Anthony Marra - A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Outside, the rising sun flashed on the frost as he stomped toward his truck, carrying his backpack and the teakettle. He popped the hood and, after letting the kettle cool in the snow, filled the radiator. Antifreeze was an unaffordable luxury, so each evening he drained the radiator and each morning refilled it, and he did this until spring. The weapons and supplies — the nineteen other Makarov pistols among them — were already packed in back. It was a risk leaving the weapons outside overnight, but less of a risk than bringing them in. The temperature difference could easily fracture the rifle operating rods. His father stood in the doorframe, his frown the largest wrinkle on his face.

In two minutes his home was indistinguishable from the other snowcapped dwellings scattered in the rear view. He honked twice when he reached Dokka’s. Through the living room window, an argument between Dokka and his wife halted with the second horn blast. Havaa stood in the doorway, watching Dokka forlornly as he slung a knapsack over his shoulder and clomped through the snow to the passenger’s side.

“Difficult morning?” Ramzan asked.

Dokka smiled. “I’m married. What morning isn’t?”

No vehicles had passed since the last snowfall and without tire tracks to follow he couldn’t be sure where the road was. As long as he didn’t run into a tree, he figured, he was going the right way. Slouched in the passenger seat, Dokka pushed a pebble in small circles around his palm.

On the road, the snow rose from ten to twenty centimeters as they drove south. Ramzan kept at forty kilometers an hour for so long the two digits seemed skewered on the speedometer needle. They stopped to eat lunch and relieve themselves beside a thicket of pines, whose snowy boughs provided camouflage for the red truck.

“The snow is like my wife’s mother,” Dokka said, kicking it over the tire tracks. “She will name every place we’ve been.”

“Have a cigarette.”

“You haven’t hunted this year. You’ve forgotten that a buck is easiest to track in fresh snow.”

Ramzan hoisted himself on the warm engine hood. What accounted for Dokka’s sudden anxiety? Yes, they would likely be shot if discovered by the Feds or state security forces, but that could happen as easily in Eldár or Volchansk, in their homes or in the street, while they slept, or while they played chess, a fate so likely to befall a Chechen man it seemed silly to worry about it too much.

Before them stretched a white field that had, for eight years now, grown nothing but weeds and dust. The snow erased all measure of distance and the field expanded past the horizon, wide enough to extinguish the sun.

“You won’t be able to do this much longer either,” Dokka said. “The war is over. Grozny has fallen. These skirmishes are final breaths.”

“You’re an optimist, Dokka.”

Night fell and they drove through terraced valleys until they reached a hamlet built of the same pale stone that crowned the slopes. Centuries earlier, the hamlet had been home to several thousand; but in 1956, when the Chechens returned from Kazakh exile, Soviet authorities prohibited them from returning to their ancestral homes, and this hamlet of pristine ruins was one among hundreds scattered throughout the highlands. It seemed so unnatural to Ramzan to see a village decimated not by bombs and bullets but by time and neglect. The thirty-nine residents who gathered around the truck shared the blood of common great-great-grandparents. The men wore lambskin hats and tall leather boots, the older women wore gray and black headscarves and long plain dresses, and the younger women wore blue and pink hijabs folded to the width of a hunting blade. The children stood just outside the splay of headlight, afraid it might burn them.

They were met by the tall, arboreal elder, known for eating snow to numb his stomach ulcer. After washing in a tin basin, they dined at his home. Slabs of white stone sealed with clay-lime mortar formed the walls. Weathered petroglyphs adorned each stone: spokes of light jutting from plum-sized suns. In the main room they ate on the mats they would later sleep on. They chewed differently here. Their bowls full, their bites unrationed. No need of words when the tongue could converse with mutton.

Unaccustomed to such portions, Ramzan and Dokka finished last. As soon as they set down their bowls, the women filed in through the backdoor. The women waited for the men to leave before taking their places on the lambskin blankets. Ramzan, the last out, heard whispers and suppressed laughter as the door closed behind him and very much wished he could have remained behind. The men followed a deer trail past the ice-glazed remnants of a stone tower. In earlier centuries, it had been a fortress, watchtower, signal light, and anchor to the long-since-scattered teip . Past the tower they reached a clearing. A series of elevated planks formed a flat, dry, tire-shaped platform in the center of the clearing. Its axle was a ring of stone containing the ashes of a bonfire. The men carried logs from a lean-to deeply entrenched in the hillside. Within minutes the fire reached above Ramzan’s head, so bright he could count the rings of the logs yet unconsumed. It had been years since he had last participated in a zikr .

Ramzan and Dokka removed their boots and joined the others in a circle around the fire. The elder began the zikr with prayer. A steady call, the voice of a man, he thought, in a country bereft of men. La ilaha illallah, la ilaha illallah . The elder repeated the cry, and its slow rhythm sliced the words into syllables that stood alone as if locutions of a higher language. Voices on either side joined in harmonies that buoyed the elder’s call. Then clapping, not to keep the rhythm, but to propel it. The silver of the moon and the orange of the flames entwined on the elder’s tilted face. There is no god but Allah . The men swayed from side to side as the pace increased. Swaying grew to stomping, and sawdust rose from the shaking platform, and the men shed their outer garments. Against the burn of bonfire, the men combusted. The flailing arms of overcoats, the falling hands of woolen gloves, but the cries were not the cries of a land mine or shelling, and the pain of the elder’s call was the merciful ache of longing. There is no god. But Allah. No god. But Allah .

Ramzan clapped and he stomped and he shouted as sweat slicked his face. Without warning, a man three down from Ramzan let out a long wail, and though Ramzan couldn’t tie one word from the string of utterances twisting from the man’s throat, he understood precisely what the man meant. The man’s eyes were closed, and the uncommon serenity of his features suggested he had seen all that could be seen. The elder’s voice dropped an octave and in unison the men’s stamping became a dance. They marched joyously, counterclockwise, sliding the left foot across the platform and dropping hard on the heel of the right. In unison they spun. Three hundred and sixty degrees flattened to an indivisible plane. The pressure had built in his chest and he tried to contain it with reminders that he was no longer Sufi, that these weren’t his people, that human sorrow was the prophecy of an empty heaven, but it built, and built, like the memory of a long extinguished orgasm, and the pressure closed the space between his cells, and he was released. No melody ran through his wail. His voice was hoarse and broken and he raised it. The other men took no note above the tremble of palms and planks, but Ramzan’s next breath brought peace.

The following morning Ramzan woke with a sore throat. After breakfasting on nuts, dried fruit, and goat’s milk, the elder led Ramzan and Dokka to their truck. In exchange for the hospitality, he gave the elder ten kilos of rice and a liter of butane. The elder refused any offer of munitions besides buckshot, and despite his protestations, Ramzan pressed the issue. He couldn’t recall when he had last felt so moved to ensure the safety of a stranger. But the stiffness of the elder’s frown made it known that he would never be persuaded of a hand grenade’s safety. Driving away, Ramzan struggled to focus on the road. The lives lived behind him were so small and anonymous they had escaped the notice of state socialism, of the first and second war. The previous night, for the first time in a long time, he had felt whole, and his eyes returned to the rearview, where his dignity was held within a few square centimeters of glass.