A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

  This was his greatest fear. Could he stay silent? Could he withstand what awaited him? He told himself that his love for the girl would fortify him against any torture, but this, like so much of what he told himself, was a lie. After all, he was squeamish at the sight of blood; what would he say when lying in a puddle of his own? But he saw no other way. He would pray for the strength to stay silent, for a quick heart attack, and leave the rest to God.

  “You remember in ninety-five, my first trip to the Landfill?” asked Ramzan. “It was my twenty-third birthday and I had the bad luck of bicycling to the city on the day of a rebel ambush. That’s the only reason they took me. I was a young Chechen man on the day rebels decide to attack the Feds outside of Gudermes, so they took me to the Landfill and you know what they did. You stitched me back together. For so long I worried you or my father would ask why it happened, and I was always afraid of it, afraid of the asking and how I would answer. But neither of you ever did. You’re both too polite. But don’t you want to know what happened? You’re always asking why, Akhmed, so let me tell you. It happened because they asked me to inform on my friends and neighbors, Akhmed. When they threatened to beat me, I said nothing. When they threatened to electrocute me, I said nothing. When they threatened to castrate me, I said nothing. I said nothing, Akhmed. Whatever you think of me, you remember that once I said nothing when a wiser man would have sung. And the interrogators, they couldn’t believe it. They called in others to examine me. I was there on the floor, and above their faces were dark ovals silhouetted by the ceiling lights. They had beaten me hard and I couldn’t hear right, but I kept saying no, with every breath I had. The only reason they let me go, the only reason they didn’t shoot me right there was out of perverse respect, some sort of professional courtesy. But I wish they had shot me, Akhmed, because the good part of me died there, and all this, everything since, has been an afterlife I’m trying to escape.”

  Akhmed had never been in a fight before, but right then he had to concentrate on controlling his hands. On their own they would have strangled Ramzan to keep him from saying one more word. Whether this was confession or ruse, Akhmed couldn’t say, but the anguish was there for him to see in Ramzan’s face. “Why did you start saying yes?”

  Ramzan looked like a small, trembling package tied off beneath his folded arms. “A second war. A second trip to that place. I knew what was coming. I knew it never stops. They put a shame inside you that goes on like a bridge with no end, the humiliation, the fucking humiliation of knowing that you are not a human being but a bundle of screaming nerve endings, that the torture goes on even when the physical hurt quiets. People treated me differently when I came back the first time. They gossiped, told rumors about me because I still lived with my father, couldn’t marry, and then I was a fucking joke to those for whom I’d sacrificed a wife, children, family, a life. When the Feds took Dokka and me to the Landfill, when I said yes, when I told them what they wanted, when I agreed to inform on anyone, I wished I had done it in ninety-five, in the first war, that is my biggest regret. If I had said yes from the beginning, I would still be a man. I’m not asking for your friendship or forgiveness, Akhmed, just tell me you understand. Please give that much to me.”

  Ramzan stepped forward to embrace Akhmed, and in the moment before he came to his senses, before he planted his hands on Ramzan’s chest and gave him a sharp shove to the ground, Akhmed wanted to take Ramzan in his arms, as a patient, as an old friend, and fix all that had gone wrong in him.

  “I don’t,” he said as he pushed Ramzan. Ramzan tumbled and the next moment Akhmed knelt over him, fist raised, ready to beat Ramzan as the interrogators had beaten him, for what he had done to Dokka, to Havaa, to the entire village, to himself. Ramzan covered his face with his hands and tried to crawl away on his elbows. “Don’t hurt me, don’t do it, don’t hurt me, mercy, have mercy,” he pleaded, eyes closed, collapsing into a fetal position, weeping into the brown snow. Akhmed stood, disgusted with himself, with the man at his feet, with the war that had reduced them to this. “I don’t understand,” he said, but Ramzan could hear nothing above his own calls for mercy.

