A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (33 page)

“Last year?”

“Yes. A year to get a simple ballistics report. It’s December 2004, and it’s just come in. When I was last in Moscow I read that Chinese assembly plants can produce a new car in a few hours. And it takes a year for us to produce a ballistics report that connects the bullet in the head of an FSB colonel to the gun lying meters away.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The report has come back, and I want you to find where the gun came from.”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Did you break wind?”

“No, sir.”

“Then don’t waste a request for my pardon.”

“Yes, sir. It’s just that I’m not sure how I’ll find the origin of a gun fired a year ago.”

“It’s one of those needle-in-a-haystack situations, is it?”

“With all respect, sir, it’s a needle in a needle-stack.”

“On that account, you’re in luck. It’s one of your needles.”

“You must be mistaken. I haven’t run so much as a toothpick in the past two years. Ask the captain, sir.”

“How about I ask his wife instead. No, I’m not concerned about what you claim not to be selling, but rather about what you’ve already sold. You see, the serial number on the Makarov pistol used to kill the colonel in December 2003 corresponds sequentially with the serial numbers of the Makarov pistols found in the back of your truck when our brave lads ambushed you and took you to the Landfill in January 2002.”

Silence.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Sir.”

“This puts us in a rather difficult situation. In seeking information on the supplier of a gun used to assassinate an FSB colonel, we are immediately led to a person whom we pay to provide us with just that information.”

“I swear I had nothing to do with it, sir. Who was the assassin, sir?”

“A Black Widow. A
shahidka
. A separatist trained and sent by those animals in the mountains.”

“Was she taken alive … sir?”

“The
shahidka
was detained at a filtration point. Cleverly, she seduced the colonel, a man, I am told, so very well endowed that only the cavernous cunt of a Chechen has the latitude to accommodate him. No doubt hearing of the colonel’s great girth, the
shahidka
used her powers of seduction. When they were alone, she shot him.”

“But, sir, why wasn’t she checked for weapons?”

“If you still had a pair of stones between your legs, you would know that the average cunt of your womenfolk is capacious enough to conceal
a rocket launcher. The colonel was a fool, no doubt, but nonetheless, he was still a colonel.”

“Yes, sir, but wouldn’t it be more prudent to trace the
shahidka
, rather than the gun?”

“A gun can be identified more easily than a person. There is a lesson in that.”

“But the
shahidka
 …”

“Irrelevant.”

“I’ll do what I can, sir.”

“No, you will not do what you can do. You will do what you are told.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Numbers are the amoral language of absolute truth. These serial numbers do not lie. At some point you were in possession of that Makarov, and I will know the name and location of the next hands who held it. I was promoted to replace the departed colonel. I now hold his rank and command, and so, understandably, it is my chief priority to kill the architects of his assassination. Should I fall victim to a similar fate, and should the cuckolded captain be given my rank, I truly fear the fate of the Russian nation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see from your file that you have a father.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he lives with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He turned seventy-nine this year?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He survived the Great Patriotic War?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the deportations to Kazakhstan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And eleven years there on the steppe?”

“Twelve, sir.”

“And you would like him to see his eightieth birthday?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then give me names, Ramzan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Or I’ll sew your stones back on just to chop them off twice.”

The Landfill filtration camp was so named for having been built, or rather sunken, into the site of a partially constructed garbage dump. Once, when Ramzan passed the site as a younger man, he watched a brontosaurial backhoe bite into the soil and scoop out a bathtub’s worth of loose earth. But after the collapse, and the subsequent wars, plans to finish the landfill were postponed then abandoned completely. Only two of the eight proposed pits, each twenty meters deep, with the surface area of a soccer field, had been excavated. The concrete and plastic foundation, which would have trapped runoff effluvia, was never installed, and so rain and snow dissolved into a knee-deep sludge at the bottom of the two earthen pits. When Ramzan was taken there in the first war, he spent three days in Pit A before two guards lowered a sixty-rung ladder, doused his feet and legs in frigid water, and led him to the two-story white building whose entranceway still bore the sign
REFUSE DISPOSAL ADMINISTRATION
. Petitions calling to fill in the pits circulated after the first war. An unfortunate group of sixteen women widowed by the Landfill shoveled for a month, but failed to visibly alter the swampscape. Ultimately, the symbolic benefit of filling the two pits didn’t hold up to the actual benefit of rebuilding roads, houses, schools, power plants, refineries, and hospitals. No one imagined the pits might again be used. No one imagined there would be a second war.

