A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (18 page)

T
HEY APPEARED FOUR
years before her father was taken, one or two at first, eyes glazed as if they’d never before seen a house, then more. They came stooped and waxen, downcast and wary, from Grozny, Shali, Urus-Martan, one long exhalation toward the mountains. Some carried the most necessary provisions: boots, woolen socks, more woolen socks, bribe money. Those who had lost everything, even their reason, carried the most ridiculous things: a man who lost his parents and children in the same Uragan rocket blast carried the key to the flat they perished in; a thrice-widowed woman carried the framed portrait of a face no one had seen alive for over a hundred years, and no images of her husbands; a retired bureaucrat carried a twelve-hundred-page regulatory binder, convinced that these rules were forever inviolable. Others carried nothing at all. They kept coming and their clothes kept getting
bigger on them. Havaa had just learned the Arabic alphabet, and she found the letter shapes in their figures. An eye raised to the mountains was
forehead sweat formed a stammer of
each jawline was as sharp as
the smoke dotting an old man’s bark-loaded pipe was the point above
and strung together they were an unpunctuated sentence the road wrote.

Her father seated the first one or two at the kitchen table and put enough food in front of them that they nearly refused to leave. Word spread through the refugee lines, and soon the number exceeded her parents’ modest means. One day she came home from the forest to find her bedroom furniture scattered across the yard, her father and Akhmed modeling new beds on hers, the air pungent with sawdust, the sun glimmering off their bare backs. Two days later her bedroom was converted into a three-bunk hostel. The refugees—that’s what they were, she could say the name in Chechen and write it in Arabic—paid for the night’s sleep, two meals, and laundry line however they could. The shame that tightened Dokka’s ventricles each time he asked for payment soon weakened to a slight, ignorable twitch. The first and thousandth refugees came from different peoples: the former deserving of his compassion and hospitality, the latter of nothing. Let them sleep outside for as long as their grandmother’s jewelry will warm them. Let them eat their rubles. But since so few had jewelry or rubles, and since Dokka was incapable of turning away those truly in need, his parameters for payment expanded to include nearly anything. The tokens and trinkets went to Havaa, who collected them as souvenirs, and so rather than toys or homework she played with and learned from the plastic figurine of a ballerina in pirouette, the field guide to Caucasian flora, and whatever else her father and guest agreed was worth a rickety bunk bed on a winter’s night. Now she slept on a mattress on the floor of her parents’ room. Many nights she woke to find herself in their bed, her body heat held between theirs, distinguishing each in the darkness by the size of their fingers.

Others came on the weekends, strangers better dressed and rested, to see Akhmed. If they had heard rumors of the pedophile’s ghost, they left their children outside when they entered the abandoned house, arms heavy with donations of linen bandages, fishing-line sutures, dry plaster, and slings of old magazines and bandannas. In the waiting room they sat straight-backed and motionless, afraid of breathing too hard, of squeaking the sensitive folding chairs and thus breaking the solemnity the proceedings demanded. Akhmed called them, one family at a time, as if they were his patients. And he wished they were, because they treated him with greater respect than his real patients, and he could do more for them. The family, as it entered Akhmed’s office, likely knew he was the worst doctor in Chechnya. Sitting at the folding chairs before his desk, likely they knew he had followed the wrong calling. Likely they knew the worst doctor in Chechnya was its most talented portraitist.

The father might break the silence with a wet cough, and, praying that Akhmed not ask to examine his chest, describe the shape of his son’s nose. Flat and wide, he might say, as if knocked in the face with a frying pan as a child. No, no, no, the mother might deny before Akhmed’s pencil reached the paper. It is a normal nose, a shapely nose, a beautiful nose, and he was never hit with a frying pan, or a soup pot, or even a kettle; a ladle, yes, of course, that is to be expected because a mother’s kitchen is her sanctum and she must maintain order. Then in might jump a cousin, a sister, an aggrieved daughter who too clearly remembered the slap of a ladle on her outstretched palm. The conversation might never recover if Akhmed didn’t raise his finger to quiet them; he had heard these arguments before, had seen grief warp the fabric of memory such that a mother refused to recognize her son when described by the father, and the father, usually compliant to his wife’s requests, truly believed his son’s nose was so crushed he could only breathe through his mouth. He asked them to close their eyes, and hoped their mouths would follow suit. He asked them to concentrate.

Hunched over the steel-legged desk, a cup of lukewarm black tea
within reach, Akhmed might think back to childhood, to the sketches of snake skeletons, knee tendons, and blood veins his father mistook for an interest in science. He might think back to medical school, when he skipped a year of pathology to audit art classes. By that point a career change was beyond consideration; he was a bottle, thrown to the sea, into which the villagers had folded their wishes, and though he was willing to give up on himself, he wasn’t willing to let down those who believed he could carry them over the water. Yet he drew still-lifes when he should have drawn diagrams, studied models when he should have studied corpses. When he graduated from medical school in the bottom tenth he didn’t know the disgrace weighing on him like a hundred rubles in five-kopek coins would one day be converted to less cumbersome denominations, when families, like this one, came, knowing he was too incompetent a doctor to save their son’s life, but so skilled and well-trained an artist he might bring their son back.

Each half minute he would slide the paper across the desk and search their faces for the pause of recognition. Yes, those are his ears, just like that. No, my wife is right, his nose isn’t so wide, and she never hit him with a frying pan. Mistakes would disappear beneath the corners of a pink eraser. That’s him, they say. He is ours.

Some portraits found their way to kiosks where they stared out at the passing refugees, searching for their reflection in the line. Others rested in more intimate spaces: set in a glass frame over an empty bed, or folded in a wallet with nothing else in it, or locked in a bureau drawer beside the birth certificate documenting the exact hour, date, and place that life had entered the world. The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn’t change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after that possibility like cartoon characters
dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down—and
plummeted
is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother’s nose and doesn’t need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother’s bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, who would be buried an arm’s length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother’s prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother’s portrait made, he should have had
his
made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother’s nose, he hadn’t been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he’d believed that
plummet
was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arm’s reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents’ house his portrait hangs
within arm’s reach of his older brother’s, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.

Every other Sunday Akhmed and Ramzan came to play chess with her father. Ramzan arrived first, knocking with his forehead, his arms hugging a stew pot; sometimes he brought self-awarded gratuities from the shipments he transported to and from the mountains, pickled trout or plum jelly, cured lamb, candied nuts. Then came Akhmed, entering without knocking, grabbing Havaa and hoisting her over his shoulder and threatening to marry her to a toad. In the living room Havaa would serve them tea, and rather than a chore it felt like her own modest contribution to the afternoon. In her eyes, the three men formed a family to whom she wasn’t a daughter but a very young sister. This changed when Khassan joined them, once every few months, as the invisible structure built between them failed to support the weight of another man. In his presence the luster of Ramzan’s laugh dulled and resentment built beneath his quiet face. Akhmed and Khassan monopolized the conversation and Ramzan observed, searching for an opening, but when one came he never knew what to say.