A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (23 page)

The ministry offices were housed in a six-story building bordering City Park, and each evening, on her way home, she passed a homeless man whose wispy beard reached his belt line. The man, a resident of the park, was known to most of Volchansk as the City Park Prophet. She gave him a few rubles each evening, and asked, half in jest, that he remember her poor tired feet in his prayers. The City Park Prophet’s
eyes would lower in gratitude, and he would promise to remember her when the end came.

She spent her Fridays at a nightclub called Nightclub, situated in what had been an aviation assembly plant. The floor spread across the eight-story hangar, wide enough to contain the gyrations of half of Chechnya. Nightclub never had reached, and never would reach, capacity. After downing drinks at the bar, Natasha and her friends shimmied their way to the center of the hangar. There, red velvet ropes created a ten-square-meter dance floor where the young, well-dressed, and secular could press against each other, shrieking and shaking in epileptic spasms of floodlight, freedom found in the ruins of empire. Natasha lost all elegance when dancing. Her heels hindered movement, but she couldn’t take them off—no matter how often it was swept, loose bolts and rust-resistant rivets appeared on the floor, gently throbbing with the bass—so she listed. The majority of her dance moves consisted of attempts to stay upright. And one Friday night, in March 1991, with her hair, heels, and three-shot tilt no different from the previous dozen Fridays, she wobbled into Sulim’s arms.

His 1990 black BMW convertible had been stolen in Belgium and driven across all of a European winter to reach him. He had three missing teeth—and one so black it was clearly on the way out—because for all his money, he still couldn’t afford a decent dentist. He had the habit of raising his voice at the ends of his sentences, turning declarations into questions, as though when he whispered her name he wasn’t really sure to whom he was talking. He had a bed the size of Natasha’s bedroom, two Soviet pistols, his great-great-grandfather’s
kinzhal
still brown with the blood of Imperial infantrymen, a short beard that never grew, eleven toes, and a long white curve of scar tissue on his pelvis that, in the seven months they saw each other, Natasha learned to desire and despise in equal measure. He had a cousin in the upper air of the
obshchina
, the Chechen mob. The cousin, educated at the London School of Economics, a man whose occupation reduced his life expectancy to
that of a gulag laborer, had taught Sulim to open new markets with a crowbar. Their first month together was perhaps the happiest of Natasha’s life. The following six, perhaps the most miserable.

The cancer in her mother’s liver metastasized and she spent the last ten weeks of her life in the chlorinated air of Hospital No. 6. Through Sonja’s connections, her father was allowed to spend the nights on the floor beside her bed, cocooned in his olive Red Army sleeping bag. Natasha gave Sulim a key to the flat. She fit her fingers in the furrows between his ribs, thought of them as rungs. The whole world was falling, but here was someone strong enough to hold on to. The two men with whom she’d been intimate previously had treated her like a slight, fragile thing, as if trying to fuck a Grecian urn. Sulim held her as if unafraid of crushing her kidneys. In her shoulders, he left perfect molds of his imperfect teeth that would turn red in the morning. He asked her to scratch him and her longer nails drew a tiger’s coat on his back. Her body by itself seemed a beautiful but useless instrument. Sulim’s grip on her wrists, his canines gnawing at her clavicle, this pressure in her chest, this flushed flesh.

But Sulim never stayed until morning. At two
A.M.
, he began to yawn. He stood and ran his fingers across his stomach, pinching the skin. He had more money hidden in his mattress than the entire apartment block had in the bank, yet he had the waistline of a pauper. His navel had stretched to the shape of an almond. The waxen light of the corner lamp wrapped around his chest as he turned. His spine curved into a thin ridge when he reached for his socks, and she counted the rises of vertebrae. He wore wide-collared Hawaiian shirts. He fumbled with the spare button, slightly too big for his trousers’ buttonhole. At times it felt like trying to build a meaningful relationship with a tooth fairy. He came at night, leaving behind presents, but always left by two. By the second month, he was leaving at one-thirty. Then one. He shrugged when she demanded to know why he hadn’t introduced her to his family,
why he didn’t dance with her at Nightclub, why he dressed her as a mistress rather than a partner. “Because that’s what you are,” he said, and walked out the door.

