A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



22





THE VILLAGE CHIMNEYS were sending up smoke among the birch trunks when Akhmed heard a low whistle from the trees. Khassan, surrounded by his guard of feral dogs, stepped into the road with an orange hand cupping the flashlight. The dogs, watchful, ears erect, studied him warily.

“I didn’t want Ramzan to see me waiting for you,” Khassan said. His fingers glowed.

“He was waiting for me last night, asking about Havaa.”

“I spoke with him today. For the first time in two years. My own son. I begged him.”

The statement knocked Akhmed a step back. Surprised, honored, grateful that the man would break the silence for Havaa’s sake, his sake, he set his palm on those radiant fingers and the road was dark again. “It’s all right.”

“I’m sorry, Akhmed, I’m—” A sob halved the old man’s voice and Akhmed gripped his fingers. When his mother died, Khassan wept at the burial. When Akhmed’s father died, Khassan provided the shroud. Akhmed had always remembered this, how Khassan had shared his mourning as if he were family. Dog paws pattered in the undergrowth.

“So they will come for me.” For years he’d lived with the fear of murder, torture, or disappearance, as all men of his age did, and it was the senselessness that truly frightened him; that the monumental finality of death could come arbitrarily was more terrifying than the eternity to follow. But if his death severed the connection between city and village, it would be neither futile nor insignificant, and he would be more fortunate than many thousands of his countrymen.

“I don’t know,” Khassan said. His hands shook under Akhmed’s.

“And Ramzan doesn’t know where I’ve been these past three days?”

“I don’t think he wants to know. So long as the burden of disclosure is on you, some small corner of his conscience can stay clean.”

He imagined her right then, annoying Sonja, asking her to explain why feces are brown, why ears bend, so young and silly and smart. She was a child without parents, and he was a man without children. Ten years earlier he couldn’t have imagined claiming her, but the rules of that society had broken. There was no one left to say whom you could love.

“I won’t say a word,” Akhmed whispered.

“Im sorry.”

“Havaa is my only allegiance.” The moon outlined Khassan’s face. Tears rimmed his eyelids, and his lips pressed into a tight frown, but he didn’t appear contrite. If Akhmed hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was an expression of overwhelming pride.

“Do you remember in the first war, Dokka carried a book with him everywhere?” Akhmed asked. “Whenever the Feds passed, Dokka would open his book and start reading.”

Khassan gave a relieved grin. “The Feds thought the rebels were illiterate, so by reading a book he proved he wasn’t a rebel.”

“But it wasn’t even a book, was it?”

“No, a journal. All the pages were blank. But they couldn’t tell that.”

They laughed and the flashlight beam tore hoops in the shadows.

“And he wasn’t shot,” Khassan mused.

“No, not then.”

Khassan pulled a manila envelope from his overcoat and passed it to Akhmed. The exchange, Akhmed thought, was the nearest thing to a postal service in many years. “I was hoping you could give this to Havaa. It’s a letter, some memories of Dokka before he became a father. So she’ll have something to look to when she’s older.”

“I’m glad you’re optimistic,” Akhmed said.

“What do I do? I know what honor requires, but that? To my own son? With my own hands? Am I expected to do that? Tell me what to do, Akhmed. You know that your name is the next he’ll give the Feds. You tell me, what should a father do?” Khassan had leaned forward, his stale, quick breaths warming Akhmed’s cheek, his hands reaching for Akhmed’s shoulders. It was a peculiar sensation. They had never hugged before.

“I don’t know,” Akhmed said. There was no right answer and he was too tired, too cold, and too close to home to sift through all the wrong ones. “I’ve never been a father. I don’t know what you should do.”

“I’m not asking for your approval. I’m asking for your advice.”

Akhmed nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

Khassan stepped back and his face, paled in moonlight, shifted violently. He opened his mouth, but for a moment only his eyes spoke. Akhmed would have filled the fragile space between them with gratitude. He would have thanked Khassan for the advice, the stories, the meals, the cigarettes, the silences, everything, even the interminable history lessons, they had shared over the years. He would have said that Khassan had been like a father to him, in the ten years since his own father had passed. He would have said it, but Khassan spoke first. “I feel fortunate to know who you are, Akhmed. I’ve wanted to say that for a long time.”

