A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra

  “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 ar
e 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.

  CHAPTER

  4

  A SHADOW APPEARED against the white horizon, filling the sleeves of a familiar navy overcoat. Two mornings earlier, Akhmed would have waved and walked to greet his friend. He would have walked until the shade dissolved from Khassan’s face and then walked farther, to raise his voice, without fear or hesitation, had this been two mornings earlier. But these were afterthoughts as he ran into the forest and hid behind a gray trunk only half his width. He crouched at the base of the trunk and gulped the dawn air and hoped Khassan, a sharpshooter in the Great Patriotic War, hadn’t seen him flee. He cradled his jaw in his palms. Was this how he would live now? Fleeing into the forest at the slightest rustle?

  Three taps sounded on the birch trunk. “Is anyone home?” the old man asked. Akhmed stood and turned ruefully. His footprints led right to the tree trunk. From the wrong ends of binoculars, Khassan could have tracked him here.

  “It’s cold to be out so early,” Akhmed said. He couldn’t raise his gaze above Khassan’s shoulders as they walked back to the service road. The old man’s frame still filled his overcoat and he held a two-kilogram weight in each hand. At the age of seventy-nine—a full twenty years past the life expectancy of the average Russian man, as he often pointed out—Khassan maintained the exercise regimen he had begun in the army a half century earlier. Fifty squats, sit-ups and push-ups, plus a five-kilometer run that had slowed to a saunter over the decades.

  “My balls have frozen in Poland and in Nazi Germany and in Kazakhstan. They have frozen in nine different time zones. But now?” He sighed and gazed sorrowfully at his crotch. “Now I’m too old to need them, so why should I care if they freeze?”

  As a child and an adult, Akhmed had been captivated by stories of Khassan’s sixteen-year odyssey. To a man who had never even been to Grozny, Khassan’s travels rose to the realm of legend. In 1941, the Red Army gave him five bullets and an order to find a gun among the dead. With a rifle pried from frozen fingers in Stalingrad, he shot a path through Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. He pulled two bullets from his left thigh, lost three friends to hypothermia, killed twenty-seven Nazis by bullet, four by knife, three by hand, fought under five generals, liberated two concentration camps, heard the voices of innumerable angels in the ringing of an exploded mortar, and took a shit in one Reichstag commode, a moment that would forever commemorate the war’s victorious conclusion. After his years of service he returned to a Chechnya without Chechens. While he had fought and killed and shat for the U.S.S.R., the entire Chechen population had been deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia under Stalin’s accusations of ethnic collaboration with the fascist enemy. His commanding officer, a man whose life Khassan had twice saved, was to spend the next thirty-eight years working as a train porter in Liski, where the sight of train rails skewering the sun to the horizon served as a daily reminder of the disgraceful morning he shipped Khassan, the single greatest soldier he’d ever had the pleasure of spitting orders at, to Kazakhstan on a train packed with Russian physicians, German POWs, Polish Home Army soldiers, and Jews. Khassan’s parents hadn’t survived the resettlement, and in 1956, when—after the death of Stalin three years earlier—Khrushchev allowed Chechen repatriation, Khassan disinterred their remains and carried them home in their brown suitcase.

  “From what you told me,” Akhmed said, “they weren’t cold from disuse.”

  Khassan smiled. “Thank goodness the borders are closed. Who knows how many frauleins might otherwise track me down for dowries?”

  Violet light veined the clouds. Akhmed searched for something to say, a sentence flung to pull them from the sinkhole of Dokka’s disappearance. “How’s the book?”

  Khassan winced. Not the right sentence. “I’m giving up on that,” he said.

  “It’s not writing itself?”

  “History writes itself. It doesn’t need my assistance.”

  “But it’s your life’s work.”

  “Your life’s work could be scrubbing piss from a toilet bowl. Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”

  For four decades Khassan had drafted and redrafted his six-volume, thirty-three-hundred-page historical survey of the Chechen lands. Akhmed was a child when he had first seen the pages. After cancer had put his mother in the ground, he and his father had received weekly invitations to dine with Khassan in the three-room house built by Khassan’s father in a time when men were expected to grow their own corn, raise their own sheep, and build their own homes. A partial draft, kept in eight boxes beneath Khassan’s desk, was written in the careful cursive of a condolence letter. Akhmed found it one afternoon while his father and Khassan sat outside, gossiping like married ladies beneath a June sun. Each afternoon, while Khassan taught at the city university, Akhmed snuck into the living room and stole a single page. He read it at night, after completing his homework, and exchanged it the next afternoon for the following page. Khassan had begun his history in the time before humanity, when the flora and fauna of Chechnya had existed in classless egalitarianism. In a twenty-page account of Caucasian geology, Khassan proved that rock and soil adhered to the same patterns of dialectical materialism proffered by Marx. A seven-page explanation of natural selection compared kulaks to a species that failed to adapt to environmental changes. Akhmed read seventy-three pages in total, only reaching the Neolithic period before Khassan realized pages had gone missing: the three Akhmed had lost, the two he had turned into paper airplanes, and the one, a description of Eldár Forest before man invented chainsaws, that had been too beautiful for him to return. Believing the culprit to be a secret police informant, Khassan had burned the pages in his wood stove.

  “But you need to finish it,” Akhmed urged, uns
ure if Khassan was serious. The Khassan obsessed with a history book that, even if published, no one would read was the only Khassan he knew. Khassan could renounce his legs and sound no more ridiculous.

  “You’re right,” Khassan said. His parted lips revealed a row of teeth the color of cooking oil. That city dentist had been so in love with the teeth of his young women patients, he couldn’t look inside the mouth of an old man for more than a few moments without feeling a wash of revulsion and betrayal; he had never told Khassan to floss. “And I’m sorry, Akhmed. For Dokka.”

  “Was he taken to the Landfill?”

  Khassan’s shoulders sloped in a shrug. They both knew the answer but that didn’t make it any easier to admit. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

  “Can you ask Ramzan …” Ask him what? Ramzan had no answers; the blindness he walked through was a shade darker than theirs. “Can you ask him to let the girl be? She’s gone.”

  “Ramzan hasn’t heard my voice in the one year, eleven months and three days since he began informing. I’ve counted every day of silence. It’s stupid, I know, but silence is the only authority I have left.”

  Each looked past the other, into the woods stretching on either side of the road, uncomfortable and ashamed. “I’m a pariah. The father of an informer,” Khassan continued. “You and my son are the only people in the village willing to speak to me, and I can’t speak to him. In one year, eleven months and three days the only conversations I’ve had have been with you. You still speak to me. Why?”

  Akhmed focused on the trees. He didn’t know. He didn’t know that when Khassan returned home that morning he would write down what he remembered of their conversation in a shorthand his son couldn’t decipher, or that later Khassan would read it quietly, without speaking a single word aloud, and even on the page their exchange would lift that blanketing silence like tent poles. What he did know was that Khassan was his friend, a decent man, and that was as rare as snowfall in May.