A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



3





DESPITE AN ADMITTEDLY unimpressive first day, Akhmed left Hospital No. 6 with his eyes on the stars and a swing in his gait. Sure, Sonja was a cold, domineering woman, whose glare could wither flowers and cause miscarriages, and Deshi was clearly a lunatic, and though there wasn’t a sliver of compassion between the two of them and the only fate worse than having those two as caretakers was having them as colleagues, it had been a good day. Havaa was safe. His medical training was put to use, and for the first time in months, Ula wasn’t his only patient.

He was the first person from Eldár admitted to medical school, an institution so distant and rarefied his inclusion had been celebrated as a village-wide achievement. There had been feasts in his honor, collections to pay for his textbooks. In 1986, Akhmed became the greatest hero in village history since an Eldár barber trimmed the beard of the great Imam Shamil one hundred and forty-one years earlier. There was talk he would move to Volchansk, or even—they would drop their voices to a whisper—Grozny. Anywhere farther was too far to dream. Did he realize the hopes the village had pinned on him? Not really. Despite telling Sonja he had graduated medical school in the top tenth of his class, he had, in fact, graduated in the bottom tenth, the fourth percentile to be precise, and he blamed his inability to find a job on prejudice within the Soviet Medical Bureau rather than on the fact that he had skipped a full year of pathology to audit studio art classes. Eventually the village had offered him an abandoned house on the outskirts, haunted, it was said, by the ghost of a pedophile. He had turned it into a clinic. Even though the villagers overcame their fear of the pedophilic specter—though many wouldn’t let their children enter—and even though their lives were undeniably improved by the presence of a clinic, Akhmed always felt he had let them down, or at least let himself down, by returning to the village that had celebrated his escape. But after applying to twenty-three different hospital positions, and receiving not one interview, he was, today, finally, a physician at Hospital No. 6. And not only a physician, but third in command! When put like that, it was a higher honor than he could have ever imagined. He trekked along the service road more confidently than he had that morning, and imagined what those smug search committees would have had to say about it. They probably wouldn’t say anything. They were probably all dead. In this way the war was an equalizer, the first true Chechen meritocracy. He was an incompetent doctor but a decent man, he believed, compensating for his professional limitations with his empathy for the patient, his understanding of pain. Passing the field where the wolf’s frozen carcass lay in moonlight, he thought of Marx. Perhaps here was where history had reached its final epoch. A civilization without class, property, state, or law. Perhaps this was the end.

The final fifty meters through the village were the most dangerous of the eleven-kilometer slog. His footsteps, if overheard, could prove as lethal as land mines. He slowed as he approached the only house without blackout curtains. The light of generator-powered bulbs burned through the windows. Ramzan, sitting inside, picking at a shiny slice of meat, didn’t look like an informer or a collaborator, looked no more menacing than a man in the throes of a mighty indigestion. In the next window, Khassan, Ramzan’s father, sat reading at his desk. Khassan hadn’t spoken to his son in the two years since Ramzan had begun informing, and though Akhmed never blamed the old man for his son’s crimes, the electric bulbs bathed both in the same light.

The glow of their house shrank to a glimmer as he reached his own. The doorframe was intact; the door still stood. Opening it, he tensed, waiting for a forceful grip on the shoulder, a rifle butt to the forehead. None came. He lit a kerosene lamp and walked into the bedroom. Ula lay on the bed. She rolled on her side and into the yellow glow.

“Where were you?” she asked. Divorced from tone, the three words still suggested accusation, and he hoped his silence would extinguish her question, as it often did. “Where were you?” she asked again. Her head barely indented the pillow.

“I went to see Dokka,” he said. “I helped him shear the sheep.”

She smiled wide enough to show the tips of her teeth. Twelve years earlier those incisors were beloved by the city dentist, a young man who plugged his most lascivious thoughts into the open mouths of young women; but the dentist died a virgin when a misaimed mortar shell landed on his practice and carried him to Paradise in an erupting gray cloud. “Dokka is so impatient,” she murmured. “If he waited a month, the flock would give more wool.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Dokka was always impatient.” He sat on the bed and set the lantern next to the bedpan and the broth bowl. Each was half full. An ellipsis of wet footprints followed him to the bed. He unlaced his icy boots, massaged the balls of his feet, and lay beside Ula. Once she would have had to roll over to make room for him, but there was less of her now.

“How is his family?”

“They are well,” he said. He turned onto his side and slid his left hand beneath her nightshirt to warm his fingers on her stomach.

“They should eat with us soon,” Ula said.

