A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (13 page)

Ula had closed her eyes, but in the quiet he felt the relief of confession like a current carrying him after he stopped kicking. It felt wonderful to be heard and forgotten. He wanted more. He wanted to erase the past he had spent his life recording. Later, in his study, he gathered his notes, rough drafts, red-line edits, everything, and set them in a bedsheet and carried them into the woods. It would take many trips, many tied bedsheets, but he would erase every word he had ever written. The dogs accompanied him, and behind them followed the memory of Mirza’s accusation, now stronger, fortified by the testimony of four decades spent as a Soviet apologist. And after the fire had read his pages, and the dogs basked in the warmth, and the ashes grayed the snow, what would he write? Not a history of a nation that had destroyed history and nationhood. Something smaller. A letter to Havaa. His recollections of Dokka. He would begin with his favorite memory of Dokka, then go back to the first time he had met him, and end with Havaa’s birth. It would be the first true thing he had ever written.

CHAPTER
6

A
T THAT MOMENT
, Havaa hated the hospital. She hated the chemicals that sharpened the air and burned her throat just like the bleach her mother used to launder sheets, when there had been bleach, and sheets, and her mother. She hated the patients, who were bruised, who were broken, who took so, so, so long to die. She hated Deshi. The nurse was old, the nurse was boring, and if she were the face of life, no wonder so many patients chose death. She frowned at the stupid yellow linoleum; what was Akhmed doing? She hated him, too. He’d thrown a lab coat over her and left her to sit by herself in the waiting room while the man hauled in on the tarpaulin filled the air with screaming and the floor with bleeding. Through the thin fabric of the lab coat, she’d watched the frantic shadows thrash about on the floor, straining
to stopper everything that was pouring from that sad man. When they finished, they disappeared down the corridor, and left her there like a coat stand.

And now Akhmed had gone home, had left her again. Would he return tomorrow? Yes, he had to. She couldn’t entertain other possibilities. Yes, Akhmed would return tomorrow; he would return tomorrow and he would go to Grozny, a place they always talked about going to
together
, and he would go with Sonja instead, whom he clearly liked more than her, because she was older and had breasts, and they would probably be doing something only the two of them would find fun, like inventing a way to scratch a phantom limb, and tomorrow, when he returned, she would hate him, and until then she would miss him.

A phantom limb. She still hadn’t taught the one-armed guard to juggle, as she had promised Akhmed, and she hated that she wanted to impress Akhmed even when he wasn’t with her. She found the guard at the hospital entrance, asleep on the bench. He wore the faded olive uniform of the rebels. She pressed her index finger into his stomach as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far, because he didn’t have much stomach to him. He woke with a grunt. “What do you want?”

“To juggle.”

He closed his eyes. “You don’t need my permission. Go forth.

Juggle.”

“No, I’m here to teach you to juggle.”

“You must be kidding.” He hadn’t opened his eyes again.

“You aren’t a one-armed freak that everyone feels sorry for,” Havaa said, as comfortingly as she could. When Akhmed had taught her to juggle six months earlier, he had used small rectangles of gauze that flapped and turned in the breeze like a shoal of starving white fish. They had stood in the middle of the street, the gusting headwind the nearest thing to traffic, the gauze strips slithering in it, and Akhmed hooting as she chased them. It had taken her all afternoon to learn to juggle one. The next day they had moved indoors. Juggling is more in your mind
than your hands, Akhmed had told her; in the still air she had learned in minutes. “Juggling is more in your mind than your hand,” she told the one-armed guard.

“I died in my sleep, didn’t I? This is Hell, isn’t it?”

“You begin by throwing a handkerchief up in the air,” she said, and demonstrated in an exaggerated flourish.

The one-armed guard began praying. “Deliver me, Allah, from this cesspool of wickedness.”

“You want to make sure you cross the handkerchief, like you’re pinning it to the shoulder of an invisible partner. Like a phantom partner; that should be familiar to you!”

“Jesus Christ, hear my plea,” the one-armed guard chanted, in case the infidel god was more receptive.

“Then you repeat the same movement with your other hand.”

“She thinks I have another hand.”

“See how well I can do it?” she said, all three handkerchiefs aloft.

“My phantom hand is slapping you in the face.”

“I can’t feel it,” she said, proudly.

“Neither can I,” he said, glumly.

“You seem a little grumpy. Maybe you should take another nap.”

As she left the one-armed guard she hated Akhmed even more; if she couldn’t tell him, it was as if she hadn’t taught the one-armed guard to juggle at all. He had left her, just like her father had, and her mother, and she bandaged that wound with all the stubborn sullenness she could muster, so it would be hidden, well insulated, and so no one could see how in just three hours she had learned to miss him with the same incredible longing she reserved for her parents. She should have known Akhmed would forget her as quickly as he had her mother.

