“Good morning,” her aunt said as she entered the room. “Alyssa,” she said in Russian, trying to pronounce the name, “went to the market with me to get some eggs. She is showing me how to make eggs that are mixed-up the American way.” The aunt nodded her head approvingly.
Her aunt’s cheery demeanor reminded Kamila what a bad mood she herself had been in the night before. “I didn’t say you could take her anywhere.”
“You were sleeping.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kamila said. She tossed aside the blanket someone had placed on her. “Why do you pay so much attention to her?”
“Alyssa brought you a blanket when you were sleeping. A pillow too. You are lucky to have such a nice girl.”
Kamila stood and the room shifted beneath her feet. She bent over, gripping the back of the couch.
“What’s the matter?” her aunt asked.
The medicine should have worn off by now.
Was something else making her feel as though she were in the middle of a carousel, watching the world reel by? Had they done something to the soup she ate last night? She had only had a few sips. It hadn’t affected the other two.
If it was the same soup.
She waited while the world decelerated. The floor grew more trustworthy. She walked a straight line to the kitchen table, and Alyssa put plates of eggs and bread on the table, placing Kamila’s food down first. They aunt and Alyssa sat down across from each other, Kamila between them.
“There’s not any salt or pepper, I don’t think.” Alyssa said.
“Give me your plate,” Kamila said.
“But I made yours bigger, because you didn’t eat.”
“Give me your plate.”
Alyssa looked at the aunt then moved her own plate in front of Kamila. They were both staring at her, waiting for something. “Eat.” Kamila said in Russian. Alyssa picked up her fork and began eating the eggs. The aunt followed her example.
Something wasn’t right, her mind not any clearer than the night before. Thoughts and ideas would form, then disintegrate. She had to eat or she would die, and it wasn’t time to die yet.
She stabbed the scrambled eggs with her fork and lifted the food to her mouth, not looking at her plate, but at the faces of the other two. She chewed and swallowed then waited, but nothing happened. She took a few more bites then glanced up at her aunt. The old woman had a hideous, evil glare that sucked you in and bit at you. It was cold, like the swift, glacial streams in the mountains above Grozny, where the current would drag you under in one poorly timed lift of the foot. As Kamila considered what to do next, her aunt’s eyes accused her of many things, and for a moment Kamila felt as though giving up was all there was left to do.
Kamila fought against her glare, found a footing on the riverbed. “Don’t stare at me.”
“I’m not. Just looking. Reading what it is that ails you.” Kamila looked away but he aunt went on. “You are tortured, girl.”
A woman’s voice whispered from behind her. She did not turn to look, and what the woman said remained outside the edge of consciousness.
“What is it Kamila?” her aunt asked.
The voice again, soft as if she were waking from a dream. Incomprehensible, but ready to breach the wall. “What?” Kamila asked of the woman not there.
“I said what is wrong,” her aunt repeated.
Kamila covered her ears and put her head down. Go away. Someone touched her back and she jerked away as though she had been slapped. “Don’t!” she yelled. It was her aunt.
Her aunt stumbled, startled by Kamila’s response, stepped back and stared at Alyssa, who shrugged.
“What are you both looking at?” Kamila demanded in English. When her aunt looked again at Alyssa, Kamila said in Chechen. “Leave me alone. The girl doesn’t know anything about anything. Stop talking to her...”
“She needs something,” her aunt said in Russian. “But I can’t understand her.”
Kamila stood. “Where is my father?”
“So you are leaving the girl with me?” the aunt asked.
“No, and what I do with her is none of your business.”
“I think it is,” the aunt said. “You are not well.”
Kamila laughed. “I’m not well? You don’t know who you are up against.”
“You need to rest more.”
“Rest…is that why you poisoned me?”
“I would not do that,” the aunt said, straightening her posture. “You accuse me of this when I invite you into my home? I think there is something else here you are not telling me about. Is her father really dead?”
“I am not a liar,” Kamila said. “Stop calling me a liar.”
“No one called you a liar.”
In her periphery, Kamila sensed Alyssa rise from her seat and take something off the table. She saw the girl approach, had a premonition that she was going to do something bad to Kamila. She shoved the girl away and Alyssa fell back slowly, it seemed, until her head bounced off the corner of the wall where it met the floor.
“Kamila!” the old lady shouted.
Kamila looked down at what Alyssa had in her hand. It was the wooden spoon they had used for the eggs, and the plates that were now scattered across the floor. “I thought—”
“You thought what?”
“I thought it was a knife.”
“Knife? Have you lost your mind?”
“You don’t know her like I do. She can’t be trusted. She’s not like us.”
The aunt helped Alyssa up from the floor and held her close, kissing her head.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Kamila said in English.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Alyssa’s voice was obstinate, a familiar tone. She turned away and buried her face, wet with tears, in the old woman’s embrace.
