A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (15 page)

Could she ask for it? Transport to Georgia? A plane ticket from Tbilisi to London? A visa stamp in the passport she still carried with her, in the money belt around her waist, each time she left her house?

“Yes,” she said. The air hummed. The yellow clouds watched indifferently. “I’ll have one of your cigarettes.”

She took that cigarette and smoked it while walking to the bazaar, where several days later, on a trip in search of fabrics, she stumbled upon an industrial ice machine at the stand of a Wahhabi arms dealer. It was a great gray piece of machinery with a plastic interior the color of potato broth and fretwork ventilation at its back end. The steel lid held her unfocused reflection within the logo of the Soviet Intourist Hotel. Three half brothers, now sixteen, eleven, and eight, had been conceived on that steel lid, none yet aware of the others’ existence. A merchant with nicotine-stained fingernails, wire-rimmed glasses, and the long beard of a Wahhabi described the machine. “Gorbachev, Brezhnev, and the Bee Gees all had their drinks cooled with the ice produced by this magnificent machine. It is a celebrity among ice machines, envied and admired among its kind. All around Chechnya ice-cube trays have photographs of the Intourist Hotel ice machine pinned on their freezer walls, and they are all told that if they work hard, and believe wholeheartedly in the ideology of ice, they may someday rise to its ranks. And you might say, ‘But Mullah Abdul, I don’t
need
an industrial ice machine that can provide twenty cubic meters of ice an hour, when required.’ To that I counter, what about clean water? You see, pure flawless H
₂
O freezes
at precisely zero degrees, the temperature at which the carefully calibrated thermometer of this magnificent colossus is set. Water containing minerals and sediments and bacteria and parasites freezes at slightly lower temperatures, and thus remains liquid and flows out the drainage. The frozen water left behind is as pure as the virgins in Paradise, with whom I hope to soon be acquainted, should God see me fit.”

Sonja nodded, not unimpressed. On the card tables beside the freezer lay guns of all sizes and caliber, brass belts of ammunition, septic pipes fashioned into homemade Stinger RPG launchers, land mines, and VHS recordings of
Baywatch
.

“What are you looking for?” the merchant continued. “Fragmentation grenades? Hollow bullets? If you give me a few days, I could find a C-4 vest that would fit you nicely.” She remembered him as the chemistry professor who had slapped her behind three times in as many months, and expected her—a first-year university student then—to thank him for saving her from the invisible bee that lived in his office. He’d been a different man back then, arriving to class each morning with freshly shaved cheeks and a stale-smelling corduroy jacket, but she recognized his delicate bee-swatting hands, now curled around the butt of a rifle. “Perhaps it would be better if I spoke to your husband,” he said. “I’d like to have a word with him about how he allows you to dress.”

“Fuck off, you disgusting little man,” Sonja said, in English.

“She speaks in tongues, too,” the merchant muttered to himself. “Another sign of the end times. Listen to me, woman. This is serious business. If you dress with your hair and your face uncovered for the devil himself to see, the Russians will come back, make no mistake, and you women will be responsible.”

Had he not had the contents of a small armory in arm’s reach, she might have kicked him squarely in his now-pious balls. Instead she shook her head and turned toward the fabric stand.

She returned home with sheets of green and purple cloth, and unfolded them across the floor of her bedroom. As a teenager, she had
declined her mother’s offer to teach her to tailor her own clothes; even at that age, such a domestic skill had insulted her ambitions. Now, eyes downcast, glaring as though a pair of trousers might materialize from the cloth by force of her concentration, she felt like Sonja the Idiot. Only one idea came to her. She took her measurements with a ruler and drew them on the cloth and cut outlines of her legs with nail scissors. For the next half hour, she stitched together the two cutouts with the same stitch she used to close wounds. When finished, she examined her creation. The stitching held tight when she pulled the seams, and her pinky just fit through the holes of the button fly. She envisioned pockets, perhaps even belt loops. If this worked, she might design a jacket and a blouse. Perhaps she could even begin a clothing line—
haute couture du guerre-zone
, all proceeds to support the hospital—and export handmade fashions to the boutique-lined avenues of London, where she had been privy to the conscience-balming Western consumption of Third World charity art and cheeseburgers.

