A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Read online

  “I’m Sonja.” Laina’s fingertips scrutinized her, holding her wrists, bending her ears. “I see,” Laina said, at last convinced of Sonja’s corporeal form. “You lived here.”

  “I heard you in the hall,” Sonja said a few minutes later, as they drank tea in Laina’s flat. “I thought you were someone else.”

  “You shouldn’t open the door when you hear strangers. It’s never a good idea.”

  “It was this once.”

  “This is the one in a million.”

  “Then I’m very, very lucky.”

  “No, you are very, very stupid.”

  “Why are you wearing a raincoat? There isn’t a cloud for kilometers.”

  Laina went to the empty window frames, through which she could see what was left of the city, a view that stretched sixteen blocks farther than it had two years earlier. “I don’t trust God. Who knows what he’s planning up there.” The bazaar had gradually been repopulated with vendors and sheet-metal kiosks and elderly women like Laina for whom war was no hindrance to a good haggle. She had just bartered a jar of engine oil for sandals that bore the blackened imprints of forty different toes. Once she had had a husband, now dead, whom she could trust not to cheat on her in a brothel. Once she had had a son, now missing, whom she had threatened to marry to Sonja if he misbehaved. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin smiled on the face of the clock hanging over the stove, and Sonja studied him as she gathered the breath to dislodge the question that for one and a half years had been wedged in her voice box. When the hour hand fell into the cosmonaut’s outstretched palm, she inhaled and asked, “Do you know where Natasha is?” Laina bit her lip and shook her head. “I don’t know where anyone is.”

  No one could answer the question. Days turned to weeks and Sonja accosted the few remaining tenants as they left for work, food, battle or better shelter, but she never received more than a shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulders, an apology. There was no sign of forced entry and the made bed in Natasha’s room suggested a deliberate departure. In the bottom dresser drawer Sonja found the burgundy cardigan she’d given Natasha for her eighteenth birthday, the one Natasha had hated and called a babushka’s sweater, and never wore, not even once, on a chilly day, to appease Sonja. It was just what Natasha would leave behind. She held that sweater, wrapping the arms over her shoulders as if in an embrace.

  Hospital No. 6 hired her without requesting an application or résumé. When she provided a list of references in London, Deshi crumpled the paper, tossed it under the desk, and told Sonja that Dr. Wastebasket would dutifully contact each recommender. Sonja’s former professors had fled to the West, to the countryside, to private practices in places where they could save lives without endangering their own. Unimpeded by a hierarchical bureaucracy or institutional memory, she rose from resident to head surgeon in two months. Land mines didn’t obey the Khasavyurt Peace Accord, and within a year she had more trauma surgery experience than the professors she’d studied under. She worked with gratitude for the pain of her patients. In their cries she heard her name as though she were the missing sister, recalled by their gibberish to this place where she amputated limbs and stanched bleeding, where her training was so needed and scarce her patients saw her hovering over the hospital bed as the last prophet of life, whom they pleaded with and praised and spoke to in prayer.

  The days were urgent, without pause for reflection beyond the recall of case studies and anatomy lessons. At night she drifted home. If she remembered, she would brush her teeth with baking soda and recite the prayers her mother had taught her. Her tongue fumbled with those awkward and ancient words, and though no one was listening she found a measure of peace in this obsolete language of supplication. After crossing herself, she lay back on the divan and squirted a cool puddle of hand lotion from the bottle she’d brought from London. Invariably she would apply too much, and her hands would be slick and shiny in the candlelight as she asked for another pair with which to share the excess.

  The weeks stacked into months that were flipped from the Red Cross calendar hanging behind the waiting-room reception desk; the calendar was from 1993 and would be reused until 2006 and for those thirteen years her birthday would always fall on a Monday. She marked the days, but time didn’t march forward; instead it turned from day to night, from hospital to flat, from cries to silence, from claustrophobia to loneliness and back again, like a coin flipping from side to side. Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness. The blind man who played accordion for her as she splinted the broken leg of his guide dog. The boy who narrated his dreams while recovering from meningitis.