“They will bring corn and cucumbers,” he whispered to the tiny translucent hairs standing from Ula’s earlobe. “The coals will smolder on the mangal and we will grill shashlyk and we will eat in the afternoon and the sun will shine. The lamb is already marinating in Dokka’s white plastic bucket with tomatoes and onions and sliced lemons and uksus. We will invite Dokka’s parents and they will come and perhaps Dokka will bring his chessboard, not the one with the fine wooden pieces, but the plastic one that Havaa gave him for his birthday, the one he said he loved though everyone thought a chess player of his skill would never play on a plastic board. But he did. Do you remember? He taught Havaa to play on it and let her win on her sixth birthday. We will invite them to eat someday.”

“I’m hungry,” she said. “I don’t want to wait that long.”

He pressed his lips to his wife’s forehead and let them linger until the kiss became a conversation between their shared skin. How could his wife’s sickness both repulse and bind him to her? His love, pity, and revulsion each claimed her, each occupied and was driven from her, and even now, as he sealed a postage stamp–sized square, he was afraid that in moments, when he broke away, his disgust would overwhelm the imprint of his lips.

“I’m hungry,” she repeated. Reluctantly he leaned back. Leaving the lantern beside the bed, he crossed the darkness to the kitchen. After a decade without electricity, his soles knew the way. Eight steps to the living room, a quarter turn, six to the kitchen threshold, two to the stove. He set firewood on the previous night’s ashes, aimed a squirt gun of petrol at the white wood, and struck a match. He prepared a pot of rice and a saucer of powdered milk as the firelight lapped against his legs. While waiting for the rice to cook he pulled a stool to the iron stove and leaned toward the light. He wanted to say something consoling to Dokka, and when his words burned in the stove chamber he hoped the sentiment would rise up the chimney pipe, carried by wind or wing to Dokka’s ears, but even if Dokka could hear him, he didn’t know what he would say, and he said nothing.

When the rice was moist he scooped it into a ceramic bowl and left the spoon slanting against the rim as he carried the bowl and the mug of powdered milk for two steps, six steps, and a quarter turn in blindness. Was this how a child felt in the womb? He had delivered dozens of newborns, but he couldn’t imagine those first few moments. A tear in the shroud and suddenly colors, shapes, coldness, a world of hallucinations.

The lantern cast a circle on the floor and he entered it reluctantly to reach her. He sat beside Ula and brought small spoonfuls of rice to her mouth. Sonja’s skill and Deshi’s experience didn’t matter; neither could care for Ula as he could. “Was anyone looking for me today?” he asked. She shook her head. “Are you sure? No knocks at the door? Nothing?”

“I don’t think so. I was sleeping.”

“But you would remember if Ramzan called from the door?”

“Oh, yes. Ramzan. He’s such a nice man. He always asked my opinion,” she said, and took a sip from the blue mug. “I think the milk has turned.”

He washed the dishes, undressed, and slid beneath the sheets. Her fingers crawled through the covers for his.

“Things are getting worse, aren’t they?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing is getting worse.”

“I don’t have much time left, do I?”

These moments were the least bearable, when her meandering trail of questions led to clarity and he couldn’t say what was lost to her. Did she really think he’d spent the day shearing sheep sold, slaughtered, and consumed long ago? Had she already forgotten Havaa sleeping beside her, the girl’s slender body like a splinter of warmth in the dark room, or was the girl the material of dream itself, burned away by morning light? An equally disturbing thought: what if she consciously participated in these delusions to placate him?

“None of us does,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

When her breaths stretched into sleep, he slid his fingers from her loosened grip and contemplated the next day. What would it be like to treat a patient again? Was he capable? Six months had passed since he had last treated patients at the clinic, but he remembered their reluctance as he led them into the examination room, as they realized their bodies had betrayed them once by sickness, and again by forcing them to rely on an incompetent physician. Sometimes he wondered if his own self-loathing manifested itself as harm to his patients, as if some dark part of his heart wanted them to suffer for his failures. And, now, to be confronted with Sonja, a surgeon whose renown had even reached Eldár. She had asked what he would do with an unresponsive patient, and he, in a blundering moment, had taken it to mean quiet or unwilling to talk, and had thought of the mute village baker, who communicated only through written notes—which had proved problematic the previous winter when the baker suffered from a bout of impotence he was too ashamed to write down, even to Akhmed. Akhmed had resolved the problem—shrewdly, he thought—by giving the mute baker a questionnaire with a hundred potential symptoms, of which the baker checked only one, and so had saved the baker’s testicles, marriage and pride. But Sonja didn’t know that; he’d been too flustered and embarrassed to explain. She had glared at him, knowing that an imposter like him could never belong to the top tenth. She hadn’t asked how he had come by her name, why he’d come to her specifically. He hadn’t intended to hide the truth from her, but when she didn’t ask, he saw no reason to tell her about the chest stitched together with dental floss.



