A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



28





“IF YOU COULD go back, would you leave London?” Natasha had asked the question on a cool Tuesday morning in March 1998. They were on good terms that month, sharing the last drags of a cigarette in the hospital parking lot as loose debris rustled under what seemed too pleasant a shade of sky. “If you could go back, would you leave London?” Of the thousands of times she had considered and still would consider the question, that had been the only time it had been posed as if an answer lived on the other side of it. “If you could go back …” There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.

The visit to Akhmed’s had taken longer than she anticipated, and as she parked the truck and crossed the lot, the premonition of impending disaster pressed on her. But Deshi’s heavy, dozing breaths were the only sound in the waiting room. Sonja jiggled her chair. The knitting needles began working in her hands before Deshi opened her eyes.

“Anything?” Sonja asked.

“No, slow week. The land mine’s brother took him away, our only visitor.”

“That’s it? Nothing else?” She held the edge of the check-in counter, where a pen, long dry, remained tethered by a thin metal chain. How could it be that today, of all days, the emergencies of God and of man rested?

“Nothing else,” Deshi said, without lifting her gaze from the needle tips. “Not a single patient in the hospital.”

“We could shut it down.”

Deshi smiled; not a day passed that she didn’t regret asking Maali to fetch clean linens; not a day passed that she didn’t hold Maali amid the rubble of the falling fourth floor, holding her as she had when Maali fell from a swing set, four years before the deportations, when Maali was crying and Deshi was the only one who knew how to comfort her. “Where would she go?” Deshi asked.

“Holiday.”

“All that education and she finally says something smart.”

“I can’t remember the last time the hospital was empty.”

“No, I can’t either.”

“It won’t last.”

Deshi shook her head. “Why spoil such a lovely afternoon with talk like that.”

“I’m just being realistic.”

“I bet she’d be realistic on a summer day, too,” Deshi said.

“I thought you were done gambling?”

“I would have liked to play cards with Akhmed. I’d have won the trousers from his legs.”

Harboring the small joy of that achievement, Sonja smiled. “I’d have liked to see that.”

“I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing him again, will we?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“A shame,” Deshi said. That simple epitaph was the last they would ever say of Akhmed. A finger materialized from the tips of Deshi’s needles. “Who are you knitting that for?” Sonja asked.

“Our young friend. She’s had her hands balled in her sleeves all week.”

The girl. Sonja hadn’t considered what Akhmed’s disappearance meant for the girl, who had, in less than a week, lost everything she had known. The day had spared legs from land mines and hearts from cardiac arrest, but it hadn’t spared her. “Where is she?”

“I retired ten years ago,” Deshi said. Another ten would pass before she acted on it. Three after that she would die of throat cancer, but not before falling in love with her oncologist. “Go find her yourself.”

Eventually Sonja found the girl on the fourth floor, cross-legged within the doorway that framed the charred canvas of the city. Sonja sat beside her. “I’m sorry.”

“Will he come back?”

“I don’t know,” Sonja said, and immediately regretted it, knowing how much false hope one can cultivate in the soil of those three words. “Probably not.”

The girl nodded to the city.

“It’s hard, Havaa, I know. The same thing happened to my sister.” But that was a lie, wasn’t it? She spoke of Natasha as if her sister was one of the disappeared. She wanted a share of the national suffering, to blame the Feds for the fact that her sister didn’t love her enough to say good-bye. There was, at the center, an unnamable darkness around which she circled but couldn’t touch. “I don’t know where she is. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. I know nothing.”

“How do you find them?” the girl asked. She lifted her gaze to Sonja as if teetering on the precipice.

“I don’t know, Havaa. I’m sorry. I don’t. Maybe we try to find them in other people. In kindness and generosity; those things don’t disappear.”

The girl gave a deep, mucus-rattled snort. The answer wasn’t the one she wanted, but Sonja had learned to be realistic when discussing death. Even if the answer put no distance between the girl and the hole the war opened within her, it was, Sonja hoped, enough to keep her holding on.

