A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra

  “You think I’m wonderful, don’t you? You think I’m the kindest, bravest, most generous man ever given a pair of feet to step into the world,” he said, and the dog kept licking his hair in reply. “That’s because you’re a stupid dog.”

  He went to the kitchen, returned with the meat of two chickens and a lamb shank, and laid it in the snow, his hair sticky with saliva, the king and benefactor of their open maws. He would never forget his son’s face the morning after Ramzan’s fifth trip to the military supplier, when Ramzan opened the refrigerator and found nothing but condiment jars basking in the thirty-watt glow. Ramzan had stormed to the backyard, where the dogs lay on the ground, swollen stomachs pointed skyward, unable to roll, let alone stand, let alone run, and Khassan lay right there among them, his own navel aimed at the clouds, turning the dead grass into confetti, such a lovely and peculiar carelessness known only to elderly men who have napped with feral dogs. Ramzan screamed at him, picking up a thigh bone gnawed clean, pulling the gristle from the slack jaws of a blind wolfhound, and a distant happiness returned to Khassan like a word he could define but not remember. From that day, a year and a half earlier, his disapproval had expanded from silence to sabotage. If Ramzan used food to justify the disappearances, Khassan made sure it all went to the dogs. Canine affection and his son’s exasperation became his only sources of pleasure. In response, Ramzan began stashing food around the house, but he soon realized that even processed meat spoiled. Then he bought a fancy refrigerator lock invented for fat Westerners without self-control; each morning he set aside enough for Khassan to eat that day, and locked up. But Khassan would give his three meals to the dogs and go hungry himself, and when he lost enough weight, Ramzan abandoned the tactic. Next Ramzan only brought foods to which dogs are allergic: chocolate, raisins, and walnuts. But Ramzan’s teeth began aching, his shit began looking like fancy Swiss candy bars, and with one glance to the insulin bottle Khassan reminded him that a diabetic couldn’t live on sweets. They were wonderful days; how he enjoyed terrorizing his son. In the end his boy surrendered. Couldn’t outwit his father. For the past year they had communicated by the glares of a resentful truce. Khassan fed the dogs as his only family, and always left enough for Ramzan, though no more than the average villager could hope to survive on in these difficult days.

  Khassan stood and smiled at the six dogs, muzzles to the ground, tails wagging languidly. One was bald, another blind. From time to time a dog would race toward the fence, chasing invisible rodents; in the vaporous insanity that had fallen across the land, even dogs hallucinated. A white shepherd dog stood at the back. He tossed him the finest cut.

  “Sharik,” he said, but the dog didn’t recognize his name. Three years earlier, before his son’s treachery allowed them food to spare, he had let the dog go. His claws had danced frantically on the floorboards, and Khassan had had to kick twice before he scampered out the open door. For three days the dog had paced the fence, head hung, waiting for Khassan to call him back. Khassan hadn’t left the house until Sharik finally had disappeared into the forest. When Ramzan had arrived with the first cardboard boxes of food, he had tried to entice the dog home, but whatever trust had existed between them was dead. Only by caring for the pack could Khassan care for his dog. That was the gift Sharik had given, and Khassan thanked him every morning with the finest cuts.

  The dogs followed him around the side of the house, through weeds winter couldn’t kill, to the tire tracks furrowed in the road. They clambered behind him, trusting him as people did not, and when he unclenched his fists and wiggled his fingers, he felt cold wet noses and the warmth of their tongues.

  “Did I ever tell you the story of the cobbler and his son?” he asked the brown mutt. “Yes, you’ve already heard it. Sharik tells it best.”

  He walked to the gap in the block where Dokka’s house had stood. The dogs wouldn’t follow him onto the frozen charcoal. He found the corner where Dokka’s bookcase had stood, and there he bent down and scooped a handful of ash into his coat pocket. The dark dust dissolved into his palm. “A bunch of big tough wild dogs,” he said to the pack, which waited for him on the banks of the frozen debris. “But too afraid to follow me …” To follow him where? Where was he?

