A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



17





HAVAA’S FATHER NEVER again played chess after returning from the final trip to the mountains with Ramzan in January 2003. He spent his days caught like a coin between the divan cushions. Sweat seeped into his shirt collar, leaving a rim the color of crushed mustard seed. His fingers had, well, healed wasn’t the right word. The stumps had hardened into pink lumps rising from the webs of his palms. He struggled to button his shirt, open the door, eat, tie his shoes, and Havaa, insistent and unrelenting, became his hands.

The heat of the following summer weighed so much it would take an extra autumn to fully lift. Her mother kept her waistline hidden beneath wide skirts and aprons, refusing to wear maternity clothes. She still slept in her parents’ bedroom on a mattress so thin she felt the pattern of nail heads in the floor. Refugees still arrived, still overdressed and bewildered, and her father still took them in.

That summer the leaves drooped in the heat. Decay baked at her feet and in it crawled little insects that made homes in her boot prints. She hiked as if the forest were a fragile thing, careful to sidestep saplings so slender they bowed with the breeze. Her father told her that Soviet timber interests had controlled the forest before the wars, but she couldn’t find a tree stump on her side of the forest, and rust-chewed saw belts, buried like relics of a prior civilization, were the only evidence of past industry.

Flocks of migrating birds clutched shaded branches. Lizards hid in dewy deer tracks. Once, she saw a wolf slaloming between the birch trunks; its pink tongue lolled from its open mouth and the sunlight glimmered on its fangs. When the wolf spotted her, half hidden behind a hornbeam, its ears snapped skyward. It found her eyes amid the leaves and studied them, questioningly, and she stared back, unnerved but not quite afraid, until they came to an understanding, and the wolf continued its saunter through the long, lovely shadows. Despite her sprinting pulse, she had only pity for the wolf, sweltering, as it was, under that heavy silver coat.

She visited Akim often that summer. His portrait survived the February frosts and March thaws, but even the varnish, smeared like sunblock across his cheeks, couldn’t save him from the summer heat. His face slumped and faded. How the summer aged him. In life he had preferred the cold and dreamed of visiting the North Pole. In eighteen years his oldest brother, a geologist, would bury what remained of Akim’s portrait in Arctic snow, not quite at the North Pole, but close enough to make a compass needle spin in circles.

The sight of Akim’s half-erased face left Havaa crestfallen, but an hour’s trek from the village, she found the solution guarding a fallow field. The scarecrow wore a burlap sack and sun-bleached blue trousers, its straw-stuffed waist wider than that of any villager. A faceless cloth crammed with dead leaves sat where the head should be. Crows perched on its brim and mice nested in the sags of its shirtsleeves. Her parents warned her against venturing into the fields, but the chance to extend Akim’s life, once again, outweighed her fear. Each step planted with cautious deliberation, she reached the scarecrow. A wooden post, rooted in the soil, impaled the limp straw body. She kicked the post, then excavated its base. The dirt scratched her knees and she scratched the dirt back. The scarecrow tilted with the post, arms and legs hanging back like a refugee collapsing into bed. Mice scurried from the sleeves when they at last brushed the ground. The whole glaring sky focused on her as she tied a rag around the splintered post end, gripped, and pulled. The scarecrow’s head nodded as it fell along the furrows. His arms stretched across the dry soil as if searching for mines.

It took three afternoons before she joined the straw body to Akim’s head. When the sun set on the first evening, she left the scarecrow to sleep in the driest part of a roadside ditch. The next evening she hid him in the shadow of a fallen tree. Finally, she had the wilted torso leaning against the tree, and taking gardening shears by their blue rubber handles, she decapitated the faceless cloth head with a few rusty snaps. She dug a small hole, slid the post in, and the scarecrow stood. Browned straw jutted from the scarecrow’s neck, bearding Akim, but another few clips shaved him. Though the scarecrow looked better, it was still no more than a lax, lifeless body propped up beneath a fading portrait, requiring resuscitation. She snipped her hair with the gardening shears and pasted the clippings on Akim’s crown. She pricked her finger with a sewing needle and rubbed her warm blood onto Akim’s cheeks. Reenacting Akhmed’s movements, she thumped on the scarecrow’s chest, as he had thumped on the boy’s chest, and when the breath of life erupted—her own—she stood back and wiped the sweat-sting from her eyes. The air was clean. Her hands brown with dirt. Pride surged through her, raw and immense; she had believed happiness to be an absence—of fear, of pain, of grief—but here it roared in her as powerful as any sadness. She looked at her fingers and loved them. They had carried the scarecrow for three kilometers of field, road, and forest without setting off a single mine. They had saved Akim for a second time.

