A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



23





THE SECOND WAR, when it came to Volchansk, came without bomb blasts or mortar rounds, tracer bullets or tank treads. It came through the bazaar at first, a few more kopeks per gram of cardamom, a few more rubles per carrot, the deprivation subtle enough to blame on currency inflation, or global markets, or natural disasters. Then the electricity went. But the municipal power lines, restrung after the first war, never had carried a current for more than two hours at a stretch anyway, as likely to come at daybreak as midnight, fifteen or twenty minutes for Natasha to charge her batteries, pull news from the airwaves, hop in the shower and blow-dry her hair before the lights flickered and the city collapsed back into darkness. The tap water went next. With the remaining civilians she drew buckets from unboarded wells and strained the water through pillowcases before boiling it. Then food shortages. No milk, then no plums, then no cabbages, then no corn meal. Even the feral animals quieted, the dogs stopped howling, the songbirds stopped singing. And though Federal forces invaded Chechnya in August 1999, the second war didn’t begin for Natasha until the afternoon in 2001 when it marched through the doors of Hospital No. 6.

The skies of the maternity ward mural were as placid as on the day she had drawn them when she mistook the first crack for thunder. Gunshots followed as quickly as her footsteps as she ran downstairs. In trauma, Sonja and the nurses huddled by the aluminum filing cabinets.

“We could evacuate them to a village,” Sonja suggested. “We have a truck.”

“No,” Deshi said. “We keep them here. This is a hospital. They belong here.”

Maali assented. “Let’s use them as human shields.”

Natasha tried to wedge herself into the conversation, but as usual the triangle wouldn’t widen into a square. She took a deep breath and turned. This isn’t about you, she told herself. Your reaction is the only thing you can control. Who would have thought those books Sonja had brought with her the day she found ice were worth reading? In the five years she had worked here her emotional spectrum expanded beyond the monochromatic depression that had tinted her early days of recovery. Recovery. What a strange, wondrous word. None better defined her gradual reintegration into humanity. Nearly nine months of confinement, forced prostitution, beatings and heroin addiction, but she had come back. No one was more surprised than she herself, and no one was happier than Sonja. When Natasha was a teenager she once fell asleep on the roof and woke the color of borscht. The following week all the popular girls at school came in sunburned, and a week later the girls that wanted to be popular, until the principal, in an impromptu assembly, explained that girls had been known to roast alive while sunbathing. The memory was still there, tucked away in folds of time, and she found it again, with a smile, on the afternoons she climbed to the hospital roof to lie in the sun. Entire hours passed without her once thinking of Italy.

The nurses didn’t want to hear from her, but the patients did. An elderly woman, Xenia, patient number 29395, repeatedly asked what is happening, more confused and hesitant with each reiteration, as her neighbor, her first cousin, begged her to shut up because her insufferable voice would kill him faster than any bullet or bomb. When the Whites had swept through Volchansk eighty-one years earlier, Xenia had asked her cousin the same question and her cousin had answered. Xenia had been six, her cousin seven. Her voice had been lovely then.

“We’re figuring it out,” Natasha said. “Don’t worry. Can I get you some ice?”

Xenia gave her cousin a smug smile and nodded.

“Bring me the tongue depressor!” the cousin shouted after Natasha.

Two days earlier, when Xenia had arrived with pneumonia, Sonja had treated her lungs with the respect a plumber shows to blocked septic pipes. Her sister’s work was undeniably good, but its execution bothered Natasha. To work in these circumstances a surgeon must reduce each patient to her body, but this was an attitude shared by the traffickers, pimps, and johns populating Natasha’s private perdition. So while Sonja examined a cracked pelvis without once meeting the patient’s eye, or addressed the patient by placard number rather than by name, Natasha sequestered herself in the fourth-floor maternity ward, where whole days passed without their paths crossing, where the wails of newborns reminded her that life is louder than its pulse. While Sonja debated the merits of evacuation, Natasha fed Xenia crushed ice with a plastic spoon and told her exactly what was happening.

Boot fall, echoing down the corridor, ended the debate. The security guard ran through the double doors, his arms pumping, his shirt-tail flapping behind him. “They’re here,” he called. He ran right past Sonja and out the back door, announcing his immediate resignation in a breathless shout.

“Who?” Sonja called after him. “Feds or rebels?” No answer. Xenia held an ice cube in her mouth, afraid to break it. No one spoke. The shuffle of military boots paused at the closed double doors. The air was stretched so taut Natasha could have walked across it. A sharp kick, initially mistaken for a gunshot, jolted them all and flung open the double doors. Four bearded men entered with machine guns raised.

“I retired seven years ago,” Deshi said to no one in particular.