She didn’t hate Sonja, not as much as Akhmed. Sure, Sonja was curt and short-tempered, a humorlessist incapable of finding in an hour the fun Akhmed could conjure in a minute. But that was okay because Sonja was different. Sonja was the boss of this place, ordering everyone
around, and even Akhmed went pale when she spoke. Not only was Sonja a doctor, she was the head of the entire hospital. Women weren’t supposed to be doctors; they weren’t capable of the work, the schooling, the time and commitment, not when they had houses to clean, and children to care for, and dinners to prepare, and husbands to please. But Sonja was more freakish, more wondrously confounding than the one-armed guard; rather than limbs she had, somehow, amputated expectations. She
didn’t
have a husband, or children, or a house to clean and care for. She
was
capable of the work, school, time, commitment, and everything else it took to run a hospital. So even if Sonja was curt and short-tempered, Havaa could forgive her these shortcomings, which were shortcomings only in that they were the opposite of what a woman was supposed to be. The thick, stern shell hid the defiance that was Sonja’s life. Havaa liked that.

And so she wandered along the corridor, wondering what she might be like if she lived like Sonja. Maybe she could be an arborist, like her father. She hadn’t thought that women were allowed to be scientists, but if Sonja could be a surgeon and hospital head, why couldn’t she be an arborist? Or a sea anemonist? She slowed to peek into the room where the legless man slept. Blood dried darkly on his bandages. His stump poked from the edge of the white bedsheet like a rotten log through snow cover. He slept. Somewhere in that hazy, heroin-induced slumber, he was already designing in dreams the monument to war dead he would, in twenty-three years, make of steel and concrete. He was the only person in the hospital right now she didn’t hate.

“I thought I told her to find something to do,” Deshi said, entering the room with her customary frown.

“I was.”

“ ‘I was,’ she says. Was what?”

“Thinking,” Havaa shot out, like a pebble cast toward the nurse’s flat face.

“Find something more useful to do,” Deshi said. She knitted as she leaned against the wall. The yarn ball slowly rolled in her pocket.

“Does Sonja order you around like this?”

“Why would she say that?”

“Because Sonja runs the hospital.”

“Unbelievable,” Deshi said with a sigh. “I’ve been working here since before Sonja was a kick in her mother’s stomach, was already retired when I hired her, and she gets the credit for making this place run. They’ll take everything from you, even the respect of an orphan girl with too many questions in her mouth.”

“Why is the hospital run by women? What happened to all the men?”

“They ran away.”

“But they’re the brave ones.”

“No, they’re the ones that break your heart and leave you for a younger woman.”

“So you’re saying that sometimes women are braver than men. And better doctors.”

“I’m saying that if you want to keep a man, you better hide his shoes every night so he can’t walk out on you.”

“I don’t understand.”

Deshi shook her head. Her romantic advice was worth a foreigner’s ransom, and here she was, giving it freely to a girl who couldn’t appreciate the hard-earned wisdom. “Just stay away from oncologists, okay?” she said, and led the girl to the waiting room. “If you just remember that, you’ll spare yourself the worst of it. Now, why don’t you get your notebook out and draw something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Where would you most want to be right now?”

“My home,” she said. She thought the word meant only the four walls and roof that held her, but it spread out, filled in, Akhmed, the village, her parents, the forest, everything that wasn’t here. “A week ago.”

“And I’d rather be right here forty years ago, when they first offered me the job. I’d wag my finger right in the head nurse’s face and say, no, no, you won’t trick me, and I’d walk right out those doors.”

“It’s stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.”

“Why don’t you draw that map?”

“Only if you let me play on the fourth floor.”

“Child, if there was such a map, there would still be a fourth floor. Start drawing.”

The sharp, chemical-curtained corridor swallowed Deshi’s footsteps and Havaa was alone again. The notebook tilting on her legs, she thought of her father. She didn’t hate him. Thinking that, realizing it, feeling it crackle through her arm bones, her finger bones, feeling her arms wrapping around her chest, her fingers clasping her shoulders, this trembling inside her that was only the beat of her heart. Each night he would tell her tales about an alien green-bodied race whose faces consisted of a singular orifice through which they saw, ate, smelled, heard, thought, and spoke. Each night he told her a new chapter, and so many nights had gone by, so many chapters had been told, that they referred to it as
chapters
rather than
story
, because stories had endings and theirs had none. According to her father, the green-bodied aliens had destroyed their planet in an interstellar civil war and had migrated to the Moon to begin again. Each night, as civilization collapsed around them, he told her of a new one being built on the lunar surface. She hoped her father was there, among them, up on the Moon.

Sonja strode through the door, reeking of cigarette smoke, her eyelids puffy and her fingers jittering. “You’re here,” Sonja said, surprised.

“Yes,” Havaa agreed. “I’m here. This is the waiting room.”

Sonja glanced down to the floor, to the chairs, puzzling over this and then nodding. “You’re right. This is the waiting room,” she said, and sat in the folding chair beside Havaa.

“How was your day?” Havaa asked.

Sonja shrugged, sparked her cigarette lighter, and stared vacantly toward the wall. “It was an okay day. You?”

“It was okay.”

Sonja sighed, closed her eyes, and sparked her lighter in a slow, senseless rhythm.

“Are the Feds going to take me, too?” To ask the question was to acknowledge that it could happen, and in Havaa’s experience, any horror that could happen eventually did. Better to armor yourself with the unreal. Better to turn inward, hide in the dark waters among the sea anemones, down deep where the sharks can’t see you.

Sonja’s hand found hers between the chairs.

“Will the Feds take me to my father?” she asked, while knowing the question had no answer she wanted to hear. Her father was her door to the world; he was the singular opening through which she saw, heard, and felt. Without him she didn’t know what she saw, or what she heard, and what she felt; all she felt, was him gone.