A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



16





IN THE WEEKS after she returned, Natasha traveled no farther than the three meters of gray carpet to Laina’s flat. She drank weak tea, interpreted hallucinations, and returned, that fourth meter sealed behind an invisible wall of terror. Sonja watched distantly, wanting to take Natasha’s hand and pull her down the hallway like a petulant child. Laina’s flat—where, three weeks earlier, she had crouched at the door, a glass of ice melting in her grip, and heard Natasha’s voice inside—seemed like the first step on recovery’s staircase. But that step had stretched into a landing, then a floor, and Natasha couldn’t have disappeared, not then.

Sonja, more talented as physician than as sister, withheld her diagnosis as long as she could. Then one Tuesday, Sonja returned from the hospital with feet swollen and shoulders heavy, too tired, really, to begin tending to her most difficult patient of the day. Natasha sat on the divan, a stack of books propped on the cushion beside her. Origins of Chechen Civilization, The Third Soviet Guide to Ornithology, Life and Fate. A yellowed tome covered her lap. The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians.

“I can define any words you don’t understand,” Sonja offered, and immediately regretted it. Not the right tone to take. “Looking up anything particular?”

Natasha shrugged, of course.

“I hope you didn’t read that all day.” She turned to the bare wall. Her open mouth, pointed at Natasha, invariably projected condescension. “Surely there are more exciting books on the shelves.”

“I don’t want to be excited,” Natasha said flatly. “I want boredom. I want to be lobotomized by boredom.”

“Listen, Natashechka, something is wrong,” she said, and hated her lack of specificity. Something? Wrong? How could a surgeon diagnose with such imprecision? “Have you heard of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?”

Natasha nodded without looking up from the page.

“What is it, then?”

Golden lamplight outlined the text as she flipped the pages. “It is a psychological reaction that occurs after experiencing a highly stressing event outside the range of normal human experience, which is usually characterized by depression, anxiety, flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, and avoidance of reminders of the event.”

Natasha hadn’t spoken a complex sentence in months, and even recited, the clause-heavy bluster made her sound alive again. “Sound familiar?” Sonja asked.

“The Italian head doctors went through this already. I don’t want your help.”

Help was the last thing Sonja knew how to give her sister. “Can you remember the last time you went outside?” she asked. Natasha could have lit a cigarette off the end of that glare. “I’ll tell you when. When you were repatriated. You haven’t set a toe outside this apartment block since you returned to it.”

“You weren’t there,” Natasha said, shrugging. “So you don’t get to tell me what to do.”

For months she’d withheld, stopped herself, thought better, bitten her tongue to shreds. “I’m right here. Now. Here I am.” She spread her arms, not to embrace her sister, but to show how wide she was, how much of her was here. “Do you know why? Do you have any idea?”

Natasha didn’t move. She couldn’t unlock the cellar door, not for Sonja, not for anyone. What had happened down there was still happening inside her, and she wouldn’t let anyone, least of all her sister, into what she was still trying, still failing to escape from.

“Because of you. Because I was afraid you were here alone. Everything was so good in London. I was happy there. But I came back for you and that entitles me to your respect. You can hate me and think I’m a self-righteous bitch, but you will treat me with respect, because I came back here for you.”

Again, that f*cking shrug! Sonja couldn’t imagine, then, with exasperation surging inside her, that one calm morning, eight and a half years away, after her sister had disappeared for a second time, she would wake on a hospital bed with her shoulders as stiff as her collarbones, and shrugging once, twice, failing to relax them, she would remember Natasha’s shrugs, how fluid, how easy, and that would be the first definitive, the first known, that wherever Natasha was she would be shrugging.

“Do you want me to feel sorry that you left your nice life in London? Are you the victim here, is that what you’re saying? Maybe you should talk with a psychiatrist about it, Sonechka. No, you made a mistake returning here for me,” Natasha stated, as simply as if still reading from the dictionary. “Just as I made a mistake leaving here for you.”

A window might have opened; a breeze might have slid across the walls, clearing the air, because Sonja smiled, and said, “We’re sisters. In that way, at least, we’re sisters.” She took a clean breath, now that they had each said what they had to say. “I bought you a souvenir,” she said, surprising even herself. “In London.”