  Across the street the curtained windows were two black eyes on the face of Akhmed’s house. If Akhmed had left at dawn, and said he would be gone all day, who was looking in on Ula? The most painful revelations were the quietest, those moments when the map opened on the meandering path that had led him here. An ailing woman would spend the day alone; he hadn’t envisioned that.

  “I could call on her, see if she is all right, if she needs anything,” he said, glancing to the dogs for approval. They were all ripples on the same pond. “If I’m looking after a bunch of dogs, the least I can do is look after her. Don’t take that tone with me. I am not breaking in. I have the key right here.” He displayed the spare key Akhmed had given him with a grin, nine years earlier, on the day the bank that owned four-fifths of Akhmed’s house was bombed into oblivion. The dogs cocked their heads, unconvinced. “No, I haven’t been called for, but that’s beside the point. Are you sure you want to discuss etiquette? I have a lot to say about ass-sniffing as a way to say hello.”

  Two paces toward the house a burgeoning worry spread through him. What if the dogs thought he was leaving them for human company? Well, he was, but he had to break it to them gently. They were sensitive souls, even if they occasionally dug up and ate newly buried bodies. He dropped to one knee and opened his arms. All but Sharik licked the aftertaste of oats from his breath, and he told them how much he loved them, how much he needed them, how he would never leave them. Then the bald dog sniffed his ass.

  His highly critical canine audience observed as he knocked at the front door. “See?” he said to them. “I have no choice but to use the key.”

  He pushed open the door and crossed the thick mustiness to the bedroom. A pair of slender legs, no more than sheet creases, shifted beneath the covers. For three minutes he watched her from the threshold, a second slice of his day spent watching a second addled mind at rest; then she rolled over. He looked into her eyes and they took their time looking back.

  “You’ve gotten old, Akhmed,” she said, and he couldn’t suppress his smile. Like a child, this one.

  “I’m not Akhmed,” he said. Akhmed had been eight days old when they first met in the living room of Akhmed’s parents in 1965. He had held the infant in his arms and a relief profound as any he would ever feel had seeped right through him. Akhmed’s eight-day-old eyes had held the reflection of ten thousand possible lives. Khassan wasn’t an emotive or superstitious man, and nothing like it had ever happened again, but he had found, layered in the infant’s half-lidded eyes, innumerable, wanting faces, none of which he had recognized.

  “I’m sorry,” Ula murmured. “My head isn’t right.”

  He sat on the bed beside the bone of her hip. “Don’t apologize. I spent the morning talking to dogs.”

  “If you’re not Akhmed, then why are you here?”

  “I wanted to see if you needed anything. If you wanted someone to talk to. Akhmed won’t be back for a while.”

  “He won’t be back?” she seemed to ask, but he wasn’t sure. She had but two notes in her, and on the wire stretching between them her questions and answers warbled the same.

  “Not for a little while,” he said. Three full water glasses and a bowl of hardened rice sat on the nightstand.

  Sensing his uncertainty, she again asked, “Why are you here?”

  “I miss speaking to people,” he said. When he admitted it aloud he wanted to laugh. It was that simple. He was that lonely. He had come to an invalid woman to offer the help he needed. “I miss being able to speak. For nearly two years Akhmed has been the only person I’ve had a conversation with.”

  “You said you spent the morning talking to dogs.”

  He smiled and nodded. “I didn’t think you’d remember that. He must be the
only person you’ve talked with in that time, too.”

  “Who?”

  “Do you know my name?” he asked. She strained but came back with nothing. “That’s okay,” he said. “That’s just fine.”

  “Tell me a story,” she said.

  “A story?”

  “There were the stories of paintings. All true.”

  He frowned. He didn’t know the stories of any paintings. “I only know one story,” he said. “I can say it happened, but I can’t say if it’s true. Did you ever meet Akhmed’s mother?” He took her empty stare for a no. “I’m glad you remember that because you couldn’t have met her. Cancer took her when Akhmed was seven. Her name was Mirza.”

  She nodded because she was expected to.

