A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (26 page)

Against the ringing of her last two kopeks of common sense, she
found Sulim. He lived in the open now, in business with both Feds and rebels, and occasionally with the smuggler Sonja would later know as Alu’s brother. They met in a bar that served nothing. No door, no liquor, no employees, no windows, but the regulars still returned each afternoon. Their lips were blue from drinking windshield wiper fluid.

In comparison to them, Sulim looked well. His eyes, unclouded by exhaustion, scanned her approvingly. The Parkinson’s that would turn him into a quivering jelly mold in eleven years was already fermenting in his midbrain, but his hands didn’t shake when he went to light his cigarette. War served him well. From mountain hideaways Dudayev’s economic and police chiefs issued statements praising an economy and a police force that no longer existed, and in the vacuum of legitimate authority, organized crime provided the only meaningful order. He offered her a cigarette.

“You want to get out,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”

“I can do well in the West.”

“Anyone can do well when they aren’t dodging bullets.” He scanned the ghost drinkers; those with the bluest lips had gone blind, and they reached out, touching the faces of their drinking partners. Sulim reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a vodka bottle. “I don’t know how they got it in their heads that we smuggle it in barrels of windshield wiper fluid.”

“I’ll work off the debt.”

“Will you?” he asked.

“You know how hard I worked at Grozneft. I’m productive.”

“Are you?” he asked.

“Please.” He took a small sip from the bottle, savoring it as he watched her. He hadn’t forgotten how she had denied him at her door, his skin sallow in the daylight. He crossed his legs, leaned back, waiting for her to beg. “I know there are trafficking routes,” she said. “I know you can get me out. Please, Sulim.”

“Under the Soviets, women who disappeared had to reappear on the other side of the world to make money. Now women can turn a profit simply by vanishing. Reappearance has too high an overhead. Chechen families will pay a higher ransom for the body of their daughter than they will for her alive. I’ve looked at the numbers.”

She stood to leave.

“But you aren’t Chechen,” he continued. “You have no family to pay for your corpse. You have no afterlife for which your body must be prepared. You can have another cigarette.”

He lit it for her with a bent match. She had kissed those knuckles. She had loved them.

“Will you help me or not?”

He was holding her index finger and he nodded it up and down. Crippled by tremors, unable to control his limbs, an embarrassment to his family, he would spend his final years in a windowless room with a television set for companionship. “You didn’t really think I would deny you? Where do you want to go?”

“London.”

“Then in London you will be an au pair. Do you know what that is? It’s a French word. It means you will watch the children while the parents are at work.”

“So I will be a grandmother?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“I’m not my sister but I’m not a fool.”

“There may be other things. Dancing, entertaining. Being, what’s the word, enticing.”

It meant prostitution. Waitressing, nannying, those were for pretty girls from poor countries, not pretty girls from war countries. Some repatriated women called it slavery, but even if it was true, so what? Paid sex with London civilians couldn’t be worse than forced sex with Russian soldiers. And in London, Sonja would find her other work. Sulim watched her from across the table. His lips twisted into a slight smile,
a challenge. Did he think she was afraid of him? Did he think he could possibly scare her?

“London,” she said. “Make me an au pair. Make me reappear.”

A young man with a soft, round face transported Natasha and five other women to the Dagestan border. They sat on crates in the near-darkness of a Federal supply van. The wind pulled against the olive canvas awning, and occasionally, a sliver of sunlight slipped through and was gone. She wanted to ask their names, where they were from, if they, too, were au pairs. Conversation seemed possible a moment after the round-faced man, looking like their younger brother, hoisted them into the truck bed. But the air clotted with doubt too thick for any words to pass.

Some hours later the van shuddered to a standstill and the round-faced man unlatched the back. Natasha shielded her eyes against the bright burn of noon and the light warmed her hands. A smock of dark evergreens wrapped around the nearest mountain. The round-faced man led them a hundred meters down a gravel path to a jeep flying the flag of national independence. Wooden benches replaced the backseats. They crowded in.

The jeep carried them up ravines of dried creek beds, along an unending jawline of pale stone. Conifer cones hung from drooped branches. The landscape appeared on the precipice of collapse. In the glens below, trickles of silvery light wound through empty pastures, glittering ribbons tied off at the horizon. It wasn’t fair. She hated the outdoors. A sex worker was one thing, but a weekend hiker? The sun silhouetted wide circling wings. A pigeon, she first thought, grown to fit the monstrous proportions of this habitat.

The round-faced man parked the jeep when the incline became too steep. When she stood straight her hair hung off her shoulders, held back by the invisible hands of gravity. Sick, dizzied, she wanted a patch of asphalt she might sit on and feel whole.
Pretty Woman
wasn’t anything
like this. The round-faced man began climbing the rock-ridden slope and called for them. No, no, no, she wanted to say, the carabiner in my purse is only a keychain. But what could she do? The top was closer than the bottom. No threat or command, just his finger beckoning, and following it, she left Chechnya.

Dagestan was three unbearable hours of hiking, then another hour by jeep. The nod of the border guard’s chin stubble was the only official record of their crossing into Georgia. Time was measured by bathroom breaks until they reached the water. The Black Sea was blue. They boarded a fishing trawler and the wind swept the scent of salt through her hair. Condominiums stood like dominoes on the coast, the white dots of lit windows numbering into the hundreds. When the sun fell below the water line the sea at last went black. She lay on the driest bit of deck she could find, used her duffel bag as a pillow, and fell asleep as the boat rocked on the water.

