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cardigan she’d given Natasha for her eighteenth birthday, the one Natasha had hated and called a babushka’s sweater, and never wore, not even once, on a chilly day, to appease Sonja. It was just what Natasha would leave behind.She held that sweater, wrapping the arms over her shoulders as if in an embrace.
    Hospital No. 6 hired her without requesting an application or résumé. When she provided a list of references in London, Deshi crumpled the paper, tossed it under the desk, and told Sonja that Dr. Wastebasket would dutifully contact each recommender. Sonja’s former professors had fled to the West, to the countryside, to private practices in places where they could save lives without endangering their own. Unimpeded by a hierarchical bureaucracy or institutional memory, she rose from resident to head surgeon in two months. Land mines didn’t obey the Khasavyurt Peace Accord, and within a year she had more trauma surgery experience than the professors she’d studied under. She worked with gratitude for the pain of her patients. In their cries she heard her name as though she were the missing sister, recalled by their gibberish to this place where she amputated limbs and stanched bleeding, where her training was so needed and scarce her patients saw her hovering over the hospital bed as the last prophet of life, whom they pleaded with and praised and spoke to in prayer.
    The days were urgent, without pause for reflection beyond the recall of case studies and anatomy lessons. At night she drifted home. If she remembered, she would brush her teeth with baking soda and recite the prayers her mother had taught her. Her tongue fumbled with those awkward and ancient words, and though no one was listening she found a measure of peace in this obsolete language of supplication. After crossing herself, she lay back on the divan and squirted a cool puddle of hand lotion from the bottle she’d brought from London. Invariably she would apply too much, and her hands would be slick and shiny in the candlelight as she asked for another pair with which to share the excess.
    The weeks stacked into months that were flipped from the Red Cross calendar hanging behind the waiting-room reception desk; the calendar was from 1993 and would be reused until 2006 and for those thirteen years her birthday would always fall on a Monday. She markedthe days, but time didn’t march forward; instead it turned from day to night, from hospital to flat, from cries to silence, from claustrophobia to loneliness and back again, like a coin flipping from side to side. Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness. The blind man who played accordion for her as she splinted the broken leg of his guide dog. The boy who narrated his dreams while recovering from meningitis.
    Then, one evening, a knock sounded from the door as she prepared for sleep. She considered and disregarded Laina’s advice as the doorknob slipped in her greasy grip. When she opened the door she wanted to scream. Natasha stood right there, in front of her, close enough to hold. She did scream, and she embraced Natasha, and later, on the divan, she took Natasha’s hands in her own and rubbed until hers were dry.

CHAPTER

3

    D ESPITE AN ADMITTEDLY unimpressive first day, Akhmed left Hospital No. 6 with his eyes on the stars and a swing in his gait. Sure, Sonja was a cold, domineering woman, whose glare could wither flowers and cause miscarriages, and Deshi was clearly a lunatic, and though there wasn’t a sliver of compassion between the two of them and the only fate worse than having those two as caretakers was having them as colleagues, it had been a good day. Havaa was safe. His medical training was put to use, and for the first time in months, Ula wasn’t his only patient.
    He was the first person from Eldár admitted to medical school, an institution so distant and rarefied his inclusion had been celebrated as a village-wide achievement. There had been feasts in his