Kamila stumbled down the stairs and out into the Grozny morning. The air was heavy with the sounds of trucks and construction cranes and people working and moving. New buildings, dark glass and painted concrete filled with and erected by the living. Nothing more than sterile tombstones made to cover the rotting dead below. The stacks, floor upon floor, were hard and angular; but the dead were shapeless. Still sentient, they wisped by her, their sorrow drawing the heat from her. To ward them off, she closed her eyes, rubbed them harshly.
When she could see again, she was in a familiar place. Older buildings and a little store she had visited so many times.
She was near the market where her mother and sister had been killed by the Russians.
***
It was October 1999, her mother’s shopping day and as usual she was trying to convince Kamila and her twin sister to go with her. “Your older sister Anna always wanted to be with me,” she would say. If there was one thing they could count on, it was reminders of how much better Anna was than the rest of them.
“Don’t make them feel guilty,” Kamila’s father said from the other room. “And remember, you need to be careful. The first sign of trouble, you get back here.”
“It’s been weeks without an attack,” her mother replied. “Have you heard something?”
“I hear enough to know you should make your trips outside short.”
“If you feel that strongly, why don’t you get us out of this place?”
“You know why, woman. I have work here.” Kamila’s father let the paper down enough to give their mother one of his looks.
But their mother wasn’t easily intimidated, and when she was on topic, there was no stopping her. “Work? You mean work for the resistance. There are plenty of jobs in Russia now. I heard that—”
“And what would a Chechen man do in Russia, besides get killed?”
“It didn’t hurt Anna to go to Moscow. She became—”
“A doctor, we all know that. And then what? Abandoned her family. She is more Russian than you.”
Her mother turned away, stung by the insult that, while directed at al
l Russians, also meant her own blood—her parents and brother and sister—the entire culture she had known before marrying him. Kamila smiled behind her mother’s back. She never understood how her mother could even admit to this foreign heritage. When she grew up, Kamila thought, she would never tell anyone that her mother was a Russian.
Her mother gathered her bags and walked to the front door. “Are you coming girls?”
“I will,” Kamila’s twin sister said, while Kamila shook her head no and walked over to her father as the other two left.
“Father…”
“What is it now?” he grumbled through the political newspaper that was stretched out between his hands.
“How come Anna won’t come home?”
She had heard the answer a hundred times, knew it would get him riled up. At least then he would talk to her.
“Why else do people go to America? Money.” He put the paper down. When I was a boy, it was the Communists who killed us. Why? Money…oil…land. Now the Capitalists kill us. Why? Money…oil…land.”
“You don’t miss her do you?” Kamila asked, ravenous for her father to rail against Anna. Anna who had, before leaving for Moscow, absorbed any paternal affection he had possessed. Her father was quiet for a long time, and Kamila wondered if she should ask the question again.
Finally, he spoke, “Yes.”
She eyed him suspiciously. Was this a trick? “Why?”
“Because she is my daughter. Why wouldn’t I miss her?” He smiled and Kamila hated him for that. “She was such a good girl, and smart. Smartest female I know. Must have got that from her mother.” He chuckled. This man, who had a reputation for being cold-hearted even among the rebels, who rarely had anything good to say about his wife and the two daughters who did not abandon him, laughed at some memory of his favorite, the one who had as much as spit on his face by her actions.
“But she left us…left Chechnya.”
“I know. And she’s probably better for it.”
“Then why are you always talking like you are mad at her?” Kamila demanded, her sense of betrayal unhidden. It was as though he had been tricking her all along. Making a joke of it all. Mocking her.
“You wouldn’t understand, Kamila.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You only think of things from your own point of view.”
She wanted to deny this, but then she realized, what other point of view was there? “If I left would you miss me?”
He was silent again, as if thinking of something else. To her father, Kamila had disappeared again.
“Papa?”
“What?” He asked with irritation.
“Would you miss me?”
“Would I miss you what? You aren’t going to go anywhere, Kamila. You’re not smart enough to be a doctor or lawyer or anything else they want in Moscow or America. You just need to find yourself a good man—any man, to take care of you.”
Kamila stood. “I don’t want to be taken care of—”
She never finished telling her father what she thought of his plans for her, how he underestimated everything she had done and was capable of doing, because at that moment sound waves from the exploding missiles pierced the walls of the apartment and rippled through her head. There was an unnatural silence, as though her ears were stuffed with cotton, then a sharp ringing. Her father was still standing but the pictures and shelves had been tossed from the walls.
Kamila imagined her mother and sister outside, helpless under the missiles that had not fallen yet, but were already on their way. She had to tell them. There was another deadly burst and the apartment seemed to move several feet under her.
She opened her eyes and her father was straddling her, slapping her face. “Get up,” he shouted. “To the shelter. Now!”
“Mother….”
“I will find them,” he said.
It was the kindest thing he had ever said to her.
He pulled her up and her head throbbed from the fall. She swayed and her father clutched her shoulder. “Go!” he shouted, and gave her a shove toward the door.