Sonja had made a bedroom of the office of the former geriatrics director, a man she’d never seen but whose tastes conjured an image so defined—browline glasses, a wardrobe predominantly tweedy in character, finely sculpted features, dainty hands—she could have identified his body among the dead. The gerontology department had been closed in the first war due to a scarcity of resources and the general consensus that prolonging the lives of the elderly was a peacetime enterprise. But the director, a bachelor who devoted a healthy portion of his monthly paycheck to office décor, had the most extravagantly furnished office in the hospital, so of course Sonja was quick to make it hers. A vermillion Tajik rug sprawled across the floor. At the end of the desk stood an antique vase swathed in ornate Persian patterning, beneath which she had found a photograph of a woman framed against the Black Sea, smiling curiously, undated and unidentified, a ghost of the director’s life that survived him. Here, the director had spent his life loving a woman he hadn’t seen since his twenty-first year, when his father had married her to a Ukrainian for fear of ruinous scandal; the woman was his half sister, and the love he felt for her caused him so much confusion he could only express it as love for the bewildered and incoherent elderly. The desk was pushed against the wall and on it lay a final payroll still awaiting the director’s signature. Six mattresses stacked three abreast formed Sonja’s bed, where, after Akhmed had left, she found the girl clothed in limp latex gloves.

“What have you done?” she asked. It was a remarkable sight. The girl had stapled cream-colored latex gloves to her sweatshirt, to her trousers, had pulled them over her feet, and even wore one on her head like a five-fingered mohawk. “I repeat, what have you done?”

“See?” the girl asked and stood up. See? See what? She didn’t think she needed another reason to renounce children, but here it was: they speak in riddles. “I see a tremendous waste of medical supplies and I very much wish I wasn’t seeing it.”

“See what I am?” the girl asked.

“A nuisance?”

“No, a sea anemone.”

The girl spun in circles. It seemed she was hoping that the gloves would inflate and reach out like tentacles, but those gloves would barely open when Sonja jammed her fingers in them, and they just flailed limply against the girl’s chest, back, and legs. The whole production seemed so sad that Sonja couldn’t muster the anger this profligacy deserved.

“Sea anemones don’t talk. Now change into your other clothes.” Sonja nodded to the blue suitcase, still standing beside the mattress where she had left it six hours earlier.

“No. It’s my just-in-case suitcase.”

“Just in case what?”

“In case there is an emergency. So I’ll have the things that are important to me.”

“There was an emergency,” Sonja said. She sighed. The child was as dense as a block of aged cheese. “That’s why you’re here.”

“There might be another one.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Sonja said, rubbing her eyes. “Change out of this ridiculous thing and you won’t sleep in the parking lot.”

The girl, who, the previous night, had watched her father’s abduction, feared many things, but this ornery and exhausted doctor wasn’t among them. She glanced down to the drooping latex gloves; her father would have found her performance enchanting, would have scooped her up in his arms and called her his sea anemone. His approval sparked magic into the blandest day, could layer her in the self-confidence and security she otherwise might lack; and without it, without him, she felt small, and helpless, and the idea of sleeping in a parking lot suddenly seemed very real. “I’ll change,” she told Sonja with a defeated sag of her shoulders. “Only if I don’t have to unpack.”

“I insist you don’t,” Sonja said, turning as the girl undressed. “It’s my greatest wish that you and your suitcase will have vanished into the sea by morning. What’s so important in there that you can’t unpack?”

“My clothes and souvenirs.”

“Souvenirs? Where have you been?”

“Nowhere.” This was the first night she’d ever spent away from the village. “The souvenirs are from people who’ve stayed at my house.”

When the girl finished changing, Sonja said, “You have a dirty fingerprint on your cheek. No, not that cheek. The other cheek. No, that’s your forehead.” Sonja licked her thumb and rubbed the sooty fingerprint from the girl’s cheek. “Your face is filthy. It’s important to stay clean in a hospital.”

“It’s not clean to wipe spit on another person’s face,” Havaa said defiantly, and Sonja smiled. Perhaps the girl wasn’t as dense as she had assumed.

They ate in the canteen at the end of the trauma ward, where Sonja flaunted the hospital’s most sophisticated piece of technology, an industrial ice machine that inhaled much of the generator power but provided filtered water. The girl was more impressed by her warped reflection on the back of her spoon. “It’s December. The whole world is an ice machine.”

“Now you’re practical,” Sonja said.

The girl made a face at the spoon. “Can fingers ever grow back?” the girl asked, setting down the spoon.

“No. Why do you ask?”

The girl thought of her father’s missing fingers. “I don’t know.”

“How do you know what a sea anemone is, anyway? The nearest sea is a few countries over.”

“My father told me. He’s an arborist. He knows everything about trees. I’m still a minimalist.”

“Do you know what that is?”

Havaa nodded, expecting the question. “It’s a nicer way to say you have nothing.”

“Did your father tell you that?”

