A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



11





SONJA DIDN’T SEE him when she crossed the parking lot, didn’t know him when she unlocked the doors, didn’t hear him when he greeted her good morning, when he climbed into the truck after her, when she released the brake, gunned the engine, and followed the gray road to Grozny. Twelve hours earlier he had nearly fainted at the sight of her palm calluses. But why think about this when the snow melted into muddy veins, when the blue of a peaceful sky radiated from all the metal of the jeep, when Havaa was safe and he was alive and Grozny waited like a great lake at the end of this river of asphalt.

To conserve petrol, Sonja accelerated for several seconds, then freewheeled out of gear. Too much oil in the ground, never enough in the tank, he thought; it could be the national motto. They progressed haltingly, the truck leaping forward and then rolling to a near standstill. He felt carsick, but knew better than to ask her to drive more evenly. Fifteen silent minutes passed before he flipped on the radio and gave the dial a quarter turn. A crush of warm static filled the cabin.

“There’s no working radio tower in the country. It’s all static,” she said, without looking to him.

“I know. But 102.3 plays the best. Not too tinny. Full and robust. If a cello were to perform static, it would sound like this.”

She shook her head and turned the dial. “I prefer 93.9,” she said. She still hadn’t looked at him.

“It’s too thin and monotone. There’s no variation. It just sounds like static.”

“And that’s why I like it,” she said. “It sounds like static is supposed to sound.”

He reeled the dial to the far end. “106.7,” he said. “Just listen.” Snatches of foreign transmissions laced the white noise. Syllables surfaced like glowing bubbles from the harsh swirl. Voices in a storm. She turned the dial back to 93.9 and they listened to static-sounding static. Fog fell over the fields. A bus was parked in a meadow. Paint chips pointed down a gravel road to the rusted remains of a tractor factory. Dormant smokestacks. Nowhere was a fire less likely to be found than inside a factory furnace.

“Do you worry about land mines?” he asked.

“Not really. There’s a steel plate mounted beneath the driver’s seat.”

“Does it happen to cover the passenger’s seat, too?”

She had to smile, but before she shook her head and said he could amputate his own legs now, her gaze hardened around a figure a hundred meters down the road. An elderly woman with the posture of a parenthesis. A twine-strapped bundle of blue tarpaulin hung from her shoulders. A lavender dress hem fluttered at her ankles.

“Don’t you know this road isn’t safe on foot?” Sonja asked through the open window. “Do you need a ride?”

The woman shrugged the blue tarpaulin, and watching her Akhmed wanted to reach out, to wipe the damp grooves of her forehead and tell her that he too had suffered Sonja’s questions.

“Only a fool would sit in a truck,” she said, pace unchanged.

“But we are doctors,” Akhmed said, emphasizing we.

She glanced at him and back to the road. “And you’re sitting in a truck.”

Thirty minutes of empty fields passed without remark before Akhmed and Sonja reached the first checkpoint. An OMON lieutenant approached, followed by two scrawny privates who mimed his movements down to the way he chewed his bottom lip between his sentences; and contemplating these slight, unconscious facsimiles, Akhmed wondered if fear so consumed the young men that they would f*ck, fart, and die on their superior’s schedule. Sonja passed the lieutenant their documents: two ID cards, one expired medical license, and three letters penned by Federal colonels, which persuaded the lieutenant more compellingly than their legitimate documents. A hundred meters past the checkpoint she reached across his lap and slid the letters into the glove box. She still hadn’t looked at him. He grabbed her wrist before she could shut it and pulled out more than two dozen envelopes. The letters varied in formality, from official endorsements typewritten on Defense Ministry stationery to a few approving words scrawled on the back of a rebel field map. The signatories formed an index of the top brass on both sides of the war: General of the Federal Army Valentin Vladimirovich Korabelnikov, Special Battalion Vostok Commander Sulim Yamadayev, Commander of the Northern Caucasus Military District Alexander Ivanovich Baranov, the deceased mujahideen leader Ibn Al-Khattab, separatist field commanders Ruslan Gelayev and Shamil Basayev, even a deputy from Putin’s office, both rebels and Feds cohabiting peacefully by the thin partition of letter envelopes.

“Be careful with those,” she said, pulling her hand away.

“Why do you have these?” he asked, as the first of long-overdue misgivings unsettled him.

“For unhindered travel. They take care of bureaucratic formalities.”

“I wish you’d told me before I’d sewn shut my pockets.”

She smiled.

“Have you actually met these people?”

“Of course not. Most are from the man we’re going to see. He says he can steal the spots off a snow leopard.”

“A criminal?”

She shook her head and glared at him with complete disdain.