“We hereby liberate this hospital for patriotic use for the glorious campaign for national independence,” the shortest rebel declared. Dirt powdered his cheeks. Blood stained his shirt and trousers. He glared at the room, daring them to blink. “Who’s in charge?”

Across the room, with an exasperated roll of her eyes, Sonja raised her hand.

“I am the field commander of the fourth brigade of the National Military of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,” the shortest rebel said. He lowered his gun and took small, plodding steps to Sonja. “There are forty of us. Most need medical attention. Everyone needs food and water.”

“We could amputate all their legs,” Maali suggested, but the limping entrance of thirty-six more rebels made permission a formality. Sonja agreed to treat the wounded provided they removed their boots. They corralled the rebels in one of the ghost wards, sharing an unspoken consensus that the quicker the work was done, the better for all involved. The rebels asked for treatment by ascending order of rank, rather than by triage. The lower ranks were first into battle, the commander explained in a clipped northern accent, and thus had suffered the longest. Natasha’s throat tightened as she cut through the trouser leg of a curly-haired private. Nothing but pale down on his cheeks and pink clouds in his eyes. She hadn’t touched a man’s trousers in five and a quarter years.

“What are you doing?” he asked, supine on the hospital bed.

“Giving you shorts. You have lovely legs.”

“Where are my legs?”

“Still here. Don’t worry.”

She tried to be gentle, but shrapnel had cratered his left calf. “Hold on,” she said. “Just hold on.” Her sweat-slickened bangs stuck to her forehead. She wanted to ask his name, but what if he died and she was left here with his name? The name Natasha wouldn’t learn was Said. He came from a Grozny suburb, where his mother, a veterinary’s assistant, brought home the litters abandoned on the clinic doorstep. The war had already taken his mother, but he would live to return home to her cats, which had multiplied to the population of a village during the war years, feasting, as they did, on the burgeoning estate of rats and mice. Working odd jobs and sacrificing the comforts of wife and family, he would spend his life caring for the descendants of his mother’s cats. Eight hundred and eighty-two, all named for his mother, though he would never know that exact figure. In sixty-six years, on his deathbed, he would remember that distant afternoon, when the fingers of a beautiful nurse had mined metal from his legs. He would remember it as the moment of greatest intimacy he ever had had with a woman. Then he would remember his cats.

Natasha called to Sonja, asking for pain relief. The young man was incoherent, addressing his mother in a jar of cotton swabs. Across the room, the surgical saw paused, but Sonja didn’t look up from the half-severed arm. “You’ll have to get it yourself,” she said calmly. Given her history with the drug, Natasha never prepared or administered the heroin. Dreams of bent spoon handles persisted, and five years clean she was still afraid a cigarette lighter could reheat her cravings. But she peeled off the latex gloves and jogged to the canteen. Now wasn’t the time for caution, not with that boy on her hospital bed. In the cupboard, behind an armory of evaporated milk, she found it. It compacted in her grip, filling the corners of the plastic bag. Alu’s brother had claimed there wasn’t enough talc in the bag to powder a baby’s bottom. The Italian junk Sergey had shot into her had contained enough to service a nursery, and even that had laid electric lines where her veins had been. But this? Ninety-eight percent pure? She spat in the sink; she was salivating. You can control your reactions. You can control your reactions, she repeated. It took two minutes to cook. She only had to take one syringe to the trauma ward, but for the twenty-meter walk, when she was alone with it, she felt vastly outnumbered.

When it came time to treat the commanding officers, the last packets of surgical thread had already disappeared into the limbs of their subordinates. The field commander, the last to receive medical attention, lay on Sonja’s cot. The blood of his command soaked the sheets, and when his bare shoulders touched it, he sighed. Between his beard and his eyes, a slim band of soil-colored skin suggested many months of sunshine and malnutrition. Natasha watched while her sister treated him. A long, semicircular gash split his left pectoral. “My chest is grinning at me,” he observed.

Sonja flooded the wound with saline and iodine. With forceps she pinched through the gash for shrapnel fragments. It had begun to clot, but wouldn’t heal without stitches. The rebels looked on with reverent interest.

“We have a problem,” Sonja said. The commander nodded to the ceiling. “We need to get you stitched up, but we’re out of surgical thread. We simply don’t have the supplies on hand to treat so many field injuries.”

“He can have mine,” murmured a thin man, whose beard was half shaven to accommodate thirteen stitches on his left cheek. A chorus of offers followed. Even those without a single stitch vociferously pledged their surgical thread.

“It isn’t sanitary,” Sonja said with a finality that ended debate. None appeared too disappointed that his offer was declined. “Don’t you have field medical kits? Anything we can sterilize and sew into you?”