The state police arrested him in November 1991 for fraud. An informer had linked him to the notorious
vosdushniki
—“air men,” they were called, for their ability to draw billions of rubles from the air. Using falsified promissory notes, they authenticated bank transfers from an invented company in Chechnya to an invented company in Moscow. Enough paperwork went through for the
obshchina
men to withdraw the forged transfer in cash from Moscow banks. A bribe from Sulim’s cousin released him from custody within two days, but the government still had enough thump in its baton to force him into hiding. He arrived at Natasha’s flat at five in the afternoon. The living room curtains were drawn open and the smog-filtered sunset bathed his cheeks in ochre. She had never before seen him in natural light. In his left hand he held a blue nylon duffel bag. He explained the situation, drained of the swagger that had so entranced and infuriated her. He couldn’t stay with family or friends, no one with whom he had a known relationship. He would stay here with her. She’d never seen him so in need. For the first time in their relationship, she realized that she had more power than he, and this was all she needed to let him go. He kept glancing to his feet. She would miss his eleventh toe. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You need to leave.”

Her mother passed a few weeks later. Natasha was at work, her sister at school, her father at the dessert counter in the hospital cafeteria. No one was there to see what the dying woman saw, in her final moments, when her uncle, the man who had disappeared when she was no more than twelve centimeters of fetal tissue in her mother’s belly, emerged from the yellow wallpaper and led her the rest of the way. Ten days after the funeral, Natasha’s father took a lorry job in Turkmenistan. On the morning he left, he wore a red sweater with golden diamonds woven across the chest. He had never filled it out, as her mother had
predicted he would when she had given it to him five Christmases earlier. He would be wearing that sweater two and a half years later, just north of the border, when a stolen cement mixing truck would slam into his lorry cabin, cutting short his life, his final haul, and his five-week odyssey to return home to his girls.

Natasha went to work but couldn’t pay attention to the reports she copied, collated, and conveyed. She lost her job soon after the declaration of national independence, when all essential oil ministry personnel were transferred to Moscow, her bloated boss included. She drifted, a kelp rope on the tide that washed away her country, family, and future. She made dinner one night, Sonja the next. Having graduated university at the top of her class, Sonja was now in her third year of medical school. She studied while they ate, paying more attention to diseases of the digestive system than to her dinner. Natasha tried to construct conversation with scraps of the day:
Did you see the car accident on Lenin Square? What classes did you have today?
But Sonja didn’t believe in small talk and answered in monosyllables, a fact Natasha would remember when, sitting at the same table four and three-quarter years later, Sonja tried to convince her of its therapeutic qualities.

In the six months she lived without Sulim, without her mother or father, only one dinner was shot through with enough excitement to make her forget the awful cooking. Just before they were to eat, Sonja returned from the mailbox with a brown manila envelope riddled with international postage, and flung her arms around Natasha, panting and screaming joyous gibberish, with more life in her face than Natasha had thought possible. “London,” Sonja finally said, and the word would remain with Natasha, its six letters stretching to accommodate every conceivable hope. “I’ve been given a full fellowship to finish medical school in London.”

Natasha tried to smile, tried to pretend her tears were of joy rather than dread, but when Sonja threw her arms around her, when they embraced, Natasha held her sister tightly, so scared of letting her go.

Though Natasha had learned to sleep through the screech of tires, the curses, the celebratory gunfire, the explosions, the cries, the laughing, the whole hell of the street below, she stayed awake that night and watched speeding taillights stretch into crimson bars across the asphalt. The young men leaning on the hoods of European cars were gangsters and mercenaries and gamblers. They made dangerous bets with safe foreign currencies, laying on the dash the annual wages men of their education would earn in a lawful society. Some nights they tried to jump the decapitated Lenin statue in the square. That night was a simple drag race. Four cars looped through the city center along a course marked by trash-can fires. Reports of aerial bombing in Grozny had filtered in, leaving the city flushed and agitated. In the morning, she would take the bus to Grozny to meet with Lidiya Nikitova, a shuttle trader who flew through Tbilisi to Hamburg once a week and returned with suitcases packed with Western electronics and clothing. Natasha would fill two duffel bags with clothes, but also Walkmen, Game Boys, satellite phones, portable televisions, and the increasingly popular noise-canceling headphones to sell in the city bazaar. The Feds blocked the border, the airport looked like another shuttered factory along the Baku-Rostov motorway, yet the bazaar was flush with Japanese electronics, Burmese silk, Belgian chocolate, Brazilian liquor, Indian spices, and American currency. Only three cars came past on the next lap. She breathed against the glass of her bedroom window, summoning from the fog a smiling, finger-drawn face. It was November 1994. She hadn’t seen her sister in more than two and a half years. She hadn’t seen her father in more than three. She wondered if it would snow.

