A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (10 page)

“Come here,” Sonja called. Akhmed looked over his shoulder to summon a more capable ghost from the Brezhnev-beige wall. “Akhmed, come here,” she repeated. He stepped forward, wiggling his toes in his boots. One step and then the next, with an immense gratitude for each. The skin was peeled back toward the knee. The calf muscle, cut away. The bone wasn’t wider than a chair leg.

She gestured with her scalpel. “For a below-the-knee amputation,
you want to keep in mind that stumps close to the knee joint will be difficult to fit for a prosthesis. Long stumps are also difficult to fit and can lead to circulation issues. First, you’ll need to make a fish-mouth incision superior to the point of amputation. You want a posterior flap long enough to cover the padded stump and to ensure a tensionless closure when sutured.” She described how to isolate the anterior, lateral, and posterior muscular compartments in dissection. She showed him how she had ligated the tibial, peroneal, and saphenous veins, and noted that the blood pressure always rose after the peroneal artery was tied off. She transected the sural nerve above the amputation line and let it retract into the soft-tissue bed to reduce the phantom limb sensation. With a clean scalpel she incised the dense periosteum. She gave directions in the flat, bored tone of a carpenter teaching a child to measure and cut wood, and Akhmed heard her without listening. All her Latin words and surgical jargon couldn’t mitigate the helplessness he felt while watching her finish what the land mine had begun.

“Leg amputations are normal business here,” she said, and handed him the saw. He held it, expecting her to ask for it back. She looked to it and nodded. No, she couldn’t be serious. She didn’t expect him to do
that
, did she? She barely trusted him to fold bedsheets properly. “You should get comfortable with this procedure as soon as possible.”

He gazed from the blade to the bone. The bone was a disconcerting shade of reddish gray; he’d expected it to be white. He had been six years old when he first realized that the drumstick he slurped the grease from was, in principle, the same as the bone that allowed him to walk, run, and win after-school soccer matches. He hadn’t eaten meat again for two years, so great and implacable was his fear that another carnivore would consume his own leg in reprisal. “I’m not qualified for this,” he stammered.

“This is the deal,” she said calmly. She reached for his hand. That grip held more of her compassion than the past two days combined, and then it was gone, replaced by hard pragmatism, and her fingers wrapped
his around the foam grip. “This is what we do. This is what it means for you to work here.”

His hands shook and hers steadied them. The last leg surgery he had performed had been after the
zachistka
, on a boy named Akim. He had tried his best, he really had, but he couldn’t be faulted for his lack of supplies and experience, for the lack of blood in the boy’s body and the great abundance drenching the floor, for the bullet he didn’t shoot, or for the war he had no say in; if anyone had bothered to ask his opinion, he would have happily told them that war was, generally speaking, a bad thing, to be avoided, and he would have advised them against it, because had he known that not one but two wars were coming, he would have dropped out of medical school in his first year, his reputation be damned, and gone to art school instead; had he known a domineering, cold-hearted Russian surgeon would one day ask him to cut off this poor man’s leg, he would have studied still-life portraiture, landscape oil painting, sculpture and ceramics, he would have sacrificed his brief celebrity within the village, if only to safeguard himself from this man’s leg.

“There’s only one amputation now, but what about next time?” Sonja said. “There could be five, ten.”

He exhaled. Sweat pasted his surgical mask to his cheeks. Sonja pushed his hand forward. The blade grated against the bone. The vibration of each thrust ran up the blade, through the handle, to his hand, and into his bones. The name of the bone was
tibia
and it was connected to
fibula
and
patella
. He had studied the names that morning, but what he knew wouldn’t push the saw.

“Press harder,” she instructed, steadying the bone for him. “This isn’t a delicate operation.”

Halfway through, the blade unexpectedly went red with marrow. He stopped sawing.

“What’s wrong?” Sonja asked.

He could have answered that question several different ways, but he
shook his head, and kept sawing. “I didn’t know human bone marrow is red. I thought it would be golden. Like a cow’s.”

“The marrow of a living bone is filled with red blood cells. If we were to shake a little salt and pepper on this bone and roast it in the oven, the marrow would turn golden in about fifteen minutes,” she said.

He feared he might vomit.

“Fine work,” she said, as he sliced through the tibia. “Just one more bone to go.”

He set the blade on the fibula and his quick hard saw-strokes spat into the air a fine white bone dust that drifted toward him, drawn by his breath, eventually dissolving into his damp surgical mask. Sonja’s dark eyes leered at him in his periphery, and he pushed the saw harder, faster, wanting Sonja to see in him more than his helplessness, wanting to finish before he fainted. A dozen strokes later the foot dropped to the table. He held the remnant by the ankle, and without pause or consideration, he flipped it on its end, and blood and marrow coated his fingers as he counted six shards of glass glinting in what was left of the man’s sole.

“Set that aside,” she said. “We’ll wrap it in plastic and give it to the family for burial.” She showed him how to round off the amputated bone and pad it with muscle. She pulled the posterior flap over the muscle-padded stump, trimmed the excess skin, and sutured it with black surgical thread.

When they finished, he peeled off his latex gloves and massaged the pink soreness of his right palm, where the skin between his thumb and forefinger had swollen from the handle’s pinch. Sonja noticed, smiled, and when she raised her right hand he wanted to be back in bed with Ula, where he could pull the covers over their heads and in the humidity of their stale breaths hold the one person who believed he was knowing, capable, and strong.

Calluses covered Sonja’s palm.