  “If I tell you this story, do you promise you will forget it?”

  “I can’t promise anything,” she said distantly. He held her wrist, felt its plodding pulse. A mind too feeble to tell the time of day can still get the right blood to the right places, he thought. He’d never told anyone about her. “I will tell you about Mirza.”

  He heard about the mass deportation nearly two years after it occurred, he told Ula, only after he himself had been deported to Kazakhstan. On February 23, 1944, Red Army Day, a day when Khassan had been shooting Nazis in eastern Poland, the Soviet NKVD rounded up Chechens in their town squares and forced them into Lend-Lease Studebaker trucks. Those who resisted or whom the NKVD deemed unfit for transport were shot. Packed into a coal wagon, Khassan’s parents and sister slept on maize sacks and ate dry maize meal as the trains slowly steamed eastward. Local soldiers cut their hair and dusted them with delousing powder when they arrived on the Kazakh steppe. Khassan never knew what happened to his sister, only that she had been seen climbing into the coal wagon in Grozny but hadn’t been seen climbing out. His parents slept in a kolkhozniki dormitory cellar, on a bed of dry mattress straw, and when hungry they made a flour of the mattress straw and fried thin powdery slabs that left them feverish but full. When they ran out of straw, they slept on the stone floor and made soup from grains picked from horse manure. By the time Khassan reached Kazakhstan in autumn 1945, conditions had improved but his parents had already perished, and he pieced together the story of their last year from the memories of their neighbors and friends, and from Mirza.

  Mirza had been a child when Khassan left for war, and in 1947, when he came upon her straining water through cheesecloth, he didn’t recognize her as the girl who, at the age of eight, had been brought up on criminal charges for drawing a charcoal mustache on her lip and goose-stepping around the barnyard, ordering livestock to become more active builders of communism. “Let me have some,” he said, thirsty after his long way. “Go fuck yourself,” she said simply. It was their first conversation. She would become the love of his life, but he couldn’t have known that as he turned and stepped into dung so deep it reached the knot in his laces. He couldn’t have known it as he pried the pail from Mirza’s fingers and washed his boot in her clean water.

  A year later the schoolmaster died and Khassan replaced him. He was without qualification or experience, but after the war, the squabbles of children approximated peace, and he was happy. Among his pupils was Mirza’s youngest sister, a quick-witted girl, with fingernails bitten so short she couldn’t lift a kopek coin from a counter, who once set a tack on the chair of the commissar’s chubby son to see if he would explode. Though he saved the commissar’s son from the tack—and thus Mirza’s sister from a bullet—he recognized that thread of recklessness running through her family just asking to be snipped short.

  For May Day 1950, Khassan organized a children’s parade. Adults lined the stone-marked road to cheer their children and avoid the penalty of ten years’ hard labor for nonattendance. Twenty-three of the ninety-six children marching that day wouldn’t live to see their native Chechnya. The commissar’s son would be among them because the cholera ward, without respect for political class, was the nearest to an egalitarian society that most of them would ever come. Mirza’s youngest sister was one of the four who held on a raised pallet the plaster bust of Stalin. Mirza glared from across the street, her hands at her sides, the only pair there not brought together in applause. Her contempt passed through him as light through vapor. The following afternoon she confronted him in the schoolhouse with a look that would have severed weaker necks. “You are a coward,” she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy. It was their second conversation.

  In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, the Chechen ethnicity was rehabilitated by the pen stroke of a distant bureaucrat. On the evening of the day the first trains arrived to transport them home, Khassan followed the pale stone road to the pale stone cemetery, carrying with him a spade and the brown suitcase his parents had last packed twelve years earlier. The earth was hard and dry, and it took several hours to reach them. His mother’s index finger pointed at him through the dirt. The burial shroud had replaced their skin. They were lighter than he had expected, their muscles hard in desiccation. He folded their arms, pulled on their legs until the tendons snapped; he was as reverent as possible. He packed them tenderly within the discolored suitcase lining. Their bones lay bowed and prostrate. He performed no ablutions, and the brown of earth and decay had rusted his hands, but God would forgive him these lesser blasphemies. They had given him as good a life as they could. He wished he could have given them a better death. He decided, then, that he would write a history of his parents, of his people, of this sliver of humanity the world seemed determined to forget. Standing in the mounded dirt the spade was a slender tombstone. He wasn’t alone. Hundreds of others had come to raise and return their dead, and the dust reddened the night.

