A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Read online

  They trod along the edge of the road and the girl’s quickened pace compensated for their stop. With deep breaths he tried to unweave threads of diesel fumes or burning rubber from the air. The daylight provided a degree of safety. They wouldn’t be mistaken for wild dogs.

  They heard the soldiers before the checkpoint came in sight. Akhmed raised his hand. Wind filled the spaces between his fingers. Once used to transport timber, the Eldár Forest Service Road connected the village to the city of Volchansk. The gaps between the tree trunks provided the only exit points between village and city, and in recent months the Feds had reduced their presence to a single checkpoint. It lay another half kilometer away, at the end of a sharp curve.

  “We’re going back into the woods.”

  “To eat again?”

  “Just to walk. We need to be quiet.”

  The girl nodded and raised her index finger to her lips. The entire forest had frozen and fallen to the ground. Crooked branches reached through the snow and scratched their shins from every angle as they walked a wide arc around the checkpoint. Visible through the trees, the checkpoint was no more than a wilted army tarp nailed to a poplar trunk in a failed attempt to lend an air of legitimacy. A handful of soldiers stood by it. Crossing the floor of frigid leaves in silence was impossible, but the soldiers, eight men who between them could share more venereal diseases than Chechen words, seemed no more alert than brainsick bucks, and they returned to the road a quarter kilometer past the checkpoint. The sun shone yolk-yellow between white clouds. Nearly noon. The trees they passed repeated on and on into the woods. None was remarkable when compared to the next, but each was individual in some small regard: the number of limbs, the girth of trunk, the circumference of shed leaves encircling the base. No more than minor particularities, but minor particularities were what transformed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into a face.

  The trees opened to a wide field, bisected by the road.

  “Let’s walk faster,” he said, and the girl’s footsteps hastened behind him. They were nearly halfway across when they came upon the severed hindquarters of a wolf. Farther into the field, blood dyed the snow a reddish brown. Nothing had decomposed in the cold. The head and front legs lay exposed on the ground, connected to the wolf’s back end by three meters of pulped innards. What was left of the face was frozen in the expression it had died with. The tongue ribboned from its maw.

  “It was a careless animal,” Akhmed said. He tried to look away, but there was wolf everywhere. “It didn’t watch for land mines.”

  “We’re more careful.”

  “Yes, we’ll stay on the road. We won’t walk in the fields.”

  She stood close to him. Her shoulder pressed against his side. This was the farthest she’d ever been from home.

  “It wasn’t always like this,” he said. “Before you were born there were wolves and birds and bugs and goats and bears and sheep and deer.”

  The heavy snow stretched a hundred meters to the forest. A few dead stalks rose through the brown frost, where the wolf would lie until spring. With heavy breaths they shaped the air. No prophet had augured this end. Neither the sounding of trumpets nor the beating of seraphic wings had heralded this particular field, with this particular girl, holding his particular hand.

  “They were here,” he said, staring into the field.

  “Where did the Feds take them?”

  “We should keep walking.”

  White moths circled a dead lightbulb.

  A firm hand on her shoulder lifted her from the dream. Sonja lay on a trauma ward hospital bed, still dressed in her scrubs. Before she looked to the hand that had woken her, before she rose from the imprint her body had made in the weak mattress foam, she reached for her pocket, from instinct rather than want, and shook the amber pill bottle as though its contents had followed her into her dreams and also required waking. The amphetamines rattled in reply. She sat up, conscious, blinking away the moth wings.

  “There’s someone here to see you,” Nurse Deshi announced from behind her, and began stripping the sheets before Sonja stood.

  “See me about what?” she asked. She bent to touch her feet, relieved to find them still there.

  “Now she thinks I’m a secretary,” the old nurse said, shaking her head. “Soon she’ll start pinching my rump like that oncologist who chased out four secretaries in a year. A shameful profession. I’ve never met an oncologist who wasn’t a hedonist.”

  “Deshi, who’s here to see me?”

  The old nurse looked up, startled. “A man from Eldár.”

