A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



13





“I DON’T KNOW,” Akhmed said softly. He watched her with such compassion it seemed he had forgotten the gun against his back. “I didn’t ask,” he said.

“You didn’t ask? How could you not ask? How could you not ask her name?”

“Hundreds of refugees stayed at Dokka’s house. I stopped asking their names.”

“Where was she going? Didn’t she say? She must have said something. Some hint or reference or mention. She must have said something. She must have. How could you not ask? How could you?”

“I didn’t think I’d be asked to remember.”

Her entire reflection fit in his widened eyes. Had Natasha’s reflection once fit in his pupils? Drawn by light? Disappeared by a blink? “What did she look like?” she asked.

Akhmed could have filled a dozen lungs with that sigh. “Dark-haired and malnourished,” he said.

The description would fit half the world. “Her eyes, what color?”

“Brown.”

“But brown with shards of green and emerald? More hazel than brown?”

“Maybe. I can’t remember.”

“And her face?”

“She reminded me of Zakharov’s portrait of the niece of Nicolas I.”

“Nicolas I? What are you talking about? I need to know what happened. Where is she?” She felt nauseous. She had to know but he would not tell her. What had happened to her sister? When she died, this one need, so near to eternal it could be her soul, would survive her. “I need to know, I need to know,” she repeated. “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

“As beautiful as the Nicolas’s niece, yes,” Akhmed said. “She was probably headed to the refugee camps. They all were. Probably Ingushetia. Maybe the Sputnik or the Karabulak camp?”

He spoke, it seemed, as if he had been speaking to her for years, as if she was expected to follow the arcs of his cadence, landing on the period before he reached it. She was afraid to look down. “She was wearing traditional maternity clothes,” he was saying. “And a green headdress.”

“Where is she?”

Her hands tightened on his shoulders. She didn’t remember putting them there. The loose handcuffs of his fingers raised them and held them and slowly placed them by her sides. She would remember this; with a gun to his back he was gentle. “I don’t know,” he said.

Far away Alu’s brother nodded and the guard stepped back. “Our friend may be a terrible doctor,” Alu’s brother said, “but I don’t think he’s informing.”

They walked to the supply crates shoulder-to-shoulder to avoid seeing each other. Akhmed helped her load the cardboard boxes into the truck and later she would remember him mopping his forehead with a gray handkerchief, asking if she needed help with a box of surgical saw blades, his poise as unsettling as any ruin she had seen that day.

As children Sonja and Natasha played hide-and-seek in the dust-thick catacombs of the apartment cellar. Light streamed through the high windows in long diagonals. On the floor each semicircle was a pool of lava, and light-caught dust motes were the remains of children who had stumbled into those incandescent rays. Natasha would drape a filthy curtain over Sonja and Sonja would count to fifty and the beat between each number would shrink as she neared that moment when she shouted “Fifty!” and sprang from the curtain and into that otherworldly place. Natasha was slender enough to hide behind a broomstick, but Sonja always found her. She always did.


“Who is she?” Akhmed asked as the warehouse shrank in the rearview. Ten minutes earlier she had told him they would stop at a phone bank and had said nothing else until she was behind the wheel and facing the mud-streaked windshield.

“My sister,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Nothing could have made her feel worse.

“I’m the one who should be apologizing,” she said to the gravel.

“Why does he help you?”

“Just after the first war I fixed up his brother Alu.”

“And he still supplies the hospital?”

She nodded.

“He must cherish his brother.”

She smiled. Poor, berated Alu, whose name was beaten more than a donkey’s ass. Six months after they first met she had learned his brother’s name was Ruslan, but she would always think of him as Alu’s brother. She knew he had amassed a small fortune smuggling arms, heroin, and luxury goods for warlords, and had used that small fortune to rebuild his ancestral village after the first war. She knew his pet turtle was still alive, still named Alu, and housed now in the largest terrarium in the northern Caucasus. When his ancestral village was destroyed again in the second war, she knew he had paid passage to Georgia for his parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, thirty-seven in total, even the oft-cursed Alu, plus the neighbors on either side of every uncle, cousin, and in-law, one hundred and seventy-four in total, where they lived in the Tbilisi apartment block he had purchased for the occasion, neighbor by neighbor, his ancestral village saved for a second and final time. She knew all this of him and more, but still didn’t know why he didn’t like Alu. “You may be right,” she said, finally. “I think he just might cherish Alu above all.”

The ruins opened onto what was once a central square filled with importunate street vendors, veiled mothers, and squirming toddlers. Pigeons missing eyes and wings hobbled on the granite stone like portents of a war still years away. There had been the statue of a Chechen, an Ingush, and a Russian poised in comradely unity, officially called “The Brotherhood of the People,” but known locally as “The Three Idiots.” Someone had dumped a few goldfish into the fountain and they had multiplied until the water thickened to a squirming orange mass. Rockets had demolished the five-story buildings that had floated on arcades of equilateral arches, the tree-lined pedestrian paths, the wooden benches dedicated to Party bosses, the fountain where in winter children ice skated over the suspended carcasses of two thousand goldfish. The ruins had been bulldozed to an uneven field of rock. She parked the car. Akhmed frowned. “I don’t see any telephones,” he said.

“We’ll stop on our way back,” she said. They climbed out. “You said you’ve always wanted to go to Grozny, so I wanted to show you the central square.” She didn’t look at him. It was the nearest to reconciliation she was able to go.

