A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2 page)

“He’s not coming back, is he?” she asked. She focused on the blue leather suitcase that sat on the street between them. Eight months earlier, her father had asked her to prepare the suitcase and leave it in the closet, where it had remained until the previous night, when he thrust it into her hands and pushed her out the back door as the Feds broke through the front.

“I don’t think so.”

“But you don’t know?” It wasn’t an accusation, but he took it as one. Was he so incompetent a physician that she hesitated to trust him with her father’s life even in speculation? “We should be safe,” he said. “It’s safer to think he won’t come back.”

“But what if he does?”

The longing knotted into such a simple question was more than he could contemplate. What if she cried? It suddenly seemed like a terrifying possibility. How would he stop her? He had to keep her calm, keep himself calm; panic, he knew, could spread between two people more quickly than any virus. He fiddled with her scarf. Somehow it had survived the fire as orange as the day it was pulled from the dye. “How about this: if he comes back, I’ll tell him where you are. Is that a good idea?”

“My father is a good idea.”

“Yes, he is,” Akhmed said, relieved they had this to agree on.

They plodded along the Eldár Forest Service Road, the village’s main thoroughfare, and their footprints began where the tire tracks ended. On either side he saw houses by surname rather than address. A face appeared and vanished in an unboarded window.

“Pull your headscarf tighter,” he instructed. But for his years at medical school, he had spent his whole life in Eldár and no longer trusted the traditional clan system of
teips
that had survived a century of Tsarist rule, then a century of Soviet rule, only to dissolve in a war of national independence. Reincarnated in 1999, after a truce too lawless to be called peace, the war had frayed the village
teip
into lesser units of loyalty until all but the fidelity of a parent for a child wore thin enough to break. Logging, the village’s sole stable industry, had ceased soon after the first bombs fell, and without viable prospects those who couldn’t emigrate ran guns for the rebels or informed for the Feds to survive.

He wrapped his arm around Havaa’s shoulder as they walked. The girl had always been strong and stoic, but this resignation, this passivity, was something else. She clomped along, kicking snow with each footstep, and in an attempt to cheer her Akhmed whispered a joke about a blind imam and a deaf prostitute, a joke that really wasn’t appropriate for an eight-year-old, but was the only one Akhmed could remember. She didn’t smile, but was listening. She zipped her puffy jacket over a sweatshirt that in Manchester, England, had warmed the shoulders of five brothers before the sixth, a staunchly philanthropic six-year-old, had given it to his school’s Red Cross clothing drive so his mother would have to buy him a new one.

At the end of the village, where the forest narrowed on the road, they passed a meter-tall portrait nailed to a tree trunk. Two years earlier, after forty-one of the villagers had disappeared in a single day, Akhmed had drawn their forty-one portraits on forty-one plywood
boards, weatherproofed them, and hung them throughout the village. This one was of a beautiful, self-admiring woman whose second daughter he had delivered. Despite his hounding her for years, she never had paid him for the delivery. After she was abducted, he had decided to draw on her portrait a single hair curling from her left nostril. He had grinned at the vain woman’s ghost and then made peace with it. She looked like a beheaded giantess staring from the trunk. Soon she was no more than two eyes, a nose, and a mouth fading between the trees.

The forest rose around them, tall skeletal birches, gray coils of bark unraveling from the trunks. They walked on the side of the road, where frozen undergrowth expanded across the gravel. Here, beyond the trails of tank treads, the chances of stepping on a land mine diminished. Still he watched for rises in the frost. He walked a few meters ahead of the girl, just in case. He remembered another joke, this one about a lovesick commissar, but decided not to tell it. When she began straggling, he led her five minutes into the woods to a felled log unseen from the road. As they sat down, she asked for her blue suitcase. He gave it to her and she opened it, taking a silent inventory of its contents.

“What’s in there?” he asked.

“My souvenirs,” she said, but he didn’t know what she meant. He unwrapped a hunk of dry black bread from a white handkerchief, split it in two uneven pieces, and gave her the larger one. She ate quickly. Hunger was a sensation so long situated in his abdomen he felt it as he would an inflamed organ. He took his time, tonguing the pulp into a little oval and resting it against his cheek like a lozenge. If the bread wouldn’t fill his stomach, it might at least fill his mouth. The girl had finished half of hers before he took a second bite.