A junior officer appeared with a small green bag. Natasha sifted through it while Sonja held a compress to the wound. She pulled out a pink toothbrush with a fan of gray bristles, a small bottle of nonalcoholic mouthwash, a tube of fluoride whitening paste, five tubes of toothpaste, on which the five daily prayers were written in black marker, and three rolls of unwaxed dental floss.

“The floss,” Sonja said. “It might work.”

The field commander grimaced as the alcohol-wetted floss followed the needle through his skin. He refused the offer of pain relief. Natasha admired his abstinence.

“Have dentists begun enlisting?” she asked as Sonja slipped the needle in a fifth time. If he refused anesthetic, she could at least offer the distraction of conversation.

“No, it was a captain’s private supply.”

“Did he have fine teeth?”

“Yes,” the field commander said. His open mouth revealed a more relaxed philosophy toward dental hygiene. “They were beautiful, beautiful things. He brushed five times a day, always before prayer, as if performing an ablution on his mouth.”

“Was he conscious of his health in general?”

“Not really. He smoked no fewer than two packs a day.”

“He sounds like a strange man.”

“You get that way. In the first war I fought with a man who went through a roll of antacids every day.”

“That can cause an electrolyte disturbance: hypercalcemia. Stones, bones, moans, groans, thrones, and psychiatric overtones. That’s the mnemonic,” Natasha said, and repeated psychiatric overtones to herself. She wondered if Maali had a taste for antacids.

“I doubt it matters. He’s very dead now. Besides, we ate nothing but buckwheat kasha. No, he took antacids as a calcium supplement. He was terrified of osteoporosis.”

She nearly laughed. “How old was he?”

“Twenty-two.”

“You are all insane.”

The field commander winced as Sonja pulled the stitches tight. “It just becomes easy to convince yourself that caring for a small part of your body will act to protect the rest. As though Allah wouldn’t be cruel enough to steal the life from a man with perfect teeth.”

“Did it work?”

“We left his mouth open when we buried him so that in Paradise he can flaunt his teeth to the angels.”

The rebels spent the night in the ghost ward. None snored; even in sleep they were wary. In the morning they pointed the hospital beds of their wounded comrades toward Mecca. Natasha ladled a dense pulp of oats and powdered milk into their bowls. With Sonja and the nurses, she checked the bandaged burns, stitched lacerations, the broken bones splinted between sterilized wooden strips. Only the rebel with the amputated arm would be left behind. The field commander prayed for him, then rooted through the man’s rucksack for anything that might connect him with the insurgency.

“You’re a civilian now,” the field commander said. “Enjoy the peace you have fought for. We’ll take your arm for burial, but must leave you here. If you want to stay, the lady doctor said the position of security guard has recently opened.”

Complying with his insistence to be treated last, Natasha served him the final bowl of oats from the canteen. The surface had cooled to a carapace the field commander tapped twice with his spoon before breaking.

“Where are you going next?”

“South,” the field commander said. “To the mountains.”

“Try to find a doctor or veterinarian before then. If this gets infected, the Feds will be your smallest problem.”

“In our condition we probably won’t make it farther than Eldár today.”

Only two of the field commander’s shirt buttons matched the brown fabric, whose original color would be anyone’s guess. Natasha pulled the shirt past his shoulder and covered the stitches with a fresh bandage. The dental floss had worked. “I was in the mountains once,” she said. “I climbed right across the border.”

“In winter?”

“Spring.”

“The winter will be difficult. We need supply lines. Good middlemen. Maybe we’ll find someone in Eldár. You’re not looking for a new profession, are you?”

As his contribution to the hospital, the field commander left the bag of toothpaste. He stood stiffly by the door as his command shuffled out. Alone, he turned to the sisters.

“Thank you,” he said, bowing slightly. “You are kind, decent, and if I can risk impertinence, quite attractive. There must be some Chechen in you.”

“I have a favor to ask,” Sonja said. “Would you write us a letter of safe passage, so we can, should we need to, travel through rebel land?”

The field commander had two sisters of his own, older by one and three years, who teased and chided and always took care of him. He kept their names written on the sheet of paper stitched in his trouser seam. He trusted them with the name of his first crush and would trust them with his eternity. He smiled and searched for a pen.

When the field commander departed, and the double doors swung closed, Natasha returned to the maternity ward almost believing the war had left with him. Six days later the Feds would enter the city. They would launch a single mortar round at the hospital in retaliation for sheltering rebels. That round would hit the fourth-floor storage room. Maali would be searching for clean sheets. She would land atop the rubble, four floors below, her pulse slowing in her wrist. A syringe would be prepared and half injected, but death would relieve Maali’s pain before the drug took effect, and the senseless, screaming world would go quiet when Natasha slipped that same syringe between her toes, and with a push of the plunger, sent Maali’s blood into her own.





THE FOURTH AND FIFTH DAYS