A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (19 page)

While the men ate she and her mother remained in the kitchen. The custom seemed so unfair, and she didn’t understand why her mother, usually as stubborn as a sleepy ox, submitted to it. Her father allowed her to join them when they finished, provided she didn’t bite her nails, and the ottoman provided the perfect perch from which to watch the chess game. It was a beautiful set of lacquered beech bordered with mother-of-pearl. The board had to have been carved from magical wood, since for all the time she spent in the forest she’d never come across so shiny a tree. The little figures, demarcated by color and bound by rules, made warfare a clean and orderly enterprise. The bulbous heads of pawns and imams, rubbed bald by the touch of too many fingers, were her favorite;
months later she would wonder why the rebels and Feds, most in their teens and twenties, still had so much hair. Her father was so skilled that Ramzan and Akhmed played in a team against him. The two consulted and conspired before making their next move, and her father would read a book while they decided, so confident in his mastery he didn’t care if Ramzan cheated. Once he told her that a true chess player thinks with his fingers, and she would remember this, thirteen months later, when he lost his. When his turn came he probed the air indecisively; then, as if each digit independently reached the same conclusion, they came together on the wooden scalp of the imam who slayed Boris Yeltsin, like any good jihadist.

Her father only lost to them twice. The first was in 2001, the Sunday after a company of wounded rebels spent one night of an eighteen-month retreat in Eldár. They came from the hospital in Volchansk, a fact that Akhmed might have exploited when he later took in the girl, had he remembered. When they hobbled into the village square, arms in slings, eyes purpled by exhaustion, the assembled villagers thought the rebels had fled the hospital too soon. One was in a wheelchair. How had the Feds failed to catch them? Their green headbands proclaimed
Allahu Akhbar
in a golden Arabic script. The villagers, Havaa among them, approached the rebels with cautious curiosity. Many, Havaa among them, had never seen a rebel in the flesh. They were a land over the horizon; sons and brothers would go
to the rebels
and never be seen again. Several mothers spoke to them directly, asking after their sons, but most, Havaa among them, watched silently. A shudder passed through the entire assembly when the short field commander planted the green flag of national independence in the square. With this act the rebels—so weak a few children with gardening tools could have overpowered them—had officially seized the village, and thus damned it to a Russian liberation.

They demanded medical attention and were taken to Akhmed’s clinic by a dozen villagers who introduced the rebels and disappeared, grateful for the clinic for the first time. Only after checking the linen
closet for a potential Federal ambush were they willing to disarm. On the other side of the village, Havaa saw none of it. She sat with her mother, in the safety of the kitchen. Had she seen the short, squat field commander, she might have thought he looked like a half-emptied grain sack in fatigues. He addressed Akhmed courteously, reiterating the importance of communal sacrifice in the campaign to defeat the godless Russian scourge. Akhmed held his hands together but one couldn’t stop the other’s tremble. He warned the field commander that he wasn’t a very good doctor, that a pedophile’s ghost was said to haunt the clinic, and that he would much rather draw his portrait. In a deep, even voice as he unbuttoned his shirt, the field commander informed Akhmed that if he didn’t become the best doctor in Chechnya within the next five minutes, he’d soon haunt the clinic as well. A surgical thread Akhmed had never encountered held the field commander’s chest together.

“What is this?” Akhmed asked.

“Dental floss,” the field commander said. Given the lichenous growth on the field commander’s incisors, Akhmed assumed the floss hadn’t seen much prior action.

“Dental floss stitches. I’ve never seen such fine work. Who put them in?”

“A doctor at the Volchansk hospital. She was both a woman and an ethnic Russian. Can you believe it?”

The self-doubt that had unfolded from the envelope with every hospital rejection letter again stole Akhmed’s breath. “No,” he said, dispirited. In three and a quarter years, when Sonja was to offer him a job, Akhmed would finally find that breath.

On the other side of the village Havaa was studying the pale blue flowers on her mother’s skirt, annoyed she couldn’t find them in the Caucasian flora guide. Why invent flowers when so many real ones would be honored to find their faces on a skirt? Her mother had spent the afternoon in the back garden and now chopped carrots, beets, and
thyme lay on the counter. Havaa, standing on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor. Later that afternoon the door would quietly close and her father would enter. He would speak with that deliberate, deceptive tone he used when reading her a story whose ending he already knew. She would ask if the army men would be staying with them and he would say, no, they’re not refugees, and leave it at that. She wouldn’t know that her father and Ramzan had spent nearly an hour conversing with the field commander. She wouldn’t know that the field commander, impressed by Ramzan’s experience as a trader in the mountains, had put him in touch with a sheikh who was looking for a capable man, a man like Ramzan, to deliver arms to the rebel encampments. All she would know was that the following Sunday, a day before the Feds arrived, her father lost Boris Yeltsin to a rook.