  Then, one evening, a knock sounded from the door as she prepared for sleep. She considered and disregarded Laina’s advice as the doorknob slipped in her greasy grip. When she opened the door she wanted to scream. Natasha stood right there, in front of her, close enough to hold. She did scream, and she embraced Natasha, and later, on the divan, she took Natasha’s hands in her own and rubbed until hers were dry.

  CHAPTER

  3

  DESPITE AN ADMITTEDLY unimpressive first day, Akhmed left Hospital No. 6 with his eyes on the stars and a swing in his gait. Sure, Sonja was a cold, domineering woman, whose glare could wither flowers and cause miscarriages, and Deshi was clearly a lunatic, and though there wasn’t a sliver of compassion between the two of them and the only fate worse than having those two as caretakers was having them as colleagues, it had been a good day. Havaa was safe. His medical training was put to use, and for the first time in months, Ula wasn’t his only patient.

  He was the first person from Eldár admitted to medical school, an institution so distant and rarefied his inclusion had been celebrated as a village-wide achievement. There had been feasts in his honor, collections to pay for his textbooks. In 1986, Akhmed became the greatest hero in village history since an Eldár barber trimmed the beard of the great Imam Shamil one hundred and forty-one years earlier. There was talk he would move to Volchansk, or even—they would drop their voices to a whisper—Grozny. Anywhere farther was too far to dream. Did he realize the hopes the village had pinned on him? Not really. Despite telling Sonja he had graduated medical school in the top tenth of his class, he had, in fact, graduated in the bottom tenth, the fourth percentile to be precise, and he blamed his inability to find a job on prejudice within the Soviet Medical Bureau rather than on the fact that he had skipped a full year of pathology to audit studio art classes. Eventually the village had offered him an abandoned house on the outskirts, haunted, it was said, by the ghost of a pedophile. He had turned it into a clinic. Even though the villagers overcame their fear of the pedophilic specter—though many wouldn’t let their children enter—and even though their lives were undeniably improved by the presence of a clinic, Akhmed always felt he had let them down, or at least let himself down, by returning to the village that had celebrated his escape. But after applying to twenty-three different hospital positions, and receiving not one interview, he was, today, finally, a physician at Hospital No. 6. And not only a physician, but third in command! When put like that, it was a higher honor than he could have ever imagined. He trekked along the service road more confidently than he had that morning, and imagined what those smug search committees would have had to say about it. They probably wouldn’t say anything. They were probably all dead. In this way the war was an equalizer, the first true Chechen meritocracy. He was an incompetent doctor but a decent man, he believed, compensating for his professional limitations with his empathy for the patient, his understanding of pain. Passing the field where the wolf’s frozen carcass lay in moonlight, he thought of Marx. Perhaps here was where history had reached its final epoch. A civilization without class, property, state, or law. Perhaps this was the end.

  The final fifty meters through the village were the most dangerous of the eleven-kilometer slog. His footsteps, if overheard, could prove as lethal as land mines. He slowed as he approached the only house without blackout curtains. The light of generator-powere
d bulbs burned through the windows. Ramzan, sitting inside, picking at a shiny slice of meat, didn’t look like an informer or a collaborator, looked no more menacing than a man in the throes of a mighty indigestion. In the next window, Khassan, Ramzan’s father, sat reading at his desk. Khassan hadn’t spoken to his son in the two years since Ramzan had begun informing, and though Akhmed never blamed the old man for his son’s crimes, the electric bulbs bathed both in the same light.

  The glow of their house shrank to a glimmer as he reached his own. The doorframe was intact; the door still stood. Opening it, he tensed, waiting for a forceful grip on the shoulder, a rifle butt to the forehead. None came. He lit a kerosene lamp and walked into the bedroom. Ula lay on the bed. She rolled on her side and into the yellow glow.

