A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (14 page)

“Let’s go to bed,” Sonja said. Still holding Havaa’s hand, she stood. “We close our eyes and there they are, right where we left them, in their own waiting room, waiting for us.”

CHAPTER
7

F
OR EIGHTEEN DAYS
Natasha slept as if her lidded dreamland were her true home, to which she was repatriated for fifteen hours a day. So what, then, could Sonja do? Natasha was here, safe, alive, and real enough to begin resenting. In the flat white light of morning she entered her sister’s bedroom, a cup of hot tea in her hand, and inspected her sister’s body as she might a corpse, or a comatose patient, or someone whom she had, once, long ago, envied. Her gaze crawled the curves of Natasha’s hips, the odd angle of elbows she could unhinge and bend at will, the bitten rims of fingernails, her legs, still long, still lithe, and the little brown hairs on her forearms, which, when they had first appeared in puberty, Sonja had used as evidence to convince Natasha she was turning into a boy. Natasha’s skin said what she wouldn’t. The scars
of habitual heroin use webbed her toes. A buckshot of cigarette burns stippled her left shoulder. If Sonja found these scars on a patient in the hospital, she wouldn’t feel pity, but in Natasha’s bedroom, she felt it all over. For eighteen days she went to wake Natasha and turned back, afraid of the dreams her sister would rise from, leaving no alarm louder than a cup of tea cooling on the nightstand.

But Natasha wasn’t right. On the eighteenth evening, standing at the cutting board, chopping two onions and a potato, Sonja broached the subject. “I think you should talk to a psychiatrist or someone.”

From the look her sister gave her, she might have announced they’d be eating the cutting board for dinner.

“I just think it would be good for you to talk with someone. About what happened in Italy. About what it’s like being home,” Sonja said.

“Talking doesn’t do anything.”

“It might do one or two things.” Sonja punctuated her sentence with a chop.

“All the words in the world won’t put those onion halves back together.”

“The human mind is a little more complex than a yellow onion.”

Natasha held back her hair as she lit a cigarette from the hot plate her father had, twelve years earlier, purchased secondhand from a woman who would never find a flame that cooked an egg quite as well. “Some of us would be lucky to have something as large as a yellow onion between our ears.”

Sonja could see her sister backing away from her, from the subject, from whatever had happened in Italy. “Think of the mind as a muscle or bone instead,” she said, looking down to address the more respectful audience of cubed potatoes. “Emotional and mental trauma doesn’t heal itself any more than a broken bone left unset.”

Natasha nodded to the cutting board. “You talk those potatoes and onions into jumping in that frying pan and I’ll talk with a psychiatrist.”

Despite its monumental aggravation, Natasha’s resistance was a good
sign, wasn’t it? The obstinacy was a pillar running alongside her spine that would support her when not lodged firmly in Sonja’s hindquarters. And while she might yearn for a little civility to grease the rusty gears of their relationship, she gladly endured the backtalk and eye-rolls to know that Natasha hadn’t lost the ability to drive her fucking crazy. Her sister was a snarky chain-smoking hermit crab that emerged from her shell in the safety of Sonja’s presence. When Natasha believed she was alone—those days when Sonja slammed the front door and stayed to spy on her—she searched for thicker shells. It was awful, watching Natasha through the keyhole as she divided her room into smaller increments of shelter. She moved the desk, bed, and bureau like a child arranging the furniture into a make-believe castle, even encircling the structure with a moat of water glasses. On the keyhole’s far side, Sonja prayed it would keep the dragons at bay; her heart, as if drawn on a piece of paper in her chest, crumpled every time. When she returned in the evening, the fortress was disassembled and the pieces of furniture had returned to their white rectangles of wall space. She never mentioned what she’d seen, holding it as a reminder to be gentle and patient as she prepared dinner. She whispered sweet nothings to the potatoes and onions, but the little fuckers were as stubborn as her sister, the great big fucker.

Natasha relented when Sonja pointed out that compared with her inexhaustible exhortations, a chat with a psychiatrist would be as pleasant as a summer picnic. She admitted to having spoken with a psychiatrist at the women’s shelter in Rome—the one that had provided the six-month supply of Ribavirin, which Sonja found in the bathroom, which was generally used to treat hepatitis, which Natasha refused to admit she had, which Sonja thought was total bullshit.

“She spoke Russian in this ridiculous Italian accent,” Natasha said. “I was always afraid she’d start singing an opera.”

“I never make promises to my patients, but I promise that whoever I find won’t speak a word of Italian.”

And she tried. She combed through her contacts only to find that
every psychiatrist in the city was dead, exiled, or missing. The ranks of the hospital staff didn’t contain a single mental-health professional. She fumed one afternoon in the hospital parking lot, wanting to punch the clouds from the sky but instead venting on a closer object, the hood of an ’83 Volga so decrepit she felt the sickening thrill of beating a wounded animal to reiterate its pain. How had she got to this point? She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat. In the months before the repatriation her heart had hardened around her sister’s absence, letting her love Natasha in memory as she could never love her in reality. The fact was that her exile had prompted Natasha’s. The fact was that she had left Chechnya first. The fact was that she had escaped the war Natasha had endured alone. It only made sense that her sister would attempt the same transaction with the only currency she possessed: her body. But now she was home and needed medical care Sonja couldn’t provide. Being a bad sister was one thing; being a bad doctor was the more serious sin. Deshi found her out in the parking lot, beating the rust off the Volga hood. Her tears turned brown when she wiped them with her knuckles. “Do you want to talk about it?” Deshi asked. “Go to hell,” she replied.

At dinner Natasha took the news with typical smugness. “It’s just as well,” she said. “Head doctors are a decadence unsuited to a country like ours. They are the bidets of the medical profession.”

