In the six months she lived without Sulim, without her mother or father, only one dinner was shot through with enough excitement to make her forget the awful cooking. Just before they were to eat, Sonja returned from the mailbox with a brown manila envelope riddled with international postage, and flung her arms around Natasha, panting and screaming joyous gibberish, with more life in her face than Natasha had thought possible. “London,” Sonja finally said, and the word would remain with Natasha, its six letters stretching to accommodate every conceivable hope. “I’ve been given a full fellowship to finish medical school in London.”

Natasha tried to smile, tried to pretend her tears were of joy rather than dread, but when Sonja threw her arms around her, when they embraced, Natasha held her sister tightly, so scared of letting her go.

Though Natasha had learned to sleep through the screech of tires, the curses, the celebratory gunfire, the explosions, the cries, the laughing, the whole hell of the street below, she stayed awake that night and watched speeding taillights stretch into crimson bars across the asphalt. The young men leaning on the hoods of European cars were gangsters and mercenaries and gamblers. They made dangerous bets with safe foreign currencies, laying on the dash the annual wages men of their education would earn in a lawful society. Some nights they tried to jump the decapitated Lenin statue in the square. That night was a simple drag race. Four cars looped through the city center along a course marked by trash-can fires. Reports of aerial bombing in Grozny had filtered in, leaving the city flushed and agitated. In the morning, she would take the bus to Grozny to meet with Lidiya Nikitova, a shuttle trader who flew through Tbilisi to Hamburg once a week and returned with suitcases packed with Western electronics and clothing. Natasha would fill two duffel bags with clothes, but also Walkmen, Game Boys, satellite phones, portable televisions, and the increasingly popular noise-canceling headphones to sell in the city bazaar. The Feds blocked the border, the airport looked like another shuttered factory along the Baku-Rostov motorway, yet the bazaar was flush with Japanese electronics, Burmese silk, Belgian chocolate, Brazilian liquor, Indian spices, and American currency. Only three cars came past on the next lap. She breathed against the glass of her bedroom window, summoning from the fog a smiling, finger-drawn face. It was November 1994. She hadn’t seen her sister in more than two and a half years. She hadn’t seen her father in more than three. She wondered if it would snow.

News came third-, fourth-, fifth-hand. Fact was indistinguishable from hearsay, so all was believed and all was disbelieved and all were right. Grab as much sovereignty as you can swallow, Yeltsin had urged, and Chechnya had opened its mouth. The president was still named Dzhokhar Dudayev, and he still had a fountain pen — drawn mustache. He was the first Chechen to make general rank in the Red Army and ten years earlier he had served in Afghanistan, where Russian bombs had fallen on Muslim civilians for neither the first nor final time. In bed Natasha listened to his radio address, his voice a lullaby compared to the screech of car tires. The fantastical marked his presidency. The government needed money, and so, after minting its own currency, Estonia sent its entire reserve of Soviet rubles to Grozny rather than to Moscow. The government needed an army, and, the previous year, when the Feds had abandoned their Chechen bases, they had left behind stockpiles of heavy artillery, ammunition, guns, armored jeeps, and more tanks than there were licensed Chechen tank drivers. She set the radio beside her pillow. The drag race had finished. She lowered the volume and rolled toward the black mesh speaker, imagining the voice of revolution to be the whispers of a friend talking her to sleep.

The rumors proved true; in Grozny, bombs fell. On the weekly trips to the capital, she paid attention to the crowds. The density of sidewalk debris ensured they only lifted their eyes at the murmur of planes. The traffic lights went out and policemen, still wearing the blue uniforms of Soviet road police, directed traffic with the tips of their cigarettes. She stood in a clogged avenue and scanned the skies. Only once did she see them fly over. Five planes in tight formation. She craned her neck while all down the avenue commuters left their car doors open as they fled. Five parallel lines of exhaust striped the empty sky. Kilometers above, men who didn’t know her name wanted to kill her. A man in a bright purple suit grabbed her shoulder, shaking her, and asking if she was deaf or stupid or both. Following him down the line of abandoned vehicles, she pushed the driver doors closed, and in this simple act restored order to the world. He took her to the basement of a party supply store. They sat on sacks of inflatable plastic balloons. The man kicked over a box and whoopee cushions, Slinkies, and glasses with fake noses toppled out. “I can’t believe I’m going to die somewhere so stupid,” the man said, and began weeping. She asked how he knew this place. The man held on to his purple lapels. “This suit,” he said, “I’m returning this stupid suit.” He was thirteen years into what would be a forty-eight-year career as a clown; he had an IQ of 167.