  “Where were you?” she asked. Divorced from tone, the three words still suggested accusation, and he hoped his silence would extinguish her question, as it often did. “Where were you?” she asked again. Her head barely indented the pillow.

  “I went to see Dokka,” he said. “I helped him shear the sheep.”

  She smiled wide enough to show the tips of her teeth. Twelve years earlier those incisors were beloved by the city dentist, a young man who plugged his most lascivious thoughts into the open mouths of young women; but the dentist died a virgin when a misaimed mortar shell landed on his practice and carried him to Paradise in an erupting gray cloud. “Dokka is so impatient,” she murmured. “If he waited a month, the flock would give more wool.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Dokka was always impatient.” He sat on the bed and set the lantern next to the bedpan and the broth bowl. Each was half full. An ellipsis of wet footprints followed him to the bed. He unlaced his icy boots, massaged the balls of his feet, and lay beside Ula. Once she would have had to roll over to make room for him, but there was less of her now.

  “How is his family?”

  “They are well,” he said. He turned onto his side and slid his left hand beneath her nightshirt to warm his fingers on her stomach.

  “They should eat with us soon,” Ula said.

  “They will bring corn and cucumbers,” he whispered to the tiny translucent hairs standing from Ula’s earlobe. “The coals will smolder on the mangal and we will grill shashlyk and we will eat in the afternoon and the sun will shine. The lamb is already marinating in Dokka’s white plastic bucket with tomatoes and onions and sliced lemons and uksus. We will invite Dokka’s parents and they will come and perhaps Dokka will bring his chessboard, not the one with the fine wooden pieces, but the plastic one that Havaa gave him for his birthday, the one he said he loved though everyone thought a chess player of his skill would never play on a plastic board. But he did. Do you remember? He taught Havaa to play on it and let her win on her sixth birthday. We will invite them to eat someday.”

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “I don’t want to wait that long.”

  He pressed his lips to his wife’s forehead and let them linger until the kiss became a conversation between their shared skin. How could his wife’s sickness both repulse and bind him to her? His love, pity, and revulsion each claimed her, each occupied and was driven from her, and even now, as he sealed a postage stamp–sized square, he was afraid that in moments, when he broke away, his disgust would overwhelm the imprint of his lips.

  “I’m hungry,” she repeated. Reluctantly he leaned back. Leaving the lantern beside the bed, he crossed the darkness to the kitchen. After a decade without electricity, his soles knew the way. Eight steps to the living room, a quarter turn, six to the kitchen threshold, two to the stove. He set firewood on the previous night’s ashes, aimed a squirt gun of petrol at the white wood, and struck a match. He prepared a pot of rice and a saucer of powdered milk as the firelight lapped against his legs. While waiting for the rice to cook he pulled a stool to the iron stove and leaned toward the light. He wanted to say something consoling to Dokka, and when his words burned in the stove chamber he hoped the sentiment would rise up the chimney pipe, carried by wind or wing to Dokka’s ears, but even if Dokka could hear him, he didn’t know what he would say, and he said nothing.

  When the rice was moist he scooped it into a ceramic bowl and left the spoon slanting against the rim as he carried the bowl and the mug of powdered milk for two steps, six steps, and a quarter turn in blindness. Was this how a child felt in the womb? He had delivered dozens of newborns, but he couldn’t imagine those first few moments. A tear in the shroud and suddenly colors, shapes, coldness, a world of hallucinations.

  The lantern cast a circle on the floor and he entered it reluctantly to reach her. He sat beside Ula and brought small spoonfuls of rice to her mouth. Sonja’s skill and Deshi’s experience didn’t matter; neither could care for Ula as he could. “Was anyone looking for me today?” he asked. She shook her head. “Are you sure? No knocks at the door? Nothing?”

  “I don’t think so. I was sleeping.”

  “But you would remember if Ramzan called from the door?”