  When he reached his cabin, a small shack within a perimeter of pale stone, he wanted to wash his hands. He didn’t. Instead he folded the shirts he’d won in cards from Red Army guards, the long underwear he’d stripped from a corpse, the marmot coat a Kazakh widow had traded for the promise that her departed husband’s name would remain on his tongue for nine years of nightly prayers. The brown suitcase stood at the door. He had inherited no other, nothing in which to pack the clothes so neatly folded on the floor. For eleven years he had dreamed of leaving behind his folded clothes for whatever Soviet ethnicity next fell from official favor, leaving behind all but his parents’ remains, and the following morning, when a locomotive whistle seared through his sleep, he awoke to that dream.

  The cattle cars were filled by the time he reached the tracks. The refugees watched uncertainly as trains glided into the pale grasses of the steppe, becoming the only measure of scale. Balancing on a tie, beneath an exhaust cloud that rose like a locust swarm returning to God’s mouth, he found Mirza. “You’re still here,” she said. “I am,” he said. She lifted his brown suitcase. “It’s light,” she said. “It’s my parents,” he said. It was their third conversation.

  The refugees camped along the tracks, afraid of missing the next transport, but Khassan, trusting the sky to convey the clatter of approaching trains, walked into the empty village beside Mirza. Trails of clothing, furniture, and dishware flowed from the open doors of cabins and huts. The commissar and his entourage were the first to flee, and the Party headquarters, the most architecturally sound building for many kilometers, was abandoned. They passed through meeting rooms papered with bulletins announcing the repatriation, and into the commissar’s office. Three upholstered chairs encircled a coffee table where a golden fountain pen stood at attention in its reservoir. Behind them, hanging over the doorframe, the plaster bust of Stalin observed them coolly. Khassan lifted it from its perch—two taps to Stalin’s forehead echoed in the hollow cranium—and wrapped it in a burgundy drape. Mirza’s face was unrecognizable in its approval.

  Khassan carried the bust to the steppe and when he set it down the tall grasses radiated around the dead dictator’s face. Mirza dropped her heel through Stalin’s temple—and what could he do, when she looked at him
like that, but become her accomplice? He crushed the big brown mustache, and she joined in, stamping out the left eye; their feet engaged in this fourth conversation until their boots were white with plaster dust, and they had finally committed the treason for which they had been sentenced twelve years earlier. They shrieked and whooped until their voices were hoarse and their lungs ached and the wind was carrying off the dust and it was all celebration. Finally, he spread the burgundy drape across the grass. She reached for his cheek and he reached for her shoulder. On her stomach, to the left of her navel, an oval birthmark spread like a tipped inkwell. He placed his mouth on it.

  Ula had closed her eyes, but in the quiet he felt the relief of confession like a current carrying him after he stopped kicking. It felt wonderful to be heard and forgotten. He wanted more. He wanted to erase the past he had spent his life recording. Later, in his study, he gathered his notes, rough drafts, red-line edits, everything, and set them in a bedsheet and carried them into the woods. It would take many trips, many tied bedsheets, but he would erase every word he had ever written. The dogs accompanied him, and behind them followed the memory of Mirza’s accusation, now stronger, fortified by the testimony of four decades spent as a Soviet apologist. And after the fire had read his pages, and the dogs basked in the warmth, and the ashes grayed the snow, what would he write? Not a history of a nation that had destroyed history and nationhood. Something smaller. A letter to Havaa. His recollections of Dokka. He would begin with his favorite memory of Dokka, then go back to the first time he had met him, and end with Havaa’s birth. It would be the first true thing he had ever written.

  CHAPTER

  6