In Odessa they were divided. Three went with the round-faced man and as they disappeared into a Yugo something small and sharp panged through her; she didn’t know their names. She and two others followed the man who had purchased their passports into the back of a delivery van. The door slammed shut. When it opened they were in Serbia. They stayed with eleven other women in a stone cellar. Manacles looted from the Sarajevo archaeology museum lay coiled on the floor, the implicit threat more constricting than the rusted cuffs. A tin pail tilted in the far corner; when one approached it, the rest turned away. Slurred voices seeped through the damp wooden ceiling. An argument over whether fire hydrants were a good idea. She touched the cheeks, forehead, and lips she had once gazed at in the mirror, proudly. Now she wanted scar tissue, missing limbs, cheeks buckshot with acne, teeth pointing every which way.

“What is this?” she asked.

No one spoke.

“Does anyone know where we are?” she asked again.

The girl sitting next to her, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, was the only one who answered. “The Breaking Grounds.”

CHAPTER
15

“S
HE NEVER TALKED
about how it happened,” Sonja said, thirty minutes outside Grozny’s outer suburbs, ten since she had begun telling him. “How she got to Italy. If they took her on a plane or in a car or what. She never even told me who took her there, when she left, how she survived the first war. Nothing. She probably just didn’t want to think about it, but I always thought it was her way of punishing me for leaving her.” Akhmed had set the radio to 102.9. She barely knew him and that was the only reason she told him; he was, himself, static. She couldn’t explain her confession any more than the calm that followed.

“War is unnatural,” Akhmed said. “It causes people to act unnaturally.”

“Even you?”

“Of course,” he said. “I was never this charming.” He stretched his
hands in front of him; brown fields wedged between his fingers. “In the first war Dokka began classifying everything. He was an arborist by training, so he was used to dividing plants into species and genera and family, and one day he began doing that with everything else. With people. Everyone was a pacifist or an imperialist or a fascist or a classicist or any other number of -ists, and anyone who criticized his system was an anarchist.”

“Havaa speaks in more -isms than a philosophy PhD.”

“Yes, she really does take after him. She began making up her own and I remember hearing them discuss mustachism and shearistry and they were so excited. I had no idea what any of it meant. It was like a language they created to speak to each other more fully.” He paused. He was breathing heavily. The flush of his cheeks had seeped to his neck. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“She plans to be a sea anemonist.”

He laughed. “I bet. We were friends for years, Dokka and I and Ramzan. Every other Sunday we played chess, Havaa watching. Ramzan was the one who was waiting for me yesterday. The informer. We played chess every other Sunday for over a decade.”

“What happened?”

“Ramzan began running guns for the rebels. He would invite Dokka on his expeditions, pay him well. I never understood why. He didn’t need Dokka’s help to drive a jeep into the mountains. The same way you thought Natasha was punishing you by her silence, I always thought Ramzan was punishing me with those trips. He never invited me along even though I needed the money as much as Dokka. We were friends, Ramzan and I, but I always felt Ramzan resented me for something I had done. Now I think it’s more complicated than that. He was detained in the Landfill in ninety-five, and I think he resents me because I know what happened to him there.

“I was jealous of Dokka. Of his trips to the mountains with Ramzan.
Of the money he made. Of his wife. Mine has been bed-bound and senile for nearly three years while his had more vitality, more urgency in her little finger than most men have between their legs. I was jealous of his daughter. We tried for years but …” His voice trailed away. Beyond him a single smokestack rose a hundred meters into the sky, no building in sight. “Dokka was my closest friend and yet I wanted his family, his opportunities, his life. He and Ramzan would go to the mountains for a week or two and I would eat dinner with Esiila and Havaa. I would spend the whole day and night there. On his final trip, in January 2003, I slept in his bed for three nights. Of course I couldn’t have known that he and Ramzan had been detained and sent to the Landfill. I couldn’t have known that his fingers were snipped off with wire cutters while I was at his house, sleeping with his wife, eating with his daughter, because I thought his life was perfect. Whatever we were to each other was lost then. I’m not sure if Esiila told him or not, but he knew. Never said anything but he knew. I would go over and talk to the refugees staying at his house when I wanted to talk to him. He didn’t say a word to me last year when I spoke to the woman who told me your name. If I saw Dokka again, I wouldn’t apologize or try to make it right. That isn’t what I would say.”

“What would you say?”

Akhmed smiled, shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The shadow of a fresh crater darkened the road. At the bottom an arm reached upward. The rest of the body lay there and there and there. Lavender tatters, caught in an updraft, twisted in a wide ocean of sky. “We offered her a ride,” Sonja said, meaning
I told her so
, meaning
this isn’t my fault
.

Snow sprayed from the tires, cresting in the rearview. What would she do if the war ended? Of all the possibilities and permutations she had
played out in her mind, peace was never among them. What would she do? The war that turned lieutenants into colonels, and unemployed men into jihadists, also turned residents into chief surgeons.

“Tolstoy was here two hundred years ago,” Akhmed said. “There was a war then. He wrote a novel about it.”

“I don’t care for fiction.”

“
Hadji Murád
it’s called,” he said. “I’ll bring it for you tomorrow.”

“Why aren’t you angry at me?” she asked. The question had been burning in her all afternoon.

Akhmed folded his hands, but said nothing.

“I had you interrogated at gunpoint. If you were deceiving me I would have had you shot.”

“If I were deceiving you, I would have been another man.”

“You’re a decent man,” she said, and smiled. “A terrible physician, but a decent man.”

“I know. I shouldn’t spend so much time with you. You’ll turn me into a first-rate surgeon and boor.”

“I think it’s the other way around,” she said. A gauze of afternoon cloud cover had wrapped around the sky and she looked up and into it. “I’m overcome by the inexplicable desire to speak to you with common courtesy.”