  After checking on Ula, he drew closed the blackout curtains and lit the living room oil lamp. Khassan’s letter lay on the divan, where he had left it the previous evening. How could he have forgotten it? He really was an idiot. Through the closed door he could still hear Ramzan’s faint crying. The previous night Khassan had asked his advice, and he thought he had understood what was the right and honorable answer, but no longer. Crammed in his jacket pocket were the two letters of safe passage he had taken from the glove box of Sonja’s truck that afternoon on the pretext of searching for a nonexistent scarf. The glove box held dozens of letters of safe passage and he hoped she wouldn’t miss or need these two. He slipped them into the larger manila envelope that had held Khassan’s letter, added a one-word note to Khassan, then sealed and addressed it: For K, 56 Eldár Forest Service Road.

  Back in the bedroom, he undressed Ula. He carried her to the bathroom and the water rose, so slightly, when he set her in the tub. She had never learned to swim. As a girl she would scoop carrots from her mother’s stew and feed them to the rabbit that lived in the back garden; her mother trapped the rabbit one autumn afternoon and made stew from it, and for all their time together, Ula refused to explain to Akhmed her aversion to carrots. He washed her neck and shoulders. He lifted her elbow and scrubbed the divot of soft underarm hair. Her mother had spoken of lust as if it were a loaded firearm, and when, one summer, the big-eared boy who lived across the village transformed into something right-sized and beautiful, she concealed her affection, holstered it to her chest, because she knew the shame of it could kill her mother. He washed her elbows and wrists. With a toothbrush he scoured the rims of her fingernails. He washed her nape and her back and slalomed his fingers down her spine. Her older brother was born touched, kept in a room with the curtains always drawn shut, this wailing, incomprehensible heart beating against the walls of the family house. For nearly as long as she had feared him, she had been ashamed of her fear, and wanted to reach through his madness to the part of him that could, at times, be so gentle, and embrace it. He washed her chest, the skin that had been breasts. He washed her hips, her stomach, swirling soap into her navel. She had been so afraid of Akhmed when she met him for the first time, on a June morning, on her porch, the branches clutched by blackbirds. In the eight years since their betrothal he had become a local celebrity. He could have any girl. He could have anyone. Her mother invited him in without fear of embarrassment because a cousin had taken her older brother for the day. He washed her pubis, vagina, and anus. He washed her thighs. He washed her knees. He washed her calves. For as far back as anyone could remember, she had wanted to be a mother. He washed the tops of her feet, her soles, all ten toes and the gaps between. She would have had eight girls, treated them like the very reason her lungs drew breath, whether they were normal or touched, whether they ate carrots or not, she would have loved them, and given herself to them; she would have given each a pet rabbit; a mother, she would have been a mother if her body and Akhmed’s had only worked the way they were supposed to work. When he finished, they were both clean.

  He wrapped a towel around her shoulders and with long, vigorous caresses, rubbed her dry. He couldn’t stop worrying that she might catch a cold. Four hours earlier, he had come inside Sonja, and now he was brushing his wife’s hair. Nagging doubt was the nearest he came to guilt. He looked into the eyes of the wife that had become his ward. A smile was buried in his beard. He had never loved her more.

  He helped her into a nightgown, pulled the covers to her chin, and lay beside her. “Any visitors today?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I was waiting for your father, but he never came.”

  So much of his marriage was a disappointment—childlessness, ailing health—but they were blessings, now, in the end, when he had to let go. Yet he’d grown to depend on the act of longing.
He performed his nightly ablutions and prayed, but the ritual was empty, mechanized, and he recited the words as he would a recipe. The pearl of faith had dissolved, and at its core was a sand grain of doubt, and he held on to it, knowing that doubt, like longing, could sustain him.

  Later that night the wind carried the low rumble of approaching trucks. He was fully dressed, wearing thick wool socks and his fifty-eight-year-old coat, because wherever they took him would be cold. By the time the trucks pulled up to his house, he’d already loaded the syringe with enough heroin to stop the heart of a healthy man. Her long, slow breaths filled the room. He took the time to disinfect her skin. Outside, truck doors slammed shut. Praise Allah for her hallucinations. Without them he wouldn’t have the strength to push the plunger and forever numb that precious vein. But she was convinced that his ten-years-dead father had visited her this week, so even when her eyelids flashed open, and a bleary, misapprehending plea poured forth, he looked away, because a woman who spoke with ghosts was nearly one herself and would forgive him for taking her the rest of the way.