As the summer burned on she would lie on her back and describe to Akim the shapes of clouds spotted through breaks in the trees. She would lie on her stomach and report the gross and fascinating news from the insect world. She would complain about her mother and father, how the Landfill had changed them both and how the dry evening air combusted without refugees to douse the tension. Silence, she had learned, was safer than questions. Even as her mother’s belly grew, Havaa kept her questions and comments for Akim, who, in death, treated her more graciously than he ever had in life.

Havaa was sitting beside Akim when she heard her mother’s screams, first mistaking them for the breeze through thicket, but the air lay thick and still, and wind couldn’t call for help. She ran home. Her mother lay on the floor beneath a blood-soaked apron. Her father and Akhmed knelt beside her. “She’s hemorrhaging,” Akhmed was saying. “I don’t know what to do. We need to get her to the hospital.” She waited with her father while Akhmed hurtled toward Ramzan’s for his truck. In a shuddering voice her father kept asking the pale-faced woman—who looked like her mother and wore her mother’s apron but couldn’t be her mother—for forgiveness. If she had been dying every minute of every day, they might have been a happy family. The blood consumed every centimeter of apron cloth and Havaa was afraid the wound would become hers if she came too close. Her mother stirred, looked to her father, and wrapped her five fingers over his none. She opened her mouth, but he shook his head, told her to save her breath, and Havaa would always remember how he had shushed what might have been her good-bye so that she could breathe.

The splatter of gravel outside and Akhmed ran in, now in the living room, now kneeling on the floor, now lifting the head of the woman who would not be, could not be, but was her mother. Her father tried to help but he couldn’t even lift the hair from her eyes. They left Havaa at the house with instructions shouted from the open passenger window and swallowed by the road before she could ask for clarification. The road distended, becoming a cloud the truck fell into. She asked Allah to save her mother, and, as her prayer vanished in dust, wondered if she should ask again in Arabic.

Back in the house she went to her parents’ bedroom and opened the top dresser drawer. She plodded over the cool circles of coins, rummaged through silk handkerchiefs and leather wristbands. She found it in the back of the drawer. It was wrapped in a cotton bandanna, next to the jewelry her mother tried on when she thought she was alone. Even through the bandanna her fingers remembered the grip. The knot was simple, loose, gone with a tug. The silvery finish shone as if in those months of darkness it had reserved its reflection for this. She held it as Ramzan had taught her. Close to her chest. As if carrying a water pitcher. What lay at the other end of the barrel didn’t matter. She couldn’t see past the trigger. The whole world was howling and if it kept on, if it didn’t stop, she would let the barrel reply.

She would remember the cool metal warming in her hands, how she gripped it like a banister. Later she would learn that Akhmed had shouted instructions as he drove; her father performed them as well as his hands allowed. She would never understand why Akhmed hadn’t thought to bring her when he needed a second set of fingers. In the panicked departure no one remembered her mother’s ID card. The sergeant at the checkpoint nodded often, sympathetically, and then explained there was simply no way he could allow her through without proper identification. There are few rules in war, he went on, but those that do exist must be upheld, because if so simple a rule as this is broken, then couldn’t the more complex, convoluted, one might even say absurd rules of the Geneva Convention break with even greater ease? Her father raised his hands in response, but the sergeant, a man who had grown up in a mining town above the Arctic circle, and found the Chechen climate so fine he had renewed his contract three times, had seen worse. Her mother died and the argument went on for several more minutes before anyone noticed.

The gun was buried in the back of the drawer before her father returned. The look on his face told her what had happened and that hurt burrowed deeper than anything she’d ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was. Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed. But even on those days when she ran to Akim in the woods, her pain wasn’t complicated by guilt. She hadn’t caused or contributed to her mother’s death. She couldn’t have saved her.

That was the difference in how she mourned each parent. One and a half years since her mother had died and she grieved for her cleanly because she wasn’t at fault. But when the security forces had come for her father three nights earlier, she could have taken that pistol and aimed it at the first face appearing in the kicked-in door. She could have fired all twelve rounds, let the magazine drop, ducked and reloaded, just as Ramzan had taught her.

But she didn’t. Instead she’d followed her father’s hoarse command and run through the backdoor and into the safety of the woods with her prepacked just-in-case suitcase. The shadows of the Feds moved across the windowpanes. The bookcase tipped and the book covers opened like wings over an underbelly of white feathers, dirty with ink. In the living room the men gathered with their faces to the floor. From behind the moldering log, she couldn’t make out what the men were laughing at, and because she couldn’t see she could still believe it wasn’t her father. She sucked snow, breathed through her mouth, her breath invisible in the cold. Their shoulders strained with an unseen weight. They vanished, reappearing in the next window, and she crept to the edge of the clearing until she could see the parked truck. The duct tape stretching over her father’s mouth wrinkled. When she saw that they had even taped his hands together, she would have fired three shots right then, if she had had the pistol. But there was no gun. The silver Makarov was not in the dresser drawer. It hadn’t been there for some time.