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In the six months she lived without Sulim, without her mother or father, only one di
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 a
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 sca
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 mille
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 prepla