  “About Natasha?”

  Deshi tensed her lips. She could have said no or not this time or it’s time to give up, but instead shook her head.

  The man leaned against the corridor wall. A one-size-too-small navy pes with beaded tassels roosted on the back of his head. His jacket hung from his shoulders as if still on the hanger. A girl stood beside him, inspecting the contents of a blue suitcase.

  “Sofia Andreyevna Rabina?” he asked.

  She hesitated. She hadn’t heard or spoken her full name aloud in eight years and only answered to her diminutive. “Call me Sonja,” she said.

  “My name is Akhmed.” A short black beard shrouded his cheeks. Shaving cream was an unaffordable luxury for many; she couldn’t tell if the man was a Wahhabi insurgent or just poor.

  “Are you a bearded one?” she asked.

  He reached for his whiskers in embarrassment. “No, no. Absolutely not. I just haven’t shaved recently.”

  “What do you want?”

  He nodded to the girl. She wore an orange scarf, an oversized pink coat, and a sweatshirt advertising Manchester United, likely, Sonja imagined, from the glut of Manchester apparel that had flooded clothing-drive donations after Beckham was traded to Madrid. She had the pale, waxen skin of an unripe pear. When Sonja approached, the girl had raised the lid of the suitcase, slipped her hand inside, and held an object hidden from Sonja’s view.

  “She needs a place to stay,” Akhmed said.

  “And I need a plane ticket to the Black Sea.”

  “She has nowhere to go.”

  “And I haven’t had a tan in years.”

  “Please,” he said.

  “This is a hospital, not an orphanage.”

  “There are no orphanages.”

  Out of habit she turned to the window, but she saw nothing through the duct-taped panes. The only light came from the fluorescent bulbs overhead, whose blue tint made them all appear hypothermic. Was that a moth circling the fixture? No, she was just seeing things again.

  “Her father was taken by the security forces last night. To the Landfill, most likely.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “He was a good man. He was an arborist in Eldár Forest before the wars. He didn’t have fingers. He was very good at chess.”

  “He is very good at chess,” the girl snapped, and glared at Akhmed. Grammar was the only place the girl could keep her father alive, and after amending Akhmed’s statement, she leaned back against the wall and with small, certain breaths, said is is is. Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

  Akhmed summoned the arborist with small declarative memories, and Sonja let him go on longer than she otherwise would because she, too, had tried to resurrect by recitation, had tried to recreate the thing by drawing its shape in cinders, and hoped that by compiling lists of Natasha’s favorite foods and songs and annoying habits, her sister might spontaneously materialize under the pressure of the particularities.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

  “The Feds weren’t looking for Dokka alone,” he said quietly, glancing to the girl.

  “What would they want with her?” she asked.

  “What do they want with anyone?” His urgent self-importance was familiar; she’d seen it on the faces of so many husbands, and brothers, and father
s, and sons, and was glad she could see it here, on the face of a stranger, and not feel moved. “Please let her stay,” he said.

  “She can’t.” It was the right decision, the responsible one. Caring for the dying overwhelmed her. She couldn’t be expected to care for the living as well.

  The man looked to his feet with a disappointed frown that inexplicably resurrected the memory of b) electrophilic aromatic substitution, the answer to the only question on her university organic chemistry exam she’d gotten wrong. “How many doctors are here?” he asked, apparently deciding to try a different tack.

  “One.”

  “To run an entire hospital?”

  She shrugged. What did he expect? Those with advanced degrees, personal savings, and the foresight to flee had done so. “Deshi runs it. I just work here.”

  “I was a GP. Not a surgeon or specialist, but I was licensed.” He raised his hand to his beard. A crumb fell out. “The girl will stay with you and I will work here until a home is found for her.”

  “No one will take her.”

  “Then I will keep working here. I graduated medical school in the top tenth of my class.”