  Her breaths slowed. Her eyes drifted to the left, to whatever came next. He held her hand. It stayed warm. Once, three months after their wedding, he had held that hand through two kilometers of sunshowers that had left them drenched and shining and purified to each other. He closed her eyes. He put a small bandage on the pulseless vein. This was it. God could ask no more of him. The fists of the security forces pounded at the front door. The manila envelope containing the two letters of safe passage lay on the floor, beside the bound pages of Khassan’s letter to Havaa. Would she ever read it? Would she ever know her father made furniture from his book boxes? The pounding grew to splintering. The underside of a corpse was the only place the security forces wouldn’t look, and he slid the manila envelope and Khassan’s letter beneath Ula’s body. He kissed her forehead. She was gone and he still couldn’t say good-bye. “We will never be dry,” Ula had said. The sky was pouring. She was there.

  When the men broke through the door, he was on his knees. He prayed for his wife, that in Paradise Allah would give her a body that worked. He prayed for Sonja, that she would find companionship. He prayed for Havaa, that she would live to die a natural death. He prayed for Khassan, and for Dokka. But when the men started beating him, when they taped his mouth and threw him in the back of the truck, he prayed only for himself.

  CHAPTER

  25

  THE TUESDAY NATASHA departed had been the third warmest December day in living memory. Sonja’s coat still hung on the coat stand, where she had left it earlier that morning, after raising the window sash to test the air. The illness Natasha had claimed, when Sonja tapped on her door with fingers still warm from their reach into sunshine, was, in fact, withdrawal. Ever since Maali had fallen with the fourth-floor storage room, Natasha had numbed herself with pinches of heroin. Not counting the first dose, stolen from the syringe intended for Maali’s forearm, she only snorted the powder. No more than once or twice a month for the first year, infrequent enough for her to believe, with some justification, that she was in charge of the heroin rather than the other way around. But then there was the time she delivered three stillborns in one week, the time the winter freeze slid right into the third week of May, the time an ache crept its way into her left ankle and stayed for months, the time she woke feeling as rotten as sunken squash and twice as ugly. The world must have grown crueler, because soon she was finding reasons to snort on a daily basis. Maali’s fall, Sonja believed, was the cause of her malaise, as if Natasha had been tethered to the nurse, as if her regression could be so neatly explained. Even as Natasha broke her standards faster than she could lower them, one was immutable: she would never use a needle again. So late the previous night, when she had found herself planting a syringe in that familiar place between her toes, she had promised herself she would leave the next day. To her great surprise, she woke in the morning. To her greater surprise, she kept her promise.

  She made her bed, cleaned her room as best she could, and packed what she needed in Sonja’s black Samsonite. Before leaving she sat at the kitchen table her father had built for them himself from ash wood. It was a rickety thing, with nails that kept falling out and matchbooks under two of the table legs, a table the poorhouse would refuse, but one she had eaten from her entire life because spilled tea and tetanus wouldn’t kill anyone as fast as a pride-wounded father. She tried to draft a note to Sonja but all alphabets failed her. What could she say? Wouldn’t any excuse read like an insult to the sister that had, she could now acknowledge, given up a decent life in London for her? No, better to say nothing for now. She would get word to Sonja from the camps, when she had gone too far to turn back. Had she known the heartache her wordless departure was to cause, she would have written down the sentence pounding in her head: Thank you, Sonja.

  She marched down the service road away from the city, toward the border, on the trodden path of some fifty thousand previous refugees. Where would she go from the camps? Turkey, Armenia, or Azerbaijan most likely, but she would rather go to China or Hawaii, a country where no one could speak Chechen or Russian. She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency. The wet leaves paving the service road caught in the suitcase’s wheels. Such a warm day, but she was cold. By sunset she had walked only the eleven kilometers to Eldár.