Havaa reached for her hand, and without thinking, Sonja felt for her pulse. Her radial artery rose and fell against Sonja’s finger as a gentle reminder. She pressed her palm to Havaa’s forehead.

“Am I sick?” the girl asked.

“No, you are in perfect health.” And as she said the words, they seemed like a small miracle. She held Havaa’s wrist, bending the joint back and forth. Through faded blue sweatpants, she felt the shape of Havaa’s calves and knees. These legs would stand and walk and run. These arms would lift and embrace and let go. This person would grow and adapt and live; Sonja would make sure of it. “Your family isn’t your choice,” her father had said, to quell a tantrum, many years earlier, and without wanting to, she kept discovering what he had meant.

“What are you doing?” Havaa asked.

Spools of raw gratitude unraveled in Sonja. She was an idiot to be so impressed by legs that walked, wrists that bent, hands that held. Instead of explaining, she focused on the sensation of good fortune, of undeniable blessing, so she could later return to this memory to marvel at the girl’s body, how remarkable it is, this human matter.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said, and helped the girl to her feet. “You kept your suitcase packed just in case you had to leave again, right?”

Havaa nodded.


A half hour later they left the hospital. Block after block passed unchanged but for the location of craters, the dispersion of brick. A one-way sign pointed to the sky. Three emaciated black dogs watched them from across the canyon of a grocery store basement, but thankfully didn’t follow. All through it Sonja’s head hummed. She held the girl’s suitcase in one hand, and her hand in the other. She tried to remember the name of the street she had lived on.

This is what there is. Scorch marks fanning like massive seashells across the ground. Clouds gathering at the horizon. The unevenness of earth. The small heat she holds in her hand. A hand that is her hand holding a hand that is the girl’s hand. This is it.

Somehow her feet recalled what she had forgotten. They led her. Her apartment block hadn’t fallen. Blast tremors had opened the windows, but the building stood. They climbed the stairs.

“A nice woman lives here,” she said as they passed Laina’s flat. “Maybe you could spend time with her while I’m at the hospital.”

The girl nodded. They stood at the front door. “I haven’t been here in many months,” she said. She unlocked the door. Dust covered everything but the ceiling. She would deal with it tomorrow, or the day after that; she had cleaned enough for one day. The entranceway bore no sign of break-in. The looters had long since emigrated. She lit a candle.

For dinner Havaa skinned and cut the sprouts from two potatoes, while Sonja found a car battery with enough juice to put a pot of water and rice to boil on the hot plate. When they ate, Sonja described the chopsticks people in Asia use to eat rice. The girl attempted it with two pencils, and after five minutes of failure, declared Asia an invention of Sonja’s imagination. When they finished, Sonja led her to Natasha’s room. Out of habit she knocked before opening the door. The bed was still made. The desk chair sat at an angle, as though its owner would return any moment to write a note, a letter, an explanation, or an apology.

“This is where you’ll sleep,” Sonja said. She set the suitcase on the edge of the bed and cleared the lower drawer of Natasha’s jeans and sweaters. Natasha had taken the burgundy cardigan Sonja had given her for her eighteenth birthday, the one she hated and never wore, and wherever she was, Sonja hoped the temperature dipped enough for her to try it on. “You can put your things here.”

“Am I going to live here?”

Sonja hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Do you want to?”

The girl surveyed the room, inspected the closet, checked under the bed. “I get the whole room?”

“The whole room.”

“And I don’t have to share it?

“It’s all yours.”

The girl slowly nodded and leaned into Sonja, listening to the gurgle of her organs, these marvelous things we ignore, forget, and take for granted. “Come on,” Sonja said. “You should unpack before either of us changes our minds.”

Havaa unlatched her suitcase and pulled out balled gray socks, a sweater, a skirt, two headscarves, white underwear patterned with little pink bows. Then came the strange and wonderful artifacts. A marriage license from 1942, given by a couple who had been married for sixty-one years and no longer needed the document. A photograph of a slender man wearing a pea jacket that now hung in a closet in Saudi Arabia. The eighty-first draft of a love letter. The uncanceled stamp that would have sent the unwritten eighty-second draft. A prayer book opened by two hundred and six yearning hands.