  Already this man’s habit of converting entreaty to command annoyed her. She had returned from England with her full name eight years earlier and still received the respect that had so surprised her when she first arrived in London to study medicine. It didn’t matter that she was both a woman and an ethnic Russian; as the only surgeon in Volchansk, she was revered, honored and cherished in war as she never would be in peace. And this peasant doctor, this man so thin she could have pushed against his stomach and felt his spine, he expected her acquiescence? Even more than his tone of voice she resented the accuracy of his appraisal. As the last of a staff of five hundred, she was engulfed by the burden of care. She lived on amphetamines and sweetened condensed milk, had regular hallucinations, had difficulty empathizing with her patients, and had seen enough cases of secondary traumatic stress disorder to recognize herself among them. At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.

  “The top tenth percent?” Sonja asked with no small amount of skepticism.

  Akhmed nodded eagerly. “Ninety-sixth percentile to be precise.”

  “Then tell me, what would you do with an unresponsive patient?”

  “Well, hmm, let’s see,” Akhmed stammered. “First I would have him fill out a questionnaire to get a sense of his medical history along with any conditions or diseases that might run in his family.”

  “You would give an unconscious, unresponsive patient a questionnaire?”

  “Oh, no. Don’t be silly,” he said, hesitating. “I would give the questionnaire to the patient’s wife instead.”

  Sonja closed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them, this idiot doctor and his ward would have vanished. No luck. “Do you want to know what I would do?” she asked. “I would check the airway, then check for breathing, then check for a pulse, then stabilize the cervical spine. Nine times out of ten, I’d be concentrating on hemostasis. I’d be cutting off the patient’s clothes to inspect the entire body for wounds.”

  “Well, yes,” Akhmed said. “I would do all of that while the patient’s wife was filling out the questionnaire.”

  “Let’s try something closer to your level. What is this?” she asked, raising her thumb.

  “I believe that is a thumb.”

  “No,” she said. “It is the first digit composed of the metacarpal, the proximal phalange, and the distal phalange.”

  “That’s another way of saying it.”

  “And this?” she asked, pointing to her left eye. “What can you say about this besides the fact that it is my eye, and it is brown and used for seeing?”

  He frowned, uncertain what he could add. “Dilated pupils,” he said at last.

  “And did they bother teaching the top tenth percent what dilated pupils are symptomatic of?”

  “Head injuries, drug use, or sexual arousal.”

  “Or more likely because the hallway is poorly lit.” She tapped a small scar on her temple. No one knew where it had come from. “And this?”

  He smiled. “I have no idea what’s going on in there.”

  She bit her lip and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “We need someone to wash dirty sheets anyway. She can stay if you work.” The girl stood behind Akhmed. In her palm a yellow bug lounged in a pool of melting ice. Sonja already regretted her consent. “What’s your name?” she asked in Chechen.

  “Havaa,” Akhmed said. He gently pushed the girl toward her. The girl leaned against his palm, afraid to venture beyond its reach.

  A year earlier, when Natasha had disappeared for the second and final time, Sonja’s one- and two-night stays in the trauma ward had lengthened into weeks. After five weeks had passed since she’d last slid the key into the double lock, she had given up on the idea of ever going back. The twelve blocks to her flat might as well have been the Sahara. Waiting for her there was a silence more terrible than anything she heard on the operating table. Years before that, she had posed with her hand pressed against a distant Big Ben, so that in the photograph her fiancé had taken, she appeared to be holding up the clock tower. He had taken it on the eighth of their seventeen-day engagement. The photograph was taped above the desk in her bedroom, but not even its rescue was enough to lure her home. Living in the trauma ward wasn’t much of a change. She’d already been spending seventeen of her eighteen waking hours in the ward. She knew the bodies she opened, fixed, and closed more intimately than their spouses or parents did, and that intimacy came as near to creation as the breath of God’s first word.

  So when she offered to let the girl stay with her, she meant here at the hospital; but the girl already knew that as she followed Sonja to her room.

  “This is where we’ll sleep, all right?” she said, setting the girl’s suitcase by the stacked mattresses. The girl still held the bug. “Is there something in your hand?” Sonja asked tentatively.

