Anthony Marra - A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Sonja, more talented as physician than as sister, withheld her diagnosis as long as she could. Then one Tuesday, Sonja returned from the hospital with feet swollen and shoulders heavy, too tired, really, to begin tending to her most difficult patient of the day. Natasha sat on the divan, a stack of books propped on the cushion beside her. Origins of Chechen Civilization, The Third Soviet Guide to Ornithology, Life and Fate . A yellowed tome covered her lap. The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians .

“I can define any words you don’t understand,” Sonja offered, and immediately regretted it. Not the right tone to take. “Looking up anything particular?”

Natasha shrugged, of course.

“I hope you didn’t read that all day.” She turned to the bare wall. Her open mouth, pointed at Natasha, invariably projected condescension. “Surely there are more exciting books on the shelves.”

“I don’t want to be excited,” Natasha said flatly. “I want boredom. I want to be lobotomized by boredom.”

“Listen, Natashechka, something is wrong,” she said, and hated her lack of specificity. Something? Wrong? How could a surgeon diagnose with such imprecision? “Have you heard of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?”

Natasha nodded without looking up from the page.

“What is it, then?”

Golden lamplight outlined the text as she flipped the pages. “It is a psychological reaction that occurs after experiencing a highly stressing event outside the range of normal human experience, which is usually characterized by depression, anxiety, flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, and avoidance of reminders of the event.”

Natasha hadn’t spoken a complex sentence in months, and even recited, the clause-heavy bluster made her sound alive again. “Sound familiar?” Sonja asked.

“The Italian head doctors went through this already. I don’t want your help.”

Help was the last thing Sonja knew how to give her sister. “Can you remember the last time you went outside?” she asked. Natasha could have lit a cigarette off the end of that glare. “I’ll tell you when. When you were repatriated. You haven’t set a toe outside this apartment block since you returned to it.”

“You weren’t there,” Natasha said, shrugging. “So you don’t get to tell me what to do.”

For months she’d withheld, stopped herself, thought better, bitten her tongue to shreds. “I’m right here. Now. Here I am.” She spread her arms, not to embrace her sister, but to show how wide she was, how much of her was here. “Do you know why? Do you have any idea?”

Natasha didn’t move. She couldn’t unlock the cellar door, not for Sonja, not for anyone. What had happened down there was still happening inside her, and she wouldn’t let anyone, least of all her sister, into what she was still trying, still failing to escape from.

“Because of you. Because I was afraid you were here alone. Everything was so good in London. I was happy there. But I came back for you and that entitles me to your respect. You can hate me and think I’m a self-righteous bitch, but you will treat me with respect, because I came back here for you.”

Again, that fucking shrug! Sonja couldn’t imagine, then, with exasperation surging inside her, that one calm morning, eight and a half years away, after her sister had disappeared for a second time, she would wake on a hospital bed with her shoulders as stiff as her collarbones, and shrugging once, twice, failing to relax them, she would remember Natasha’s shrugs, how fluid, how easy, and that would be the first definitive, the first known, that wherever Natasha was she would be shrugging.

“Do you want me to feel sorry that you left your nice life in London? Are you the victim here, is that what you’re saying? Maybe you should talk with a psychiatrist about it, Sonechka. No, you made a mistake returning here for me,” Natasha stated, as simply as if still reading from the dictionary. “Just as I made a mistake leaving here for you.”

A window might have opened; a breeze might have slid across the walls, clearing the air, because Sonja smiled, and said, “We’re sisters. In that way, at least, we’re sisters.” She took a clean breath, now that they had each said what they had to say. “I bought you a souvenir,” she said, surprising even herself. “In London.”

Exhibiting great restraint, Natasha didn’t shrug. “What sort of souvenir?”

“I’m not telling you. I’m keeping it for myself.”

“It’s not a souvenir if you keep it.”

“Of course it is. It’s a gift to myself. I deserve it.”

“Why didn’t you give it to me?” Natasha had sat up and cocked her head to Sonja.

“Because,” Sonja said, picking up the dictionary and fanning the pages with her thumb, “you’re always on my nerves.”

“All the time?”

“Stampeding on my nerves.”

“I wouldn’t want it even if you were giving it to me,” Natasha said.

“Good, because I’m not.”

“I bet it’s a book about intestines.”

“You know I’d keep that for myself,” Sonja said. “I’ll give it to you right now.”

“Why?”

“How many intestines books does a woman need? I’ll trade it to you for a promise,” Sonja said. Natasha had taken up the clarinet when she was twelve, and Sonja, sixteen at the time, already sitting in on university classes, had heard every squeak, every warble, every pinched sharp through their shared, shadow-thin wall. She had paid Natasha, by the hour, not to practice. That same glint of easy opportunity returned to Natasha’s eyes.

“What promise?” she asked.

“Promise that you’ll come to the hospital with me tomorrow.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Just that. If you think you’re well enough.”

“What, you think I’m not?”

“No, no. I’m not saying that.”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Natasha said. “Fine. I promise.”

Sonja went to her room and returned a minute later. “Close your eyes,” she said, and handed her a sturdy oblong object wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.

“What is this? A doll?” Natasha asked, pulling it from the bag. “I’m a grown woman.”

“It’s not a doll. It’s a nutcracker of a Buckingham Palace guard.”

“Who are they?”

“They stand outside the queen’s palace. They’re not allowed to laugh. They just stand there. They’re not very good at guarding, when you think about it. They just stand there. You could dress up a lamppost and get as good a guard.”

“Yes,” Natasha agreed, cranking the nutcracker’s mouth up and down. “A bad guard and worse souvenir. What should I call him?”

Sonja bit her lip. “What about Alu?”

“Alu the lousy, boring, worthless souvenir.”

“Yes,” Sonja said. “That is the perfect name for him.”

“I’m a little disappointed. You spent five years in London and all I get is a doll?”

“The real gift was my absence.”

Finally, a smile.

The next morning the hospital was quiet. The few patients Maali couldn’t scare off with promises of an amputation cure-all waited for her: a sprained ankle, a case of the common cold, nothing urgent. She took Natasha through the ghost wards of deserted laboratories and examination rooms. Pigeons roosted in split IV bags. A manhole cover, leading nowhere, lay in radiology. The rooms would look unchanged eight and three-quarter years later when Sonja led Akhmed through. The powdered heroin, provided by Alu’s brother, would still slouch against the canteen cupboard wall, but when she led him past she would do so without worry, without wondering if his veins, like her sister’s, might tingle from proximity.

“This was once among the foremost oncology departments in the U.S.S.R.,” she said, as they shuffled into a room relieved of its doorknobs and light fixtures. “Party officials came from as far as Vladivostok for treatment.”