Exhibiting great restraint, Natasha didn’t shrug. “What sort of souvenir?”

“I’m not telling you. I’m keeping it for myself.”

“It’s not a souvenir if you keep it.”

“Of course it is. It’s a gift to myself. I deserve it.”

“Why didn’t you give it to me?” Natasha had sat up and cocked her head to Sonja.

“Because,” Sonja said, picking up the dictionary and fanning the pages with her thumb, “you’re always on my nerves.”

“All the time?”

“Stampeding on my nerves.”

“I wouldn’t want it even if you were giving it to me,” Natasha said.

“Good, because I’m not.”

“I bet it’s a book about intestines.”

“You know I’d keep that for myself,” Sonja said. “I’ll give it to you right now.”

“Why?”

“How many intestines books does a woman need? I’ll trade it to you for a promise,” Sonja said. Natasha had taken up the clarinet when she was twelve, and Sonja, sixteen at the time, already sitting in on university classes, had heard every squeak, every warble, every pinched sharp through their shared, shadow-thin wall. She had paid Natasha, by the hour, not to practice. That same glint of easy opportunity returned to Natasha’s eyes.

“What promise?” she asked.

“Promise that you’ll come to the hospital with me tomorrow.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Just that. If you think you’re well enough.”

“What, you think I’m not?”

“No, no. I’m not saying that.”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Natasha said. “Fine. I promise.”

Sonja went to her room and returned a minute later. “Close your eyes,” she said, and handed her a sturdy oblong object wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.

“What is this? A doll?” Natasha asked, pulling it from the bag. “I’m a grown woman.”

“It’s not a doll. It’s a nutcracker of a Buckingham Palace guard.”

“Who are they?”

“They stand outside the queen’s palace. They’re not allowed to laugh. They just stand there. They’re not very good at guarding, when you think about it. They just stand there. You could dress up a lamppost and get as good a guard.”

“Yes,” Natasha agreed, cranking the nutcracker’s mouth up and down. “A bad guard and worse souvenir. What should I call him?”

Sonja bit her lip. “What about Alu?”

“Alu the lousy, boring, worthless souvenir.”

“Yes,” Sonja said. “That is the perfect name for him.”

“I’m a little disappointed. You spent five years in London and all I get is a doll?”

“The real gift was my absence.”

Finally, a smile.


The next morning the hospital was quiet. The few patients Maali couldn’t scare off with promises of an amputation cure-all waited for her: a sprained ankle, a case of the common cold, nothing urgent. She took Natasha through the ghost wards of deserted laboratories and examination rooms. Pigeons roosted in split IV bags. A manhole cover, leading nowhere, lay in radiology. The rooms would look unchanged eight and three-quarter years later when Sonja led Akhmed through. The powdered heroin, provided by Alu’s brother, would still slouch against the canteen cupboard wall, but when she led him past she would do so without worry, without wondering if his veins, like her sister’s, might tingle from proximity.

“This was once among the foremost oncology departments in the U.S.S.R.,” she said, as they shuffled into a room relieved of its doorknobs and light fixtures. “Party officials came from as far as Vladivostok for treatment.”

They paused at a hulking MRI machine which the former hospital director had sacrificed his pension, his marriage, and all the black in his hair to procure. “It’s a shame we can’t use this, but a single scan would kill the generator.” A meter from her foot the bronze rim of a shell casing was silhouetted in dust. “Besides,” she added, “there’s so much embedded metal in here the magnetic field would turn the room into a shooting gallery.”

The tour ended on the fourth-floor maternity ward, where a woman who had given birth the previous night smiled at everyone in placid exhaustion. Her child had emerged with a collapsed lung but the doctor on call had acted quickly and the child had lived. The mother held the infant to her breast. Its little lips bent the nipple. She beamed as they approached.

“God is great. She will live,” the mother said in a slow cadence to make it clear that the two statements were logically dependent. She glanced up at Natasha, mistaking her white sweatshirt for scrubs. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I’m no one,” Natasha said.

“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You save lives.”

Natasha crossed her arms, and Sonja couldn’t see it, couldn’t know it, but right then, when Natasha dipped her head, looked to her palm, to the floor, to Sonja and back, she believed that their body temperatures rose by some fractional degree, that this they shared. The baby finished suckling and tilted its square little face upward.

