A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



19





“SO THIS IS why they keep you around?” Akhmed said to the one-armed guard, who just then, in the hospital parking lot, floundered under the weight of a heavy box. A blue throbbing vein surfaced on the guard’s valiant left forearm. “Do you moonlight as a professional mover?” Akhmed asked. He leaned against the jeep, casually smoking a cigarette. “Half-off moving?”

“May I shoot him, Dr. Sonja?” the one-armed guard asked, hopefully.

She smiled at these two buffoons—the one-armed guard threatened to kick Akhmed’s ass with his two working legs—and they had to be buffoons, because every hospital employee with a kopek of common sense had left. “I need his arms,” she called after the guard, who was chasing Akhmed across the parking lot. “Don’t shoot him until we get all the supplies inside.”

When they finished unloading, she went to the canteen cupboard. Behind the shoebox of loose cash, the clattering ID cards, the plastic bag of heroin, stood the good stuff: cans of sweetened condensed milk. The sweet syrup gurgled from the cut triangle, a thick coating on her gums, and for a few succulent seconds her mind narrowed to the width of that sugary stream. “Sweetened condensed milk will rot your mouth but preserve your soul,” advised her father’s aunt Lena, who died in a Grozny nursing home at the age of one hundred and three, having outlived two husbands, six children, three grandchildren, and thirty-two teeth. The maternity ward was empty, the trauma quiet, and Sonja closed her eyes, slipped into this unexpected peace as she would warm, cleansing water.

She climbed to the fourth floor. The swinging doors of the old maternity ward crooned as she entered. The droplet flame of her cigarette lighter guided her to an oil lamp and expanded to fill the glass chamber. When she lifted the lamp the light peeled back the shadows. In the years since their completion, Natasha’s murals had faded and smudged as if a fog had fallen across the city. Even so, the degree of detail still amazed her. There, in the window that held half of City Park, a dog had been, for eight years now, relieving itself on a commissar’s leg.

“You didn’t show me this on the tour.”

He had changed into those ridiculous woman-sized scrubs and leaned against the doorframe, trying and failing to act casual. Buffoons, imbeciles, orphans, lunatics, and visionaries; family. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For earlier today.”

He shrugged; was there no end to the number of shrugging shoulders she was asked to decipher? “What is this?” he asked, glancing to the walls.

“The old maternity ward.”

“On the fourth floor?”

“The genius of Soviet engineering,” she said, shaking her head. “The hospital was designed in the early Brezhnev years entirely without the input of practicing physicians. After the Feds shot a rocket at the storage closet, we finally decided to move everything to the first floor.”

The shadows slipped from his face as he stepped into the pool of lantern light.

“Did you draw these?” he asked, nodding to the nearest window mural.

“Natasha did.”

“What was she like?” he asked, tilting his face to her.

She had described Natasha to border guards, camp officials, and aid workers. Hazel eyes, brown hair, one hundred seventy centimeters in height, sixty kilograms in weight, no tattoos or piercings, no visible scars but cigarette burns clustered on her left shoulder; she incanted the litany, scribbled it on paperwork as an unconscious doodle, but how could an instrument as blunted as language express one as strange and fleeting as Natasha? Metaphors failed her; Natasha could not be summarized. What she possessed were losses: the loss of Natasha’s laugh, the loss of Natasha’s scorn, the loss of Natasha’s begrudging love; and as a phantom limb can ache and tickle, her lost Natasha was still laughing, still scornful, still loving begrudgingly, burgeoning with enough life to make Sonja wonder if she, herself, was the one disappeared.

“Natasha was complex,” she said finally, which was as near to the truth as she could articulate.

“Is,” he corrected. “She will come back. Like a George Bush.”

Smiling stupidly, she shrugged, at long last discovering the gesture’s utility. Akhmed’s cheeks bunched at the corners of his grin. His confidence was so big and brash she might believe it if she wasn’t careful. It was that hope, lingering in the slimmest margins of possibility, that hurt her more than the loss; unlike Natasha, it never disappeared entirely. “Talking about it doesn’t do any good,” she said, glad, at least, that Natasha wasn’t there to hear her admit it.

“Dokka was disappeared once, and he returned. Without his fingers, but still. I hope he does again.”

This is the hardest part, she could have told him, before time dulls the loss to a manageable ache. But he and the girl still joked with a levity Sonja couldn’t have summoned a year after Natasha left, and that capacity for joy unsettled her.

“Would you love her,” she asked, unable to mask her unease, “if you had children of your own?”

“It’s hard to know,” he said. “I’ve always loved her. But she is mine, now, more than anyone’s. If I had a family, I might know better what to say. But she’s mine. That I know.”

