“I’m just as likely to shoot off my own head as anyone I aim at,” Natasha said. She didn’t want the gun and told him as much, but he insisted, saying Comrade Makarov would keep her safe on those dangerous roads. “Do you arm all your guests?” she asked with a smile.
“You’re our first.”
“Why?”
“After I lost my fingers, I thought Havaa should learn to shoot. But when I think about her shooting at the Feds, and what would come after that … She knows to run. It’s better if we don’t have the gun.”
“But why give it to me?”
“Because I want to protect the person who gave me Havaa.” She could think of no refutation. He insisted she keep it on her person, and it pressed against her left breast as she hugged Havaa good-bye. The girl clung to Natasha’s fingers, and Natasha shook them both away, with gratitude, and hurried into the cool daylight before their affirmations of goodwill crippled her. Her boot heels bit into her ankles but she wouldn’t stop to slip on extra socks before she had traveled far enough from Dokka’s house to preclude the possibility of returning. The wood, brick, and cinderblock dwellings grew smaller as she reached the village’s southern end. A stubble of dead grass filled the ungrazed fields. The forest closed around the road. Hanging from a tree was a final portrait, a woman with long, dark hair and an aquiline nose, whom Natasha recognized but couldn’t identify. Of all the village portraits, this was the most detailed and closely observed. In the center of the otherwise serene portrait, the woman’s lips opened, just a centimeter, revealing no more than a sliver of her tongue, the forty-second portrait, if Natasha were to count, the only one whose subject opened her mouth in speech or sigh, a word spoken and heard for eternity, or an expression of longing, though whether it belonged to the woman or the artist, Natasha couldn’t say. She stared at the portrait for several minutes before understanding, belatedly, why the woman looked so familiar. Perhaps those chestnut-sized eyes recognized her. Natasha was, after all, wearing the woman’s maternity dress.
She made it twenty kilometers by the time the sun set. She had hoped to come to a village where she might enjoy a morsel of Dokka’s hospitality, but the scavenged remains of logging encampments were the only signs of prior habitation. All else was woodland. She went deep enough into the trees that not even the glimmer of a campfire could be seen from the road. Recalling the lessons of the City Park Prophet, she built a fire from dried branches and dead leaves. Dokka had given her a G-4 humanitarian aid ration: three cans of evaporated milk and one tin of processed meat. The Feds who doled out the G-series aid claimed it was enough food to support a man of average height and build for three days, thus corroborating her long-held suspicion that everyone in Russia was either a midget or a fucking idiot. She cut the evaporated milk with canteen water, shaking the concoction until it came out in glossy, fire-soaked dribbles that beaded the canteen lip like golden roe. When it came time to sleep, she extinguished the flames and, as the City Park Prophet had taught her, spread her sleeping bag across the charred ground so it would pleasantly toast her backside as she drifted away.
The next day she hiked ten or twenty or forty kilometers. The following day, maybe more, maybe less. A thousand times she considered turning back but the huff of every cloud in Chechnya was no bleaker than another afternoon in the hospital corridor, fighting the ten steps to the canteen cupboard. And my god, the Samsonite suitcase, why had she thought this was a good idea? Gravel and dirt caught in the wheels as it slowed from a rolling suitcase to a dragging suitcase to an anvil with a retractable handle. What sort of lunatic shows up to a refugee camp with a Samsonite? She packed so much emotional energy into that suitcase she had none left to consider what she had done to Sonja.
Each day the mountains grew taller. Filtration points and checkpoints abounded, most manned by young soldiers too timid to investigate movement in the woods. But on the evening of the fourth day, carrying on her shoulders all twenty-eight weary kilometers, Natasha came to a filtration point larger and better lit than the others. The chain-link fence, crowned with razor wire and stretching along the pasture and into the woods, prevented the usual circumnavigation. Had she arrived at the checkpoint when the sun warmed her bones, she might have turned back and taken the connecting road she had passed two hours earlier. Had it been summer, and the ground hadn’t needed to be warmed and dried by fire, she might have bedded in the woods and waited for the morning to illuminate her options. But it was neither earlier that day nor earlier that year. It was night; it was cold; her bones hated her; she just wanted to get to the other side, warm the ground, and sleep and sleep and sleep. Besides, she was a refugee destined for a refugee camp, and in her exhaustion she believed the soldiers would honor the international law guaranteeing her safe passage.
A halo of floodlight surrounded her; whether it guided or followed her, she couldn’t say. A bullhorn demanded she keep her hands in plain sight. Fatigue and haste had clouded her judgment, and only now, as she walked in that brilliant circle with one arm raised, the other pulling the suitcase, did she begin to worry. She’d imagined that homesick boys a year out of school would man the filtration point as they had the others. But when she saw the prison tattoos on their hands, when the bespectacled official frowned at the fifty-ruble note she presented in lieu of a passport, she saw her mistake beyond all doubt. These were kontraktniki, and this was the front line rather than a checkpoint. The Makarov weighed more every second it went undiscovered. The men found her sanitary napkins suspicious enough to inspect, yet hadn’t searched her. They gathered around her portable alarm clock like uncomprehending tribesmen. All the while the gun grew heavier on her breast.
She drew her mind to the Rome women’s clinic, which, despite every aspersion she had cast at it, was in memory another term for rescue. Her blood had been drawn and filtered through a vending machine that flickered with red and yellow numbers. She had tested positive for a half dozen sexually transmitted diseases, all of which sounded like geometry terms. In group, listening to the confessions of women who missed their pimps, who were terrified of what their families would say, who didn’t sleep for fear of waking up in the brothel, she had nodded in recognition. Strangers from Poland and Turkey and Siberia had spoken with her breath. Her hope of rescue had taken so long to die. It had survived the Breaking Grounds, Kosovo, the beatings, rapes, and heroin. It had survived longer than denial and indignation, longer than three of her teeth. It had survived until the day a john’s wallet had fallen from his trousers, opening on the floor. The transparent plastic sleeve had held a portrait of a boy and girl dressed in matching sweaters and smiling uncomfortably. She had begged him, a father, a family man, to rescue her. But he had just looked at her as if she’d asked him to staple feathers to her arms. When her turn had come, she told the other women and they had looked at her and nodded.
But rescue was another country, and she didn’t know if she would make it there. The soldiers kept unpacking and unfolding, unraveling and unwrapping, while on her chest the Makarov grew to a Kalashnikov, then a Katyusha rocket launcher. The soldiers were ripping the wheels from her suitcase and still hadn’t touched her. As she tightened her headscarf, she finally understood. The soldiers thought she was a traditional Chechen woman.
An older officer, fragranced with enough aftershave to inebriate lesser men, emerged from the camouflaged outhouse that constituted the checkpoint office. Golden stars glimmered from his epaulets. A double-headed-eagle perched on his tie clip. His hair parted above his left ear and was plastered across his balding crown. Nothing escaped his wide blue eyes. The soldiers addressed him as colonel.