A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

  “Honor the dead?” Sonja was saying, her face level with that of the corpse. Akhmed watched from the doorway. “Yes, but only if the dead are honorable. No, of course I’m not casting aspersions. It’s okay if you feel rotten. You just died. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Now, I must ask if you can see my sister down there. Yes, I know it’s crowded, but please have a look. I can wait. And while you’re at it, would you save me a chair? Oh, I should have known it would be standing room only.” Akhmed couldn’t see her face, but her exhausted voice was enough to make him ache. “You say you’ve had trouble breathing?” she said, speaking into the tailpipe as if into a microphone. “It appears you have a bronchial growth.” When she took the man’s face in her hands, Akhmed stepped into the room to save her from whatever was happening inside her head. “There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man,” she told the corpse. “But I can tell we would have had a grand time, you and I.”

  Two hands, on her shoulders, pulled her gently from the corpse before it could answer, before it could tell her if Natasha was down there with him.

  “Not you, too,” Akhmed said, wearily. His skin was a degree or two warmer than the corpse’s. His navy pes, a size too small, still roosted on the back of his head. “Someone here has to stay sane.”

  The big oaf led her to the office that was her bedroom. He was like a pool of water she’d fallen into; she hit, hit, hit and he was still there, around her. She’d been awake forever. The flap of moths was overwhelming. In the office, he pushed her into the overstuffed executive chair. “You need to rest,” Akhmed said, in a tone of authority obviously an imitation of her own.

  “And who do you think you are to order me around?” she asked. Already she missed the corpse. He was a much better conversationalist.

  “I think I’m someone who slept last night.” He scanned the bookcase, selected the thickest book from the bottom shelf, and dropped it on the desk. “A medical dictionary. If you won’t read Tolstoy, read this. It will put you to sleep in no time.”

  When the door closed behind him, she scrutinized the dictionary, wary of subterfuge. She hadn’t opened the book in years. A surgeon of her skill had no need. Slowly, fearing further hallucinations hid between the covers, she opened the book. It was just as dull as she remembered.

  But she was already in, and the crowded little script calmed her. The definitions had the stately reassurance of orthodoxy, reminding her of the prewar years, when she had relied on the reference book to complete her weekly assignments, when she had sat at her desk, her ears plugged with cotton balls, as that awful thudding Natasha called music had pounded from the next room, when she still believed the meaning of a thing was limited to a few tersely worded clauses, but nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all other things to fulfill its own.

  Her fingers shadowed the thin pages and the words appeared written on her skin: the average weight of a hand, interpretations of a knuckle. A shawl of post-high drowsiness wrapped itself around her. She hated to admit it, but Akhmed had been right. Then, halfway through the book, at the bottom of the 1, 322nd page, circled in red ink:

  Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

  The breaking sky could release no more striking a pronouncement. She repeated it to the unmade bed, to Havaa’s still-packed suitcase, to the desk of the former geriatrics director. Not once had she ever marked a dictionary, but here this was, encircled by the same red pen she’d kept on her nightstand. She stumbled into the corridor, reached out but couldn’t find a wall. Her legs felt as stiff as they had been on the day she had tried to make her own trousers, but when she lost her balance, when she fell forward, Natasha wasn’t there to catch her.

  When she woke on the floor, the insides of her cheeks felt like the insides of lemon rinds. She rubbed her temples and checked the unlit overhead lights, but, thankfully, the ceiling was still. In the storage room she pulled a pack of Marlboros from the fresh carton. The crinkle of plastic wrap followed her down the corridor. At the door the one-armed guard declined her offer of a cigarette. Shards gleamed in his ashtray. His name was Mohmad. He didn’t particularly enjoy this job, but he knew enough to know that any man was fortunate to have work these days, particularly amputees. In Ingushetia he had an eleven-year-old daughter he didn’t know about, who was waiting for him to call. In two and a half years he would hear her voice for the first time.

  She smoked three cigarettes before Akhmed appeared behind her, warming his hands around a mug of steaming water. “Marlboro?” she offered. He lit the cigarette from her ember.

  “You look much better,” he said. The corners of his lips inched toward a grin.

  “Shut up.”

  “Nothing like a little beauty rest.”

  “I’ll light your scrubs on fire if you say another word.”

  The incipient smile sagged into an expression of surrender. “They came back for him,” he said. “Whoever dropped him off.”

  “Bringing a dead man to a hospital. Do they think we’re magicians?”

  “Medical miracles are the only miracles most of us will ever see.”

  He had her on that one. “You’re a believer,” she said. That explained his incompetence as well as anything.

  “I believe in some things.”

  “In God.”

  He shook his head.

  “But I’ve seen you pray at noon.”

  “That’s like asking if I believe in gravity,” he said. “It doesn’t require belief.”

  “I’ve always thought Marx’s view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.”

  “If you step on a land mine,” Akhmed said, “the crutch becomes the leg.”

  Westminster Abbey was the only steeple she’d ever stood beneath, a tourist guidebook, rather than a prayer book, in hand. God, like everything kind and good, lived in London. She dropped her gaze to her hands and picked at the white calluses that scalloped her palm.