  The last time she passed through Eldár had been in the bed of a canvas-canopied truck with five women. She hadn’t known its name then. The service road widened into the trunk of the village road, from which unnamed side streets branched into the shadows. Even if the overhanging electrical lines carried a current, no streetlamps stood to light those crevices. She came to a porch where two women knitted and gossiped in the warm air and she asked for a room. They nodded down the road.

  A third of the houses were ruined by fire or explosions, or even by the former occupants themselves, who, like farmers sowing their fields with salt, believed destruction to be the final act of ownership. Portraits hung eerily from electrical poles and doors, their faces staring blankly at her. She asked an elderly man for a room and he directed her farther down the road to a house with a green door where a man named Dokka kept beds for refugees traveling toward the border.

  The man named Dokka opened the front door with his foot. He regarded her suspiciously, and she worried her skin, paler since September, revealed her ethnicity. But then his hesitation burst into a firework of recognition. “Natasha!” he exclaimed, opening his arms in welcome. Attached to them were two hideous, fingerless hands. She stepped back. He knew her name, but they had never met. Those things at the ends of his wrists wouldn’t have slipped her mind.

  He asked if she remembered him.

  “I’m sorry. How would I?’

  He laughed, loud and brightly, while she stared at his hands. Those, at the very least, were no laughing matter. “I met you seven years ago in the maternity ward of Hospital No. 6. I’ll never forget you, not for the rest of my life. I am Dokka. You delivered my daughter, Havaa.”

  She repeated the name, but couldn’t match it to the several hundred newborns in her memory. Behind him stood a little girl with almond-brown hair, green eyes, and ten fingers, all there. Natasha began to ask about the refugee beds, but Dokka cut her off. “Come inside. You can stay as long as you’d like.”

  The rooms themselves appeared amputated at waist height; nothing stood out of a child’s reach. Dokka, politely declining her offers of assistance, used his hands like forceps as he bustled around the kitchen. He pinched a matchstick between his teeth, struck it against the wall, and spat it into the open stove. Over four years he had brewed tea for perhaps two thousand refugees, but there had been no pot he wanted to taste finer than this one. Again she offered help, but he had brewed tea for two thousand without faltering, and only needed her help drinking it.

  “You’re going to the refugee camps?” he asked. She nodded. She’d heard stories of overcrowded camps, w
here a single spigot left running would supply water for three thousand souls, but the blessing of rumor was its boundlessness, and she could disbelieve what she wanted. Despite all that had happened, Sonja’s description of London lured her. She wanted to live there.

  “You shouldn’t be traveling alone. There are soldiers and bandits, often the same people. You should travel in a group with at least one man.”

  She couldn’t help smiling. “I’ve done that before. It didn’t work out.”

  “And you’re ethnic Russian? No, no, no.” After a moment Dokka gave a knowing nod to the empty seat beside Natasha. “Before you leave, we will think of something.”

  When the girl returned a half hour later with a treasure trove of pinecones, bird feathers, and dried leaves divided by color, her father, in a tone of familiar exasperation, asked her to remove her muddy boots. She carefully placed her findings on the kitchen table and followed them into the bedroom. She still hadn’t said a word to Natasha. Standing before the open closet, Dokka explained that his wife had died that spring. He missed her greatly, not least because her passing had left the household with only one pair of functioning hands, still too small and weak to chop firewood, but he had a closet full of her clothes, which the moths would feast upon before Havaa could grow into them, so she should, he said while walking out, in short, have at it. As she undressed she turned to hide her burn scars, but the girl had seen worse and studied her without judgment or disgust. Without a mirror, she had to ask the girl’s opinion of each dress. The girl shook her head no, no, no. She had seen her mother in this dress and that dress, each one of which pained her to see worn by a stranger, and she nodded yes only when Natasha put on a maternity dress, the only one in the closet she hadn’t seen her mother wear.