It wasn’t until she tried on the trousers that she realized her error. She had traced the exact measurements of her legs without allowing any extra wiggle room, and so she struggled with the trousers, falling onto the mattress and raising her feet toward the ceiling in the vain hope that gravity might pity her. An exhausting effort. It had been years since she had floundered this much without at least the prospect of an orgasm. When she finally pulled the trousers past her hips, she found Natasha’s hundred-watt smirk in the doorway. “How long have you been watching?” she demanded.

“Not nearly long enough.”

“You’re always fucking asleep! You’re always asleep when I’m making dinner or sweeping the floor or finding car batteries or crying or doing anything mature and useful, but then you always somehow wake up to witness me making a fool of myself. Do you have clairvoyance? If you do, you can see what I’m thinking; and if not, I’m thinking of a very rude gesture.”

“Try to stand up,” Natasha suggested, far too cheerfully. Sonja would rather have amputated her legs with the nail scissors than further humiliate herself, but what could she do? Refuse? Admit failure? No. She placed her palms on the edge of the bed. She pushed forward. Arms flailing, legs inflexible, she would have let the prurient chemistry professor slap invisible bees from her behind all afternoon for a pair of trousers that fit. At the apex of her ascent, when she saw Natasha, her eyes burst into coals, because was it really too much to be thanked? To be appreciated? To be assured that all the scones in England were worth less than all the potatoes and onions with one’s own sister?
Yes, apparently that is too much to ask
, Sonja told herself,
or at least too much to ask from you, my potato-eating friend, you who believe you are the only person in the world to understand loss, and even that you’re unwilling to share with me
.

But her glare broke with her balance. The wooden planks of her trouser legs pitched her forward and, arms flapping, she reached for Natasha. There was no one else to help her.

And Natasha caught her. The impact shimmied down Sonja’s spine, loosening the tension coiled between each vertebra. How had they descended so far? How had they become so embittered that Natasha preventing her from falling on her face felt like an act of tremendous sisterly love? Tears squeezed through Sonja’s closed eyes. A plug was pulled from the center of the floor through which the tension drained.

“Those are the ugliest trousers I’ve ever seen,” Natasha said, still holding her. It was the first time they had hugged since she returned. Two and a quarter years would pass before it happened again. “They look painted on.”

“I can’t feel my toes,” Sonja cried. “I don’t think my blood is circulating past my knees.”

“You should use them as tourniquets at the hospital.”

“I don’t want to be here, Natasha. I’m so fucking unhappy. I want to be back in London.”

“It’s okay. They’re only trousers. Here’s what we do.” Clasping the
waistline, Natasha halved them in one clean flourish. Sonja pulled the ends over her heels and stretched her sore thighs. She picked up the sheet of fabric stenciled with the silhouette of her legs, and tilted her head to see Natasha through the cutout.

“I think this is my knee.”

“It is a lovely knee.”

“What should I do with it?”

“I don’t think you’ve ever asked my opinion before.”

“I won’t make a habit of it.”

“You could.”

“Tell me what to do.”

Natasha looked to the fabric. “I could use a new pair of trousers, too.”

Sonja smiled and gave Natasha the nail scissors.

Despite their moment of reconciliation, they soon returned to a policy of polite avoidance. When, after work, Sonja wanted less complex company, she visited Laina next door. Laina never looked particularly pleased to see Sonja, but she never looked particularly pleased about anything these days, and Sonja didn’t take it personally. The old woman received daily visitations from ghosts, angels, prophets, and monsters, and some evenings, Sonja wondered if she herself was, to this old woman, a trivial hallucination.

“I saw an ice machine at the bazaar the other day,” she said. Laina didn’t look up from the scarf she was knitting, afraid to raise her eyes with so many visions crowding the air. “It once cooled the glasses of the Bee Gees, or so said the freezer merchant. Never turn your back to him, Laina. There is no bee.”

“You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man,” Laina said, without lifting her eyes from the needle tips.

“You know that song?”

“Of course. People used to recite it in the war. I didn’t know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur’an.”

Sonja smiled, glad she could still be surprised. “I never knew the Bee Gees were so profound.”