  “My goodness. These belong to a lumberjack,” he said, lifting her hands, examining them with a mixture of awe and pity. “Woodsman hands.”

  “I hate my hands.” Aloud it sounded as small and petty as it had in her head, but they were horrid things, these hands, a crime for which she felt the immediate relief of confession. “How could such things grow from a woman’s wrist?”

  “You’ve chosen the wrong profession. If not a lumberjack, you would have made a marvelous strangler.” With the unexpected sensitivity of a surgeon, his fingers drifted up her forearm.

  “I keep thinking in Latin,” she said. He paused on her ulna. “The names of bones.”

  “Latin is a problem with which I have no experience.” He squeezed her bicep. “You should think about anatomy like I do. This is your arm. It’s only your arm. This is your shoulder, nothing less than your shoulder. Your neck is only your neck.” His finger rose to a chin that was simply her chin, cheeks that were her cheeks, a nose that belonged to no one else. “And lips,” he said, leaning to her. “Our lips.”

  A moment and she pulled away, frowning back at the hospital and smoothing out her scrubs. Of the varying shapes of love, grief, anger, and terror that had inhabited these scrubs, optimistic anticipation was a new one. She looked to his big, stupid face, blushed, and turned away. What would Deshi say if she saw her like this? The shock might very well make her act on her ten-year-long threat to retire.

  “I’m going to the fourth floor,” she said, finally. “You could meet me there in a half hour.”

  “Even though I’m not a very good doctor.”

  “Even though you are criminally incompetent.”

  He opened his hands. Not one callus.

  “Don’t make fun of my lumberjack hands.”

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “You are,” she said.
>
  He squinted across the parking lot to the armored truck, thinking of the previous day, perhaps, how she had ambushed him in Grozny, how repellant a woman she was for putting a gun to his head one day and her lips to his the next. When he asked for the keys to the truck, claiming he had forgotten his scarf in the passenger seat, she felt too relieved to dwell on the fact that he hadn’t worn a scarf the day before.

  Their footsteps from the previous evening were still evident in the dust of the fourth-floor maternity ward. Natasha’s murals seemed to study her, as if she were their creation. Unsettled at the thought of standing alone among these ghosts, she went to the corridor and opened the storage room door for fresh air. The smashed city stretched to the frozen river. International law prohibited the targeting of medical facilities, which explained why, in a city where eighty percent of freestanding structures had been flattened, the hospital still stood. The shell that had crashed into this very room had been an act of reprisal rather than war. Natasha had collapsed with the walls, fallen with Maali, kept aloft by momentary updrafts, then plunged ever downward, until the earth had yawned open and she had entered it. Sonja knew the two had been coconspirators and confederates, sisters to ambitious, demanding women. She knew Natasha hadn’t been right after Maali’s tumble. She didn’t know that Maali, eighteen minutes Deshi’s junior, had lived her sixty-seven years in those eighteen minutes, finding room there for every dream, fear, and exasperation, setting her watch eighteen minutes ahead so she could pretend she had Deshi’s experience, always wondering what her life would have been like if she were just eighteen minutes older. Natasha had loved Maali for this as much as for her demented enthusiasm for amputation, but Sonja didn’t know it. In four months, when cleaning out a file cabinet, she would find municipal buildings drawn on the back of payroll forms. Long, uneven lines of Maali’s penmanship disfigured Natasha’s sketches, her critiques sometimes playful, sometimes damning, but always invested, and in those sketches, framed and hanging in the waiting room, as they would be within an afternoon, Sonja would see what the two younger sisters meant to each other.

  The stairwell door slammed shut. They walked to each other until their silhouettes converged. In the darkness she found his eyebrows with her thumbs. They went to the third maternity bed, and she sat on the edge, and he stood between her legs. Her thighs clasped his hip bones. From the far side of the room the lantern dimly bathed them.

  “I think there is a bee on my behind,” she said.

  “You’re still hallucinating,” he said.

  “You should slap it away, just in case,” she said.

  She reached under his shirt, spread her hand across his abdomen, and tried not to think of which organ lay beneath which finger. “This is your stomach,” she said, mimicking his tenor. “Not your brother’s stomach, not Stalin’s stomach, but your stomach.”

  “You make me sound like a serious man.”

  “You certainly aren’t that.”

  They undressed by degree, a button here, shirtsleeve there, making a show of their shortcomings, their bodies androgynous with deprivation. It was remarkable to trust someone enough to be silly like this. She lay back. It was dark. Her lips found his.

  “Good night to you and your ugly nose,” Deshi told Akhmed as he was leaving. A buoyant confidence swelled in him and as he stepped into the navy twilight and trekked toward the village he finally felt part of the top tenth percentile. Never had he been so honored by being addressed in the second person.

  But the radio antenna listing from the hood of Ramzan’s truck, parked before his house, punctured the sweet feeling inside him. Akhmed smiled sadly and trudged forward, balling his fists in his coat sleeves. The coat was fifty-eight years old, canvas military grade, about the only thing the Red Army had ever done right. It kept him as warm as it had kept his father and his father’s father and the idea of three generations sheltered by the same stiff, unyielding fabric gave him greater comfort than the coat itself ever could.