“You could talk to me,” Sonja offered with enough snarl in her voice to ensure that Natasha would demur. Which she did. In seven years and three weeks, when Natasha disappeared for a second time, Sonja would orbit that moment, circling every angle without ever touching down: what if she had tried harder, been kinder, gentler?

As the street noise filled the gap in the conversation, Sonja gave up. If the world was determined to drown her, she’d stop swimming. She lengthened her hours at work, then lengthened her commute. At the bazaar, vendors sold everything that could be lifted and carted away:
emergency rations, grain sacks, spools of uncut cloth, raw wool, floorboards, industrial kitchen appliances, abandoned Red Army munitions, traffic lights, and oil-refining machinery. She wandered past racks of used shoes that had clocked more kilometers than the average Federal fighter jet, past blocks with more craters than her sister’s left shoulder blade, past exoskeletal scaffolding, workmen hoisting wheelbarrows of masonry, all the way to Hospital No. 6.

And as eighteen days turned to twenty, forty, sixty, the trauma ward became the capital of the reconstructed republic. Each day patients arrived with heart attacks and kidney stones, the lesser emergencies of peacetime. When a man limped in with a soccer injury she kissed his cheek; that man and his wife would create the plaque honoring the hospital staff of the war years, which was to be set into the sidewalk eleven years later to little official fanfare. The war was over; no one knew it was only the first. Still, the scarcity of medical supplies remained a constant problem.

She contacted the brother of a man with a mustache made of dead spider legs whose life she’d saved when a land mine had lodged eight ball bearings, four screws, and three ten-kopek coins in his left leg. The brother met her in the backseat of a Mercedes that drove in tight circles on a tennis court–sized slab of asphalt just outside his Volchansk garage, the only unbroken stretch of road worthy of such a fine Western automobile. He pinched a Marlboro filter between his manicured fingernails. She didn’t need to look past his first knuckle to verify his access to the smuggling routes snaking through the southern mountains.

“You saved Alu’s life,” the brother said, setting the cigarette between his delicate lips, moisturized nightly with aloe balm. “For that I owe you a favor. A small one, because of my six brothers, I like Alu the least.”

She handed him a list limited to easily procurable medical supplies: absorbent compress dressings, adhesive bandages, antiseptic ointment, breathing barriers, latex gloves, gauze rolls, thermometers, scissors,
scalpels, aspirin, antibiotics, surgical saw blades, and painkillers. “It’s basic stuff. Any medical distributor will have it. You can find most of it in an average first-aid kit. I just need a lot of it.”

“Alu spoke highly of you,” the brother lamented. “I should have known you would be a bore. Anything else?”

“I thought I only had one favor?”

“Let me tell you a story,” the brother said, holding his cigarette like a conductor’s baton. “When I was a child I had a pet turtle, whom I named after Alu because they shared a certain—how can I put it—bestial idiocy. Once I went to Grozny with my father and five of my brothers for the funeral of my father’s uncle, and we left so quickly I hadn’t the time to provide food for Alu the Turtle. My brother, Alu the Idiot, had a fever and stayed home with my mother. In a moment so taxing on that little intellect that steam surely shot from his ears, Alu the Idiot remembered to feed my turtle. He caught grubs and crickets, likely tasting them before he gave them to my beloved crustacean. Since then Alu the Idiot has grown into a Gibraltar-sized hemorrhoid, but when he was a child he used the one good idea this life has allotted him to feed my turtle, and because of it, you get a second favor.”

“Turtles aren’t crustaceans,” she said.

“Excuse me, half crustacean.”

“They’re full-blooded reptiles.”

The brother gaped at her. “You should hear yourself. You sound ridiculous.”

“A turtle is one hundred percent reptile,” she said. “I imagine even Alu knows that.”

“Don’t insult me. Everyone knows a turtle is crustacean on its mother’s side.”

“Explain that to me,” she said, shifting in the seat as the car spun in circles.

“A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It’s called evolution.”

“I hope your biology teacher was sent to the gulag,” she said. She caught the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. The driver had grown up in a mountain hamlet where more people believed in trolls than in automobiles. The first war had catapulted him from the back of a mule to the inside of a Mercedes, and he would look back at that war as the one stroke of good fortune in a life otherwise riddled with disappointments.

“I can’t believe you’re allowed to operate on people with such an incomplete understanding of nature,” the brother said.

“Any other animals come about this way?”

The brother pursed his lips. “A whale.”

“Let me guess. A fish fucks a hippo?”

“Close, an elephant,” the brother said, laughing.

“Of course,” Sonja said. “How could I forget about the herds of elephants roaming the open ocean.”

“I would never dishonor my mother, but someone less noble might suggest that Alu is half monkey. So shall I include Darwin as your second favor?”

She wrote several titles on the list and passed it back.

“My god,” he said. “You’re worse than I could have ever imagined. No wonder you and Alu got on famously.
Modes of Modern Psychological Inquiry. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment. From Victim to Survivor: Overcoming Rape
. This is what you want? I was thinking cocaine and a prostitute or something.”

“Do I look like someone in need of a prostitute?”

The brother was all grins. “I’ve never met someone in greater need,” he said.

“Can you get them or not?”

“We’ll see. Guns, drugs, uranium, whores, hostages, no problem. But I’ve never been asked to find books or medical supplies. These will be a challenge.”

The Mercedes drove in dizzying circles. She wanted out of this spinning, nauseating contraption. What was wrong with Alu, anyway?
Compared to this ridiculous man, who spoke as if he lived in a genie’s lamp, Alu was a model citizen. But what could she do? Those who have the bullets also have the bandages.

“Can you get them or not?”

“Don’t insult me,” he said. “I can steal the spots off a snow leopard.”

“Then thank you.”

“That’s it? Nothing else? Once you leave this car you’ll never see me again.”