Again, she nodded, staring down to the spoon head that held her buckled reflection. Her father was as smart as the dictionary sitting on his desk. Every word she knew came from him. They couldn’t take what he had taught her, and this made the big, important words he’d had her memorize, recite, and define feel for the first time big and important. “He told me about minimalists and arborists and marine biologists and scientists and social scientists and economists and communists and obstructionists and terrorists and jihadists. I told him about sea anemonists.”

“It sounds like you know a lot of big words.”

“It’s important to know big words,” the girl said, repeating her father’s maxim. “No one can take what’s inside your head once it’s there.”

“You sound like a solipsist.”

“I don’t want to learn new words from you.”

Sonja dunked the dishes in a tub of tepid water. Behind her the girl was quiet. “So your father is an arborist,” she said as she scrubbed their spoons with a gray sponge. It was neither a question nor a statement, but a bridge in the silence. The girl didn’t respond.

Back in the geriatrics office she gave the girl a blond-haired Barbie doll from the lost and found. It had belonged to the daughter of a devout Warsaw Catholic who believed the makers of department-store toys were conspiring to turn his ten-year-old girl into a heathen, and so he had boxed up all but her Nativity figurines and, filled with the spirit of Christian charity, sent them to a heathen country where they could do no harm to the souls of children already beyond salvation. The doll, dressed in ballroom gown and tiara, appeared surprisingly chipper given her emaciated waistline. The girl inspected the doll, distrustful of this vision of humanity.

“Why is she smiling?” the girl asked.

“She probably found that tiara on the ground and plans to sell it for a plane ticket to London.”

“Or maybe she killed a Russian.”

Sonja laughed. “Sure, maybe. She could be a shahidka.”

“Yes, she’s a Black Widow,” the girl said, pleased with the interpretation. “She snuck into a Moscow theater and took everyone hostage. That’s why she’s wearing a dress and jewelry.”

“But where are her hostages? I don’t see any. Why else might she be smiling?”

The girl concentrated on the doll’s unnaturally white teeth. “Maybe she’s starving and just ate a pastry.”

“What about a cookie?” Sonja asked, as the idea came to her.

“She’d probably smile if she ate a cookie.”

“Would you?”

The shadow of the girl’s head still bobbed on the wall when Sonja found a chocolate-flavored energy bar in the upper left desk drawer, a new addition to the humanitarian aid drops, designed for marathon runners. The girl chewed the thick rubber and grimaced. “What is this?”

“It’s a cookie.”

She shook her head with wide-eyed betrayal. “This is not a cookie.”

“It’s like a cookie. Cookie-flavored.”

“How can something be flavored like a cookie and not be a cookie?”

“Scientists and doctors can make one type of food taste like another.”

“Can you do that?”

If only she could. “I’m not that type of doctor.”

The girl took another bite, then crinkled the foil around the remnant and slipped it under her pillow.

“It’s not that bad,” Sonja said, annoyed by the girl’s finicky palate.

“I’m saving it.”

“For what?”

“Just in case.”

The girl lurched against the blankets, but still fell asleep first. Sonja tightened her eyelids and pressed into the pillow but couldn’t push herself into oblivion. She only knew how to sleep alone. Since she had returned from London eight years earlier, her casual affairs had never been serious enough to warrant an overnight bag. She sighed. When Deshi woke her that morning, she could have never imagined the day would end like this, with her trying to fall asleep beside this bizarre little thing. Even so, she was glad for Akhmed’s help. She needed another set of hands, no matter how fumbling and uncertain they might be. Not that she’d admit it to him. She had to harden him, to teach him that saving a life and nurturing a life are different processes, and that to succeed in the former one must dispense with the pathos of the latter.

The pull of sheets transmitted the girl’s shape, her indentation in the mattress, that slight heat burning off her skin. Sonja didn’t want her here, couldn’t imagine what the girl had seen, or knew, or was blind to or ignorant of that had put her in the Feds’ crosshairs. Somewhere a colonel tossed in bed, wanting to find Havaa as much as Sonja wanted her gone, and she would happily trade the girl for Natasha, or her parents, or a plane ticket to London, or a decent night’s rest. The girl had lost her father and she had lost her sister and though their shared experience might lead to shared commiseration, she felt cheated. Moths had fluttered on the edge of her vision as she floated into the hallway that afternoon, hoping the man brought news. Her sister had taken the Samsonite when she vanished the previous December. There was no note or explanation, not even under the divan, where Sonja had crawled with a broomstick and the vain hope that the breeze had hidden Natasha’s good-bye. It was as if she’d opened the door to the fourth-floor storage closet and fallen off the earth. Poof and gone. But there were no arrest reports, no border-crossing records, no body, and the absence of evidence was enough to allow Sonja to go on hoping that the next patient funneled through the waiting room, through the swinging doors of the trauma ward would be Natasha. But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

The night-light coated the girl in a green film. Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn’t say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between the creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving. For now, she slept.