“Do you want to hold her?” the mother asked.

“No,” Natasha said, ratcheting her frown.

“Nonsense,” the mother said. “You want to hold her.”

“I need to go, but you stay here. There is a case of the common cold in need of my attention,” Sonja whispered as Natasha took the infant in her arms.


That morning, in the cavernous wards, Natasha’s brain finally hushed. When the newborn sniffed strangely at her chest, she stared into its eyes and saw a world only two days old. Those two and a half kilograms righted her, turned her vantage to a future kinder than experience had taught her to expect. The next morning she woke when Sonja woke, left when Sonja left, and the next morning and the next.

Deshi and Maali, her superiors, were nurses and twins. Deshi, on the eleventh of her twelve loves, reminded her of Sonja, and she preferred Maali, the younger by eighteen minutes, who treated illness and injury as the practical jokes of a God wheezing with laughter, and suggested amputation for every cough, chest cold, ulcer, and eye infection that had the misfortune of seeking her counsel. In the maternity ward, Natasha cleaned towels, bedsheets, the linoleum floor, plastic tubes and hoses, bottles, baby bottoms, and bedpans. Her fingertips reddened in the bleach, and in this good hurt and those clean bottles, she found herself warmed by the small suggestions of her agency. In her day’s rare pauses, she restored the view to the boarded windows. It began with a few right angles penciled on the plywood. She hadn’t known what she was drawing until it took shape. Two squares, one atop the other. In the pencil’s descent a stray line became a downspout, the pulsing overhead fluorescence became a blue afternoon sun, and a small curl of wood grain became a secretary’s brown hair blown back by a desk fan. Drawing by division on the plywood, she parceled the building into floors, floors into windows, windows into panes. Familiar, but it still floated a centimeter off her memory; she placed a Soviet flag over the arched entrance, placed pigeons on the flagpole, placed a strong westerly breeze so the flag caught every squirt of pigeon shit. Pencil lead smudged on the thick of her palm as she dredged the building from its ruins. When finished she wrote its name in block Cyrillic above the awning. The Volchansk State Bureau of Vehicular Licensing and Registration. Of course it looked familiar; it had once stood on the other side of the window.

Over weeks and months, as spare minutes became hours and the hours days, she added linden and poplar trees, rusted streetlamps, drooping electrical lines, shingled roofs, a skyline of television antennae, clotheslines curved by wet laundry, smoke ribbons unwinding from tailpipes, the sidewalks and cigarette kiosks and everything she could remember. She added no fire hydrants.

Behind her back, and later to her face, Deshi and Maali opined.

“A dreadful thing,” Deshi said when she thought Natasha had gone to the parking lot for a cigarette.

“Completely inaccurate,” Maali concurred. The nurse understood what it was like to be the younger sister, if only by eighteen minutes, and her criticism hurt Natasha the most. “The perspective is skewed. It isn’t possible to see so much of City Park from this window.”

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard,” Deshi said. “She’s never actually seen the view from this room.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? She’s drawing something she’s never seen.”

“She isn’t even Chechen.”

“Her greatest shortcoming.”

“She deserves pity rather than scorn.”

“We retired three years ago,” Deshi lamented. “What are we even doing here?”

The unlit cigarette somersaulted from her fingers as she pushed open the door, dashed between her critics, and closed the curtain over the boarded windows. She had felt more humiliated before, but never by people whom she trusted. She grabbed her lighter from the counter and pushed past the nurses, but Maali’s grasp, surprisingly firm on her wrist, held her.

“Let me guess,” Natasha said. “The only way to fix the mural is to amputate the hand that drew it.”

Maali smiled. “It’s not quite so serious.”

“Really?” She felt strangely honored that Maali didn’t want to chop off her hand.

“It’s just that there was never a bus stop at the intersection of Lenin Prospect and City Bureaucrat Street. I know because I stared at that corner for thirty years.”

