A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (31 page)

He drove until the mountains no longer let him. Then came the shortest and most arduous distances. He loaded the supplies on a plywood frame and strapped the frame to his shoulders with strips of canvas and bungee cord. If properly balanced he could carry forty kilograms up the mountain. The rebels would not assist him, believing such labor beneath men of their pious patriotism, and he carried the forty kilograms up boulders and bluffs while the drop of the valley glared up at him.
Every ten minutes he checked the compass and mountain line. He tied a bell to his wrist so the lookouts would hear his approach before their scopes saw him. They materialized in camo fatigues faded to the same moss-spotted tan of the stone. Beards hung from their sun-darkened faces and the martyrs greeted him with imperious gratitude. Depending on where the rebels were camped and where the road ended, he would invite Dokka, never Akhmed, to join him.

There.

The hoofprints of an elk.

He squatted to the ground, stopped by a set of prints that marked the snow like a long ellipsis leading nowhere. The tracks hadn’t yet frozen and the elk was likely within a few hundred meters. To come upon an elk again. To admire rather than shoot. He stood and checked his watch. The sunlight turned the silver hands golden. Twenty minutes before he was due to check in. Staring down the trail of prints, he tried to follow its line through the birches and pines. Somewhere in that distance of frost and shadow, movement disrupted the stillness and the disturbance had carved a distance within him. He continued. The call couldn’t come late. Not even the sighting of an elk would excuse it.

The trees opened to the most recently clear-cut swath of forest. Already the saplings had grown taller than him. They loomed over the short, frost-buried stumps of their antecedents. His footprints wove among them, larger and more apparent than the elk’s, halting at the deep-treaded tires of a dilapidated logging truck. The loggers had abandoned the truck when they fled, and in the intervening decade its yellow paint had faded, chipped, and been recolored in a maroon coating of rust. The tire treads were so deeply cut he used them as rungs to climb to the cabin. Spiderweb fractures spread across the windshield, but the glass still held the snow. Seated in the driver’s seat, he unzipped
the duffel bag and assembled the phone. The satellite consisted of three metal rectangles coated in hard resin, which, when set up and positioned at a fifteen-degree angle on the cabin roof, looked like a cooking sheet basking in the sun. He connected two black rubber wires to the satellite. One led to a battery pack, which he left sitting beside the satellite on the roof, and the other ran through the cracked window and attached to the receiver. The pea-green keypad lit up. Three minutes remained before his call was due. Though wrapped in shame and remorse, these phone calls constituted the best moments of his month; for nearly two years, the military men on the other end had been the only people interested in speaking to him. He measured the cold by the length of his breath, which grew and vanished, like a tusk that kept dissolving from his face. The entire forest’s quiet was concentrated in the cabin.

Later he would store the memory of this moment with that of his mother’s rolling pin, how just the sight of it emerging from the kitchen cabinet would make him salivate. He would treasure it as he treasured the ball of yellow yarn, still attached to the amputated sleeve of a sweater she had been knitting for him when she died. He would weave those three minutes into the fabric of his mother’s memory, because she had loved him, and believed him a kind and generous child, and died before she could see the half man he had become. For nearly two years he had worked as an informer for the state security forces. He had given up neighbors who had wished him a happy birthday every year of his life. And still he believed himself the victim as much as the perpetrator of his crimes.

At eleven o’clock he punched the nine-digit number into the keypad. An adjutant answered, and in the cramped cold of the cabin his voice trilled like a clarinet. The adjutant passed the phone to the colonel, whose voice—if he were being honest—had no effect on his bowels until it spoke of the silver Makarov pistol.

Nearly two years earlier, in January 2003, he drove into the mountains for what would be the final time. The morning of his departure, he woke early and performed his ablutions and prayers on the trapezoid of dawn light that lay like a prayer rug on the floor. The winter sun kept the same hours the Soviet post office once did, and he prepared to leave without even the light of a kerosene lamp. Nine years had passed since the house he shared with his father had received reliable electricity, and darkness no longer felt like an absence, but rather a thickening in the air, a viscosity that slowed his movement and called upon his spatial memory. His long underwear had stretched in the knees and as he pulled the elastic band to his hip, he mourned the fact that he could obtain a crate of Special Forces sniper rifles more easily than a decent pair of thermal underwear. Before leaving his room, he reached into a wicker basket of unwashed clothes. The wool socks and gray undershirts parted and compressed as he pushed through them, but at the bottom, the Makarov pistol kept its shape.

