A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Page 3

  “Before, you couldn’t see the river from here,” she said. “This hospital is the tallest building in the city now.”

  There had been tall buildings and plans to erect taller ones. After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., oil reserves had promised prosperity for Chechnya in the coming capitalist century. Yeltsin had told the republics to grab as much sovereignty as they could swallow, and after two thousand years of foreign occupation, it had seemed the republic would finally achieve independence. Her grandparents had moved to Volchansk in 1946 after Stalin added lorry drivers and seamstresses to the expanding list of professions requiring purging, but she felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns. That sense of electric optimism was evident in the designs that had been solicited from architects in Riyadh, Melbourne, and Minsk. City officials had made a show of the blueprints, displaying them on billboards and distributing them as leaflets at the bazaar. She’d never seen anything like it. The sketches had suggested that the pinnacle of design no longer consisted of cramming the greatest amount of reinforced concrete into the ugliest rectangle possible. Once she had held a leaflet against the horizon and as the red sun bled through the paper the towers had become part of the skyline.

  “Did they really want the girl?” she asked, turning her attention back to Akhmed. It didn’t surprise her, but she asked anyway. Disappearances touched down as randomly as lightning. Only those actually guilty of abetting the insurgency—an infinitesimal fraction of those abducted—had the benefit of understanding their fate.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Akhmed said. Whether he meant the floorless room, the crushed city beyond, or the girl, Sonja didn’t know. In the distance, a faint stream of tracers streaked skyward, disappearing into the clouds.

  “Payday must be coming,” Akhmed said.

  She nodded. The Feds were only paid if they used a certain percentage of their ammo. If the soldiers tired of firing blindly into the sky, they might bury their excess rounds, then dig them up a few hours later to claim the bonus given for discovering a rebel arms cache. “Let’s go,” Sonja said.

  They passed the original maternity ward, unused since Maali’s death, and descended the stairwell to the new maternity ward. Deshi set down her knitting needles and eyed Akhmed suspiciously as she crossed the room to meet them. After twelve love affairs over the course of her seventy-three years, each beginning with a grander gesture, each ending with a more spectacular heartache, Deshi had learned to distrust men of every size and age, from newborns to great-grandfathers, knowing they all had it in them to break a decent woman’s heart. “Will he be joining us?” she asked.

  “Provisionally,” Sonja said.

  “And the girl?”

  “Provisionally.”

  “You’re the nurse,” Akhmed said, curtly. “We met earlier.”

  “He speaks out of turn, without being addressed,” Deshi observed.

  “I just wanted to say hello.”

  “He continues to speak without being spoken to. And he has an ugly nose.”

  “I’m standing right here,” Akhmed said, frowning.

  “He tells us he is standing right here. As if we have been made blind and idiotic.”

  “What am I doing wrong?” he asked Sonja. “I’m just standing here.”

  “He seems to believe that his presence might somehow transform the ugliness of his nose, but seeing that nose, right here in front of me, provides irrefutable evidence.”

  “What am I supposed to say?” He looked desperately to Sonja. She smiled and turned to Deshi.

  “Do you see the way he looks at me?” Deshi asked, her voice trembling with indignation. “He is trying to seduce me.”

  “I’m doing nothing of the sort. I’m just standing here!”

  “Denial is the first impulse of a traitor.”

  “You’re quoting Stalin,” Akhmed said.

  “You see? He’s a lecher and a Stalinist.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “He must be an oncologist.”

  “There are few fields of medicine more important than oncology.”

  Deshi appeared flabbergasted. “You see!” she shouted. “A lecher, a Stalinist, and an oncologist? It is too much. It can’t be.”

  “With respect, I’m thirty-nine and you’re old enough to be my mother. I have no desire to have anything but a professional relationship with you.”

  “No desire? First he leers, then he insults. Mocking an old woman like me, has he no shame?”

  “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get along with you.”

  Deshi’s lips sharpened into a scowl. “Only a weak man apologizes to a woman.”

  His eyes were watery by the time Sonja interrupted the exchange. He looked more shocked than he had when she opened the door to the fourth-floor storage room, and through her laughter, she couldn’t help feeling guilty for exposing the man to Deshi without warning. “Enough,” she said. “Akhmed, this is Deshi. Deshi, Akhmed. Let’s work.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” Deshi said, and returned to the desk beside the incubator.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Akhmed asked when the nurse was safely out of earshot.

  “And now he thinks there’s something wrong with Deshi,” Sonja said. A look of horror sank into his face. She assured him she was joking. “She once fell in love with an oncologist. It didn’t work out.”

  A woman with dark greasy hair lay in the first bed with a child suckling her left breast. She pulled the bedsheet past the child’s head when she saw them approach.

  “It’s okay,” Sonja said. “He’s a doctor too.”

  “But he’s a man,” the woman countered.

  “This hospital is a madhouse,” Akhmed said, as he turned away. The woman glared at his back, unamused by the implication that her three-day-old son was a lunatic, and then edged the bedsheet down her chest to reveal the child’s scrunched face fastened to her nipple.

  “The baby is hungry,” Sonja said.

