A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



8





FIVE HOURS AFTER his first successful amputation, Akhmed’s hands stopped shaking. The frost-caked road glared up at him, the more menacing since he’d seen, up close, what it could do. He had sawed straight through that poor man’s leg. He hadn’t been able to grip the saw until Sonja’s fingers had wrapped around his. Until hers had pushed his hand forward. The man he had imagined himself to be had died the moment she set the blade against the bone and pushed his hand forward. He was one more instrument for her manipulation. Her face had hardened with a marble-like resolve unmoved by both his and the other man’s suffering. As if she hadn’t known that leg belonged to someone. As if she hadn’t known the hand she held did as well. Pushing the blade forward, she had observed him as if he were the patient. And he had been. As the saw teeth caught on the bone, she had performed a second surgery, one less bloody but no less brutal, excising from his heart the impulse to run, to cower, to let the man bleed to death rather than face the horror of saving him. The amputation had left both patients lighter.

Watching for the slightest rise in the road, he still felt more like that young man than he did that doctor. He was nothing like Sonja. She was the strangest Russian he’d ever met, a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside a set of unattractive but very white scrubs. What parts had she discarded for the sake of her sanity? What had she cut from herself? Had he stared into her pupils he would have emerged, bewildered and blinking, on the far side of the earth. Was he awed by her? Absolutely. Did he respect her? Unequivocally. Want to be anything like her? No, never, not at all. If he never again saw the beige corridors of Hospital No. 6 he would call himself lucky. But he had to go back in the morning; he had an agreement. A woman so casually capable of cutting off a leg was capable of throwing out an orphan girl.

Two hundred meters away, at a crook in the road, a diffuse fan of headlights turned into view. He ran. Birch trunks divided the beam into pale yellow blocks as he sheltered behind a half-rotted log, sucking on snow to mask his breath. Once the headlights passed he glimpsed the red of Ramzan’s pickup heading toward the city. He bit his knuckle, unable to recall its Latin name. Ramzan couldn’t know. He couldn’t. When the taillights shrank to a distant scarlet flush he returned to the road, massaging the soreness between his thumb and index finger. In that busy afternoon his palm had had two more opportunities to callus.

A half kilometer from the village the flicker of a campfire jumped through the underbrush. With the pickup truck halfway over the horizon, curiosity rather than fear led Akhmed back into the forest. He crept with the faith that the flames spoke louder than the frost beneath his boots. There, in the clearing, a man made of shadow passed pamphlets to that shivering brightness. The dogs, lounging beside the fire, heard him before the man.

“It’s Akhmed,” he called over the dogs’ growl. Never had he understood the obligation Khassan felt for those filthy, diseased animals. His son made him a pariah, but the dogs weren’t helping. Another handful of pages fluttered into the fire. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Khassan was studying the sheet of paper in his hand, where in the fifth sentence of the second paragraph, in the gap of a missing comma, he found the sorrow of his life. The sentence described the upbringing of a minor eighteenth-century tribal leader, and it would be the last time human eyes would read the name of the tribal leader’s mother. “A punctuation error,” he said, with the tremble of more ominous inaccuracy. “I’ve read through that paragraph hundreds of times and never caught it.”

“Don’t do this,” Akhmed said. He could have reached out, caught it, and kicked snow on the fire, but the page with the punctuation error was already smoke, and the name of a mother who died two hundred and twenty-three years earlier was already lost. He emptied his lungs but his sigh wasn’t finished; it went on emptying him. One spring day, when Akhmed was a child, Khassan had led him to a logging field a half morning’s walk from the village. Men with roaring orange saws had leaned into beech trunks and the trunks had spumed clouds of sawdust and groaned as the green treetops toppled. He was eight years old and the stumps were shorter than he was. “Hundred years to get that tall,” Khassan had said, and turned for home.

“I was thinking of someone I lost many years ago,” Khassan said. “She called me a coward once. It wasn’t what she said, but the way she said it. As if her judgment just passed through me. As if I were a cloud.”