“What is all this?” Sonja asked. In three weeks, when she would help Havaa build a case to display these treasures, Sonja would use her surgical saw, for the first time, to create something.

“My souvenirs,” Havaa replied. She spaced them across the drawer with greater reverence than she’d shown her clothes. “From the refugees that stayed at our house.”

There was a silver ring that had made a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two feel like the most glamorous woman in Grozny. An address book that an unfaithful husband had given Havaa so his wife’s ghost wouldn’t find it among his possessions. A dried seahorse that a father gave his six year-old daughter in lieu of a pony. A Taj Mahal keychain that a refugee in southern Russia regretted giving away. A tie clip that a cosmonaut carried to space and back. And a Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker.

“What’s that?” Sonja barely got it out.

“That’s Alu,” the girl said. In three weeks and one day, with her palm aching wonderfully from sawing through wood, Sonja would tell her about Buckingham Palace. “He’s an idiot.”

“Who gave you Alu?”

“One of the women who stayed at our house.”

“One of the refugees?” Sonja asked. In eight months, she would begin telling the girl about Natasha, and it would take her the rest of their time to finish the story.

“I introduced her to Akim,” the girl said. “She was nice.”

“What was her name?”

“I can’t remember. Lots of people stayed at our house.”

“But you remember Alu’s name.” In eight and a half years, she would have already taught the girl every lesson she had scribbled in her secondary school notebooks. In ten and three-quarter years, the girl, then a first-year biology student at the newly constructed Volchansk State University, would begin teaching her.

“Alu didn’t leave.”

“But what did she look like?”

“She had all her fingers.”

“What else? What else?” In twelve and a third years, the girl, now a woman, would accompany Sonja on a five-day holiday to London. When the night porter asked, “Would your daughter care for an herbal tea?” it wouldn’t cross Sonja’s mind to correct him; it wouldn’t have crossed her mind for some time. At the end of five days, they would leave London. Sonja would never see the city again. Havaa would.

“She was very pretty. I was nervous she wouldn’t think I was pretty.”

“Was she happy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where was she going?” When the girl, she would forever be the girl to Sonja, went to Lake Baikal for two years to write her dissertation on the effects of climate change on freshwater microorganisms, Sonja would briefly consider sleeping in the hospital. But the world had long since stopped shaking, and no one would tolerate such eccentricity, not even from the distinguished head of surgery.

“Probably to a refugee camp.”

“But where, which camp?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think hard. Where?” In twenty years Sonja would find Natasha’s name beside her own, in the final sentence of the acknowledgments of Havaa’s dissertation. The dissertation would be published to some acclaim, and on dusty university bookshelves in a half dozen countries, the two sisters would share an afterlife in that final sentence, one comma away from Akhmed and Dokka.

“I don’t know.”

“Was she alone?”

“Yes, she was alone.” In twenty-eight years and seven months, at a limnology conference in Cologne, the girl would meet the man she was to marry nine years later. At the age of forty-six she would have her one and only child in the same maternity ward she was born in, a boy to carry her father’s name; hers would be the second hands to hold him. At the age of sixty-eight she would hold her first grandson, also to carry her father’s name; hers would be the third hands.

“And she left your house?”

“I said good-bye and she left.”

“What direction, then? What direction did she go?”

“Down the road. There’s only one direction you can go.” The girl would outlive her husband, her son, one grandson, and every soul she had met before the age of eleven. She would outlive twenty-three of her teeth, three of her toes, one of her kidneys, and all the brown of her hair.

“Then where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you saw her.”

She would die at the age of one hundred and three, in the geriatrics ward of Hospital No. 6, in a room that had been the director’s office, then Sonja’s bedroom, and finally a regular hospital room, a room Havaa would remember as many thousands of refugees remembered her own childhood bedroom, a room that had been there when it was needed.

“Where is she? Please, Havaa. Please.”

The girl wrapped her fingers around Sonja’s. She looked up. Her eyes were green. “We don’t know where she went,” she said.

They never would.