“You shouldn’t rush,” he said. “There are no taste buds in your stomach.”

She paused to consider his reasoning, then took another bite. “There’s no hunger in your tongue,” she mumbled between chews. Her cupped hand caught the crumbs and tossed them back in her mouth.

“I used to hate black bread,” he said. When he was a child he would only eat black bread if it was slathered in a spoonful of honey. Over the course of a year, his mother weaned him from it by slicing larger pieces, until his breakfast consisted of a small, sad oasis of honey on a desert of black bread.

“Can I have yours, then?”

“I said used to,” he said, and imagined a brimming jar of honey, standing on a counter without a breadboard in sight.

She dropped to her knees and examined the underside of the log. “Will Ula be all right alone?” she asked.

His wife wasn’t all right alone, with him, with anyone. He believed she had, in technical terms, lupus coupled with early-onset dementia, but in practice her nerves were so crisscrossed that her elbows ached when she spoke and her left foot had more sense than her brain. Before leaving that morning he had told Ula he would be gone for the day. As she gazed at him through her blank daze, he felt himself as one of her many visions, and he held her hand, and described from memory the placid pasture of a Zakharov oil painting, the herb garden and the cottage, until she fell back asleep. When she woke again that morning would she still see him sitting on the bed beside her? Perhaps part of him was still there, sitting on the bed; perhaps he was something she had dreamed up.

“She’s an adult,” he said at last and without much thought. “You don’t need to worry about adults.”

Behind the log, Havaa didn’t reply.

He had always tried to treat Havaa as a child and she always went along with it, as though childhood and innocence were fantastical creatures that had died long ago, resurrected only in games of make believe. The only times she had been in a schoolhouse were when they went to steal child-sized desks for firewood, but sometimes he imagined they shared what was essentially the same wisdom separated by years and
experience. It wasn’t true, of course, but he had to believe that she had lived beyond her years, that she could confront what no eight-year-old is capable of confronting. She climbed from the log without looking at him.

“What’s that?” he asked. She carefully lifted a yellow shape from her palm.

“A frozen bug,” she said, and put it in her coat pocket.

“In case you get hungry later?” he asked.

She smiled for the first time that day.

They trod along the edge of the road and the girl’s quickened pace compensated for their stop. With deep breaths he tried to unweave threads of diesel fumes or burning rubber from the air. The daylight provided a degree of safety. They wouldn’t be mistaken for wild dogs.

They heard the soldiers before the checkpoint came in sight. Akhmed raised his hand. Wind filled the spaces between his fingers. Once used to transport timber, the Eldár Forest Service Road connected the village to the city of Volchansk. The gaps between the tree trunks provided the only exit points between village and city, and in recent months the Feds had reduced their presence to a single checkpoint. It lay another half kilometer away, at the end of a sharp curve.

“We’re going back into the woods.”

“To eat again?”

“Just to walk. We need to be quiet.”

The girl nodded and raised her index finger to her lips. The entire forest had frozen and fallen to the ground. Crooked branches reached through the snow and scratched their shins from every angle as they walked a wide arc around the checkpoint. Visible through the trees, the checkpoint was no more than a wilted army tarp nailed to a poplar trunk in a failed attempt to lend an air of legitimacy. A handful of soldiers stood by it. Crossing the floor of frigid leaves in silence was impossible, but the soldiers, eight men who between them could share
more venereal diseases than Chechen words, seemed no more alert than brainsick bucks, and they returned to the road a quarter kilometer past the checkpoint. The sun shone yolk-yellow between white clouds. Nearly noon. The trees they passed repeated on and on into the woods. None was remarkable when compared to the next, but each was individual in some small regard: the number of limbs, the girth of trunk, the circumference of shed leaves encircling the base. No more than minor particularities, but minor particularities were what transformed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into a face.

The trees opened to a wide field, bisected by the road.

