by Asa Avdic
I walked through the front door and up the narrow, uneven steps. The steps of the stone staircase were worn and sloped gently, like old bars of soap. How Nour managed to get up the stairs with her crutch was a mystery. I was late, as usual, and Nour opened the door with a stern expression.
“I hardly thought you would show up,” she said as she let me into the hall.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
I took off my shoes and placed them beside Siri’s winter boots, which were arranged neatly under her jacket. Small black boots with white fur trim. They looked new and expensive. I thought about asking Nour how much they had cost and offering to pay, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Nour walked to the kitchen without answering my question and began to clatter through the dishes as she called out something I couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“She’s already in bed. Go up and say good-bye before she falls asleep.”
I walked into the apartment and up the stairs to Nour’s old office. There had been many such offices throughout the years, in all the apartments we lived in, and I had never been allowed to enter them without permission. These days, there was a sign on the door drawn in crayon of a happy cat and flowers, on which Siri had printed her name in sprawling, multicolored letters. I knocked softly, and when no one answered I stepped in. Siri was tucked into bed, in her blue polka-dot sheets, and she was paging through a book I had given her about a bear who starts school. Surrounding her in bed were stuffed animals, staring blindly out of their button eyes, and on the wall above the bed was a picture of me and her together in Kyzyl Kum. Two identical smiles; her long dark hair beside mine, short and blond. On my first visit there, she and Nour had flown down to see me, back when my job was administrative. That was before the cold and the refugees, before the violence. There hadn’t been any visits during my later trips. No more family photos.
I sat on the bed beside her. Her body stiffened immediately.
“Should I read to you?”
She shook her head, staring at me with eyes as big and round as a cat’s. I hesitated for a moment, then reached out my hand and brushed her dark bangs off of her forehead. Her hair felt nice and a little coarse under my hand. She held her breath for a second, but then she rested her head against my side. I put my arm around her and pulled her against me. We sat there like that for a moment, both a touch uncomfortable, but still capturing the sudden closeness that I, at least, didn’t want to disrupt. I stroked her cheeks. They were soft and smooth. Their childish roundness from the photo above the bed was starting to disappear, and in some brief moments you could glimpse the angularity and beauty she would likely develop as a teenager. Her skinny arms rested on the blanket, the book in her hands. When she was a baby, they had constantly encircled my fingers, her cheek against my breast, her heart against my own.
“You know I’m going away again?”
I felt her stiffen once more. She said nothing but gave a short nod.
“It’s just for a few days this time, and then I’ll come home again. And after that I’m going to stay home; I’m not going to go away anymore.”
Her body was stiff and still, except for the fidgety movements of her hands, which were picking at a thread that had come loose from her duvet cover. I continued to stroke her cheek.
“And when I come home again, we can do tons of fun stuff. We can go to the sea again—would you like to do that?”
She still didn’t respond. I could hear the forced tone of my voice, cheerful and ingratiating. Why would she want to go to the sea with me? She hardly knew me anymore.
“So, time to go to sleep, and we’ll see each other again in a few days. Good night, my darling, sleep tight.”
I took her book, tucked her in, kissed her on the cheek, and turned out the light. She was lying on her back, her face turned toward the wall. The contours of her thin body were barely visible under the billowy duvet. Just as I was on my way out of the darkened room, I heard her voice for the first time since I’d come in:
“Mom?”
“What is it, sweetie?”
“Are you coming back?”
I hesitated a second too long.
“Of course I’m coming back. Go to sleep now, honey.”
As I walked down the stairs, I felt something tacky along my jawline, and only when I raised my hand to wipe it away did I realize it was my own tears.
I walked through the living room and stopped there for a moment. It wasn’t just the building that felt old; Nour’s entire home was like a piece of an old world. When I was little, she had decorated it with furniture from IKEA and Hellerau, just as the party recommended, but as the years went by and her personal enthusiasm for the party waned, the more her home began to look like Grandpa’s. Photographs of old relatives instead of party leaders, Oriental carpets on the floor, old books on the shelves. And not just there—dusty books everywhere. Nour says that when Grandpa came here from Bosnia in the 1970s, when that country was still part of Yugoslavia, it wasn’t unusual to see foreigners here. Nowadays you hardly ever saw them. Most of those who came here left the Baltic Sea area after the Wall Coup in 1989, after the dissidents tried to tear down the wall between East and West Germany, before the annexation. Nour and her home were a dying breed in this world. In some ways I was happy that Siri got to have them in her life, even though it might create problems for her in the future.
I walked into the kitchen and sat down on a chair at the table. Nour was still doing dishes, her back to me. Suddenly she put down her hands and stopped working, although she still hadn’t turned around.
“She wonders what you’re up to, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why you have to disappear all the time.”