The fire had thawed the overhanging branches. Droplets sliding down the slender fingers turned to steam before landing in it. Nothing Akhmed could say would put this man back together. “You were a good husband,” he said. “Your wife loved you.”

Khassan looked confused, as though he hadn’t been thinking of his wife at all, and reached to the ground for another stack of pages. “My wife didn’t, but thank you,” he said, nodding to the fire. “Forty-four thousand three hundred and thirty-eight pages. It took five hours to count. Over twenty trips to carry them. No wonder these pups are so tired.” He knelt and patted the bald dog’s stomach with an awful affection. “Each page averages three hundred and fifty words. That’s fifteen million words I’ve written.”

“There are more words.” The firelight twitched across their faces. It was all he could say.

“There are more writers.”

“You can’t do this.” He spoke from a fear that closed his stomach into a fist, helpless like a child, his emotions a magnification of what he detected in the elder. If Khassan lost hope, where would Akhmed find it?

“You wouldn’t understand, Akhmed, but you might, if you reach my age. I was thinking of the stories my mother used to tell me about princes and warriors who went to great measures to ensure their names would endure, and were punished by Allah for their pride. I want to be forgotten. There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”

“What are you saying?” Akhmed asked, though he didn’t want Khassan to say any more.

“I’m saying that I want to disappear.”

Once, while hunting in these woods, Akhmed came upon a doe flopping on the ground and struggling to breathe. A distended pink wound spread her hind legs, and her snout held a long line of anguished groans, and to end her suffering he aimed for her neck. But before he pulled the trigger, the sac-wrapped end of a fawn split open the wound. His jaw slackened. He set the rifle among the leaves, hid his forefinger behind his back, ashamed of what it had nearly caused, and watched one life begin where another had nearly ended. And now, with the final sheets curling on the coals, fear rose to wonder as he witnessed a moment of equal profundity. Not once for as far back as he could recall had Khassan ever admitted to a shortcoming, a mistake, not even a lapse as trivial as a missing comma. Tonight he confessed total failure.

The returning headlights stretched their shadows across the clearing too soon to have gone all the way to the hospital. As the beam of light swung toward them, he saw, briefly, paw prints in the ashes of fifteen million words.


Held aloft by distant tacks of starlight, the night was a blackout curtain concealing Ramzan’s truck until it was too late for Akhmed to turn back. Ramzan climbed from the cabin, lit a cigarette, and stared at what had been Dokka’s house as Akhmed approached.

“Have you seen my father?” His face dipped into the orange orb with each inhalation. If he had the flat face of an ogre, or the many heads of a hydra, Akhmed might understand. If he had the cleft tongue of a devil, or the snake-hair of a Medusa, or the matted hair of a wolf-monster, Akhmed might understand. But Ramzan had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, pairs of arms and legs and ears, hair greasy but not slimy and certainly not slithering, and Akhmed did not understand. They had been born in the same village, had gone to the same school, had their knuckles purpled by the same meter stick, kicked the same soccer ball down the same dirt patch where in summer the grass grew thick enough to block a penalty kick.

“What do you really want?” Akhmed asked, too tired to be intimidated.

Ramzan frowned, his cheeks the white of pounded metal. “Just to talk,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to anyone. Two weeks. I keep a notebook and sometimes I write things down, and you can fake a conversation that way, for a little while, but—”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Akhmed interrupted.

“The last person I talked to was Dokka. Two weeks ago. I came by to ask if he wanted more firewood. And now look what happened. Our poor friend. What did he get himself into?”

“Nothing. He couldn’t kill a loaf of bread with a butter knife.”

“And I’m told the girl, Havaa, even she was disappeared. But not by the security forces, praise Allah. No, she was taken by someone else. Someone else took her, but I don’t know who. I think I have my finger near him. Or her. He could be a she. But I think he is a he. A him. A—”

“Where was she?” Akhmed asked, as calmly as he could manage.