  “He’ll get used to it,” the woman said, and closed her eyes.

  The mother in the next bed slept on her side with her face half swallowed by the pillow. An incubator on a metal cart sat beside her bed. Inside, the infant was underweight and overheated, more like a crushed bird than a human.

  “Poor nutrition in utero?” Akhmed asked.

  “No nutrition in utero. Since the second war began, we’ve only had a handful of mothers healthy enough to give birth to healthy children.”

  “And I imagine their fathers aren’t civilians?”

  “It’s not our policy to ask those questions.” She walked to the door. In the corridor she stopped at a darkened lightbulb. “Do you see any moths there?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. In five weeks she would find a moth flapping in the canteen, and wouldn’t believe it real until its wings crumpled under her palm. “The trauma ward is just down the hall.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  WITHIN DAYS AFTER the proposal of the Khasavyurt Peace Accord, Sonja broke up with her Scottish fiancé, resigned from her residency at the University College Hospital, and sat through connecting flights from London to Warsaw to Moscow to Vladikavkaz. The backseat of the gypsy cab she took from the airport had been removed to allow room for luggage, and her single suitcase slid with the curvature of the road, thudding again and again against the back of her seat, as if to reiterate the lesson that despite the illusions she’d entertained while Brendan’s chest rose and receded against hers, her life was small enough to fit inside a piece of luggage. Fuck me, she thought, what am I doing back here?

  Dark plumes drifted from distant smokestacks, a chain of wind-rounded mountains, the taste of post-Soviet air like a dirty rag in her mouth. When they reached the bus terminal, she waited until her roller suitcase was safely on the ground before paying the driver. The Samsonite, a final gift from Brendan, might as well have been a neon-lit b
illboard advertising her foreignness as she rolled it past the imperial-era steamer trunks of other travelers. The nationalized bus line no longer ran routes into Chechnya, but after she had waited for an hour in a three-person line, a clerk directed her to a kiosk that sold lesbian porn, Ukrainian cigarettes, Air Supply cassettes, and tickets on a privately owned bus that made a weekly journey from North Ossetia to Chechnya. The next departure wasn’t until the following morning. Though tired from travel, she knew she wouldn’t sleep. She sat through the night on a wooden bench with one of her shoelaces tied around the suitcase handle to discourage gypsy children from rolling off with it.

  “I am driving you all to your graves,” the bus driver announced as he walked down the aisle to collect tickets at a quarter past six in the morning. He leaned back as though balancing an invisible shot glass on his round stomach. “If given the opportunity, I will sell you all to the first bandit, kidnapper, or slave trader we come across. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. I wouldn’t have to drive this bus to that country if you hadn’t purchased these tickets, and for that I will drive over every pothole and divot to make the ride as miserable for you as it will be for me. And no, we will be making no bathroom breaks, and yes, it is because I know the pain a pothole causes a full bladder.”

  She dozed for an hour with her head resting against the window. Every bump in the road was transferred through the glass and recorded by her temple. The sharp pitch of brakes, followed by the bullhorn-amplified instructions of a Russian border guard, brought her back to sudden consciousness. The soldiers were all fear and peach fuzz. They ordered the passengers off the bus and demanded each open his or her luggage in a field twenty meters from the road, while they, the waiting soldiers, crouched with their arms wrapped around their legs and their eyes clamped tight, as if jumping into a lake. The poor driver swayed from side to side. Since he was a boy, living on the banks of the Terek, he had dreamed of owning his own tour boat. Six and three-quarter years earlier, just a week before the Berlin Wall fell, the driver had sunk his life’s savings into a tour boat, never built, and a contract, never fulfilled, to ferry Party members along the Terek. Now he sat on the ground and rested his back against the tires of the bus, but the land was a swelling and uncertain ocean and he would feel seasick for many years.

  The checkpoint left Sonja charged, and as they crossed from Russian-controlled North Ossetia into Chechnya, she stared through the window she had slept on. On the crater-consumed road the driver made good on his pledge. They passed deserted fields. A toppled farmhouse. A plow resting at the end of a furrow, four months past sowing season. A burning oil well. At the horizon the mountains wore skullcaps of snow. It took ten hours to drive the two hundred kilometers to Volchansk. Checkpoints dotted the highway more regularly than the boarded petrol stations. At each one she carried her suitcase twenty meters from the road and opened it as soldiers held their ears in anticipation.

  She spoke to the elderly woman sitting beside her, rolling each word in her mouth like an olive pit before spitting it out, and the woman was a wonderful listener, quiet and attentive as Sonja unfastened the latch to what had been her life until two days prior. She cataloged Brendan’s shortcomings—his unclipped hangnails, his habit of singing Rodgers and Hammerstein while peeing, his reluctance to correct her grammatical errors—but even as she tried to convince the old woman that Brendan would have made a lousy husband, she missed the way he would write his initials in the pad of her thumb with his hardened hangnails, the way the flush of toilet water accompanied the hiiiiiiilllllls are aliiiiiiiiive with the sound of muuuuuusiiiiic, the intentional grammatical mistakes he would make, to see if she would catch them, as they took a sledgehammer to the rules of English and reassembled the pieces into a language only they understood. It was wonderful to unburden herself to a sympathetic ear. An hour passed before the old woman pulled a notepad from her purse, scribbled on it, and passed it to Sonja. I thought you would have realized, the old woman had written. I’m deaf.

