I found a roll of bandage in a cabinet and gave Nurse Larissa a length. She continued to cry. I took the hand of hers that was holding the bandage and brought it up to her face, covertly measuring her pulse. Her hand was hot.
“Are you sick?” I said. “Your heart rate is elevated. I think you’re also running a fever.”
Nurse Larissa looked at me through her tears as if I were an alien. “Da, they weren’t kidding about you. I am fine, Sonya.”
“You can tell me. I can keep confidentiality.”
“You can, can you? Well, that’s a relief,” she said, I think sarcastically. She had stopped crying. “It’s not about me.”
“Did your boyfriend leave you?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
She wiped her face with the bandage. “My friend died.”
“Was she sick?” I said. I was acutely aware of the cardiovascular dangers of grief. My other grandma, Baba Mila, had died of cancer of the bladder when I was eight. Also my cousin died, of ventricular septal defect. She was a year old. I was four, and I cried all day, though I barely remembered what the baby had looked like. I had only seen her once. I was in Magadan and they were in Ukraine, and even with all that distance between us I had felt the loud heart murmurs from my sadness. I would have had a heart attack if we were closer.
“She wasn’t sick. She was a nurse here, too.”
“A car accident?”
“A fire. In her apartment.” Nurse Larissa fumbled with the phone’s dial.
“Did she suffocate?”
We sat in silence. I noticed an ornate cuckoo clock on the wall. Somebody must’ve brought it from home, somebody who’d spent a lot of time in this office.
“Or burn alive?”
She gave me a hard look. “Yes, she burned alive.”
“Honestly? That’s terrible,” I said. I wanted to show her real sympathy. To do it right, I first had to feel what she felt. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know anyone who had died in a fire.
“You’re a bit weird, you know that, Sonya?”
“Why?”
“You have morbid interests,” Nurse Larissa said more softly. “Ask too many questions.”
“No, no, no. I want to be a doctor so I have to know everything. Are you part Mongolian?”
“You know the proverb ‘He who knows too much, doesn’t sleep well’?”
“Yes, I know, but I don’t believe in it.”
She chuckled. “Proverbs are not for believing. They just are.” Her eyes were two small slits.
I took Nurse Larissa’s hands, like the cardiologist had done, and whispered, “What happened?”
“Tatar.”
“What?”
“I’m part Tatar, Sonya … My friend had this boyfriend, a criminal. Half a year ago she decided to leave him, after a fight.” Nurse Larissa’s voice became husky. “He and his gang set fire to her apartment and barricaded the door. Maybe she knew too much, or he was just angry.”
“He killed her? But why?” I said.
“I told you why.” She looked at the cuckoo clock and waited several seconds. “The neighbors were afraid to call the police. They could hear her screaming. Can you imagine?”
I tried imagining. I tried hard and just couldn’t. The only thing I’d heard that might be close to a scream like that was in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” “I would’ve called the police,” I said.
“What gets me the most is that it happened in this shitty nowhere town. This is not Moscow. Things like that happen there every day.”
I patted Nurse Larissa’s arm, though I didn’t like her calling Baba Olya’s Syktyvkar shitty. “I think you have post-traumatic stress disorder. People get it after war, too. You need to go to a sanatorium on the sea for a whole summer and you’ll feel better. Do you have some valerianka to take for calmness?”
Again, Nurse Larissa narrowed her swollen Tatar eyes at me. Her nose was still red from crying. “Not a bad idea, Dr. Sonya.” I felt uncontrollably excited when she called me that. She combed through the desk drawers and the supply cabinets. “Don’t have it here.” Then she found a metal cup, poured some ethyl alcohol in it, and added water from the sink in the corner.
“Never do this.” She poured the mixture down her throat. Her face lemon-squished and so did mine. “Let’s go. I have to report for my rounds.”
“Where?”
“Infectious diseases.”
“Oh.” Wasn’t I sick enough to get admitted there?
We made several wrong turns and detours before reaching my room. The Big Hospital was a real labyrinth, or maybe Nurse Larissa was now intoxicated. I held her hand just in case. Before letting her go, I asked whether she’d heard of a patient named Alina being treated at the hospital for migraines this summer, and Nurse Larissa said no, no one by that name.
The room was empty when I returned. I climbed into bed and opened Robinson Crusoe. How would I escape from a burning apartment? I could break the windows in Baba Olya’s glassed-in balcony using one of the flowerpots, then tie the clotheslines together to make a ladder. I thought about Nurse Larissa’s friend, about the flames and the screams. I imagined her pushing against the door so hard she broke her nails, but my tears were still not coming.
The girls came back before dinner. Natasha pulled out a box of Bird’s Milk candies from under her bed and offered some to me. Only up close did I notice how dull and yellow her sclera was, like eggplant flesh.
“I’m not supposed to eat candy because of my stomach,” I said. I liked Bird’s Milk, but I had to maintain my cover.
“Cho, mad at us or something?” Liza said.
“No.”
“Forget about it already. We were kidding before, right?” Natasha said.
“Yeah. You’re too young to get the joke.”
“At least I don’t pretend to throw up,” I lied — in the name of medicine.
“Come to the cafeteria with us. Or are you gonna eat your stinky markers?”
I tried to concentrate on my book; the letters trembled on the page. “My grandma’s bringing me a homemade dinner. She has a car with a driver, and her friends at the Ministry of Health give her smoked sturgeon and black caviar for free. She has eleven Lenin honorary awards, and I’m moving to America in the fall to live with my father.”
As soon as those words escaped my mouth, I heard Baba Olya’s reproachful voice in my head: a doctor must walk a kilometer in her patient’s shoes.
“Hope you choke on your caviar and the little fishes hatch in your stomach and eat you from inside out.”
They banged the door hard when they left.
I put on my sweatshirt, which hadn’t been washed yet, and inhaled the bright, clean smell of America. I hadn’t noticed earlier how hideous the sickroom was — sinusitis-yellow walls, a constellation of brown spots splattered in the ceiling’s far corner like bacterial growth in a petri dish. The paint on the heating pipe had peeled in so many places that the pipe looked like a wet cat’s tail. Outside, the hospital park was sinking into darkness. Patients and nurses in white flashed ghost-like between the trees.
I had seen a ghost once, the ghost of Baba Mila. On the fortieth day after she died, when her soul finished visiting all the places she had loved on earth one last time, I saw her back in Magadan, standing behind our living room curtains. I wasn’t scared. In her last months, when she didn’t leave the bed, Deda Misha fed her soup and pureed apples, and gave her birch juice to drink. I liked birch juice, too, but I held back from drinking it for fear there wouldn’t be enough left for Baba Mila. On some days, some very hot days, I couldn’t resist. I didn’t understand anything about medicine back then. The day I saw Baba Mila’s ghost, I had whispered “I am sorry” and promised her I would become a doctor.