But there was a second war, and now, in January 2003, having encountered the lost Federal patrol, Ramzan was imprisoned for the second time. He spent eleven days belowground, this time in Pit B, while
Dokka was taken to Pit A. At the very least his ears would receive a welcome rest. He descended the now-rusty sixty-rung ladder and the guard shook him from it before he reached the final rungs. The sludge had frozen to a snowy dampness that only reached his ankles. The pit held two dozen others. Over the coming days, he would pray to the sky with them all, but only his conversations with the blue-eyed imam would remain etched in his memory. The guards lowered food and fresh water in tin pails attached to yellow cords that came irregularly, sometimes five in a day, sometimes one, sometimes in the middle of the night when the men would wake, gather, and divide the provisions. The one thing the pit had no shortage of was space. Ramzan spent the daylight hours walking alongside its walls, wondering if somewhere the Feds had a modern prison, with electricity, bunks, cells, and roofs, in which they housed not prisoners but banana peels, and potato skins, and broken shoelaces, and apple cores, and last year’s calendars, and deflated tires, and balled-up paper, and used tissues, and cigarette butts, and the last worthless slivers of bar soap. Some compassionate guard, whose soul the imam would teach Ramzan to honor, had tossed in thin wooden planks, and a sidewalk the width of a balance beam stretched around the pit’s perimeter. The names and villages of captives were carved into the clay walls. Men packed snow on the walls as far up as they could reach to moisten the clay, and after a few minutes scraped it off and identified themselves in block letters drawn by stick or finger. Information the Feds would torture them for was written here on the walls for all to see. It was well understood among the men that the Feds had as much sense as two bricks smashed together. It was also understood that pain, rather than information, was the true purpose of interrogation.

In the afternoon of the fourth day, Ramzan balanced on the slender sidewalk when the blue-eyed imam stopped him.

“Give me a boost,” the imam asked, nodding his bearded chin toward the wall where he had written half his name. At first, Ramzan refused. Since arriving he had done his best to keep his distance from the filthy,
brutalized men, as though his refusal to acknowledge them were the tightrope he walked upon, saving him from falling into their ranks.

“Are you a general, hmm?” the imam asked. “Or a Persian prince? Are your hands too delicate to help an imam old enough to be your uncle?”

“I’m not a Persian prince.”

“Then climb down from your throne and help me.”

The imam placed his muddy boot in the stirrup of Ramzan’s woven fingers. He hoisted the imam, whose weight, held in Ramzan’s straining hands, was greater than his size suggested. After an endless moment, the imam tapped him on the forehead with a muddy finger and Ramzan let the old man drop to the ground.

“Take a good look at it,” the imam said, pointing to his name and village. “If it turns out you are a Persian prince, and they let you leave, you must remember me.”

“If they let me leave, I will forget everything here.”

“No,” the imam protested, wagging his muddy little finger at Ramzan. “You must remember.”

“Why?”

“So that my nephews will know where to buy my corpse.”

Ramzan nodded.

“I can afford it, you know,” the imam said, proudly. “I still have my retirement account.”

When Ramzan turned, the imam asked, “What did they get you for?”

“Smuggling weapons. You?”

“Height.”

“Height?”

“Well, the lack of height. The Feds came to my village for a counter-terrorist operation. They were looking for some Wahhabi mastermind that was supposedly hiding there, but their only physical description of the man was that he had a beard and was less than two meters tall. They
rounded up every short, bearded man, and many adolescents who didn’t have beards but met the height description. On the reason-for-arrest line of my report, they wrote
too short
.” The imam shook his head and stared up at his name written in the clay wall, now beyond his reach. Ramzan was glad he’d stopped to lift the imam.

“It’s funny,” the imam continued. “My generation grew up in the Kazakh resettlement camps, and because protein was so scarce, it’s not at all uncommon for men of my age to be short, but I’ve always been ashamed of it. My younger brother used to tell me that my shortness wouldn’t kill me. He was only two centimeters taller than me, but I swear, he lived his entire life in those two centimeters, lording them over me, always asking if I needed help reaching the upper shelves. I wish he were still alive, just so the Feds could arrest him for being too short, too.”