Once, after she had renounced her family in a childhood tantrum, her father had said, “Your family isn’t your choice.” Nearly thirty years later, while walking through City Park, she had seen two homeless men wedged into a single sleeping bag, their soot-stained arms wrapped around one another, and finally understood what her father had meant.

“It’s funny,” he said, walking to the window. “A friend of mine told me about this mural years ago.”

“Did he have a child delivered here?”

“I doubt it.” He stood in reverent concentration a hand’s width from the ply boards. “He’s nearly eighty.”

“She worked on them for such a long time. I’d never seen her devote so much of herself to anything. I was so proud of her. Deshi and Maali helped her.” Natasha had once described it as transcribing their memories, a turn of phrase so lovely Sonja was unwilling to share it with him.

“I’d forgotten completely, otherwise I would have asked to see them sooner. When Khassan told me about them, I was so moved that someone would go to the trouble. It seemed like such a big beautiful waste of time. You can imagine how much that would appeal to me. So I did something similar.”

Her heart rose a centimeter. Even disappeared, Natasha was still surprising her. “Because of my sister’s murals?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I told you about the wounded rebels that occupied the village? The Feds came next. Forty-one of my neighbors were disappeared. I remembered what Khassan had told me about the room with its view recreated on boarded windows, and I drew portraits of all forty-one on plywood boards and hung them throughout the village.”

“Everyone here is a f*cking artist,” she said, shaking her head. “If you people spent more time fighting and less time drawing, you might win a war now and then.”

“It was medical school that did it to me.” He leaned to her and dropped his voice to an exaggerated, conspiratorial whisper. “I used to skip lectures and labs to sit in on art classes. That’s why I’m a better drawer than physician.”

“I can’t believe you told me that.”

“I’m trusting you with my darkest secret,” he said, so pleased with himself she couldn’t avoid laughing with him.

“I could lose my job for knowing that and keeping you on. Criminal neglect.”

“Obviously you are a criminal, look at the company you keep. International smugglers and amateur artists.” His left arm had steadily edged toward hers. “You could fire me.”

“It’s too late for that,” she said, and focused on the women’s scrubs cinched around his biceps, how ridiculous he looked. There had been fourteen since the elevators last ran: four Russians, six Chechens, two Ingush, one French physician, and a Finnish journalist, who she f*cked before granting an interview. None knew her surname or patronymic; anonymity was the most comprehensive prophylactic. And the sex itself, infrequent and illicit and often awkwardly impersonal, fulfilled her more wholly than anything a husband could provide. As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn’t exist exclusively to feel pain.

“Even before those portraits, people from neighboring farms and villages would come to my clinic, people who didn’t have photographs of their lost ones. I’d draw them.” He said it as if it had happened centuries ago.

“Like a police sketch artist?”

“If I must be an -ist I’d prefer portraitist.”

And then it was so obvious.

“Draw her for me,” she asked. “Now. Draw the face of the woman who told you my name.”

When he returned with a notebook and pencil, they sat at the counter. He opened the notebook.

“I only barely remember her,” he said, in apology or indemnity, she couldn’t tell.

She nodded at him to begin. If she opened her mouth, if she tapped that reservoir, nothing would stopper it. He folded the notebook at the spine and drew a line so soft it looked halfway erased. An oval. It could be anyone’s head, even Natasha’s. Next he drew two smaller ovals, right in the middle of her head, too long, until she imagined bangs. The two eyes watched her from the page. When he began drawing the wrong nose, she squeezed his wrist.

“That’s not …” She struggled to push words into the sentence. She would regret this. She knew she would. But she hadn’t seen her sister’s face in twelve months, two weeks and three days, and even more than Natasha’s face, even more than her return, she wanted Natasha to end. “Her nose was smaller,” she said.

For the next half hour she gently corrected him whenever he strayed. He hadn’t forgotten her face, she told herself; she was only helping him remember. And if she was deluding herself, so what? Weren’t delusions better than desperation, false hopes better than none at all? As Natasha’s calm, untroubled face emerged, Sonja’s heart climbed her ribs. It drummed against each one, then rose to her neck, pressing against her throat. In a refugee camp or foreign country, somewhere far away, Natasha was safe. He drew a chin she would recognize in a crowd of thousands, then down to her perfect, unblemished neck. Not one cigarette burn; she hadn’t told him to put them there. Something spectacular was happening in her chest. She hadn’t expected this. On one sheet of paper in a notebook of two hundred and twenty, and with no more than a few millimeters of pencil lead, he returned Natasha to her and to the maternity ward.

“Please stop,” she said.

“I thought you wanted this?”

He reached for her shoulder and she turned away. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said after a moment.

“Take this with you.”

He lifted Natasha from the counter and carried her from the maternity ward.