“We’ll help you,” Deshi added, and under the combined guidance of eyes that had spent some sixty years in front of the maternity ward windows, she erased and redrew, swept up the eraser lint, erased and redrew again. Deshi and Maali argued over every signpost and streetlamp, every tree in City Park, every storefront, kiosk, and traffic light; they had stared from different windows onto different cities, and in trying to bring back both, she created her own. She shaded the buildings with ash and coal, sliced advertisements from unread magazines still stacked in the waiting room and pasted slivers of color across the plywood. The blue waves of a Black Sea resort became sky. Mint gum became linden leaves. Some afternoons the nurses would become lost in the mural, pointing to the distant corners and alleyways like faded pictures in a photo album. The finely detailed ventilation grate that had once suspended a thousand-ruble note in its draft, where Deshi plucked three months’ rent from the air. The aboveground gas pipes from which their mother had hung laundry and their father a hammock. Or the schoolyard blacktop, where Maali’s son had played soldiers years before the war took him. In sixteen years, when glass replaced the plywood boards, Natasha’s murals would find their way to Sonja’s bedroom closet, where they would remain a private treasure for some sixty-three years, until Maali’s great-great-grandson, an art historian, put them on display in the city art museum.


She was studying her city when the nurses arrived on the morning she was to perform her third solo delivery. “It’s going to get busy,” Maali said, with no small amount of glee. With her rain jacket, windbreaker, and overcoat hung on different pegs, the coat stand suggested a fully staffed ward. “We heard land mines on the way in.”

Deshi wagged her head. “You enjoy this job too much, sister. I worry your head has broken.”

“It’s too bad you can’t amputate a head.”

“You can. It’s called a decapitation.”

Maali noted it excitedly on her clipboard.

“We’re all working trauma today,” Deshi said.

“What if there are deliveries?” Natasha asked.

“Then you’ll do them, Natashechka. It doesn’t take much to deliver a child. The mother does most of the work.”

The first casualties arrived a half hour later; red heat radiated from their skin. Natasha disinfected the ropy ends of a calf when Deshi came calling. “We have a delivery. Go.”

The patient lay gowned and supine on the maternity ward bed. Her face throbbed against the white sheets, as flushed and anguished as those four floors below. Two men stood beside her, each holding one hand. She recognized the cleft in the older man’s chin, but now wasn’t the time for pause, for reflection; now was the time to act. She stood between the woman’s pale open legs, trying not to look down.

“The contractions are three minutes apart,” the younger man volunteered. He spoke with the halting formality of an outsider.

It was all she needed in order to remember what to do. “Lasting how long?”

He didn’t know. Sweat grew heavy on the woman’s forehead and trickled toward her temples. After washing her hands to her wrists, rubbing sanitizer to her elbows, she snapped on a fresh pair of gloves. Another contraction came; they all heard it.

“Do you feel like you have to shit?” she whispered into the woman’s ear, afraid of embarrassing her in front of her husband.

The woman nodded.

“What did you ask?” the younger man asked. “Is she okay?”

“The child is in the birth canal, putting pressure on the rectum, that’s all.” These people knew nothing of her, and she drew enough confidence from what they did not know to keep her voice level. They didn’t know that her name was Natasha; that she had performed only two solo deliveries, one and three weeks earlier; that six months earlier, as she detoxed in a Rome psych ward, God had pulled her through a needle’s eye so narrow that this thread in front of them was all that remained.

She told the woman to lift her pale little legs, place her feet in the stirrups, and the woman did. She pulled the woman’s dress into a crumpled hoop around her stomach. They thought she knew what she was doing and she made their faith hers.

“My chest hurts,” the woman said.

“You need to breathe.”

“My eyes hurt,” the woman said.

“You need to blink.”

She set two pillows on the floor, beneath the woman’s open legs, just in case. The vise of the woman’s grip crushed the older man’s fingers to squirming scarlet tendrils. “I’ve seen you before,” Natasha said, but was swallowed within the woman’s wail. “Push,” Natasha said. “Push.”

A mat of damp hair ringed by pubic curls began to crown.

“Gently,” she said, extending her hands as the mat of hair became a head. “Take deep breaths. Slow breaths. Imagine you are inflating a balloon. Your breaths are slow and deep. Blow through your mouth at the most painful point of each contraction. Try to whistle.”

