything but the ceiling. She would deal with it tomorrow, or the day after that; she had cleaned enough for one day. The entranceway bore no sign of break-in. The looters had long since emigrated. She lit a candle.
For dinner Havaa skinned and cut the sprouts from two potatoes, while Sonja found a car battery with enough juice to put a pot of water and rice to boil on the hot plate. When they ate, Sonja described the chopsticks people in Asia use to eat rice. The girl attempted it with two pencils, and after five minutes of failure, declared Asia an invention of Sonja’s imagination. When they finished, Sonja led her to Natasha’s room. Out of habit she knocked before opening the door. The bed was still made. The desk chair sat at an angle, as though its owner would return any moment to write a note, a letter, an explanation, or an apology.
“This is where you’ll sleep,” Sonja said. She set the suitcase on the edge of the bed and cleared the lower drawer of Natasha’s jeans and sweaters. Natasha had taken the burgundy cardigan Sonja had given her for her eighteenth birthday, the one she hated and never wore, and wherever she was, Sonja hoped the temperature dipped enough for her to try it on. “You can put your things here.”
“Am I going to live here?”
Sonja hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Do you want to?”
The girl surveyed the room, inspected the closet, checked under the bed. “I get the whole room?”
“The whole room.”
“And I don’t have to share it?
“It’s all yours.”
The girl slowly nodded and leaned into Sonja, listening to the gurgle of her organs, these marvelous things we ignore, forget, and take for granted. “Come on,” Sonja said. “You should unpack before either of us changes our minds.”
Havaa unlatched her suitcase and pulled out balled gray socks, a sweater, a skirt, two headscarves, white underwear patterned with little pink bows. Then came the strange and wonderful artifacts. A marriage license from 1942, given by a couple who had been married for sixty-one years and no longer needed the document. A photograph of a slender man wearing a pea jacket that now hung in a closet in Saudi Arabia. The eighty-first draft of a love letter. The uncanceled stamp that would have sent the unwritten eighty-second draft. A prayer book opened by two hundred and six yearning hands.
“What is all this?” Sonja asked. In three weeks, when she would help Havaa build a case to display these treasures, Sonja would use her surgical saw, for the first time, to create something.
“My souvenirs,” Havaa replied. She spaced them across the drawer with greater reverence than she’d shown her clothes. “From the refugees that stayed at our house.”
There was a silver ring that had made a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two feel like the most glamorous woman in Grozny. An address book that an unfaithful husband had given Havaa so his wife’s ghost wouldn’t find it among his possessions. A dried seahorse that a father gave his six year-old daughter in lieu of a pony. A Taj Mahal keychain that a refugee in southern Russia regretted giving away. A tie clip that a cosmonaut carried to space and back. And a Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker.
“What’s that?” Sonja barely got it out.
“That’s Alu,” the girl said. In three weeks and one day, with her palm aching wonderfully from sawing through wood, Sonja would tell her about Buckingham Palace. “He’s an idiot.”
“Who gave you Alu?”
“One of the women who stayed at our house.”
“One of the refugees?” Sonja asked. In eight months, she would begin telling the girl about Natasha, and it would take her the rest of their time to finish the story.
“I introduced her to Akim,” the girl said. “She was nice.”
“What was her name?”
“I can’t remember. Lots of people stayed at our house.”
“But you remember Alu’s name.” In eight and a half years, she would have already taught the girl every lesson she had scribbled in her secondary school notebooks. In ten and three-quarter years, the girl, then a first-year biology student at the newly constructed Volchansk State University, would begin teaching her.
“Alu didn’t leave.”
“But what did she look like?”
“She had all her fingers.”
“What else? What else?” In twelve and a third years, the girl, now a woman, would accompany Sonja on a five-day holiday to London. When the night porter asked, “Would your daughter care for an herbal tea?” it wouldn’t cross Sonja’s mind to correct him; it wouldn’t have crossed her mind for some time. At the end of five days, they would leave London. Sonja would never see the city again. Havaa would.
“She was very pretty. I was nervous she wouldn’t think I was pretty.”
“Was she happy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where was she going?” When the girl, she would forever be the girl to Sonja, went to Lake Baikal for two years to write her dissertation on the effects of climate change on freshwater microorganisms, Sonja would briefly consider sleeping in the hospital. But the world had long since stopped shaking, and no one would tolerate such eccentricity, not even from the distinguished head of surgery.
“Probably to a refugee camp.”
“But where, which camp?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think hard. Where?” In twenty years Sonja would find Natasha’s name beside her own, in the final sentence of the acknowledgments of Havaa’s dissertation. The dissertation would be published to some acclaim, and on dusty university bookshelves in a half dozen countries, the two sisters would share an afterlife in that final sentence, one comma away from Akhmed and Dokka.
“I don’t know.”
“Was she alone?”
“Yes, she was alone.” In twenty-eight years and seven months, at a limnology conference in Cologne, the girl would meet the man she was to marry nine years later. At the age of forty-six she would have her one and only child in the same maternity ward she was born in, a boy to carry her father’s name; hers would be the second hands to hold him. At the age of sixty-eight she would hold her first grandson, also to carry her father’s name; hers would be the third hands.
“And she left your house?”
“I said good-bye and she left.”
“What direction, then? What direction did she go?”
“Down the road. There’s only one direction you can go.” The girl would outlive her husband, her son, one grandson, and every soul she had met before the age of eleven. She would outlive twenty-three of her teeth, three of her toes, one of her kidneys, and all the brown of her hair.
“Then where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you saw her.”
She would die at the age of one hundred and three, in the geriatrics ward of Hospital No. 6, in a room that had been the director’s office, then Sonja’s bedroom, and finally a regular hospital room, a room Havaa would remember as many thousands of refugees remembered her own childhood bedroom, a room that had been there when it was needed.
“Where is she? Please, Havaa. Please.”
The girl wrapped her fingers around Sonja’s. She looked up. Her eyes were green. “We don’t know where she went,” she said.
They never would.
CHAPTER 29
THE MEN IN Pit B would remember him as a quiet man, if they remembered him at all. They would remember how he fastened his shirt buttons with his toes, how he had learned to live without his fingers. He was anxious, hungry, and scared, but they all were. At night they slept in the brown snow on sheets of carpet, slabs of plywood, whatever they could find. Though they all had nightmares, some would remember how the fingerless man kept repeating is she … is she … is she … is she … is she … before another man shook him awake.