  “A dead bug,” the girl said.

  Sonja sighed, grateful, at least, to know she wasn’t imagining it. “Why?”

  “Because I found it in the forest and brought it with me.”

  “Again, why?”

  “Because it needs to be buried facing Mecca.”

  She closed her eyes. She couldn’t begin with this now. Even as a child she had hated children; she still did. “I’ll be back later,” she said, and returned to the corridor.

  If nothing else, Akhmed was quick to undress. In the time it took her to show the girl to her room, he had changed into white scrubs. She found him preening before the hallway mirror.

  “This is a hospital, not a ballroom,” she said.

  “I’ve never worn scrubs before.” He turned from her, but the mirror held his blush.

  “How could you go through a residency without wearing scrubs?”

  He closed his eyes and his blush deepened. “My professors didn’t have much faith in me. I never had, exactly, what you would call a residency.”

  “This isn’t what I want to hear right after I take you on.”

  “I just feel privileged to work here.” The sleeves showed off his pale biceps. “I always thought these would be looser.”

  “They’re women’s scrubs.”

  “You don’t have any for men?”

  “No men work here.”

  “So I’m wearing women’s clothes.”

  “You’ll need to wear a hijab, too.” His face paled. “I’m kidding,” she added. “A headscarf is sufficient.”

  He nodded, unconvinced. Clearly, she had hired a buffoon, but a buffoon who could wash linens, make beds, and deal with relatives was better th
an no buffoon at all. “Have you ever been here before?” she asked, disinclined to give more than a brief tour of the hospital.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I was born here.”

  She took him through the ghost wards: cardiology, internal medicine, endocrinology. A layer of dust and ash recorded their path. “Where is everything?” he asked. The rooms were empty. Mattresses, sheets, hypodermics, disposable gowns, surgical tape, film dressing, thermometers, and IV bags had been moved downstairs. All that remained was bolted to the floor and built into the walls, along with items of no practical use: family portraits, professional awards, and framed diplomas from medical schools in Siberia, Moscow, and Kiev.

  “We moved everything to the trauma and maternity wards,” she said. “They’re all we can keep open.”

  “Trauma and maternity.”

  “It’s funny, isn’t it? Everyone either fucking or dying.”

  “No, not funny.” He stroked his beard, burying his fingers to the first knuckle. His fingers found their way to his beard in moments of trouble or indecision, trawling the thick dark hair but rarely touching upon wisdom. “They are coming and they are leaving and it is happening here.”

  They climbed a stairwell washed in blue emergency light. On the fourth floor she led him down the corridor to the west side of the building. Without warning him she opened the door to the storage room. Something gleeful and malicious shot through her when he took a step back, afraid of falling. “What happened?” he asked. The floor broke off a meter past the doorframe. No walls or windows, just a cityscape muraled across the winter air.

  “A few years back we harbored rebels. The Feds blew off the wall in reply.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Maali. Deshi’s sister.”

  “Only one person?”

  “A benefit of understaffing.”

  On days when both sides abided by the ceasefire, she came to this doorway and looked across the city and tried to identify the buildings by their ruins. The one that flickered with ten thousand pieces of sunlight had been a sheet-glass office building in which nine hundred and eighteen souls had labored. Beneath that minaret a rotund imam had led the pious in prayer. That was a school, a library, a Young Pioneers’ clubhouse, a jail, a grocery store. That was where her mother had warned her never to trust a man who claims to want an intelligent wife; where her father had taught her to ride a bike by imitating the engine growl of a careening municipal bus sure to run her over if she didn’t pedal fast enough; where she had solved her first algebra equation for a primary school teacher, a man for whom Sonja’s successes were consolation whenever he pitied himself for not having followed his older brother into the more remunerative profession of prison guard; where she had called for help after witnessing one man spear another on the university green, only to learn they were students rehearsing an Aeschylus play. It looked like a city made of shoeboxes and stamped into the ground by a petulant child. She could spend the whole afternoon rebuilding it, repopulating it, until the hallucination became the more believable reality.