“Let’s walk faster,” he said, and the girl’s footsteps hastened behind him. They were nearly halfway across when they came upon the severed hindquarters of a wolf. Farther into the field, blood dyed the snow a reddish brown. Nothing had decomposed in the cold. The head and front legs lay exposed on the ground, connected to the wolf’s back end by three meters of pulped innards. What was left of the face was frozen in the expression it had died with. The tongue ribboned from its maw.

“It was a careless animal,” Akhmed said. He tried to look away, but there was wolf everywhere. “It didn’t watch for land mines.”

“We’re more careful.”

“Yes, we’ll stay on the road. We won’t walk in the fields.”

She stood close to him. Her shoulder pressed against his side. This was the farthest she’d ever been from home.

“It wasn’t always like this,” he said. “Before you were born there were wolves and birds and bugs and goats and bears and sheep and deer.”

The heavy snow stretched a hundred meters to the forest. A few dead stalks rose through the brown frost, where the wolf would lie until spring. With heavy breaths they shaped the air. No prophet had augured this end. Neither the sounding of trumpets nor the beating of seraphic wings had heralded this particular field, with this particular girl, holding his particular hand.

“They were here,” he said, staring into the field.

“Where did the Feds take them?”

“We should keep walking.”

White moths circled a dead lightbulb.

A firm hand on her shoulder lifted her from the dream. Sonja lay on a trauma ward hospital bed, still dressed in her scrubs. Before she looked to the hand that had woken her, before she rose from the imprint her body had made in the weak mattress foam, she reached for her pocket, from instinct rather than want, and shook the amber pill bottle as though its contents had followed her into her dreams and also required waking. The amphetamines rattled in reply. She sat up, conscious, blinking away the moth wings.

“There’s someone here to see you,” Nurse Deshi announced from behind her, and began stripping the sheets before Sonja stood.

“See me about what?” she asked. She bent to touch her feet, relieved to find them still there.

“Now she thinks I’m a secretary,” the old nurse said, shaking her head. “Soon she’ll start pinching my rump like that oncologist who chased out four secretaries in a year. A shameful profession. I’ve never met an oncologist who wasn’t a hedonist.”

“Deshi, who’s here to see me?”

The old nurse looked up, startled. “A man from Eldár.”

“About Natasha?”

Deshi tensed her lips. She could have said
no
or
not this time
or
it’s time to give up
, but instead shook her head.

The man leaned against the corridor wall. A one-size-too-small navy
pes
with beaded tassels roosted on the back of his head. His jacket hung from his shoulders as if still on the hanger. A girl stood beside him, inspecting the contents of a blue suitcase.

“Sofia Andreyevna Rabina?” he asked.

She hesitated. She hadn’t heard or spoken her full name aloud in eight years and only answered to her diminutive. “Call me Sonja,” she said.

“My name is Akhmed.” A short black beard shrouded his cheeks. Shaving cream was an unaffordable luxury for many; she couldn’t tell if the man was a Wahhabi insurgent or just poor.

“Are you a bearded one?” she asked.

He reached for his whiskers in embarrassment. “No, no. Absolutely not. I just haven’t shaved recently.”

“What do you want?”

He nodded to the girl. She wore an orange scarf, an oversized pink coat, and a sweatshirt advertising Manchester United, likely, Sonja imagined, from the glut of Manchester apparel that had flooded clothing-drive donations after Beckham was traded to Madrid. She had the pale, waxen skin of an unripe pear. When Sonja approached, the girl had raised the lid of the suitcase, slipped her hand inside, and held an object hidden from Sonja’s view.

“She needs a place to stay,” Akhmed said.

“And I need a plane ticket to the Black Sea.”

“She has nowhere to go.”

“And I haven’t had a tan in years.”

“Please,” he said.

“This is a hospital, not an orphanage.”

“There are no orphanages.”

Out of habit she turned to the window, but she saw nothing through the duct-taped panes. The only light came from the fluorescent bulbs overhead, whose blue tint made them all appear hypothermic. Was that a moth circling the fixture? No, she was just seeing things again.

“Her father was taken by the security forces last night. To the Landfill, most likely.”