News came third-, fourth-, fifth-hand. Fact was indistinguishable from hearsay, so all was believed and all was disbelieved and all were right.
Grab as much sovereignty as you can swallow
, Yeltsin had urged, and Chechnya had opened its mouth. The president was still named Dzhokhar Dudayev, and he still had a fountain pen–drawn mustache. He was the first Chechen to make general rank in the Red Army and
ten years earlier he had served in Afghanistan, where Russian bombs had fallen on Muslim civilians for neither the first nor final time. In bed Natasha listened to his radio address, his voice a lullaby compared to the screech of car tires. The fantastical marked his presidency. The government needed money, and so, after minting its own currency, Estonia sent its entire reserve of Soviet rubles to Grozny rather than to Moscow. The government needed an army, and, the previous year, when the Feds had abandoned their Chechen bases, they had left behind stockpiles of heavy artillery, ammunition, guns, armored jeeps, and more tanks than there were licensed Chechen tank drivers. She set the radio beside her pillow. The drag race had finished. She lowered the volume and rolled toward the black mesh speaker, imagining the voice of revolution to be the whispers of a friend talking her to sleep.

The rumors proved true; in Grozny, bombs fell. On the weekly trips to the capital, she paid attention to the crowds. The density of sidewalk debris ensured they only lifted their eyes at the murmur of planes. The traffic lights went out and policemen, still wearing the blue uniforms of Soviet road police, directed traffic with the tips of their cigarettes. She stood in a clogged avenue and scanned the skies. Only once did she see them fly over. Five planes in tight formation. She craned her neck while all down the avenue commuters left their car doors open as they fled. Five parallel lines of exhaust striped the empty sky. Kilometers above, men who didn’t know her name wanted to kill her. A man in a bright purple suit grabbed her shoulder, shaking her, and asking if she was deaf or stupid or both. Following him down the line of abandoned vehicles, she pushed the driver doors closed, and in this simple act restored order to the world. He took her to the basement of a party supply store. They sat on sacks of inflatable plastic balloons. The man kicked over a box and whoopee cushions, Slinkies, and glasses with fake noses toppled out. “I can’t believe I’m going to die somewhere so stupid,” the man said, and began weeping. She asked how he knew this place. The man held on to his purple lapels. “This suit,” he said, “I’m returning this stupid suit.”
He was thirteen years into what would be a forty-eight-year career as a clown; he had an IQ of 167.

When the bombing stopped, she left the sobbing purple-suited man and went to Lidiya Nikitova’s flat. She found Lidiya packing a suitcase on the unmade bed. Natasha expected to find it filled with Prada handbags, Gucci blouses, Ferragamo neckties, but instead found coarse woolen sweaters, baggy sweatpants, gray socks, a photo album. For ten minutes Lidiya shook her head in despair. Natasha worried the poor woman’s head would fall off. “Chechens have family,” Lidiya said, as she pulled out a pair of boots buried beneath a mound of toeless shoes. “They have their
teips
and their ancestral homes in the highlands to flee to. The barbarians. It’s nearly the millennium and they still live in clans. Even now, in the middle of all this, they don’t believe orphans or vagrants can ever exist because the
teip
will provide. The barbarians. What do we ethnic Russians have? No
teip
. Our countrymen are dropping bombs on us. No, back north for me. I’ve never been to Petersburg, but my cousin says it’s much more civilized.” After Lidiya Nikitova left, Natasha spent an hour browsing her apartment. She took a pair of high-heeled leather boots, cashmere sweaters, and silk evening gowns. She wouldn’t have an opportunity to wear them, but beautiful things were so rare it seemed wrong to leave them behind.