Anthony Marra: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“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.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He was a good man. He was an arborist in Eldár Forest before the wars. He didn’t have fingers. He was very good at chess.”

“He is very good at chess,” the girl snapped, and glared at Akhmed. Grammar was the only place the girl could keep her father alive, and after amending Akhmed’s statement, she leaned back against the wall and with small, certain breaths, said is is is . Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

Akhmed summoned the arborist with small declarative memories, and Sonja let him go on longer than she otherwise would because she, too, had tried to resurrect by recitation, had tried to recreate the thing by drawing its shape in cinders, and hoped that by compiling lists of Natasha’s favorite foods and songs and annoying habits, her sister might spontaneously materialize under the pressure of the particularities.