  Again Ramzan questioned him, and again he claimed ignorance.

  “You disappoint me, my friend,” Ramzan said. Ramzan’s coat was six months old. It would never warm another set of shoulders. “You’re a doctor. Think logically. Think about your wife. Think about yourself. Think about your silence. It’s reckless.”

  “I owe Dokka my silence more than I owe you anything,” Akhmed said.

  “Owe? We’re beyond obligation,” Ramzan said. “We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are. I know you think you are being noble, that this is some terrific act of sacrifice. You probably believe that because you fucked Dokka’s wife two years ago, you owe it to him to save his child. But let me be clear, Akhmed. You don’t. She is not yours.” Ramzan’s voice cracked, and he steadied himself with two deep breaths. It wasn’t an act. “I know you think I’m a traitor and a coward, Akhmed. And you’re right. But that doesn’t make me wrong. I’m telling you this because we were friends. You don’t owe this to Dokka.”

  Akhmed hadn’t lusted for Esiila before the wars, hadn’t thought of her as more than the wife of his closest friend. She could have been anyone. He had just wanted to hear his name breathed in his ear, a body warm and damp beneath him, whole and alive and a world away from pain. Was it such a sin? No, of course not. But Dokka. There was Dokka. Now he stood up for them, as if he were a hero rather than a hypocrite, as if he hadn’t betrayed, dishonored, and broken the family whose last living member he now offered his life to save. Ramzan stood across from him, but he knew that in their hearts, they stood on the same side.

  Pale moonlight fell across his snowy boot tracks, and Akhmed suddenly saw the fragility of the plan he’d designed over the past day. The girl would be safe, he had assumed, if he severed the link between the village and the city, and the link was him. But this meant trusting that Sonja would care for the girl. It meant trusting an erratic, overextended surgeon, who had put a gun to his back a day earlier, with the girl’s life. It meant pushing through his endless doubts and trusting, however misguidedly, the decency he believed was buried inside Sonja.

  “Why do they want the girl, Ramzan? You still haven’t tried to explain.”

  “Revenge,” Ramzan said flatly. “Dokka fucked up.”

  “But what did he do?”

  “Akhmed. So many questions. If you had learned to keep your mouth shut, your eyes on your feet, you would have had a happier life.”

  “They already have Dokka, Ramzan. Why do they need the girl?”

  Ramzan shook his head. “Because the life of a Russian colonel doesn’t equal the life of a Chechen arborist.”

  “You can’t mean that—”

  “A few days after we returned from the Landfill, Dokka asked me for a pistol. He wanted to be able to protect his family, so I gave him one of the Makarovs I’d kept from our final fucked-up gun run. That same Makarov was later used to assassinate a colonel.”

  “But Dokka couldn’t have been an insurgent. He couldn’t hold a gun in his hand, much less fire it!”

  “That doesn’t matter when the serial number on the pistol used to kill a colonel sequentially matches the serial numbers of the guns those lost soldiers took off us before they left us at the Landfill. The Feds made the connection. I couldn’t give Dokka up, because they already had him.”

  “But why do they want the girl?”

  Ramzan gave him a sad smile. “You know the saying, As the son inherits from the father, so the father inherits from the son? The Feds have made it official policy. There is a campaign to disappear not only suspected insurgents but their relatives as well. The idea being that you are less likely to go into the woods with the rebels if you know that your house will burn and your family will disappear. Rebel recruitment has plummeted in recent months. It’s part of the new hearts-and-minds strategy. It’s how they will win the war on terror. They will kill Havaa and call it peace.”


  Akhmed’s head hummed with the shock of how not shocked he was. What Ramzan said made sense to him. He understood why the Feds would want to kill a child. Accompanying that understanding was a second, equally shameful recognition: this incomprehensible war would take from him even the humanity to find it incomprehensible.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I’m trying to save you.”

  When Ramzan returned from the Landfill the first time, with that wound between his legs, Akhmed had saved him. They never said it, Ramzan never thanked him for it, but they both knew that the week he spent treating the infection was just that. If a stranger were to put his ear in the space between them, he would hear the dull roar of that knowledge.

  “Isn’t it too late for that?” Akhmed asked.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “If you give up like this you really will be the stupidest doctor in Chechnya.”

  Akhmed allowed himself a smile. This was the Ramzan he remembered. “That honor has been mine for some time.”

  “You probably think you are a hero or a martyr, don’t you?” Ramzan asked. “You probably think you are a saint for refusing the Feds. I know, Akhmed, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that by refusing me you’re refusing them. But let me tell you, my friend, I am nothing. I am no one. I am so much easier to refuse than those to come. You’re thinking that you will be as silent to them as you are to me. But you won’t, Akhmed. You just won’t. You might believe that you will be brave, that you will hew to your convictions, but you have never been to the Landfill. They won’t ask you where the girl is. They will make you bring her to them, and you will watch yourself do it. Look at me, Akhmed. Once I was like you, and soon you will be like me. They are in the business of changing lives, Akhmed, and they are the very best.”