In the kitchen, steam surged from the kettle spout. Ramzan opened the stove door and cupped his hands in the orange heat. Pages rustled in the living room. His father knew he would leave for the mountains today. A fan of mustard light fell from the living room doorway, and after preparing a cup of tea, Ramzan walked toward it. The light rose from the floor to his feet and up his legs, outlining the droops in his long underwear and then jaundicing his hands, wrists, forearms, elbows. “You are leaving soon,” his father said with a foreknowledge that made a statement of the question. His father sat at his desk in the pool of lamplight. Ramzan took a seat on the brown ottoman; the backside had paled from years facing the morning sun.

“What are you reading?” Ramzan asked.

His father gave an abashed smile, as if caught eating
manti
from the pot with his fingers, and tilted the cardboard cover toward the light. It was a conspiracy story about an inept American spy who infiltrated the
Kremlin and was discovered by a commissar whose proletariat spirit and exceptional good fortune compensated for his lack of deductive reasoning. His father only read these potboilers when Ramzan was in the mountains. For a man whose life revolved around academic texts, the shift to pulp fiction announced his paternal worry with the volume of a bullhorn.

“You’ve read it before?”

“Twice.”

“Who wins? The Americans or the Russians?”

“Both,” his father said, glancing to the frost-filled windowpane.

“Then who loses?”

“Everyone else.”

“I should be back in a week.”

His father nodded, and looked down to his book. Two years would pass before he had another conversation with his father.

“I’ll see you soon,” Ramzan said. His father marked his place with a pencil, stood, and wrapped his arms around Ramzan’s shoulders. His father’s breath warmed his cheek like a small, surviving cloud of summer humidity. On the desk, beneath the novel, the typewritten carcass of his manuscript bled red ink. “If you were writing your book instead of reading others, you might be finished by now.”

“Perhaps,” replied his father. Their embrace didn’t break off so much as dissipate, an exhalation releasing whatever tenderness was briefly held between them. His father’s hug was an act of precaution rather than love, so that if Ramzan did not return from the mountains, his father would have the consolation of knowing his final gesture toward his son had been one of kindness rather than disappointment.

In his bedroom he popped two rigged floorboards and felt through the shadows for the frayed tail of rope. Coiling the rope around his wrist, he drew the wooden pallet across the concrete foundation. A duffel bag with his most treasured possessions sat on the pallet. In it were three fragmentation grenades, a Kalashnikov and eight full magazines,
a hunting knife, an old membership card to the village
banya
, two hundred thousand rubles divided in eight shrink-wrapped stacks, and a small sandalwood box containing a single yellow sweater sleeve still attached to the yarn ball.

He slid a stack of bills into the upper right pocket of his old Red Army jacket—a jacket that appeared to be composed entirely of pockets—and slid his arms into sleeves that felt like the largest of the pockets. He looked like a fisherman. He pulled the silver Makarov from the wicker basket, wrapped it in an undershirt and set it in the duffel bag, to keep for himself. The sidearm was one of the twenty he was supposed to transport to the mountains that day, a small gratuity he had awarded himself. In three weeks, he would teach Havaa to shoot it.

Outside, the rising sun flashed on the frost as he stomped toward his truck, carrying his backpack and the teakettle. He popped the hood and, after letting the kettle cool in the snow, filled the radiator. Antifreeze was an unaffordable luxury, so each evening he drained the radiator and each morning refilled it, and he did this until spring. The weapons and supplies—the nineteen other Makarov pistols among them—were already packed in back. It was a risk leaving the weapons outside overnight, but less of a risk than bringing them in. The temperature difference could easily fracture the rifle operating rods. His father stood in the doorframe, his frown the largest wrinkle on his face.