She steadied her hands beneath the crowning skull. Instinct told her to palm the back of the child’s head so its first sensation was of warmth and comfort, but she kept a finger’s width between the child’s skin and her own. Maali had warned her never to touch a child’s head before seeing its face; doing so could cause the child to inhale amniotic fluid. But it wasn’t the child who gasped, it was Natasha as she watched the damp forehead emerge. The birth canal sheathed every slip of skin as the mother slid her child into life. Its little eyes didn’t move. Far away, the mother emptied her lungs in an unshaped melody. They all inhaled her whistle.

“The head has come out,” Natasha announced, trying her hardest, for the sake of professional decorum, to stifle the smile widening across her face. The mother pushed and the room hushed, dampened, narrowed by her exertion. The shoulders stuck. With the most tender turn of her gloved hands, Natasha rotated the child’s head so its lids looked into the fleshy pale of the mother’s thigh. The right shoulder slid through. She lifted the child’s head and when the mother’s next whistle pushed out the left shoulder, the rest glided into her hands like an afterthought.

She lifted the umbilical cord over the child’s face, and the warm wet weight of the head pressed to her palm. She angled the child toward the floor. “A girl,” she said. The child opened its eyes and a sharp chill ran through her to know that hers were the first hands to hold the girl.

“She doesn’t look right,” the father said.

Natasha rubbed the girl’s back through a towel, then tilted her head to open the airway. She stroked the girl’s nose, dried the girl’s mouth, suctioned residue through a plastic syringe, tickled her feet, but still the girl hadn’t cried. Should she run downstairs for help? Could she perform CPR on a newborn? She pushed her fingers into the child’s soft, soggy soles, and begged them to kick back. At the ends of her feet the protruding toes seemed in error, so curled and delicate they might sink back into the doughy flesh. These are the feet of a human being you brought into the world. She will not die.

She didn’t. Lips drawn to the pink edges of her toothless gums. A sharp gulp.

“She’s breathing.”

“I can hear,” the father said. The girl wailed. “She breathes like her mother.”

She placed the girl on the mother’s bare skin. The mother stared through a frame of damp hair and recognized her daughter; they were both breathing. Pink liquid trickled from the girl’s mouth, striping the incline of her mother’s still swollen stomach. With a fresh towel Natasha wrapped the two together.

“You should start nursing as soon as you feel able,” Natasha said. She didn’t need to borrow their confidence. It was hers. “It will help the placenta come out and stop the bleeding.”

The mother nodded weakly, happily. Her voice was unfamiliar when she spoke. Natasha had only heard it in screams. “This is my daughter?”

“Yes,” Natasha said, finally allowing herself a smile. “She’s yours.”

The older man approached as she washed her hands under the sputtering tap. There was much yet to clean, but first, her hands. He thanked her.

“The mother did most of the work,” she said. In his wrinkles she recognized his face as she might a photograph crumpled and flattened. “I’ve seen you before.”

“Have you been to Eldár?”

In a truck, with five other women. “In passing.”

“What about the city university? I taught there. Or the Café Standard? I enjoyed their bebop nights. Do you like bebop?”

“I don’t like trumpets.”

“But what if a trumpet is playing the music you like?”

She thought of loose screws trembling on the Nightclub dance floor.

“The music I like can’t be played on a trumpet,” she said.

“If it can’t be played on a trumpet, it’s not music.”

“My name is Natasha,” she said, smiling.

“Khassan Geshilov.”

Repeating the name aloud, she saw the black-and-white dust jacket photo. “I’ve read your book.”

He gave a bashful laugh. “You’re the one?”

“It ended before the Russians arrived. A stupid decision, if you ask me.”

“If only you had been my editor! Origins of Chechen Civilization,” he said fondly, as if he had also forgotten the title. He turned to the boarded windows. “This is the whole city, isn’t it?”

“As much as can be seen from the window.”

He strolled the ash-shaded streets and verdant leaves, reading the city so he might later remember. He lingered at an intersection between City Park and the university library, hesitated, then pressed his finger into the street. “The love of my life was nearly killed by a bus here. She had been following me, and I only found out then, with the screech of bus tires.”

“You have stalkers? No wonder you didn’t have time to write about the Russians.”

“That’s a story for another day.” He glanced back to the newborn. “Let’s introduce ourselves.”

The father and the historian embraced, all gratitude and congratulations silently locked between their arms. The father lifted the girl from the mother. His long fingers held her.

“What will you call her?” Natasha asked.

“Havaa,” the father said. “Havaa.”