CHAPTER
5

K
HASSAN
G
ESHILOV COMPLETED
the first draft of his Chechen history on the one day in January 1963 when it didn’t snow. The manuscript was 3,302 pages. When he submitted it to the city publisher in Volchansk he was told he needed to send it to the state publisher in Grozny, and when he submitted it to the state publisher in Grozny he was told he needed to send it to the national publisher in Moscow; and when he submitted it there he was told he needed to send
three
typed copies. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes as he looked at his poor, battered fingers. But he purchased the postage, paper, typewriter ribbons, and cigarettes such a monumentally monotonous activity required, and eighteen months later he received a phone call from the head editor of the history section, Kirill Ivanovich Kaputzh.

“We’re launching a thrilling new series called ‘Prehistories of Soviet
Autonomous Republics’ and we would like to publish your book as our lead title,” Kirill Ivanovich said. Even in his surprise and excitement, Khassan asked what the publisher meant by prehistory; the book he had written ended in 1962. “Prehistory,” Kirill Ivanovich explained, “is the time before the cultural and political presence of the Russian state.”

“But for Chechnya that would mean 1547.”

“Indeed.”

“But that’s just the first chapter of my book.”

“You must be delirious in your excitement, Citizen Geshilov. That is your entire book.”

“No, that is the first two hundred twenty-eight pages. Some three thousand follow it,” Khassan insisted. He had never imagined that the joy of being published at all and the despair of being published poorly could be tied together like opposite ends of a shoelace.

“Yes, in your joy and astonishment you have become confused. Go and celebrate your achievement, Citizen Geshilov. Accept my congratulations and best wishes. Not everyone has the opportunity to publish a two-hundred-twenty-eight-page book.”

And so
Origins of Chechen Civilization: Prehistory to Fall of the Mongol Empire
appeared the next year with little fanfare. The sole review, written for the university newspaper by one of his students, called the book “more interesting than the average reference book.” No one wanted to read pre-Russian history books, which was precisely why Moscow was so eager to publish them. By the time Khassan reworked the remaining three thousand pages into a lopsided companion piece—burning a partial draft after pages began disappearing—Khrushchev had been deposed; in response to murky shifts of politics, Kirill Ivanovich Kaputzh, receding farther into the safety of the past, decided to publish only pre-human geological surveys. They were heady days for Khassan’s earth-science colleagues.

Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver. Each passing
year the publisher waded farther into the morass of human history, first allowing histories of the Sumerians, then the Ancient Egyptians, and by 1972, the year Ramzan was born, publishing books on the Hellenic age. Sensing the border of 1547 might be crossed within the decade, Khassan revised his tome under the title
Chechen Civilization and Culture Under Russian Patronage
. He wrote as the voice of appeasement, justifying, glossing over, but never forgiving the four centuries of Russian depredations, believing all the while that he might slip three thousand pages of subtext past censors so sensitive to insinuation they would expurgate rain clouds from an International Workers’ Day weather forecast. In a knee-height cradle, Ramzan, skull-capped and swaddled, dozed while Khassan wrote. He would never feel closer to his son than he did then, when the rustle of Ramzan’s sleep accompanied the scratching of his pencil, and with one hand on the page and the other dipping into the crib he was the wire connecting this halved legacy; much later, he would remember those months when he and his boy could spend the whole day in the same room and mean nothing by the silence.

In 1974 Kirill Ivanovich provisionally accepted the book for publication, with the stipulation that two thousand pages be cut, before he was fired and briefly imprisoned for being too conservative with his edits, too vocal with his own opinions, and too Polish; eight months later, on hard labor duty some four thousand kilometers east of Poland, Kirill Ivanovich would stumble upon the artifacts of an ancient settlement while digging the foundation for a prison latrine, and would remember his assistant, a young man for whom he harbored the pangs of love that time and captivity hadn’t blunted, a young man whom Kirill Ivanovich had listened to, as he read aloud passages from Khassan Geshilov’s history of early civilization, passages Kirill Ivanovich kept intact in his memory, like jars to hold and preserve the beautiful voice of his assistant. Kirill Ivanovich’s successor, an editor whose aquiline nose pointed toward the prevailing political winds, decided the book required more radical revision to conform to the tedium of the era. And so began a
decade of rewrites that mirrored the plummeting Brezhnev reign. The new editor stressed that the book didn’t need to be more concise—if anything it should be longer, the editor said, so reviewers would dismiss its shortcomings as the price of ambition—and Khassan reupholstered the paragraphs he’d stripped under Kirill Ivanovich’s guidance. He wrote tracts on nineteenth-century threshing techniques, the history of Chechen meteorology. The new editor would respond with changes so vague and inconsistent it took weeks to divine a politically safe interpretation. “Rewrite chapter twelve as though you were not a person but a people,” one letter said. “If you write on the fatherland, your words will face the heavens,” said another.

No longer did he write in his son’s company. Ramzan had learned to speak, though Khassan wished he hadn’t. The boy used his voice like a rubber mallet;
can I
was the only question that escaped his mouth, never
what
or
how
or
why
. Ramzan wasn’t clever or kind or imaginative, or even overly obedient or cruel or dull, and Khassan built his aversion upon the empty cellar of what his son was not. In the historical sources there were kings and princes whose distaste for their progeny took more sadistic forms than Khassan’s indifference; compared to Ivan the Terrible, he was a paradigm of good parenting. You can choose your son no more than you can choose your father, but you can choose how you will treat him, and Khassan chose to treat his as if he wasn’t there. He chose to write when he should have spoken, to speak when he should have listened. He chose to read his books when he should have watched his son, to watch when he should have approached. One day when Ramzan was eight he entered Khassan’s office and asked his father to teach him to ride a bicycle. “You’ll fall,” Khassan said, without looking up from the page. The moment would haunt him later. What if he had looked up?