In the stairwell, other tenants filled in the spaces around her. Old women and young mothers carrying babies with one hand, dragging children with the other. When she reached the second floor she nearly tripped over a little girl, no more than five, who was blocking one side of the narrow passage. The girl was going to get herself killed, get other people killed too if she didn’t move. Kamila bent to talk to the girl. The others brushed by the child roughly with shouts of “Move!” and “Get out of the way!”, their knees bumping the child’s head, feet pinching her chubby legs.
Another salvo arrived and the sequential bursts moved closer. Shockwaves from the right sent everyone veering to the left side of the stairwell, reminding Kamila of an old film she had seen of people on a ship in a storm. Kamila reached down and shook the girl’s shoulder. “Get up!”
The girl looked up at Kamila. “Mommy…I want mommy…”
Blood streamed from the little girl’s nose, down her neck and onto her shirt.
“Your mommy is not here. Come with me.” Kamila pleaded.
There was no time to waste. She pulled the girl’s dead weight to her feet. She wouldn’t budge. Someone shoved Kamila in the back and she caught her balance on the wall. People shouted for her to move while outside, the clap and rumble that was destroying Grozny continued. Another, much harder push against her back. “Leave it,” a man’s voice said.
She stood upright and faced the man. He was well fed and probably in his forties. Kamila said, “She is not an it…she is a person.” With the word person, Kamila jabbed her fist into his chest and he toppled down the stairwell on the backs of the others, who did nothing to support him but moved out of the way, until he reached the landing of the first floor. Those that had backed up upon the landing behind Kamila kept their distance from her now, allowing her room to breathe and deal with the girl. She picked up the girl, held her tightly against her chest, and continued down the stairwell, stepping over the man who had pushed her.
In the basement, Kamila found an empty space along the wall and set the child down. She put the child on her lap and used her shirt to wipe the blood from her face. Soon the basement was full, groups of families huddled together under the shelter’s dim light and dripping pipes. Kamila scanned the room. Kamila and the girl were the only pair, the only ones without a family, in the entire shelter. Her eyes caught on a group of women staring back at her. They had obviously been discussing Kamila and the girl. Here were hundreds of people trapped in a breathless tomb, as likely to be killed by a missile here as outside, and all they could do is gossip. Why? Because Kamila had helped a child they were willing to throw away.
She swept the girl’s hair from her face, pinning it behind her ears. “What is your name?”
“Lulai”
“What a pretty name,” Kamila said, taking the scarf off her own head and pinching the remaining blood from the girl’s nose.
“Ow,” she said, recoiling, tears forming in her eyes again.
“Tell me, Lulai, where is your mother?”
The girl’s breathing turned shallow again as though she were about to hyperventilate. “I...don’t…know.”
“Me too.”
The girl stared back at Kamila, waiting for the rest of the story.
“I don’t know where my mother is either,” Kamila said. “But at least you and me, we are safe for now.”
Another missile shook the ground, but further away this time. The girl winced.
Kamila’s childhood, only five years earlier, had been scarred by the Russian carpet-bombing of Grozny. These new bombs—the explosions were further apart—but they caused more destruction. She knew, thanks to her father’s descriptions of such things, that these were missiles.
“Are the bombs going to come down here?”
“I don’t think so,” Kamila said, pausing for effect, as if she we
re seriously considering the question. “If they do, we won’t know.”
“Why won’t we know?”
“Because you never know. It just happens and then you get to be with God.”
The girl’s expression showed that she was not comforted by this thought.
“Don’t you want to be with God?” Kamila asked.
“Not right now.”
Kamila laughed and held the girl. “Let’s be quiet now and listen to the music.”
After a while the girl raised her head and looked up at Kamila. “What music?”
Kamila said, “When I hear the bombs I imagine there is a beautiful symphony playing on the radio. So beautiful that it fills all the air around me and every once in a while one of those big drums goes boom, but always perfectly in time with the music. Those booms are right where the composer wanted them to be. Never too late and never too soon.” The girl’s body relaxed against Kamila and they both waited for their mothers to return.
Neither one did.
***
Now, years later, Kamila crossed the street to the market where Russian missiles had disintegrated her mother and sister. Some in the city waited for days hoping to find survivors in the rubble. Others prayed that their father, mother, or child had simply wandered off in the confusion of the bombing. That they would come to, and realize it was fine to return home now.
Kamila knew better. When someone was dead, they were dead. She wondered where the little girl was now. Kamila had stayed in the shelter that day until the girl’s grandmother, who lived in a different part of Grozny, came looking for survivors. Both of the girl’s parents had worked in a factory near the river, the factory where those who had survived the blasts were burned in the ensuing fire.
The Russians even bombed the hospital so that the wounded had no chance. But wasn’t that the point—kill everyone and destroy everything? The little girl probably had died with those who fled the city after the bombings, when the Russians promised the refugees from Grozny safe passage along a road the Russians had filled with land mines. Those who, by dumb luck or caution, had survived that trap were killed by tank fire.
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