Their eyes met and broke away. Such naked acknowledgment of their relationship embarrassed them both, and nodding, turning toward the village, Akhmed said nothing.

He entered the musty blindness of the living room and crept toward the bedroom’s lantern light. “It’s me,” he said, in the doorway. “How are you?”

Beneath the blankets, Ula turned and smiled lazily. “Oh, just fine. Fine and fine. Your father came again. He told me a bedtime story.”

He prepared a dinner of lentils and canned apricots, pulled a chair beside the bed, and ate with her. His poor Ula. She really was losing her mind. Her health had improved in recent months, but this insistence that she spent her days with his ten-years-deceased father dispelled hope for recovery. Just as well. Her mind was one less thing she had left to lose. In a cigar box beneath the bed he hid a hypodermic needle and a vial of heroin he had swiped from the hospital.

After cleaning the dishes, he found his copy of Hadji Murád, steadying the wobbling dresser leg, and set it by the door. He secured the living room blackout curtains before opening Khassan’s envelope. Brass fasteners bound forty or fifty sheets. He parted the pages at random. Your father loved your mother’s nose. It was a big, ungainly thing, and he said it was still growing, and was slowly taking over her cheeks and forehead, so her entire face would soon submerge beneath her nose. He couldn’t start, not now, and slid the sheets back into the manila envelope.

In bed he cupped Ula’s bony hip. It wasn’t the hip he’d held on their wedding night as he fumbled and grunted, so self-conscious about his performance he wasn’t prepared for the embarrassment that accompanied the turn of her nose to the open window. But he loved it more, would miss it more. They used to argue about everything, quarrels that left them both hoarse the next morning, and they forgave each other in silence, with a cup of tea, a hand on the shoulder, unencumbered by the voices that divided them. He missed her scorn more than anything. How she looked at him as if he weren’t there. How she knew what the whole village suspected: that he was an incompetent physician, a worse bookkeeper, a romantic, a man who was never happier than when sketching birds in the woods. How she knew that and still loved him. He ran his fingers through her hair. Days since he had last washed it, and still so clean. Praise Allah she is speaking with my father. If she is looking so far over the horizon, she won’t see what’s in front of her.

“Do you remember who I am?” he asked, but she had already fallen asleep.


“You know how those things were invented?” Sonja asked with a nod to the stethoscope the girl was using to listen to her own heartbeat. “It was invented by a French physician who had a very fat patient. The patient was so fat that the French physician couldn’t hear the heartbeat through his chest. So he invented a stethoscope.”

“That’s weird,” the girl said, shifting the bell like an indecisive chess piece. “I’ve never seen a fat person before.”

“Never?”

“Never. But in my souvenirs I have the autograph of a man who used to be fat.”

The girl noted her heart rate on the chart Sonja had given her. Overcome by an inexplicable interest in medicine, the girl, draped in a lab coat that swished against the linoleum, had been following Sonja since dinner. It took the better part of an hour before Sonja realized the girl was imitating her. Her raw exasperation softened to a more delicate displeasure when the girl began scolding the air for carrying contagions. Poor child, she thought, let’s hope she finds a better role model.

The girl held the stethoscope bell like a microphone and, while kicking a drooping tail of bedsheet, began interviewing Sonja. “What’s it like being a surgeon?” she asked.

“Wonderful. Next question.”

“Why don’t you have kids?”

“They ask too many questions.”

“Who did you bribe to get into medical school?”

“Surprisingly, no one at all.”

“And are you the only woman surgeon in the world?”

“It feels like it.”

“What’s your favorite disease?”

“Chlamydia.”

“If they let you become a surgeon instead of a wife, would they let me become an arborist instead of a wife?”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“You know.”

“Tell me.”

