Anthony Marra - A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

She went to Sonja’s bookshelf. Extra brackets supported the heavy textbooks, and her index finger brushed past the spines of books too heavy to hold in one hand. How had civilization survived long enough to accumulate the knowledge contained in these books? The slimmer volumes stood on the upper shelf, a yellowed Red Army field manual the most useful of the bunch. Scanning the shelf, she recalled how Sonja always read the last page of a book first, how her sister had to know what would happen, where the story led, to see if it was worth the effort. She didn’t open the torrid romance novels at the end of the shelf. The worn bindings had an intimacy absent from the rest. She imagined Sonja lying in bed, reading melodrama with an ache in her chest she couldn’t quantify or explicate, and thus couldn’t understand. Instead, she took a slender volume entitled Origins of Chechen Civilization: Prehistory to the Fall of the Mongol Empire by Khassan Geshilov.

She read by the slow burn of candlelight. Folklore said God had scattered ethnicities across the earth with a saltshaker; the shaker had slipped from his fingers when he reached the Caucasus, and a few grains of every nation had landed in its valleys. Other origin theories: the Chechens had descended from Scythian hordes, from the daughters of Genghis Khan, from a penal colony established by Alexander the Great, from a lost Roman legion. After finishing the first chapter, she flipped to the dust jacket. According to the three-sentence biography, Khassan Geshilov taught at Volchansk State University and lived in Eldár. This book was the first of a proposed multivolume history of the Chechen lands. In his photo he had clear brown eyes, a thick mustache silvered with gray hair, and a smile suggesting he was thinking of a flaky pastry or a woman’s smooth calves rather than ancient hordes. Until the candle died, she read of ancient invasions: the Scythians in 850 B.C., the Greeks two centuries later, the Romans in the first century B.C., the Baltic Goths in A.D. 240, the Asian Huns in A.D. 370, the Avars, Khazars, Circassians, Mongols, and finally, ultimately, the Russians.

Without electricity or gas, the kitchen became a twilight mausoleum of dead appliances. One day, Natasha had an idea. Wearing latex gloves she found in Sonja’s room, she scrubbed the innards of the oven and refrigerator with steel wool and bleach. She cut a broomstick to the width of the refrigerator compartment, jammed it in below the thermostat control, and pulled out the plastic shelves. In her bedroom, she gathered clothes from the floor in sweeping armfuls and deposited them before the refrigerator and the oven. Ever since she had begun working for the shuttle trader, her wardrobe exceeded her closet space. She hung silk evening dresses and cashmere sweaters on the broomstick bar, set folded jeans and blouses on the oven rack. When finished, she opened the doors to her new closet and bureau and felt pleased with her ingenuity. This is how you will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space.

Smoke turned the days into twelve-hour twilights. In the afternoons, when the chance of aerial bombing was the greatest, she wandered through the suburbs. She thought of her sister often. In their weekly conversations, Sonja described her boyfriend, Brendan, a Slavic Studies PhD candidate from Scotland, whose Russian was worse than Sonja’s English. She described the international dormitory, which housed students from thirty-four different countries, none of whom tried to kill each other. She described pubs and monuments, black taxies that looked like bowler hats on wheels, a massive obelisk supporting the statue of a tiny man in Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace guards who wouldn’t shoot her even if she openly mocked them, supermarkets with entire aisles devoted to breakfast cereal and salespeople who actually seemed pleased by the presence of customers. That first year, for the first time, the sisters had become friends. We are all the other has, Natasha had thought, but she knew Sonja had so much more. Sonja promised to find a way to bring her to London, promised to plead her case with the university, the Home Office, the goddamn queen, but nothing came of it, and Natasha wanted to flee but couldn’t, didn’t know how to, had heard horror stories of what happened to lone women refugees, and so their conversations grew shorter as civil society disintegrated. Teenagers with stolen firearms replaced policemen on the streets. Hand grenades cost less than jars of Nescafé at the bazaar. She didn’t want to hear about the scones, and decided Sonja didn’t want to feel guilty for eating them.

Days passed without speaking, then weeks. The telephone lines went weak from electrical shortages, but the central telecommunications exchange hadn’t been hit. Natasha left the phone off the hook for days and the soft throb of the dial tone became the voice of stability in her solitude. When she wanted to speak with her sister, she went to the bookshelf instead. She read Origins of Chechen Civilization twice in one month, focusing on the last pages of each chapter, where the ancient invasions ended. After she wrung from Khassan Geshilov’s words all the consolation she could, she returned the book to the top shelf, beside the romance novels, and kneeling on the floor, tugged at the largest reference book. A massive thing, a dining room table’s worth of pulped wood. The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians . She rested the book on her thighs and its weight soon put her legs to sleep. The four thousand eight hundred and eighty-four translucent pages held the most arcane and useless information. The names of buried blood vessels in Latin, Russian, and the official languages of the fourteen Soviet republics. The weight ranges of internal organs: 117 to 170 grams per kidney, 1.4 to 1.6 kilograms for a liver, 250 to 350 grams for a heart. She flipped through the book and found answers to questions no sane person would ever ask. The definition of a foot. The average length of a femur. Nothing for insanity by grief , or insanity by loneliness , or insanity by reading reference books . What inoculation could the eight-point font provide for the whisper of Sukhois in the sky? Based on the average life expectancy of a Soviet woman, she could expect to live for another forty-eight years, but the Soviet Union had died, and she hadn’t, and the appendices couldn’t explain this discrepancy in data, when the subject outlasted its experiment. Only one entry supplied an adequate definition, and she circled it with red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena — organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation .

If she stood on the stool in the southwestern kitchen corner and pointed the radio antenna due south, she could occasionally pick up Russian-language news broadcasts from Nazran or Tbilisi. From there, she gleaned what information she could from the outside world. Porous enough to allow luxury cars, American cigarettes, and Russian firearms, the borders remained too dense for objective journalism. A Georgian accent raised the newscaster’s Russian by half an octave and from that lilting, disembodied tenor she learned that Yeltsin had an eight percent approval rating and an election eighteen months away. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the primary opposition party, denounced him for losing the vast territories of the former Soviet Union. She understood precisely that this wounded pride would lead to punishment, would lead a crippled country to start a war to prove itself more powerful. On December 9, 1994, Yeltsin issued a statement ordering the Federal army to execute the disarmament of all illegal armed units in Chechnya, or, as they were known locally, the government . On December 10, 1994, he went to a hospital for a nose operation. On December 11, 1994, upon hearing reports that the first of the forty thousand troops amassed at the northern border had crossed the Terek River, she realized that the war had only just begun.