“It’s funny,” he said, walking to the window. “A friend of mine told me about this mural years ago.”

“Did he have a child delivered here?”

“I doubt it.” He stood in reverent concentration a hand’s width from the ply boards. “He’s nearly eighty.”

“She worked on them for such a long time. I’d never seen her devote so much of herself to anything. I was so proud of her. Deshi and Maali helped her.” Natasha had once described it as transcribing their memories, a turn of phrase so lovely Sonja was unwilling to share it with him.

“I’d forgotten completely, otherwise I would have asked to see them sooner. When Khassan told me about them, I was so moved that someone would go to the trouble. It seemed like such a big beautiful waste of time. You can imagine how much that would appeal to me. So I did something similar.”

Her heart rose a centimeter. Even disappeared, Natasha was still surprising her. “Because of my sister’s murals?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I told you about the wounded rebels that occupied the village? The Feds came next. Forty-one of my neighbors were disappeared. I remembered what Khassan had told me about the room with its view recreated on boarded windows, and I drew portraits of all forty-one on plywood boards and hung them throughout the village.”

“Everyone here is a fucking artist,” she said, shaking her head. “If you people spent more time fighting and less time drawing, you might win a war now and then.”

“It was medical school that did it to me.” He leaned to her and dropped his voice to an exaggerated, conspiratorial whisper. “I used to skip lectures and labs to sit in on art classes. That’s why I’m a better drawer than physician.”

“I can’t believe you told me that.”

“I’m trusting you with my darkest secret,” he said, so pleased with himself she couldn’t avoid laughing with him.

“I could lose my job for knowing that and keeping you on. Criminal neglect.”

“Obviously you are a criminal, look at the company you keep. International smugglers and amateur artists.” His left arm had steadily edged toward hers. “You could fire me.”

“It’s too late for that,” she said, and focused on the women’s scrubs cinched around his biceps, how ridiculous he looked. There had been fourteen since the elevators last ran: four Russians, six Chechens, two Ingush, one French physician, and a Finnish journalist, who she fucked before granting an interview. None knew her surname or patronymic; anonymity was the most comprehensive prophylactic. And the sex itself, infrequent and illicit and often awkwardly impersonal, fulfilled her more wholly than anything a husband could provide. As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn’t exist exclusively to feel pain.

“Even before those portraits, people from neighboring farms and villages would come to my clinic, people who didn’t have photographs of their lost ones. I’d draw them.” He said it as if it had happened centuries ago.

“Like a police sketch artist?”

“If I must be an — ist I’d prefer portraitist.”

And then it was so obvious.

“Draw her for me,” she asked. “Now. Draw the face of the woman who told you my name.”

When he returned with a notebook and pencil, they sat at the counter. He opened the notebook.

“I only barely remember her,” he said, in apology or indemnity, she couldn’t tell.

She nodded at him to begin. If she opened her mouth, if she tapped that reservoir, nothing would stopper it. He folded the notebook at the spine and drew a line so soft it looked halfway erased. An oval. It could be anyone’s head, even Natasha’s. Next he drew two smaller ovals, right in the middle of her head, too long, until she imagined bangs. The two eyes watched her from the page. When he began drawing the wrong nose, she squeezed his wrist.

“That’s not …” She struggled to push words into the sentence. She would regret this. She knew she would. But she hadn’t seen her sister’s face in twelve months, two weeks and three days, and even more than Natasha’s face, even more than her return, she wanted Natasha to end. “Her nose was smaller,” she said.

For the next half hour she gently corrected him whenever he strayed. He hadn’t forgotten her face, she told herself; she was only helping him remember. And if she was deluding herself, so what? Weren’t delusions better than desperation, false hopes better than none at all? As Natasha’s calm, untroubled face emerged, Sonja’s heart climbed her ribs. It drummed against each one, then rose to her neck, pressing against her throat. In a refugee camp or foreign country, somewhere far away, Natasha was safe. He drew a chin she would recognize in a crowd of thousands, then down to her perfect, unblemished neck. Not one cigarette burn; she hadn’t told him to put them there. Something spectacular was happening in her chest. She hadn’t expected this. On one sheet of paper in a notebook of two hundred and twenty, and with no more than a few millimeters of pencil lead, he returned Natasha to her and to the maternity ward.

“Please stop,” she said.

“I thought you wanted this?”

He reached for her shoulder and she turned away. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said after a moment.

“Take this with you.”

He lifted Natasha from the counter and carried her from the maternity ward.

CHAPTER 20

SHE WAS SOLD to a brothel within bullet range of Kosovo, and from there south through the cinderblock city of Tirana and across the Adriatic, where, rocking on the dull green water, she saw the face of the moon for the first time in five weeks. It, too, was cratered with cigarette burns. Her passport was her deed, her title, and bill of sale, carried by whoever owned her today, traveling within reach of her hand but never in it. Through it all, she could count on a ritual as fixed in the day as sunrise and set. Every morning a shot of heroin inflated her head so it floated a meter above her neck until noon. By afternoon she’s itching. By evening she’ll do whatever they ask to get a shot that night. She’s not the high-priced, high-class call girl she had imagined, borne by limousine to fancy hotels, where she knows the doormen by name and tips them generously when she saunters into the night a free woman. She couldn’t buy a full bag of groceries with what the johns pay for thirty minutes. It feels like autumn, but maybe it’s spring. She can’t tell, fifteen stories above the nearest leaf. She can’t remember the year or the city, the taste of fresh air or the feel of her passport, her sister’s voice or the love and desperation that compelled her to flee, but she stands by the window and remembers the view; in eight months, when it’s all over and she’s taking three-hour showers in a women’s shelter, she will walk to the bathroom mirror and, angle by angle, she will draw it on the steamed glass. The men call her Natasha, but she doesn’t know how they know her name. Finally Katya tells her that’s what every girl from Eastern Europe is called, we’re all Natashas to them. An average day consists of ten men, three cheeseburgers, eight glasses of tap water, and two shots. A toothbrush, no toothpaste. A roll of Certs, one after each man. The repatriated women are right: modern-day slavery, but there’s nothing modern about it. Eight of you sleep on four bunk beds crammed into a bedroom. In the early morning, midafternoon, whenever the clouds part, when the heroin slithers into your blood and you forget your name, you stand at the window and thread the eternity of sky through needle-head retinas. Block after block the city goes on and every last building, right up to the horizon, stands. Sergey, the pimp, whose brother was sent back from Grozny in a zinc can, quit smoking last week or last month and the spent pieces of his nicotine gum, spat out and dried on the floor, look like little gray brains. One Natasha died, seven Natashas left; a new Natasha walked in the room and asked if this was where the au pairs slept. You are all replaceable, all disposable. Sergey reads business books and listens to lectures on free-market capitalism and, sometimes, in the middle of it, you can hear the lectures through the wall, through the grunting flab atop you, and listening to free trade and commodity economy leaves you with a rich nostalgia for the relative generosity of totalitarianism. There is the night, the last night, the next night. The belt around your ankle, the two taps of the syringe, the blood into the barrel, the plunger pushing in. There is the woman named Anzhela but called Natasha. The woman named Nadya but called Natasha. The woman named Natasha, called Natasha.