“The security forces didn’t find her. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.” Ramzan paused only to breathe. “Not in the living room or bedrooms or under the floorboards or in the closets, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.”

“Why do they even care?” he asked, hoping Ramzan, who sold information, might give a small piece for free. “What could they possibly want with a child?”

“No one is off limits because there are no limits. The why and what aren’t for us to consider. Those are questions for philosophers and imams and not for people like us, whoever we are.” His lips glowed in amber light. “The who and the where are all we must know and all we must answer.”

“I don’t see the why and what of a child.”

“There you go, Akhmed. Asking the wrong question. She’s wanted. That’s it. It doesn’t matter why. All that matters is where she is and with whom.”

“If I see her I’ll tell her you’d like a word.”

“You’re being smug, smug, smug.” Ramzan’s lanky arm wrapped around Akhmed’s shoulder and the sweet, decadent scent of deodorant wafted from his underarm. The first time Akhmed became fully aware of his own odor had been on his wedding night, when, pressed against her in bed, awkward and struggling and generally doing it all wrong, he noticed Ula tilt her head to the open window.

“Dokka is gone,” Ramzan said, close enough for his breath to warm Akhmed’s neck. “He’s gone. It makes me sad. He’s gone. I wish he were here so I could ask him what to do. So I could say hello. I could talk to him. He always listened to me. He always spoke with me. He always answered when I asked a question.”

All too aware of that, Akhmed said nothing. It hadn’t always been like this. For years he, Ramzan, and Dokka had been friends. Every other Sunday they had gathered at Dokka’s house to play chess, feast lavishly, and for just a few hours overthrow the fear and deprivation that had replaced the old order. In another life Ramzan’s weaknesses would have manifested no tragedy greater than a cheated chess victory. Ramzan was the youngest of the three, so poor a chess player that Dokka had given him private lessons. He had learned well: made a board of the village, a pawn of the master.

“So tell me, where have you been all day?” Ramzan asked, his voice flat and solid, the voice of the anvil rather than of the metal flattened to it. “Tell me where you’ve been, who you’ve seen.”

“Nowhere, no one.”

“Come on, Akhmed. We both know that you will tell me. You are a clever man, you have a sick wife to consider, you know what will happen if you don’t. Let’s try it again. Akhmed, my dear friend, where were you today?”

Akhmed said nothing.

“Shy today, aren’t we? Well, let’s start small. Tell me something you’ve done today, hmm?”

“Praying.”

“That’s good. You should pray. I pray ten times a day. Five times for me and five for my father. I’m taking care of him, don’t worry about that,” Ramzan said. His lips were banks unable to seal the stream gushing between them. “Prayer is important. Prayer is very important. Especially now that we are living in the end time. You know that, don’t you? The final Caliph will appear and the prophet Jesus will descend and he will slaughter the pigs and break the crosses. We don’t have much time left, I don’t think. That’s why I pray ten times a day. I should probably pray fifteen or twenty times. My father needs it. You believe in the last days, don’t you?”

“I believe in final judgments,” Akhmed replied. “I believe we will each be called to account for our lives.”

“When I was a child, my father brought me an eight-track tape player. Most of the tapes he brought me from the university library were violin concertos and operas and symphonies. Can you imagine anything more boring for a ten-year-old? But it was a wonderful present. I loved it. I enjoyed messing around with the speeds and knobs more than I enjoyed listening to it. If I slowed the speed of the tape, the whine of the violins sank to lower, more ominous pitches. It makes me think of Al-Haaqqa. Are you familiar with verse thirteen? When the trumpet will sound one blast, the earth with the mountains will be uprooted and broken, that is the day when the inevitable event will come to pass, the heavens will fracture and fall, the angels will be on all sides, raising the Throne of the Lord that day, above them. And I used to think that the trumpet blast would come sudden and all consuming. A true blast. An atom bomb. A pinprick in the balloon that is the world. But maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe the trumpet blast has been slowed like an eight-track tape, sounding on the lower frequencies, and maybe the trumpeter’s breath lasts for many years, calling us not in unison, but each at a time.”

