A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



14





THE WINTER BRENDAN and Sonja fell in love, all of Volchansk became homeless; even those like Natasha, whose homes hadn’t been hit, found the cold easier to sleep through than the fear of falling rubble. She spent the winter in City Park, a twelve-square-block refuge of brown grass and barren trees, designed, it was said, by the dimwitted fourth cousin of Boris Iofan, where the tallest man-made edifice was a corroded jungle gym. The homeless, insane, and alcoholic reigned in this world. Trained and experienced in the art of surviving a winter outdoors, the city pariahs were inundated by professors and lawyers and accountants whose degrees were worth the five seconds of warmth they could fuel. Natasha and her cohort took direction from the City Park Prophet. The great bib of gnarled hair, now reaching mid-thigh, shook indignantly when he reminded them of his prophecy. No one had listened when he predicted the fast-coming day when the sky would split open and God would fall upon the indecencies of man. Natasha remembered passing the madman each evening as she returned from the oil ministry, and he remembered the coins she had given him. “I told you I would remember you,” he said when she first moved into the park; soon she realized that all of the City Park Prophet’s flock had been daily alms-givers the Prophet now felt obligated to protect. He taught them to camouflage their tents and to scavenge for pinecones buried in the frost; to hunt feral dogs with cudgels and bait pigeon traps with the viscera; to pray five times a day and perform the proper ablutions, and Natasha, who had never stepped in a church, let alone a mosque, praised Allah because she knew better than to challenge a man who spent his life preparing for the apocalypse. In fourteen years those accountants and lawyers would collectively purchase for the City Park Prophet a studio apartment in a newly rebuilt apartment block. They would search for Natasha, hoping she would contribute to the considerable down payment, or at least be there when they led the Prophet into his new home, but the combined brainpower of six lawyers, three accountants, and eight PhDs couldn’t solve the mystery of the former secretary’s whereabouts.

By spring, when the Feds took the city, the bombing ceased and the siege settled into occupation. The City Park refugees dispersed to ancestral villages and auls scattered throughout the highlands, where they could count on the hospitality of distant family and clan. But Natasha had no family left. Her apartment block still stood, now the tallest building on the street. The windows had blown out but the bathroom mirror was still intact. She hadn’t seen herself in months. Her options dwindled to subsistence and scavenging. Her reflection said she wouldn’t last long in a city of drunken, vengeful, sex-starved soldiers. But avenues of escape still existed for women who could make themselves attractive without the benefit of running water.

Against the ringing of her last two kopeks of common sense, she found Sulim. He lived in the open now, in business with both Feds and rebels, and occasionally with the smuggler Sonja would later know as Alu’s brother. They met in a bar that served nothing. No door, no liquor, no employees, no windows, but the regulars still returned each afternoon. Their lips were blue from drinking windshield wiper fluid.

In comparison to them, Sulim looked well. His eyes, unclouded by exhaustion, scanned her approvingly. The Parkinson’s that would turn him into a quivering jelly mold in eleven years was already fermenting in his midbrain, but his hands didn’t shake when he went to light his cigarette. War served him well. From mountain hideaways Dudayev’s economic and police chiefs issued statements praising an economy and a police force that no longer existed, and in the vacuum of legitimate authority, organized crime provided the only meaningful order. He offered her a cigarette.

“You want to get out,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”

“I can do well in the West.”

“Anyone can do well when they aren’t dodging bullets.” He scanned the ghost drinkers; those with the bluest lips had gone blind, and they reached out, touching the faces of their drinking partners. Sulim reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a vodka bottle. “I don’t know how they got it in their heads that we smuggle it in barrels of windshield wiper fluid.”

“I’ll work off the debt.”

“Will you?” he asked.

“You know how hard I worked at Grozneft. I’m productive.”

“Are you?” he asked.

“Please.” He took a small sip from the bottle, savoring it as he watched her. He hadn’t forgotten how she had denied him at her door, his skin sallow in the daylight. He crossed his legs, leaned back, waiting for her to beg. “I know there are trafficking routes,” she said. “I know you can get me out. Please, Sulim.”

“Under the Soviets, women who disappeared had to reappear on the other side of the world to make money. Now women can turn a profit simply by vanishing. Reappearance has too high an overhead. Chechen families will pay a higher ransom for the body of their daughter than they will for her alive. I’ve looked at the numbers.”

She stood to leave.

“But you aren’t Chechen,” he continued. “You have no family to pay for your corpse. You have no afterlife for which your body must be prepared. You can have another cigarette.”