The girl’s face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger than the weakest boy, and with those ideas crowding your head no wonder subordination was the only inevitable outcome. She sat on the hospital bed beside the girl, remembering what it was like to have that face, and pitying it. “Listen, Havaa,” she said, summoning as much generosity as she could muster at this hour of night, “you can be exactly the person you want to be, okay? It may not seem that way, but things change when you get a little older. If you work hard, and give up certain things, and yes, resort to bribery now and then, you’ll be an arborist, or a sea anemonist, or anything else you want.”

And they kept talking, passing the stethoscope bell back and forth.

“Do you have any questions for me?” the girl asked at the end of the interview.

Since Akhmed had left that evening, Sonja had held the question as she would a long-awaited letter, terrified of what the envelope contained. “Did a Russian woman ever stay at your house?”

“Which one? Lots of people stayed with us.”

“Her name was Natasha.”

“Probably thirty Natashas at least.”

“She looked like me.”

Havaa gave her an appraising look. “Then no.”

“Like me only beautiful.”

The girl tilted her head. “I can’t imagine that.”

And it struck her. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? Akhmed’s sketch. She was upright and out of the room before Havaa could ask where she was going. Why had she asked him to take the portrait? Where would he have put it? She climbed to the fourth floor and worked her way back to her room, checking the new and old maternity wards, the land-mine man’s room, the empty administrative offices, the waiting room. While searching, her mind flashed to the day she had purchased the Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker. True to form it had endured flights across Europe, every bump of the Samsonite, and even the shame of Alu’s name, without once breaking composure.

She had found the nutcracker in a convenience store sticky with the residue of spilled soda, where she stopped for cough drops before attending a lecture. It was four weeks to Christmas. The first war wouldn’t officially begin for twelve more days. She had bought it without once thinking of Natasha, on a whim, because Buckingham Palace was what foreigners thought of when they thought of London and she, Sonja with a j, was nothing if not foreign. Gray clouds lined the horizon as she climbed the escalator at Holborn and crossed Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the Royal College of Surgeons. There, at a neurosurgery lecture, she transcribed the snaking syntax of British academia in a bright pink notebook she had found in a fifty-pence bin. Attached to the Royal College was a museum dedicated to the history of anatomy and pathology. After thanking the lecturer, and pausing in the atrium for a cigarette and cough drop, she strolled through the museum’s curious exhibitions. There was a display detailing the history of non-Egyptian mummification. An alcove devoted to the tibia. One room exhibited the 1,474 skulls collected by nineteenth-century physician Joseph Barnard Davis. A fractured skull of a Roman woman found at Pompeii. The skulls of nine Chinese pirates hanged in Ningpo. Congolese from Leopold’s rubber plantations. But the skull that haunted her was that of a Bengali cannibal. Fully intact, the mandible still locked against the temporal, the twenty-two bones that constitute a human skull all accounted for. The eight bones forming the neurocranial brain case bathed in halogenated light. From the size of the plates, the prominence of the supraorbital ridge and temporal lines, as well as the overall size and solidity of the skull, she knew it belonged to a man. The skull appeared no different from those of the Chinese pirates, the Congolese plantation workers. She read the placard written a century and a half earlier by a Victorian phrenologist. There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man.

That morbid association between the cannibal and the nutcracker, one which she never mentioned to Natasha, was all she thought of while searching for the portrait. She finally found the notebook on the canteen counter, beneath a stack of folded linens. From the last page Natasha observed her calmly, through eyes unclouded by judgment or resentment, her hair held back with a headband she had never owned, her ears heavy with earrings that didn’t exist. Clearly Akhmed hadn’t met her.

Her footsteps, slowing to a processional as she neared her room, tapped like the last drops falling from a stopped faucet. She wanted to know and didn’t want to know; the two were always there, always tearing at her, a tug-of-war in which she was the rope. But that was okay, she told herself. The truth was one more rumor passed along the refugee lines, another hallucination she could freely disbelieve. When she entered the room the girl was already asleep. She slid the portrait into one of the drawers, thankful to postpone the answer for one more night.