Three mornings after the rebels tottered from the village, Havaa woke to her parents’ hushed panic. Her father hoisted her in his arms before she could change out of her nightclothes. The impact of each footstep jolted through her, and as he ran into the forest, she watched the village shrink over his shoulder.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We are being liberated,” her mother panted from beside her.

A rotten log shielded them from all but the
zachistka
’s sound. When a ten-second spray of gunfire flooded the sky, Havaa couldn’t have imagined it was directed at eight villagers deemed too dangerous to be transported to the Landfill. Lying on the mossy topsoil for hours, she thought of her father’s defeat the previous afternoon. She knew that Russian soldiers could destroy a village, but she hadn’t known her father could lose
a chess match. He lay next to her, twitching at the slightest shift in the wind, his fingers white around the handle of the kitchen knife. The rising smoke was so thick dusk came at three o’clock. Her father peered over the log with a pair of binoculars. He passed her the binoculars, the two-night payment of an ornithologist, who was now homesick, studying birds in Ecuador. As she spied Feds through the gaps between tree trunks, her father explained the difference between
kontraktniki
and ordinary draft soldiers.

“The draft soldiers in blue uniforms are scared teenagers. They are what we might call the victims of absurdism,” he said, not one to miss an opportunity to lecture a captive audience. “They would surrender if you waved a soup spoon at them. Most can’t find Chechnya on a map and don’t care if Putin, Maskhadov, or Father Christmas presides over the republic; most arrived by train in passenger carriages but most will return as Cargo 200, sealed within zinc-lined coffins in the freights. But the
kontraktniki
, the ones you see wearing sleeveless black T-shirts to show off their tattoos, they are nihilists, immoralists, or misanthropists, take your pick. They were released from prison provided they serve a certain number of years in Chechnya. They
want
to be here because this is the only place they can express their true nature, and, if I weren’t hiding behind a log, I suppose I might even admire them because they are committed to the dialectics of their philosophy, no matter how horrid.”

At that moment, a blond-haired conscript had pulled Khassan from the line of men that were to be taken to the Landfill. He hid Khassan in a tin-roofed shed and gave him his grandparents’ name and address. “You must survive,” the blond-haired conscript said. “You must survive and tell my grandparents. Tell them their grandson is not like the other solidiers. Tell them that they raised him well, that he’s trying so hard to stay the boy they raised.” Khassan would write a letter to the conscript’s grandparents, but without access to a functional postal system, it would remain in his drawer for seventeen months, until the autumn morning when a Russian woman knocked on his door, asking if he had seen her
son. It wasn’t uncommon to see the mothers of missing Russian soldiers searching the Chechen highlands for their sons. Khassan wouldn’t be able to help her, but he would ask her to post his letter from Russia. He wouldn’t know that in Novosibirsk the grandparents of the blond-haired conscript would receive his letter eight days after they received word of their grandson’s death and would read it as a eulogy at his funeral.

By evening the village still lay under an awning of smoke. Twenty-three had died. Fourteen from gunfire, three from collapsed houses, two from mortar fire, and one from suicide: a ninety-year-old man who had survived two world wars, three heart attacks, and, most debilitating of all, the shame of his firstborn son, a boy who could have been anything but chose to be a puppeteer. The Feds forced three into a cellar and lobbed in a live grenade before shutting the door. Another eighteen were taken to the Landfill, which meant forty-one villagers disappeared that day, to return only by the grace of Akhmed’s pencil. Shortly after Havaa followed her parents home, Akhmed appeared in the doorframe and knelt to knock on the kicked-in door. He needed Havaa’s fingers. In his clinic the wounded lay on every surface flat enough to hold a body. The butt of a Kalashnikov had forever shut a woman’s left eye. The arm of a man who would go on to summit Elbrus bent as if it had three elbow joints. Akhmed’s hand, flaccid on her shoulder, guided Havaa through the waiting room. His office was an operating theater. Mountainous tarpaulin topography spread across his desk, streams flowing into lakes of blood. A lamp sat on the floor, its light pinning the silhouette of Akhmed’s head to the ceiling where it would blankly observe the scene. He spoke as if accountable to her, explaining that this wasn’t a hospital and he wasn’t a surgeon, that he could draw lovely sketches of the wounded but couldn’t save their lives, that the doctors at Hospital No. 6 were unquestionably superior and had the
zachistka
cordon not blocked all traffic to the city, he would carry each to the hospital on his back to avoid the responsibility of their care.