In two minutes his home was indistinguishable from the other snowcapped dwellings scattered in the rear view. He honked twice when he reached Dokka’s. Through the living room window, an argument between Dokka and his wife halted with the second horn blast. Havaa stood in the doorway, watching Dokka forlornly as he slung a knapsack over his shoulder and clomped through the snow to the passenger’s side.

“Difficult morning?” Ramzan asked.

Dokka smiled. “I’m married. What morning isn’t?”

No vehicles had passed since the last snowfall and without tire tracks to follow he couldn’t be sure where the road was. As long as he didn’t
run into a tree, he figured, he was going the right way. Slouched in the passenger seat, Dokka pushed a pebble in small circles around his palm.

On the road, the snow rose from ten to twenty centimeters as they drove south. Ramzan kept at forty kilometers an hour for so long the two digits seemed skewered on the speedometer needle. They stopped to eat lunch and relieve themselves beside a thicket of pines, whose snowy boughs provided camouflage for the red truck.

“The snow is like my wife’s mother,” Dokka said, kicking it over the tire tracks. “She will name every place we’ve been.”

“Have a cigarette.”

“You haven’t hunted this year. You’ve forgotten that a buck is easiest to track in fresh snow.”

Ramzan hoisted himself on the warm engine hood. What accounted for Dokka’s sudden anxiety? Yes, they would likely be shot if discovered by the Feds or state security forces, but that could happen as easily in Eldár or Volchansk, in their homes or in the street, while they slept, or while they played chess, a fate so likely to befall a Chechen man it seemed silly to worry about it too much.

Before them stretched a white field that had, for eight years now, grown nothing but weeds and dust. The snow erased all measure of distance and the field expanded past the horizon, wide enough to extinguish the sun.

“You won’t be able to do this much longer either,” Dokka said. “The war is over. Grozny has fallen. These skirmishes are final breaths.”

“You’re an optimist, Dokka.”

Night fell and they drove through terraced valleys until they reached a hamlet built of the same pale stone that crowned the slopes. Centuries earlier, the hamlet had been home to several thousand; but in 1956, when the Chechens returned from Kazakh exile, Soviet authorities prohibited them from returning to their ancestral homes, and this hamlet of pristine ruins was one among hundreds scattered throughout the highlands. It seemed so unnatural to Ramzan to see a village decimated
not by bombs and bullets but by time and neglect. The thirty-nine residents who gathered around the truck shared the blood of common great-great-grandparents. The men wore lambskin hats and tall leather boots, the older women wore gray and black headscarves and long plain dresses, and the younger women wore blue and pink hijabs folded to the width of a hunting blade. The children stood just outside the splay of headlight, afraid it might burn them.

They were met by the tall, arboreal elder, known for eating snow to numb his stomach ulcer. After washing in a tin basin, they dined at his home. Slabs of white stone sealed with clay-lime mortar formed the walls. Weathered petroglyphs adorned each stone: spokes of light jutting from plum-sized suns. In the main room they ate on the mats they would later sleep on. They chewed differently here. Their bowls full, their bites unrationed. No need of words when the tongue could converse with mutton.

Unaccustomed to such portions, Ramzan and Dokka finished last. As soon as they set down their bowls, the women filed in through the backdoor. The women waited for the men to leave before taking their places on the lambskin blankets. Ramzan, the last out, heard whispers and suppressed laughter as the door closed behind him and very much wished he could have remained behind. The men followed a deer trail past the ice-glazed remnants of a stone tower. In earlier centuries, it had been a fortress, watchtower, signal light, and anchor to the long-since-scattered
teip
. Past the tower they reached a clearing. A series of elevated planks formed a flat, dry, tire-shaped platform in the center of the clearing. Its axle was a ring of stone containing the ashes of a bonfire. The men carried logs from a lean-to deeply entrenched in the hillside. Within minutes the fire reached above Ramzan’s head, so bright he could count the rings of the logs yet unconsumed. It had been years since he had last participated in a
zikr
.