“Is common decency too much to ask?”

“Excuse me?” she said, but he knew she couldn’t claim affront. Common decency was the one thing he had that she didn’t, and he held on to it as a rare, improbable triumph.

“You said every doctor and nurse to ever work for you has left but Deshi. Do you think that might have something to do with the way you treat people?”

“I think you’d better have brought your boots, because you’re walking home.”

He spoke in a measured tone as her knuckles whitened on the wheel. “You think I’m an idiot. An embarrassment to your profession. You are probably right. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“I think you need to be quiet, Akhmed.”

“Why?” He didn’t dare turn to her.

“Because two days ago, I thought I was adding a competent doctor to my staff. Instead I’m babysitting a child who speaks in riddles and a man who couldn’t identify his own foot if he tripped over it.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to treat me dismissively. I’m trying to help you.”

“Actually that gives me every right to treat you dismissively. It gives me every right to dismiss you and the girl and f*ck off back to London where even eighteen-year-old biology students know better than to give an unresponsive patient a questionnaire.”

“The Feds are looking for Havaa,” he said. “You’re this prodigy surgeon, right? Leaving London to come back and save lives? You are saving hers, Sonja. Each day. And you don’t even have to cut off her legs.”

“How do you even know they want her? Why would they care about some child?”

“An informer was waiting at my house yesterday.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll be quiet.”

“What could you possibly be sorry for?”

“I’m sorry for you. Something in you is broken.”

“Another razor-sharp diagnosis, Dr. Akhmed.”

“No, it isn’t that.”

“I’ve amputated one thousand six hundred and forty-three legs. You’ve done three, and you think you have the right to diagnose me?”

“I’m not diagnosing you.”

“Then what the f*ck are you doing?” She turned fully from the road and he saw her pupils, as wide as kopek coins, for the first time that morning. He shook his head at the windshield. Brown fields were everywhere.


And Grozny appeared, gray on the horizon as the road devolved to a basin of broken masonry and trampled apartment blocks. Cigarette kiosks slouched on the sidewalk. Akhmed wished he had taken paper and a pencil with him to capture his first trip to the city. Sonja brought the jeep to a crawl as they tipped into a crater. The street rose and disappeared somewhere above them, the whole world of dark wet earth, the tires spinning and reaching the lip. No scent drifted through the open window but the engine burn. No sewage or raw waste. Nothing. A flattened bureau basked in the sun, knobs pried out. The flicker of an oil-drum fire three blocks out came as a small, welcome signal of human habitation. Behind the flame a man turned a rotisserie fashioned from clothes hangers and a gardening stake on which was impaled a pink fist of flesh. Two pigeon claws revolved over the fire. Behind the fire, wooden gangplanks connected pyramids of rubble. Some lay over craters, others were suspended two or three stories high, bridging alleyways. This is Grozny? He should have visited sooner.

“It’s like scaffolding,” he said, the first words in many kilometers.

“Built by the street kids that live in the ruins,” she said, and in a tone of apology added, “You were smart to bring her in.”

No faces peered from the yawning walls. The thought of his dreary, soul-crushingly backward village sent an unfamiliar flare of pride up his chest.

“How do they survive?” he asked, glancing at a building with more plank bridges than floors. An ingenious strategy; these young engineers were clearly ethnic Chechen. Collapsed floors would take construction crews years to lift and rebuild, but plank bridges could be reassembled in minutes.

“They sell the rubble back to the Russians. Construction has begun on defense and petroleum ministry buildings. They buy back the bricks at two rubles each.”

“More than I would have thought.”

“Bricks purchased at dawn are cemented by noon, so the kids have to chisel off any remaining mortar. You see those white rubber casings in the rubble?”

“Like snake skins.”

“It’s electrical wire insulation. They strip and sell the copper wire. Just about any metal is worth its weight. Most of these kids can’t read or write, but they’ve created metal-based currencies.”

“Scrap metal and disappearances,” Akhmed said, flat and without irony. “Our national industries.”


The warehouse stretched wider than a soccer field with half its windows stained tar-black and the other half blown out, and when Sonja nodded to it he knew something was wrong. They passed a toppled chemical drum, its top peeled back like a bean-tin lid; a glowing blue sludge, too thick to evaporate, pooled at the bottom. A guard blocked the warehouse drive. His bloodstained bandoliers intersected at the sternum, the only red cross Akhmed would see that day. A dull glint, less recognition than knowing, appeared in the guard’s face when he saw Sonja. “Only a fool would sit in a truck,” the woman had said; if only Akhmed had met her a day earlier. The vise tightening in his chest had been there since the morning, since Sonja had refused to acknowledge him. She parked the truck, went to find the snow leopard–thief, and he was alone, brought by a woman who didn’t trust him to a warehouse large enough to hold his village, a place where he shouldn’t have been, in a city unworthy of even an imaginary plane ticket. Three Mercedes sedans sat at the center of the warehouse floor, Scandinavian license plates hanging from shiny screws. The walls were Western department stores: racks of leather and fur coats, refrigerators and dishwashers with warranties dangling from plastic ribbons, cardboard boxes stacked two stories high. A folding chair sat open on the floor, pliers and duct tape on the seat. A faucet turned on in Akhmed’s mouth.