Two neighbors helped him carry a limp body to the desk. He cleaned
the wound with water, but he had run out of iodine solution and had to use a half bottle of
spirt
for sterilization. He made a homemade hemostat by wrapping clean bandages around the head of a pliers and clinching the handles with a rubber band.

Akim was thirteen, the first wisps of a mustache filled in with soot. Red dishrags were wrapped around his thigh, and between half-opened lids, his eyes found Havaa’s.

“My fingers are too big,” Akhmed repeated as he tightened a leather belt around Akim’s thigh. The adults in her life all acted like children, and rather than compounding her fear, this forced her to be calm. Piece by piece she broke down the room, chopping the ceiling from the walls and the walls from the floor, amputating her shadow from her feet, until the one floorboard holding her was all that remained. Akhmed explained that Havaa had to help him ligate an artery with thread from a frayed skirt. A few months earlier her mother had taught her to sew and he knew that for her father’s birthday she had mended the toes of all his socks.

“Okay,” she said, though she didn’t want to help Akhmed, though she wanted to hide in the forest, where birch branches were the only limbs that ever broke. But she did it for Akhmed, rather than for the boy, who once had found her talking to a pinecone and had teased her so badly she had wished him dead.

She couldn’t sleep that night. In the quiet of her parents’ bedroom she could still hear his screams. Everything was different now. She couldn’t say how or when, whether it had happened when her father had carried her to the woods, or when her fingers had sunk into the hot ooze of Akim’s open thigh, but everything was different. On either side her parents lay awake, and when she squeezed the flaps of their pajama tops, as she had always done for reassurance when she had a bad dream, her mother squeezed back.

No one wanted to risk moving the unexploded shells that lay scattered
across the village, so the next morning Havaa’s parents, among other villagers, pried toilet bowls from the rubble of collapsed houses and dragging them upside down and two by two gently set them over the unexploded shells. Havaa would never forget the sight. So many dozens of upside-down toilet bowls crowded the street that cars wouldn’t pass for weeks, and in that time, she would occasionally hear the overdue explosions, the shrapnel ringing within the ceramic, but those bowls, the one decent legacy of the Soviet Union, never broke.

In the afternoon, she and her parents went to the clinic. Akhmed wouldn’t meet their eyes when they entered his office. The blood-hardened tarpaulin lay on the floor, and in its red desert Havaa remembered streams. Akhmed slouched forward, his head propped against the desk by his pencil.

“I can’t remember their faces,” he muttered.

“Whose?” her father asked.

“I promised I would draw them, but I can’t remember anymore.”

“You should sleep,” her father said, and beside him, her mother gazed at Akhmed with an expression of concern Havaa would only later recall.

When Akhmed woke, he kept his promise. He mounted blank pages on plywood boards, and over the next ten days drew forty-one meter-tall portraits. He used ink and charcoal, the cinders of burnt houses; there was a word for it, when artists used parts of the subject to recreate the subject, an -ism only Dokka would know. The portraits were larger and more detailed than anything he’d ever drawn. Eyelashes five pen strokes thick. Pupils the size of plum pits. When finished, he brushed the portraits with weatherproof finish and left them to dry overnight. By morning they shone like the lacquer of Dokka’s chessboard. One at a time, he carried them to the street. Some he mounted within the doorless frames of abandoned public buildings; others he fixed into the walls of private homes, or hung over broken windows, or strung from empty planters, or raised to the top of flagpoles, or nailed to lampposts,
tree trunks, or fences. One covered the hole punched into a wall by a mortar round. Another he staked upright in the cemetery, a tombstone for a man whose family couldn’t afford one. They appeared with no commemoration louder than Akhmed’s solitary hammer rap. Sometimes weeks or months would pass before the bereaved stumbled across the face of their disappeared, and when they did they might approach in awe, or pat their breast pocket for a cigarette, or laugh as if just understanding a joke, or ignore it entirely, having grown used to hallucinating their loved ones on walls, tombstones, and clouds.