“You forgot Al-Haaqqa’s next line,” Akhmed said. A swollen bead of sweat slid down Ramzan’s forehead, following a thin ridge of scar tissue. When Akhmed was in his first year of medical school, he returned one November weekend for the Festival of the Sacrifice. Ramzan, still a teenager then, attempted a midnight liberation of the goat pledged for slaughter, partly because he believed the barbaric custom antithetical to Soviet rationality, but mainly because he wanted to see his pajama-clad father chase it through the night. In the ensuing struggle—Khassan, no fool, lay waiting—the goat, unable to distinguish its liberator from its executioner, grazed Ramzan’s temple with a sharp kick. He became Akhmed’s first patient. As Akhmed stitched a seam in his skin, the usually sullen teenager kept asking for Latin words. Ramzan spoke the words as if to spell them, holding the vowels like grapes between his rounded lips. And Akhmed couldn’t have imagined that the teenager reverentially intoning fellatio, believing it the name of a Roman god, would grow into a man who spoke Chechen as a dead language, selling its words as he had sold firearms and explosives, without knowing their real worth, without regard for who they might kill.

“The next line in Al-Haaqqa?” Ramzan asked uncertainly.

“On that day you will be revealed and nothing of you can be hidden.”


Ula smiled sleepily and rolled onto her side when Akhmed entered the room. He drew little eights on her forearm with his thumb until Ramzan’s voice, addressing no one, faded with the splatter of gravel. In the kitchen he pulled a stool to the wood oven. He wanted to perch over the open oven door and bathe in the flicker until the ghost of this exhausting day disappeared into the chimney pipe. Havaa was safe. She was safe and he would have amputated his own legs for Dokka to know that. Thinking of Dokka and Havaa, he began sobbing. He’d forgotten the swell of pride, how it could overwhelm when least expected, how it could grow back—and how good it was to know there were parts of him a surgical saw couldn’t remove. The flames dissolved in his eyes and through them an ache sounded: laughter. He couldn’t explain it. His face couldn’t express the thing in his chest. He was the most incompetent doctor in Chechnya, the single least distinguished physician to ever graduate Volchansk State University Medical School, and he had saved Havaa’s life. He wiped his eyes on his sleeves, wanting to stay there, perched before the fire, but he had to feed his wife.

“How was your day?” he asked, after Ula swallowed her first bite.

“It was so busy,” she murmured.

“Yours too?”

“I spoke to your father.”

His father, a botanist and collector of pressed flowers, had passed ten years earlier. She had never met him. “He must have come a long way to see you.”

“He did. He looked terrible.”

“And what did you talk about?”

“Your mother,” she said, as if it were nothing. He set the bowl on the floor and lay beside her with his arms folded so their noses and kneecaps nearly touched. Her forehead felt as though she’d spent the day in the sun. Maybe it was summer in the exile his father had returned from, and maybe he’d brought a bit for Ula. She didn’t turn to the window when she inhaled; he kissed her nose for it.

“What did he have to say about my mother?”

She closed her eyes for so long he assumed she’d fallen asleep. “I saw a birthmark,” she finally whispered. “An oval on her stomach.”

Soon she slept. He finished the bowl of rice, disappointed by how little she had eaten, and rinsed it in the pail that had become the kitchen sink. After he stitched shut his pockets—to prevent checkpoint soldiers from planting contraband on him the next day—he brushed his teeth with baking soda and climbed into bed. He wiggled his toes. They felt wonderful there, at the ends of his feet. A question surfaced as he swam to meet Ula in sleep. By morning it would be forgotten, drawn back into dreams, but for a moment it sat there left by the tide. The oval-shaped birthmark on his mother’s stomach. He had never told Ula, yet she knew.