  “Oh, yes. Ramzan. He’s such a nice man. He always asked my opinion,” she said, and took a sip from the blue mug. “I think the milk has turned.”

  He washed the dishes, undressed, and slid beneath the sheets. Her fingers crawled through the covers for his.

  “Things are getting worse, aren’t they?”

  “No,” he said. “Nothing is getting worse.”

  “I don’t have much time left, do I?”

  These moments were the least bearable, when her meandering trail of questions led to clarity and he couldn’t say what was lost to her. Did she really think he’d spent the day shearing sheep sold, slaughtered, and consumed long ago? Had she already forgotten Havaa sleeping beside her, the girl’s slender body like a splinter of warmth in the dark room, or was the girl the material of dream itself, burned away by morning light? An equally disturbing thought: what if she consciously participated in these delusions to placate him?

  “None of us does,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

  When her breaths stretched into sleep, he slid his fingers from her loosened grip and contemplated the next day. What would it be like to treat a patient again? Was he capable? Six months had passed since he had last treated patients at the clinic, but he remembered their reluctance as he led them into the examination room, as they realized their bodies had betrayed them once by sickness, and again by forcing them to rely on an incompetent physician. Sometimes he wondered if his own self-loathing manifested itself as harm to his patients, as if some dark part of his heart wanted them to suffer for his failures. And, now, to be confronted with Sonja, a surgeon whose renown had even reached Eldár. She had asked what he would do with an unresponsive patient, and he, in a blundering moment, had taken it to mean quiet or unwilling to talk, and had thought of the mute village baker, who communicated only through written notes—which had proved problematic the previous winter when the baker suffered from a bout of impotence he was too ashamed to write down, even to Akhmed. Akhmed had resolved the problem—shrewdly, he thought—by giving the mute baker a questionnaire with a hundred potential symptoms, of which the baker checked only one, and so had saved the baker’s testicles, marriage and pride. But Sonja didn’t know that; he’d been too flustered and embarrassed to explain. She had glared at him, knowing that an imposter like him could never belong to the top tenth. She hadn’t asked how he had come by her name, why he’d come to her specifically. He hadn’t intended to hide the truth from her, but when she didn’t ask, he saw no reason to tell her about the chest stitched together with dental floss.

  Sonja had made a bedroom of the office of the former geriatrics director, a man she’d never seen but whose tastes conjured an image so defined—browline glasses, a wardrobe predominantly tweedy in character, finely sculpted features, dainty hands—she could have identified his body among the dead. The gerontology department had been closed in the first war due to a scarcity of resources and the general consensus that prolonging the lives of the elderly was a peacetime enter
prise. But the director, a bachelor who devoted a healthy portion of his monthly paycheck to office décor, had the most extravagantly furnished office in the hospital, so of course Sonja was quick to make it hers. A vermillion Tajik rug sprawled across the floor. At the end of the desk stood an antique vase swathed in ornate Persian patterning, beneath which she had found a photograph of a woman framed against the Black Sea, smiling curiously, undated and unidentified, a ghost of the director’s life that survived him. Here, the director had spent his life loving a woman he hadn’t seen since his twenty-first year, when his father had married her to a Ukrainian for fear of ruinous scandal; the woman was his half sister, and the love he felt for her caused him so much confusion he could only express it as love for the bewildered and incoherent elderly. The desk was pushed against the wall and on it lay a final payroll still awaiting the director’s signature. Six mattresses stacked three abreast formed Sonja’s bed, where, after Akhmed had left, she found the girl clothed in limp latex gloves.

  “What have you done?” she asked. It was a remarkable sight. The girl had stapled cream-colored latex gloves to her sweatshirt, to her trousers, had pulled them over her feet, and even wore one on her head like a five-fingered mohawk. “I repeat, what have you done?”

  “See?” the girl asked and stood up. See? See what? She didn’t think she needed another reason to renounce children, but here it was: they speak in riddles. “I see a tremendous waste of medical supplies and I very much wish I wasn’t seeing it.”