“It was the most remarkable thing I’ve seen in years. I couldn’t think. I was stunned. Do I bow? I didn’t know what to do.” The thin, excited voice belonged to the thin, excited man entering the warehouse beside Sonja. “I never thought I would meet someone from China.”

The two strolled with a familiarity—she touching his shoulder, he timing his footsteps to hers—that left Akhmed uncertain and unaccountably envious. The wide arc they walked around him drew a line of tension across the room. “What was he doing here? A journalist?” Sonja asked, avoiding his eye.

“An oil man. He wants to buy a refinery.”

“You’re selling refineries now?”

“Just the machinery,” the man said simply. He wore a beige summer suit and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to exhibit a triangle of voluminous chest hair. His loafers reflected the pale light. A man dressed like this would be stripped, hog-tied, and beaten within one city block, but he didn’t seem like the type of man that went anywhere alone. “Is this our friend?” the man asked, and nodded to the folding chair, pliers, and duct tape. “Have a seat, please.”

Akhmed pivoted sharply, but the guard was behind him, the gun barrel leveled to his chest. A tourniquet gripped the corridor between his brain and body, and directions came to his limbs in halting dribbles that wouldn’t save him. That morning Ula had been asleep when he left. He hadn’t said good-bye to her.

“You haven’t been honest, Akhmed,” Sonja said. The way she studied him he knew his skull was just another bone she could amputate.

“I’m sorry,” he gushed. “I lied about being in the top tenth of my graduating class. I was in the bottom tenth. In the fourth percentile.”

No relief in her smile. “Do you think that’s what this is about?” she asked.

What else could it be? The only lie he had told was that he was a good doctor.

“You knew my surname and patronymic, Akhmed.” She had said his name twice now. The third time would be the last. “No one knows those. But you did.”

“She wouldn’t even tell me,” the man offered. “Not that I had difficulty finding out, but still, she’s rather cautious, don’t you think?”

“You have to explain yourself,” she said, and she paused for a breath. “Or I’ll leave you here. I can’t risk having an informer on my staff.”

Had the gun barrel not pressed against his spine, he would have laughed. He would have treated the setup as another one of Sonja’s tests. Treated the whole thing like the misunderstanding it was, because how could she mistake him for the man he had saved Havaa from? Havaa. The thought of her shucking the insulation from electrical wires reconnected his nerves. He couldn’t swallow. In the mouthful of warm saliva a pearl formed; an irritant hardened into white gleaming fury at the possibility that the war would end his life as indifferently as it had a hundred thousand others, that he was no more privileged. He didn’t want to die before an audience of stolen refrigerators. He had kissed Ula’s forehead in the early morning and felt the flutter of her lashes on his chin but when he raised his face she had already gone back in the gentle wash of wherever it was she went when she wasn’t with him. He hadn’t said good-bye.

“I saw your work before I ever met you,” he explained. “The rebels, they came to my village a few years back, and the field commander had a chest held together by the most magnificent dental-floss stitches. I was so impressed. The commander said it was the work of a Russian woman and I assumed they had kidnapped a Russian medic. But then, later on, I met a refugee from Volchansk who used to work at the hospital. She had stayed with Dokka when he was running a hostel for refugees.”

“What was her name?” Sonja asked, eyes as fixed as constellations. She stood close enough for him to hear her teeth grind. There was so much of her, right here, in his face, and he would have stepped back, had a gun not pushed him forward.

“I mentioned the dental floss and the Russian woman doctor. It was only in passing. I wanted to know if the hospital was hiring. And she looked up and said, ‘Sofia Andreyevna Rabina. Sonja.’ I tried to ask her more, but she didn’t want to talk about you. Your name was the only one I had when Dokka disappeared. I thought a doctor good enough to stitch a man with dental floss would be good enough to take in Havaa.”

“What was her name!” she demanded. He was afraid to answer, afraid even to exhale; the hope wrapped within the question was so small and flickering a breath could extinguish it.

“Was it Natasha? Was her name Natasha?”