Babushka began to get up, arms outstretched, but the woman said, “No,” loudly enough that even the old man stirred. She turned to her husband, a thin man who had been entirely obscured by her generous silhouette in the door, and said, “You have the money?”
He nodded, looking terrified, and when the nurse appeared, he handed her a thin pile of rubles—straight from the ATM—and murmured, “Soon, please.”
The nurse put her palm over the money in his and squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Getting the baby out’s the easy part. It’s the next twenty years that will be hard.” She smiled, showing one long, gray tooth in a line of white ones.
“That’s the truth,” Babushka said.
The pregnant woman grunted and sank into a chair. “A room, please.”
The nurse smiled again, but without showing her teeth this time. “Be patient. I can tell from your face that you’re not even three centimeters.”
“It helps to pray,” Babushka said. “I prayed through my labor.”
The woman moaned, from annoyance and agony, and Ilya wanted badly to plug his ears. The idea that a baby was moving through her, would soon emerge from her, made his stomach seize, and he eyed Vladimir’s bedpan, thinking he might vomit. Then the doors to the clinic swung open again. It was a doctor this time, in a white coat that was too short in the sleeves, with a tiny stain of what appeared to be blood on the collar. The nurse started and strode toward her clipboard.
“Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov,” the doctor said, as though it were roll call, and Vladimir would raise his hand.
You have Vladimir, Ilya wanted to say. His mother jumped up from her chair. Ilya gathered the supplies, and as he was helping Babushka with the broth, he heard the doctor say, “We weren’t able to save the knee.”
Ilya had his back to his mother. He could not see her face. He eased Babushka down into her chair and turned. His mother’s neck was bent, her arms slack at her sides, and the doctor was looking at her kindly, sadly, but with a little embarrassment too. Then the doctor’s eyes met Ilya’s.
“You’re his brother?”
Ilya nodded.
“You can’t all see him. Only one of you. You brought all of the supplies?”
“Yes,” Ilya said.
“Good.”
Ilya’s mother’s face had gone the gray it went when she had the flu, when Vladimir had kept her up all night with worry, but she managed to say, “Where did you cut?”
The doctor held a hand to Ilya’s leg, halfway between his hip and knee. “There,” he said. Ilya’s mother made a small, choking sound. Later, she would rant about the doctor, about how strange, how cruel it had been that he had demonstrated on Ilya’s leg and not his own. But Ilya thought it natural that the doctor could imagine taking another’s leg more easily than his own since that was exactly what had happened. And for weeks after, when Ilya thought of Vladimir, he would feel the pressure of the doctor’s fingers in that spot, and it would make him feel close to Vladimir. There, he’d think. Right there.
His mother was not crying, but Ilya could see that she would be soon—crying or yelling or both—and so he said, “I’ll go see him.”
The doctor shrugged, and in the silence, the pregnant woman gave her husband a shove forward.
“Izvinitye,” the husband said. The doctor looked at him, and then at his wife.
“How bad is the pain?” he asked her.
“Right now, not so bad, but—”
“Good,” the doctor said, “because it will be a while. The rooms are full. Your brother”—he looked at Ilya, with an expression both kind and pointed—“is not the only one to lose a limb. These kids are willing to die, to rot. Over what?” The doctor was shouldering through the doors now, and Ilya glanced back at his mother and Babushka. His mother had her head on Babushka’s shoulder, and Babushka was whispering in her ear, and Ilya knew what she’d be saying.
“Tchoo, tchoo. Tchoo, tchoo.” A nonsense word that she used for scraped knees and spilled tea and for this now too.
Vladimir looked healthier than he had in months. His eyes were clear, the whites like snow, and the bruised skin under them had faded to a respectable gray. His leg was bandaged in so much gauze that it was easy to ignore; it was easy to forget that there was not actually a leg under there but a stump. His room was halved by a curtain with a repeating scene of wild animals picnicking—a lion, an elephant, a zebra, and a tiger plopped down around a basket as though they’d all decided to ignore their baser instincts for a day and share some cucumber sandwiches. Ilya could see nothing of the patient on the other side but a pair of tiny, filthy sneakers under a chair.
Ilya’s tape player was in Vladimir’s lap, the Delta headphones around his neck, and when Vladimir saw him he lifted the player up and said, “OK if I borrow it for a bit?”
Ilya nodded. “Learn some English,” he said. “I brought you a bedpan. And polka-dotted gowns.”
Vladimir grinned. “Did you see the hot nurse?”
“The one with the red hair?”
“Yes. That braid is made for tugging. She comes in here to help me pee. She said if I ever lose my arms, she’ll hold my dick for me.”
“In your dreams.” A male voice came from the other side of the curtain, high and wheezy.
Vladimir rolled his eyes and pretended to take a swig from a bottle. “It’s none of your business what happens on this side of the curtain, Tolya.”
“That’s not what you were saying last week. Screaming for me to put you out of your misery.”
Tolya began to laugh, and Ilya looked away from Vladimir’s face.
“Does it hurt?” Ilya asked.
“It’s numb. I don’t feel anything there—no real leg, no ghost leg. People are going to think I’m a vet. Tolya and I are going to make a killing panhandling.”
Ilya put the duffel in a chair in the corner and handed Vladimir the magazine he’d gotten him at the Minutka. On the cover, a girl in an ushanka, lace underwear, and fishing waders posed in a river. Vladimir nodded without much enthusiasm, and Ilya wondered if he’d already seen this one, or if it was too tame, if Ilya could not even pick the right kind of nudie magazine.
“How is Mamulya?”
“She’s fine. She’ll be fine.”
“And you’re going?”
Ilya nodded.
“When?”
“August.”
“That’s good,” Vladimir said. “Don’t fuck it up again, OK?”
“I won’t.”
Behind the curtain, Tolya’s cough grew rough, like he was dredging up something awful from his sternum.
“Tolya?” Vladimir said.
Tolya was silent.
“Is he OK?” Ilya said.
“Are you OK?” Vladimir said.
“I’m dying,” Tolya said.
“Don’t be dramatic,” Vladimir said.
Tolya coughed again, and Ilya could feel the pain of it in his own chest. The lights flickered overhead, and for a moment he and Vladimir just listened to Tolya coughing. A phone was ringing somewhere down the hall. Then there were footsteps and the nurse appeared pushing an empty wheelchair, her braid tick-tocking behind her. She looked at Vladimir like he was an especially tough tea stain on her counter and said, “You’re about to get a life lesson. Have you ever seen a baby born?”
“You’re shitting me,” Vladimir said.
“I am not. And this woman does not seem like the friendly type—not that any woman is when she’s being ripped stem to sternum—but you might want to shut your trap for once.”
“What about me?” Tolya said.
“You’re out of here,” she said, pulling back the curtain.
Tolya had the body of a ten- or eleven-year-old and the face of someone much older. His cheeks were speckled with scars the size of kopeks and there was something strange and sucked-in about his lips. He did not have any teeth, Ilya realized, and as the nurse lifted him out of the bed Ilya saw that he did not have any legs either.