“I saw six chariots in the sky today. I would have rather seen an ice machine.”

For the next hour Laina described abounding supernatural phenomena. The angel Gabriel had fluttered into a rooster-less henhouse in Zebir-Yurt, and the next morning a farmer found eight immaculately conceived eggs. A boy in Grozny defeated his grandfather, a chess master third class, ranked one thousand six hundred and eighty-fourth in the world, after a game lasting thirty-nine sleepless days and nights that left the grandfather so bewildered, proud, and exhausted he promptly died. A band of corpse-devils rose from the earth at the Dagestan border to hijack three Red Cross cargo trucks, leaving the drivers hog-tied and blindfolded and magically suspended three meters in the air.

“Stalin has been resurrected,” Laina said.

“I know,” Sonja replied. “He’s the prime minster of Russia.”

On her way to work a week later, when the black Mercedes found her, she was sure she’d wandered into one of Laina’s deliriums. The Mercedes braked sharply, drawing a curtain of dust along the street. The tires—before so dainty they could only drive in circles on a tennis court—were replaced with those of an armored jeep, raising the body of the car by a half meter. Swedish license plates, she noted, were still attached. The window descended and those gorgeous fingernails beckoned her.

“I thought we wouldn’t see each other again,” she said, pulling the door closed.

“And I keeping saying I’ll never see Alu again and he keeps on being my brother. You intrigue me. You lived in London for several years,
if my information is correct, which it always is. Had you stayed, you would be eligible for citizenship now. Even I can’t get my name into one of those beautiful maroon passports. And yet you returned.”

“I have family here,” she said uneasily.

“I hide the toilet paper when my family visits so they won’t stay too long.”

“Could you get me back to London?”

“You could ask. But then who would I have to talk to? No one with your intelligence would return from London, which means you are either one of those idiot savants, light on the savant, or something entirely different. The only people who return are people like me, people who know how much money can be made.”

Through the window, the city limits gave way to brown fields tilled by tank treads. They were on the road to Grozny. “I’m not here to make money.”

“That’s why you are so intriguing.”

They reached the Grozny garage two hours later. Two dour-faced men met them at the door holding Kalashnikovs, one still three weeks from killing the other in an argument that would begin over driving directions, and Sonja feverishly hoped that the smuggler’s love for Alu the Turtle still surpassed his loathing for Alu the Unluckiest Younger Brother in History. Three trucks sat at the end of the concrete tarmac. The brother led her to the first truck, whose shot-off lock clung by a half-broken, glimmering grip. He lifted the door and shined a flashlight into the trailer. A Red Cross first-aid kit sat in the circle of yellowed light. The circle spread to illuminate torn cardboard boxes and hundreds, no, thousands of first-aid kits. “These were stolen,” she said.

“Of course they were, and not without some headache, I’ll have you know. But as you said, nearly all of what you asked for can be found in a first-aid kit.”

“What happened to the drivers?”

“Why do you care?”

She could feel him testing her, ready to blunt the slightest edge of moral outrage with a lecture on relativism in war, or maybe with another example of his contempt for Alu. She unsnapped the first-aid kit and surveyed the contents. Four absorbent compress dressings, eight adhesive bandages, a tube of antiseptic ointment, a breathing barrier, two latex gloves, a gauze roll, a thermometer, a packet of aspirin, and a scissors. She closed the lid, refastened the clips, had nothing but gratitude to give him. For all she cared, the drivers could be hog-tied and beaten, since she now had the ointment to disinfect their cuts, the gauze to bandage their wounds, even scissors to cut through whatever magical threads held them three meters off the ground.

“What about the morphine?”

“I nearly forgot.” He pulled a black nylon duffel bag from the front seat, set it on the bumper, and unzipped it. A plastic-wrapped brick of white powder lay at the bottom. “Morphine is too expensive,” he said, handing it to her.

“What is it?”

“Heroin.”

The word alone weighed ten kilograms. This powder had been boiled and squirted between Natasha’s toes twice a day for eight months. My god. And for the first time in how many days, she breathed the relief of knowing Natasha was safe at home, barricaded behind a water-glass moat, safe from the fangs of dragons. “Is it unadulterated?”