Anthony Marra - A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Only two of the field commander’s shirt buttons matched the brown fabric, whose original color would be anyone’s guess. Natasha pulled the shirt past his shoulder and covered the stitches with a fresh bandage. The dental floss had worked. “I was in the mountains once,” she said. “I climbed right across the border.”

“In winter?”

“Spring.”

“The winter will be difficult. We need supply lines. Good middlemen. Maybe we’ll find someone in Eldár. You’re not looking for a new profession, are you?”

As his contribution to the hospital, the field commander left the bag of toothpaste. He stood stiffly by the door as his command shuffled out. Alone, he turned to the sisters.

“Thank you,” he said, bowing slightly. “You are kind, decent, and if I can risk impertinence, quite attractive. There must be some Chechen in you.”

“I have a favor to ask,” Sonja said. “Would you write us a letter of safe passage, so we can, should we need to, travel through rebel land?”

The field commander had two sisters of his own, older by one and three years, who teased and chided and always took care of him. He kept their names written on the sheet of paper stitched in his trouser seam. He trusted them with the name of his first crush and would trust them with his eternity. He smiled and searched for a pen.

When the field commander departed, and the double doors swung closed, Natasha returned to the maternity ward almost believing the war had left with him. Six days later the Feds would enter the city. They would launch a single mortar round at the hospital in retaliation for sheltering rebels. That round would hit the fourth-floor storage room. Maali would be searching for clean sheets. She would land atop the rubble, four floors below, her pulse slowing in her wrist. A syringe would be prepared and half injected, but death would relieve Maali’s pain before the drug took effect, and the senseless, screaming world would go quiet when Natasha slipped that same syringe between her toes, and with a push of the plunger, sent Maali’s blood into her own.

HAD HE SLEPT on the divan, he would have seen the letter to Havaa. Had the side lamp still held even a spark of electricity, he would have seen the letter to Havaa. Had he risen an hour later, when dawn threw its bright beams across the floor, he would have seen the letter to Havaa. But he hadn’t seen it, and now Havaa was galloping across the waiting room, her face a flower head, a moon, a cannonball, and then it was there, punching into his gut, knocking the breath from his lungs, and only then, with her arms belted around his waist, did he remember the letter from Khassan which he had forgotten to bring.

“You’re here,” she proclaimed to his hip bone.

“Where else would I be?” He didn’t fully appreciate what the girl knew, that here was a special, unlikely place. She thought he could have disappeared by now, too. That he could be with her father, wherever that was, and whatever that meant. But he was here. The sharp sting of bleach preceded Sonja’s footsteps and they both looked to the door before she appeared. Her bright white scrubs could belong to a doctor in Moscow or London or Berlin. Should he ever disturb a sleeping land mine, or cross the path of a bullet, he would want to be treated by a doctor wearing those scrubs.

The previous night, as he had sketched the portrait of her sister, he had fought the urge to lean in so his left knee would touch her right. Two years had passed since he last touched a knee like that. And before that? When had he touched Ula’s knees with anything like desire? Caretaking had refined his passion, once as raw and combustible as crude oil, into a dimmer, longer-burning love.

“So this is the Tolstoy book?” She nodded to the chair where Hadji Murád lay. That, he hadn’t forgotten.

“Yes, the one he wrote about Chechnya.”

Pulling back a stray lock of hair, she drew a question mark around her ear. He handed her the book. She flipped to the last page.

“What are you doing? Don’t read the last page.”

“I always read the last page first,” she said, without looking up.

“That ruins everything. The whole book is working toward the last page.”

Her lips pursed to a pebble. The paper cover bent in her grip, as if she were steadying her hands. The amphetamines? But she spoke in a flat, uninspired tone. “If it’s not an ending I think I’ll like, then I won’t read the book.” She handed it back to him.

“Are you serious?”

“He gets decapitated on the last page. That’s not an ending I want to read.”

She was harder to pin down than the last pickle in the jar. Here he had thought he would impress her, thought they would have conversations about the book’s images and themes, a literary salon in a city without electricity.

“But it’s the great book. It’s a century and a half old and still the best book about the first and second wars.”

“Why would I want to read what I’m living?”

“You prefer escape?”

“You’ve been here four days,” she said. “Keep coming back, and we’ll see if you still think books are worth arguing over.”

Akhmed, Deshi, and Havaa went to the weekly aid distribution point, so shortly after eight, when a man was carried in with a tailpipe lodged in his chest, Sonja received him alone. The man, an army contractor, had been plagued by asthma for all of his twenty-one years. After living his life as a drowning man, his final breath, nineteen seconds after the car bomb detonated, entered him effortlessly, the easiest inhalation of his life, through the metal trachea jutting from his chest, and into his collapsed lung.

But Sonja only knew him as a corpse. The handful of amphetamines that had propelled her through a sleepless night lingered in her veins. She wheeled him into the trauma ward on a hospital bed, and sat beside him as moths fluttered overhead. His head lolled to the side and his eyelids snapped open. She began speaking with the corpse — who was, in all respects, a wonderful listener — and became so engrossed in the hallucination she lost track of the real world behind her where Akhmed’s footsteps sounded in the corridor.

“Honor the dead?” Sonja was saying, her face level with that of the corpse. Akhmed watched from the doorway. “Yes, but only if the dead are honorable. No, of course I’m not casting aspersions. It’s okay if you feel rotten. You just died. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Now, I must ask if you can see my sister down there. Yes, I know it’s crowded, but please have a look. I can wait. And while you’re at it, would you save me a chair? Oh, I should have known it would be standing room only.” Akhmed couldn’t see her face, but her exhausted voice was enough to make him ache. “You say you’ve had trouble breathing?” she said, speaking into the tailpipe as if into a microphone. “It appears you have a bronchial growth.” When she took the man’s face in her hands, Akhmed stepped into the room to save her from whatever was happening inside her head. “There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man,” she told the corpse. “But I can tell we would have had a grand time, you and I.”

Two hands, on her shoulders, pulled her gently from the corpse before it could answer, before it could tell her if Natasha was down there with him.

“Not you, too,” Akhmed said, wearily. His skin was a degree or two warmer than the corpse’s. His navy pes , a size too small, still roosted on the back of his head. “Someone here has to stay sane.”