  The four-story Volchansk terminal was now a one-story rubble heap. The bus driver held out his hat for tips as they disembarked. “You will all die in this hellscape,” he cheerfully announced. “Would you rather your rubles go to your godless murderers, or to me, an honest and pious bus driver, who braves death each week to provide for his family?”

  Against her better judgment, Sonja dropped a hyper-inflated thousand-ruble note into the hat, and climbed down before he could curse her. At the next block she caught up with the old woman, who had flagged down a lemon-colored Lada. The old woman had grown up on a lemon orchard and for her first seventeen years she hadn’t eaten a meal that wasn’t made of lemon. There had been lemon cucumber salad, lemon vinaigrette beans, lemon-glazed chicken, lemon-stuffed trout, lemon lamb kabob, lemon-dill rice, lemon-roasted chicken thighs, lemon-curd dressing, lemon pudding, lemon-apricot cake, lemon marmalade cookies, and on it went. She was still four years and one month away from her seventy-sixth birthday and the miracle of her first lime.

  The old woman gestured for her to take the cab, and when Sonja refused, she pulled out her notepad and just below I’m deaf wrote Curfew will begin soon and you are younger and prettier than me.

  What had been a delivery van blocked the road three blocks from the flat. Sonja climbed out, and the lemon-colored Lada sped off before she could close the door. The apartment block on the left had lost its exterior wall and she observed the rooms like a mouse peering into a dollhouse. She turned to the road where pieces of ground went missing at regular intervals. The land was supposed to be flat, no hills or valleys for fifty kilometers, yet here she was, climbing into a canyon, the dirt wet and thick as she descended asphalt and clay, clambering over broken masonry that had fallen through six stories of air and one story of earth, finding her footing on sewage pipes, cursing and kicking the Samsonite when she remembered the instruction booklet’s clearly stated direction that the luggage was only suited for paved surfaces, and she was standing at the bottom of the crater when it hit her—I’m standing at the bottom of a fucking crater!—and the impact doubled her over, followed immediately by the uppercut of a question—What am I doing in the bottom of a fucking crater?—to which the answer was as insubstantial as the word on her lips, three syllables naming the reason for her return—Natasha—her sister, haughty, beautiful, and unfathomably comfortable in social situations, whom she had last spoken to on the phone the day the first war began, one year, nine months and three weeks earlier, whom she had last seen the day she left for London, four years, eight months, and one week earlier, whom she had last envied five years and two months earlier, on the day before the day she received news of the London fellowship, and whom she had last loved at some indeterminate point in the past before they had grown into the people they were to be. She wouldn’t climb out of bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn’t cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

  Her apartment block stood past the bakery where, as a child, she had been given tea cakes in exchange for sweeping flour from the floor and repackaging it in brown paper bags. The apartment block windows were blown out and a line of bullet holes leaked light into the doorframe, but it still stood. The front door lay before the threshold like a welcome mat. She climbed to the third floor. Her breaths didn’t fill her chest.

  Her flat was locked and she knocked on the door and waited, but no pattering footsteps or groaning floorboards answered her. After a fourth quartet of raps led to a fourth silence, she pulled the spare key from her toiletry bag and opened the door. She didn’t call out; the thought of her own unheard voice seemed unbelievably sad. Across the room empty window frames held square pieces of twilight. A half-burned candle sat on the dining table, anchored in a shot glass by melted wax. In the past two days she’d slept five hours and an aching exhaustion reverberated through her, tingling her skin. She lit the candle and the small glow fluttered across the egg-white walls. No receipts or envelopes or letters remained, nothing lig
ht enough for the wind to carry through the empty frames, nothing on which a good-bye might be written. The furniture was as she remembered: the divan against the right living room wall, still stained where Natasha had dropped an entire pot of borscht; the black-and-white Ekran television set perched on a milking stool; the wooden kitchen table leveled by three matchbooks. This had been her home. This had been her life. That had been her divan. She was returning to it, burying her face in the cushions and weeping into fabric that all these years later still held the scent of beets.

  The next morning she went to the doors of the adjacent units. She couldn’t recall the names of her neighbors, and judging from her unanswered knocks, they had fled from their flats as from her memory. On the fourth day footsteps came from the hallway. Sonja found a hunched woman wearing a green raincoat even though the sun was shining. The woman carried a dozen plastic shopping bags layered inside each other and tied at the straps.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked, with enough suspicion to flatten the question to an accusation. Laina had been on the far side of middle age when Sonja accepted the London fellowship. She had worked the cosmetics counter at the Main Department Store and had gorgeous skin, skin that a thirty-year-old would envy, skin that her supervisor correctly cited as the cosmetic counter’s most effective advertisement, skin plied with every moisturizer and emulsion stocked within the glass display case, skin that Sonja and her mother and even her sister had admired, that now looked like the skin of a peach left for many days in the sun.