“What can one do?” Ramzan said, shrugging.

“Pray,” the imam said.

The imam held court in the southwest corner of Pit B, perched on the seat of honor, an upturned water pail that had come loose from its cord. Each morning he led prayers and performed ablutions with snow that turned his hands a numb white. He insisted that God, in His mercy, would forgive their unclean state. He had memorized the entire Qur’an and lectured on the nature of evil, which, like a shadow, cannot exist independently of the good it silhouettes. Unlike the sheikh and mujahideen, he never tied politics to Qur’anic verse, and instead explained the righteousness of the faithful and the wisdom of the Prophet and the joyousness of a Paradise that is the summer to the winter of the world. Above all, he spoke of the end times and God’s judgment.

But the interrogator would judge Ramzan before God would, and it was the interrogator’s judgment that he feared. Each day he watched the ritual of men called forth. First the sixty-rung ladder was slid down the wall of the pit, and then the name of the summoned was magnified through a bullhorn speaker, so loud and static-laced it sounded like it
truly came from the heavens. If the summoned hesitated, a warning shot was fired. The summoned climbed all sixty rungs to the sixty-first, street level, a place so distant the sky seemed closer. None of the summoned returned. An optimistic man might believe they had been found innocent, released, sent home to their families; but not even Dokka, in whatever comparable perdition he lived, would be capable of such optimism. As soon as the summoned reached the top of the ladder and stepped onto the snowy soil of the sixty-first rung, the imam began the funeral. The service was unlike any Ramzan had attended. No body. No shroud. No friend or neighbor who had known the summoned in any but this desperate condition. They were all dead, just a step or two behind the summoned, and they honored him not as one who departs, but as one who has fully entered. The imam congregated the others around the damp plaque where the summoned had written his name and village. They read the name aloud, softly at first, then growing to a chant that rivaled the
zikr
, and made prayer from the name and sent it skyward. For twenty-four hours, or as close as they could calculate, the name and village of the summoned was left on the clay wall. At the twenty-fifth, the men gathered around the inscription. Each took a palmful of earth from the thawing ground and pressed it to the wall. Without the body, they could only bury the name, and when they could no longer read it, they knew the man was gone.

“According to
hadith
, he who nightly recites the sixty-seventh surah will be spared a torturous death,” the blue-eyed imam lectured one evening from the upturned bucket. “You must all know that. You must all count on that. The surah describes the Merciful’s creation of all seven heavens, each one above the other. The Throne of God sits atop the highest heaven, and lanterns adorn the lowest. The lanterns are our stars and comets, this firmament above our very heads.”

He glanced to the sky and lowered his face. He pulled a matchbook from his pocket and struck it. Soft yellow light gloved his hand. “Take
heart, my friends; we are already among the righteous. We are already with God.” He raised the match to his face, and his shadow was cast across the Landfill clay. “Here is the lantern of our lowest heaven.”

From somewhere far above them, a name was called through the bullhorn speaker. The imam stepped down from the bucket and walked toward the ladder. “With God,” he said, as he stepped onto that first and lowest rung.

Night fell. The moonlight covered Ramzan like a flimsy bedsheet. He lay on a strip of once-burgundy carpeting, which would capsize in the mud if he sat up, turned over, yawned, or thought too hard. The stars shone much brighter here. The gauzy light of the Milky Way canopied Pit B, the nearest thing to a roof. Nothing in this or the next world was worse than physical pain. In the afterlife, as no more than a soul, he would be without a body to beat, skin to peel, blood to flow, eyes to gouge, fingernails to pry, lungs to drown, ventricles to stop, and so the retribution of God would always be gentler than the retribution of man. He held on to this one truth the next morning when his name was called through the bullhorn. He held on to it as he climbed the ladder and saw, framed by the rungs, the names of those to follow. When ordered to disrobe, he complied. When one of the interrogating officers wanted a better view of the cratered skin that had been his scrotum, he complied. Those scars were seven years old. During his first detention in the Landfill, in 1995, in the first war, he had refused to inform. They had wrestled down his pants, shown him the bolt cutters, and still he had said no. Screaming, thrashing, with his manhood half severed, he had said no. He had done that, and now he was ready to start saying yes.