He smiled, nodded, held his hands behind his back. She exhaled. “Is that what this is?” he asked.

She shielded her eyes with a salute to the afternoon sun. “Right there, where the ground is blackened, just to the left of that cloud, that’s where the Presidential Palace stood.” Rotating in a slow circle, her index finger pressed the past into the empty panorama. The market selling Levi’s two decades before any licensed clothing store. The music college, where some years earlier a prodigy had learned to play the viola by listening to the two-hundred-year history of chamber music lilting through those open windows. She reconstructed the square for Akhmed—her voice raised every edifice from the dust, replanted every linden tree—because that was easier than apology.

“Thank you. I’ve always wanted to see Grozny.”

They passed through two more checkpoints before reaching a clean, freshly paved street. The anomaly of unmarked asphalt never failed to surprise her. A gray stone building filled most of the block. The sheet-glass windows, intact and absent of fractures, proclaimed the building’s significance more eloquently than the Petroleum Ministry sign hanging over the entranceway. Armed soldiers stood at ten-meter intervals along the perimeters, as tall and broad as doorframes.

“I’m not going in there,” Akhmed said, arms folded, refusing to leave the truck.

“Don’t worry. All the letters in the glove box wouldn’t get us in. We’re going over there,” she said, pointing down the block to what had been a shopping center. “The Petroleum Ministry has working international lines. Some clever entrepreneur tapped the outbound line and set up a phone bank in the basement.”

The shopping center was a cave of broken storefronts, empty shelves, and stalagmitic glass. Even the plastic flowers had been looted from the planters. She led the way by her cigarette lighter.

“In London this would be an escalator,” Sonja said as they descended a staircase.

“What’s an escalator?”

“It’s a moving staircase.”

“Like a children’s ride?”

“No, it’s not a ride. It’s just a staircase that moves. That’s all.”

“Then this is a broken escalator.” In three years that staircase would become the first escalator in Chechnya. On weekends families from as far away as Lake Kezanoiam would bring their children to play on it.

She descended on the right side; even in a choice as arbitrary as which side to walk on she strove for order. At a brown door at the end of the basement corridor she knocked to the beat of an Umar Dimayev song. The deaf boy opened the door, and the blind man, his father, stood just behind him. Two spoonfuls were missing from his face.

“It’s Sonja,” she said. The blind man reached for his son, who tugged his left index finger in confirmation, then, looking at Akhmed, tugged the blind man’s right middle finger.

“Yes, I’ve brought a friend. His name is Akhmed.”

The blind man nodded to his son and reached for Akhmed’s face. The first time the blind man had touched Sonja’s cheeks she had known by his fingers that he would have made a great surgeon. “Don’t make a face,” she said, as the blind man parted Akhmed’s beard. “You don’t want to be remembered as a sourpuss.”

Lightbulbs dangled from a brown electrical cord held by rusty staples to the ceiling. Somewhere a generator was humming. Card tables with rotary telephones sat evenly across the room. The whispers of five callers overlapped. She gave the deaf boy three hundred rubles and stepped over the braided wires to her telephone.

“City University Slavic Department,” said the voice on the other end once she dialed.

“Good morning, Janice. It is Sonja. May I speak to Brendan?” Wrapped in the formality of proper English, her request sounded insincere to her.

“Hang on a mo’, Sonja. He just left his office, but I’ll see if I can’t fetch him.”

In the static hold she saw his chest, pale as a tadpole; she could have stood him before a bright light and seen his organs. Eights years on and he would have filled out, perhaps a paunch to accompany his promotions to Assistant Department Director, perhaps even a tanning salon gift token. When she backed out of the engagement he had spent three days on hold with the airlines and paid for part of the ticket when the cheapest, most circuitous route exceeded her savings. Going through her medicine cabinet, he had made a list of her favorite toiletries and purchased a half dozen of every tube, bottle, and canister for her to take home. She said she would come back. He said she would come back. The morning she left he wheeled the Samsonite, another parting gift, to the curb outside the international student dormitory, and sat beside her in the taxi, a cool perspiration on his palm, the city gliding past. When she said, half jokingly, as they reached the Heathrow turnoff, that he must be glad to be rid of her, because why else had he made it so easy for her to go, he buried his face in the crook of her shoulder and twelve hours later, in a lavatory twenty-five thousand feet over Ukrainian wheat fields, she found a streak of his hardened mucus and for a moment mistook it for her first gray hair.

“Sonja?” Janice said. “Brendan’s left for a meeting. Can I take a message?”

They hadn’t spoken since the previous month. He had contacts at Memorial and the Red Cross and if Natasha’s name were to be typed into a computer he would know of it. Usually the moments before the call went through were honed with the hope that this month, this time, he would have an answer. But today was different. Today she just wanted him to know she was still alive. “Just tell him I called.”

“And you spell your name with a j, yeah?”

She had asked him about it once, on their third or fourth coffee after classes. She wanted to know why Raskolnikov’s love was transliterated as Sonia or Sonya but never Sonja. “Because that’s how you spell it in English,” Brendan had said. “Only Swedes spell it with a j.” “Swedes are foreigners, too,” she said, and held that j as the one letter in her name that was hers.

“Oh, and Sonja?” Janice said. “Is there a number where he can call you back?”

“How do the Swedes spell Natasha?” she had asked, but Brendan didn’t know.