I felt the panic rising in my chest, the urge to defend myself. I sat without speaking for a moment. Then I said, “But she has you.”
Nour turned around. There were dark circles under her eyes. It suddenly struck me that she was about to turn seventy. I had always considered her immortal, like someone who existed outside of time. She gave me a searching look, then turned to the cupboard and took out two glasses and a bottle of vodka, sat down across from me, placed the glasses in front of us, and filled each. She looked at me for a long time, as if she were trying to determine whether I would be receptive to what she wanted to say.
“Don’t be mad,” she said at last.
“About what?”
“About what I’m going to ask you.”
“Well, doesn’t that depend on what you’re going to ask?”
“Don’t brush this off with jokes; this is serious.”
She wouldn’t stop looking at me.
“Okay, ask away.”
Nour lifted her glass, took a large, fast gulp, and put it down again.
“What I want to know is, are you coming back?”
“I’ll be gone for two or three days, and then . . .”
Nour shook her head frantically.
“No, no, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean are you coming back?”
I stared back at her until she looked away, turning her eyes to the dark window. Neither of us said anything for a long time. In the end, it was Nour who started to speak again, in a low voice: “There’s a little girl lying up there who doesn’t know whether she has a mom. And she doesn’t talk about it, but it eats at her. I can see it, even if you don’t.”
“But she has you,” I said tonelessly, once again, like a mantra. Nour stubbornly continued to gaze out the window.
“But the problem is, I’m not her mother. I’m your mother. And as it happens, I, too, want to know whether . . .” She stopped in the middle of her sentence. I saw her swallow.
“Know what?”
“Whether you’re coming back. Whether you want to live.”
A tear ran down Nour’s cheek, and she didn�
�t wipe it away.
“My little girl,” she said quietly, still without looking at me. I couldn’t tell whether she was talking about me or Siri. I emptied my glass in one gulp, my pulse pounding in my ears, then stood up and walked around to Nour, who was still sitting stiffly and looking out the window. I kissed her firmly on the head, where the white hair had begun to grow out under the dye, which made it look like she was wearing a wig.
“See you in a few days, Nour.”
I walked into the hall, put on my coat and boots as fast as I possibly could, and ran down the stairs and out to the street, where I threw up in a trash can.
THE NEXT MORNING I left home before it was fully light out. A taxi picked me up on the sidewalk outside my apartment. Little snowflakes were dancing in the air as the taxi driver huffed and heaved my bags into the trunk. I was struck by the urge to turn around and take a picture of my building, as if I would be gone for a very long time.
The taxi driver drove out of the city and down to the large industrial wharves where the lake turned to sea; he wove around warehouses and stacks of containers before stopping at a pier with locked gates. He removed my bags from the trunk and placed them on the ground, but before I even had time to ask whether I was supposed to pay or sign a receipt he had hopped back into the taxi and driven off. I stood there alone, wondering what I should do, but then I saw a uniformed man approaching from the other side of the gate. Without a word, he unlocked the padlocks that fastened thick chains around the gates and let me in. As I looked around, I discovered that there was a surveillance camera mounted on one of the tall gateposts, and I assumed that was how they had learned of my arrival. The white snow had covered the ground like a thin layer of powdered sugar, and as we walked along the pier I turned around to look at my own footprints. They were already being covered by snow again.
Docked at the far end of the pier was a gray motorboat, military-style, and I recognized the thin silhouette of the secretary on the quay. Next to him stood a woman I assumed was the doctor, Katerina Ivanovitch. She was younger than me, younger than I’d expected, with blond hair in a simple bun and shiny dark eyes in an open face; she was wearing practical, casual clothing and had a backpack made of performance fabric hanging from one shoulder. Despite the raw, cold morning and the blurry dawn, she looked energetic, a Pioneer leader on her way to new adventures in the mountains, which made me even more conscious of the sleep- and stress-induced lines on my face. She shook my hand with a certain firmness when I introduced myself.
“Hi, Anna. My name is Katerina. Call me Katja.”
She looked me straight in the eye as we met, and the way she repeated my name as I introduced myself indicated that she was used to inspiring rapid confidence in strangers. A type of secret handshake for doctors, psychologists, and priests. I wondered what sort of hold they had on her, considering that she had accepted this assignment.
The secretary put out his cigarette on the quay and pulled his gray coat around him.
“Well, I suppose it’s time for us to go onboard, and we can hash out the details on the journey. It will take a few hours, so I suggest we try to get going as soon as possible.”