When the bombing stopped, she left the sobbing purple-suited man and went to Lidiya Nikitova’s flat. She found Lidiya packing a suitcase on the unmade bed. Natasha expected to find it filled with Prada handbags, Gucci blouses, Ferragamo neckties, but instead found coarse woolen sweaters, baggy sweatpants, gray socks, a photo album. For ten minutes Lidiya shook her head in despair. Natasha worried the poor woman’s head would fall off. “Chechens have family,” Lidiya said, as she pulled out a pair of boots buried beneath a mound of toeless shoes. “They have their teips and their ancestral homes in the highlands to flee to. The barbarians. It’s nearly the millennium and they still live in clans. Even now, in the middle of all this, they don’t believe orphans or vagrants can ever exist because the teip will provide. The barbarians. What do we ethnic Russians have? No teip. Our countrymen are dropping bombs on us. No, back north for me. I’ve never been to Petersburg, but my cousin says it’s much more civilized.” After Lidiya Nikitova left, Natasha spent an hour browsing her apartment. She took a pair of high-heeled leather boots, cashmere sweaters, and silk evening gowns. She wouldn’t have an opportunity to wear them, but beautiful things were so rare it seemed wrong to leave them behind.

Time no longer marched forward. The giant clocks hanging from office buildings began to confuse the minutes for the hours. They displayed June dates in November, August weather forecasts in December. Dudayev changed the national clock in an independence declaration from the imperium of Moscow time. His supporters set their watches an hour back, everyone else remained in the standard zone, and no one knew what time it was. At first, Natasha ate at preplanned points in her day to maintain the illusion of structured time, then only when she was hungry, then only when she had food. The phone lines trembled with static. The debilitated independence government promised at least five hours of daily electricity, but the five hours usually came in the middle of the night. The crumbling infrastructure turned time back farther than any presidential mandate. When had you last lived a day with the starting bell of your alarm clock? With breakfast djepelgesh? With news from Moscow and New York and Beijing beamed on the back of television waves? With the heat of that first cigarette in your throat and the Route 7 bus turning the corner, unfailingly three minutes behind schedule, just like you? With truant children pegging construction crews with snowballs, and the steam curling from the Main Department Store corner, filling your skirt, a convection tingling your thighs? With morning drunks, lining the sidewalks of City Park, switching from liquor to mouthwash? With a midmorning coffee break, sipping Nescafé that has probably a dozen actual beans per kilo, huddling within the yellow fluorescent wash of a bathroom stall, the only place you can be alone? With lunch? With a pause taken from work for the length of an afternoon cigarette? With the soft pinging of five-thirty streetlamps, coming to life as you pass, and the City Park Prophet waiting for you, his beard tucked into his trousers, his hand outstretched and humble, and you with ten rubles to press into his palm? With a home to come home to? With electricity in the wiring as you flick the lights, and heat humming from the radiators, and water in the tap, showerhead, and toilet tank, and voices saying hello and how was your day and shut the fucking door it’s freezing out there, and you hearing them in your ears rather than your head, they who know your name? With a meal that is actually that, a meal, with family, both of which sustain in ways you will only understand in their absence? With soapsuds coating your forearms, the bubbles blinking out against your fingertips and rinsing away as you pass the plate for your sister to dry? With evening television, your parents on the divan, and you’ve never seen them hold hands, but they kick off their slippers, and on the floor their little toes touch? With your father’s snores turning the hall into an echo chamber you walk through to reach the bathroom, warm enough you don’t think of wrapping yourself in a blanket when you get out of bed? With toothpaste? With your sister’s pencil scratches coming through the shadow-thin plaster walls, the mumble of rote memorization, her nightly prayers to a god you neither know nor comprehend? With your belief that no matter how badly you fuck up, you will always belong to these people, and that they will never let you disappear?