“God is great. She will live,” the mother said in a slow cadence to make it clear that the two statements were logically dependent. She glanced up at Natasha, mistaking her white sweatshirt for scrubs. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“I’m no one,” Natasha said.
“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You save lives.”
Natasha crossed her arms, and Sonja couldn’t see it, couldn’t know it, but right then, when Natasha dipped her head, looked to her palm, to the floor, to Sonja and back, she believed that their body temperatures rose by some fractional degree, that this they shared. The baby finished suckling and tilted its square little face upward.
“Do you want to hold her?” the mother asked.
“No,” Natasha said, ratcheting her frown.
“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You want to hold her.”
“I need to go, but you stay here. There is a case of the common cold in need of my attention,” Sonja whispered as Natasha took the infant in her arms.
That morning, in the cavernous wards, Natasha’s brain finally hushed. When the newborn sniffed strangely at her chest, she stared into its eyes and saw a world only two days old. Those two and a half kilograms righted her, turned her vantage to a future kinder than experience had taught her to expect. The next morning she woke when Sonja woke, left when Sonja left, and the next morning and the next.
Deshi and Maali, her superiors, were nurses and twins. Deshi, on the eleventh of her twelve loves, reminded her of Sonja, and she preferred Maali, the younger by eighteen minutes, who treated illness and injury as the practical jokes of a God wheezing with laughter, and suggested amputation for every cough, chest cold, ulcer, and eye infection that had the misfortune of seeking her counsel. In the maternity ward, Natasha cleaned towels, bedsheets, the linoleum floor, plastic tubes and hoses, bottles, baby bottoms, and bedpans. Her fingertips reddened in the bleach, and in this good hurt and those clean bottles, she found herself warmed by the small suggestions of her agency. In her day’s rare pauses, she restored the view to the boarded windows. It began with a few right angles penciled on the plywood. She hadn’t known what she was drawing until it took shape. Two squares, one atop the other. In the pencil’s descent a stray line became a downspout, the pulsing overhead fluorescence became a blue afternoon sun, and a small curl of wood grain became a secretary’s brown hair blown back by a desk fan. Drawing by division on the plywood, she parceled the building into floors, floors into windows, windows into panes. Familiar, but it still floated a centimeter off her memory; she placed a Soviet flag over the arched entrance, placed pigeons on the flagpole, placed a strong westerly breeze so the flag caught every squirt of pigeon shit. Pencil lead smudged on the thick of her palm as she dredged the building from its ruins. When finished she wrote its name in block Cyrillic above the awning. The Volchansk State Bureau of Vehicular Licensing and Registration. Of course it looked familiar; it had once stood on the other side of the window.
Over weeks and months, as spare minutes became hours and the hours days, she added linden and poplar trees, rusted streetlamps, drooping electrical lines, shingled roofs, a skyline of television antennae, clotheslines curved by wet laundry, smoke ribbons unwinding from tailpipes, the sidewalks and cigarette kiosks and everything she could remember. She added no fire hydrants.
Behind her back, and later to her face, Deshi and Maali opined.
“A dreadful thing,” Deshi said when she thought Natasha had gone to the parking lot for a cigarette.
“Completely inaccurate,” Maali concurred. The nurse understood what it was like to be the younger sister, if only by eighteen minutes, and her criticism hurt Natasha the most. “The perspective is skewed. It isn’t possible to see so much of City Park from this window.”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard,” Deshi said. “She’s never actually seen the view from this room.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? She’s drawing something she’s never seen.”
“She isn’t even Chechen.”
“Her greatest shortcoming.”
“She deserves pity rather than scorn.”
“We retired three years ago,” Deshi lamented. “What are we even doing here?”
The unlit cigarette somersaulted from her fingers as she pushed open the door, dashed between her critics, and closed the curtain over the boarded windows. She had felt more humiliated before, but never by people whom she trusted. She grabbed her lighter from the counter and pushed past the nurses, but Maali’s grasp, surprisingly firm on her wrist, held her.
“Let me guess,” Natasha said. “The only way to fix the mural is to amputate the hand that drew it.”
Maali smiled. “It’s not quite so serious.”
“Really?” She felt strangely honored that Maali didn’t want to chop off her hand.
“It’s just that there was never a bus stop at the intersection of Lenin Prospect and City Bureaucrat Street. I know because I stared at that corner for thirty years.”
“We’ll help you,” Deshi added, and under the combined guidance of eyes that had spent some sixty years in front of the maternity ward windows, she erased and redrew, swept up the eraser lint, erased and redrew again. Deshi and Maali argued over every signpost and streetlamp, every tree in City Park, every storefront, kiosk, and traffic light; they had stared from different windows onto different cities, and in trying to bring back both, she created her own. She shaded the buildings with ash and coal, sliced advertisements from unread magazines still stacked in the waiting room and pasted slivers of color across the plywood. The blue waves of a Black Sea resort became sky. Mint gum became linden leaves. Some afternoons the nurses would become lost in the mural, pointing to the distant corners and alleyways like faded pictures in a photo album. The finely detailed ventilation grate that had once suspended a thousand-ruble note in its draft, where Deshi plucked three months’ rent from the air. The aboveground gas pipes from which their mother had hung laundry and their father a hammock. Or the schoolyard blacktop, where Maali’s son had played soldiers years before the war took him. In sixteen years, when glass replaced the plywood boards, Natasha’s murals would find their way to Sonja’s bedroom closet, where they would remain a private treasure for some sixty-three years, until Maali’s great-great-grandson, an art historian, put them on display in the city art museum.
She was studying her city when the nurses arrived on the morning she was to perform her third solo delivery. “It’s going to get busy,” Maali said, with no small amount of glee. With her rain jacket, windbreaker, and overcoat hung on different pegs, the coat stand suggested a fully staffed ward. “We heard land mines on the way in.”
Deshi wagged her head. “You enjoy this job too much, sister. I worry your head has broken.”
“It’s too bad you can’t amputate a head.”
“You can. It’s called a decapitation.”
Maali noted it excitedly on her clipboard.
“We’re all working trauma today,” Deshi said.
“What if there are deliveries?” Natasha asked.
“Then you’ll do them, Natashechka. It doesn’t take much to deliver a child. The mother does most of the work.”
The first casualties arrived a half hour later; red heat radiated from their skin. Natasha disinfected the ropy ends of a calf when Deshi came calling. “We have a delivery. Go.”
The patient lay gowned and supine on the maternity ward bed. Her face throbbed against the white sheets, as flushed and anguished as those four floors below. Two men stood beside her, each holding one hand. She recognized the cleft in the older man’s chin, but now wasn’t the time for pause, for reflection; now was the time to act. She stood between the woman’s pale open legs, trying not to look down.