THE SHIP HAD two rooms belowdecks. One was a lounge with brown leather sofas bolted to the walls, and beyond that was a cabin with narrow berths on top of one another. The secretary waved his hand, and Katja and I sat next to each other on one sofa and accepted the offer of coffee from a wall-mounted coffee machine. It tasted burned and had a strange flavor, and the paper cup felt thin, as though you had to finish your drink quickly lest the cup dissolve. But it was still coffee, and it was warm. I took a gulp of mine, way too large and too fast, and burned my tongue. Meanwhile the secretary blew into his cup with his thin lips, as if he were trying to play a misshapen pan flute. Then he set it down and started talking.
“I thought I would refresh your memories by going through the guidelines for your collaboration on the island. So what’s going to happen is that you, Anna, will be introduced as one of the candidates for the position with the RAN group. Katja, however, will be presented as herself, a doctor, someone available as a resource on the island should anyone fall ill, for example, or have some sort of accident. That is also our excuse for having a medical station in the basement—that acute care can be given there, since a rescue evacuation would take time. After all, we don’t want to appear irresponsible,” he said, apparently unaware of the irony. “The stress test will last for forty-eight hours. In the middle of the night tonight, you, Anna, will be ‘murdered.’” His fingers made air quotes. “Katja will anesthetize you and also give you a muscle relaxant, so that you won’t move just by reflex. And Katja, you will later ‘discover’ the ‘murder’”—he didn’t even bother to lower his hands between words—“and send for one of the others to serve as a witness to what has occurred. We’ll have to make sure the witness is thoroughly drugged at the time, so that he or she is not too observant. Then, Anna, you’ll be placed in a chest freezer in the medical station before anyone else can examine you. The freezer will be sealed, and we’ll say that Katja is the only one with the code. In reality, you can open it from the inside, both to get out to the medical station and down to the Strategic Level, and as soon as the effects of the medicine abate you can make your way through the hatch in the floor of the freezer and onto the Strategic Level. Then comes careful observation and evaluation, and when the time is up we will come ashore and pick up the participants as well as the two of you, and the participants will learn what they have been a part of on the boat on the way home; they will be cared for by our team. You, Anna, will give us the general rundown and recommend your candidate. Any questions?”
I cleared my throat before opening my mouth, afraid that my voice wouldn’t quite work after the secretary’s long speech; at the same time, I was debating how honest I could be. The secretary was not the Chairman, didn’t have his power, even if he almost certainly reported directly to him. Perhaps I could allow myself a few critical questions after all.
“So you won’t come ashore until forty-eight hours have passed, no matter what happens?”
“Correct.”
“So what will happen if someone doesn’t handle it very well? If someone breaks down?”
The secretary looked meaningfully at Katja, and she took over.
“In that event, there are a number of potential solutions we can turn to, so there’s nothing to worry about.”
“What sorts of solutions?”
Katja hesitated. “Pharmaceutical solutions, above all.”
“So your plan is that we’ll just drug anyone who has a nervous breakdown until the exercise is over? How well does that fit with your sense of medical ethics, Katja?”
Katja looked uncomfortable; a small wrinkle got stuck between her small dark eyes.
“That could be argued either way, of course, but nowadays there are extremely good, effective anti-anxiety medications that can be used in times of crisis, as you yourself should be well aware, given your time in Kyzyl Kum, if I’ve understood correctly?”
The question was posed in a broad sort of way, but it still made me feel slightly nauseated. It was clear that she knew more about me than I did about her. I decided to let the matter rest, so I shrugged.
“Well, I’m not the one in charge of medical care, so I’ll leave that to you.”
“How lovely,” the secretary exclaimed. “After all, cooperation between the two of you is a prerequisite for the success of this experiment.”
I couldn’t help myself, even though I had just decided that it wasn’t my problem.
“But what happens if it doesn’t succeed?”
The secretary sighed with deep annoyance.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Which I’m sure we won’t. Naturally, we have made meticulous preparations and we know what we’re doing. Now, I suggest that you try to get a little rest; there m
ight not be much of that to go around in the next few days. There are cots in the berth if you want to sleep; otherwise you’re welcome to sit in here—there are magazines and several TV channels.”
I stood up and went into the berth, where there were four made bunks. I crawled into the lower left-hand one, but I couldn’t fall asleep. At last I climbed back out of the bunk and joined the secretary, who was hunched over a stack of papers. When he saw me, he reflexively put his arm around them like a schoolboy, as if I were trying to cheat off his test. I sat down in front of the TV and found a channel that was showing all of the old episodes of a TV show I’d liked when I was younger. It was one of the few imported series that was still broadcast. In the early 1990s, when there were still capitalist TV channels and we weren’t yet a full Union state, the series had been ridiculously popular among young people, and there had been an outcry when the party decided it would be taken off the air. So instead the state television company bought the rights, and now it was almost tradition that it was always running on one of the channels, year after year. Nour had told me, with poorly disguised distaste, that American and British series had constantly been shown on TV before. Now this was almost the only one left.