He lit it for her with a bent match. She had kissed those knuckles. She had loved them.

“Will you help me or not?”

He was holding her index finger and he nodded it up and down. Crippled by tremors, unable to control his limbs, an embarrassment to his family, he would spend his final years in a windowless room with a television set for companionship. “You didn’t really think I would deny you? Where do you want to go?”

“London.”

“Then in London you will be an au pair. Do you know what that is? It’s a French word. It means you will watch the children while the parents are at work.”

“So I will be a grandmother?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“I’m not my sister but I’m not a fool.”

“There may be other things. Dancing, entertaining. Being, what’s the word, enticing.”

It meant prostitution. Waitressing, nannying, those were for pretty girls from poor countries, not pretty girls from war countries. Some repatriated women called it slavery, but even if it was true, so what? Paid sex with London civilians couldn’t be worse than forced sex with Russian soldiers. And in London, Sonja would find her other work. Sulim watched her from across the table. His lips twisted into a slight smile, a challenge. Did he think she was afraid of him? Did he think he could possibly scare her?

“London,” she said. “Make me an au pair. Make me reappear.”


A young man with a soft, round face transported Natasha and five other women to the Dagestan border. They sat on crates in the near-darkness of a Federal supply van. The wind pulled against the olive canvas awning, and occasionally, a sliver of sunlight slipped through and was gone. She wanted to ask their names, where they were from, if they, too, were au pairs. Conversation seemed possible a moment after the round-faced man, looking like their younger brother, hoisted them into the truck bed. But the air clotted with doubt too thick for any words to pass.

Some hours later the van shuddered to a standstill and the round-faced man unlatched the back. Natasha shielded her eyes against the bright burn of noon and the light warmed her hands. A smock of dark evergreens wrapped around the nearest mountain. The round-faced man led them a hundred meters down a gravel path to a jeep flying the flag of national independence. Wooden benches replaced the backseats. They crowded in.

The jeep carried them up ravines of dried creek beds, along an unending jawline of pale stone. Conifer cones hung from drooped branches. The landscape appeared on the precipice of collapse. In the glens below, trickles of silvery light wound through empty pastures, glittering ribbons tied off at the horizon. It wasn’t fair. She hated the outdoors. A sex worker was one thing, but a weekend hiker? The sun silhouetted wide circling wings. A pigeon, she first thought, grown to fit the monstrous proportions of this habitat.

The round-faced man parked the jeep when the incline became too steep. When she stood straight her hair hung off her shoulders, held back by the invisible hands of gravity. Sick, dizzied, she wanted a patch of asphalt she might sit on and feel whole. Pretty Woman wasn’t anything like this. The round-faced man began climbing the rock-ridden slope and called for them. No, no, no, she wanted to say, the carabiner in my purse is only a keychain. But what could she do? The top was closer than the bottom. No threat or command, just his finger beckoning, and following it, she left Chechnya.


Dagestan was three unbearable hours of hiking, then another hour by jeep. The nod of the border guard’s chin stubble was the only official record of their crossing into Georgia. Time was measured by bathroom breaks until they reached the water. The Black Sea was blue. They boarded a fishing trawler and the wind swept the scent of salt through her hair. Condominiums stood like dominoes on the coast, the white dots of lit windows numbering into the hundreds. When the sun fell below the water line the sea at last went black. She lay on the driest bit of deck she could find, used her duffel bag as a pillow, and fell asleep as the boat rocked on the water.

In Odessa they were divided. Three went with the round-faced man and as they disappeared into a Yugo something small and sharp panged through her; she didn’t know their names. She and two others followed the man who had purchased their passports into the back of a delivery van. The door slammed shut. When it opened they were in Serbia. They stayed with eleven other women in a stone cellar. Manacles looted from the Sarajevo archaeology museum lay coiled on the floor, the implicit threat more constricting than the rusted cuffs. A tin pail tilted in the far corner; when one approached it, the rest turned away. Slurred voices seeped through the damp wooden ceiling. An argument over whether fire hydrants were a good idea. She touched the cheeks, forehead, and lips she had once gazed at in the mirror, proudly. Now she wanted scar tissue, missing limbs, cheeks buckshot with acne, teeth pointing every which way.

“What is this?” she asked.

No one spoke.

“Does anyone know where we are?” she asked again.

The girl sitting next to her, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, was the only one who answered. “The Breaking Grounds.”