Anthony Marra - A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

After Ramzan climbed into the driver’s seat, after he bandaged Dokka’s hands with bandannas and duct tape, he looked to the dash and saw that the interrogator — whose shoes, wet with blood, now shone in the afternoon sun — had left them with a full tank of gas.

And, now, two years later, December 2004, two weeks before Dokka disappeared, when the dial tone severed the Cossack colonel’s threat, and Ramzan packed away the satellite phone, and descended from the cabin of the abandoned logging truck, he did so with the same numbness that had allowed him to drive away from the Landfill two years earlier. Both times he heard Dokka’s beseeching voice, and both times he did his best to ignore it. For the two weeks after the Cossack colonel’s call, the two weeks in which his bowels clenched in a constipated fist, Dokka, not yet a ghost, haunted Ramzan. He ran through the twelve names he had already given the Feds, the twelve who had disappeared because he had become an informer two years earlier at the Landfill. What did a thirteenth matter? What did any one person matter when pounded against the anvil of history? He sat quietly and remembered Dokka as if he had already gone. Dokka always ended his questions with or , as if anticipating he would be denied: Would you like to play chess, or …? Will the G-3 rations be handed out tomorrow, or …? His generosity in opening his home to refugees, and his intransigence in demanding rent, even if payment was no more than a dull button, or a paper clip, or a piece of stationery for his daughter’s souvenir collection. His brown eyes had twice grown dull: first after he lost his fingers, then after he lost his wife. His paddle hands. His slender toes taught the dexterity of a left hand. He could clasp a pencil between his first and second toe, and write in awkward letters so large only a sentence would fit on the page. His genius for chess.

The more Ramzan thought about it, the more awful it became. The Dokka unearthed in no more than a trowelful of memory was enough to break his heart. Dokka insisted on wearing button shirts, and how he dressed each morning, if the girl helped him, if he was too proud to ask his daughter for help, if he woke before dawn to begin the long arduous task of buttoning his shirt with his toes, Ramzan didn’t know. On that frantic truck ride back from the Landfill, Dokka had thanked Ramzan for saving his life. Somehow they had survived and not even the agony of ten amputated fingers had been enough to make him forget his manners.

Two weeks after his first conversation with the Cossack colonel, he trekked back into the woods, back under the ice-encased branches, to the cabin of the corroded logging truck. He called the colonel and gave up Dokka, explaining that Dokka harbored refugees, and also likely rebel sympathizers, though he didn’t add that most Chechens sympathized. He described, truthfully, how Dokka had asked for a weapon when they returned from the Landfill because he had feared he couldn’t protect his family. He described, truthfully, how he had taught Havaa to shoot the Makarov pistol because Dokka no longer had the fingers to pull the trigger. It was the first unembellished account he had provided. The silver Makarov pistol was the sole piece of evidence, and though he gave extenuating circumstances, mitigating factors, and reasonable doubt, the colonel wasn’t interested in building a prosecution against Dokka. The colonel asked about Havaa, and Ramzan, with a tightening in his gut that promised no parole of his captive bowels, understood that when a man is implicated in the assassination of a colonel, his entire family must disappear, even if his entire family is an eight-year-old girl.

When it was done, and Ramzan emerged from the woods after speaking with the Cossack colonel for the second time, he forced himself to walk to Dokka’s house. An ache radiated from his temples. He closed his eyes. What did you do with that gun, Dokka? You stupid man. I can’t buy your life this time. With each step he discarded a piece of himself. Even as he gave up his neighbors, he cocooned himself in the rationale of exigency. Whether eating scavenged food or selling an old friend, they had all shamed themselves to survive. Greed didn’t motivate his informing, at least not primarily; primarily, he informed by necessity, to survive, for his love and hate and above all awe of the power wielded by the interrogating officer with less shiny shoes. But by giving away Dokka and the girl, he had stepped into full accountability, and lost the shadows that had saved him.

A few seconds after the knock, the door opened by the ingenious foot-operated pulley system Dokka had designed from a timber saw band, a shopping-cart wheel, and a stirrup.

Dokka welcomed him, invited him in. Not a trace of suspicion. Dokka, he realized with painful clarity, was the only person, besides the Feds, who would speak with him. The only person who tolerated his voice, who would listen and respond, and it was at that moment, he would later realize, that the universe went silent. He could have pinned the gun on Akhmed, on anyone. Why, this one time, had he told the truth? Again Dokka invited him in. Only then, with Dokka’s hospitality, friendship, and conversation before him, did Ramzan understand why he had inflicted this visit upon himself.

“Oh, no,” Ramzan said, when Dokka beckoned to the kitchen table. “I just stopped by to see if you needed any firewood.”

“You left a heap in the backyard just the other day.”

“Yes, I know, I just wanted to see if …” He bit his lip and glanced to the threshold, scuffed and worn by the feet of hundreds of passing refugees. It would record the footfall of those who would disappear Dokka and his daughter that night. He looked up into Dokka’s brown eyes.

“Are you all right?” Dokka asked. “You look ill.”

I’m sorry, Dokka. Look at you. I’m sorry.

“Ramzan?”

I came to say good-bye, he thought. “I came to say hello,” he said.

“SO THIS IS why they keep you around?” Akhmed said to the one-armed guard, who just then, in the hospital parking lot, floundered under the weight of a heavy box. A blue throbbing vein surfaced on the guard’s valiant left forearm. “Do you moonlight as a professional mover?” Akhmed asked. He leaned against the jeep, casually smoking a cigarette. “Half-off moving?”

“May I shoot him, Dr. Sonja?” the one-armed guard asked, hopefully.

She smiled at these two buffoons — the one-armed guard threatened to kick Akhmed’s ass with his two working legs — and they had to be buffoons, because every hospital employee with a kopek of common sense had left. “I need his arms,” she called after the guard, who was chasing Akhmed across the parking lot. “Don’t shoot him until we get all the supplies inside.”

When they finished unloading, she went to the canteen cupboard. Behind the shoebox of loose cash, the clattering ID cards, the plastic bag of heroin, stood the good stuff: cans of sweetened condensed milk. The sweet syrup gurgled from the cut triangle, a thick coating on her gums, and for a few succulent seconds her mind narrowed to the width of that sugary stream. “Sweetened condensed milk will rot your mouth but preserve your soul,” advised her father’s aunt Lena, who died in a Grozny nursing home at the age of one hundred and three, having outlived two husbands, six children, three grandchildren, and thirty-two teeth. The maternity ward was empty, the trauma quiet, and Sonja closed her eyes, slipped into this unexpected peace as she would warm, cleansing water.