A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (38 page)

“Do you remember who I am?” he asked, but she had already fallen asleep.

“You know how those things were invented?” Sonja asked with a nod to the stethoscope the girl was using to listen to her own heartbeat. “It was invented by a French physician who had a very fat patient. The patient was so fat that the French physician couldn’t hear the heartbeat through his chest. So he invented a stethoscope.”

“That’s weird,” the girl said, shifting the bell like an indecisive chess piece. “I’ve never seen a fat person before.”

“Never?”

“Never. But in my souvenirs I have the autograph of a man who used to be fat.”

The girl noted her heart rate on the chart Sonja had given her. Overcome by an inexplicable interest in medicine, the girl, draped in a lab coat that swished against the linoleum, had been following Sonja since dinner. It took the better part of an hour before Sonja realized the girl was imitating her. Her raw exasperation softened to a more delicate displeasure when the girl began scolding the air for carrying contagions. Poor child, she thought, let’s hope she finds a better role model.

The girl held the stethoscope bell like a microphone and, while kicking a drooping tail of bedsheet, began interviewing Sonja. “What’s it like being a surgeon?” she asked.

“Wonderful. Next question.”

“Why don’t you have kids?”

“They ask too many questions.”

“Who did you bribe to get into medical school?”

“Surprisingly, no one at all.”

“And are you the only woman surgeon in the world?”

“It feels like it.”

“What’s your favorite disease?”

“Chlamydia.”

“If they let you become a surgeon instead of a wife, would they let me become an arborist instead of a wife?”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“You know.”

“Tell me.”

The girl’s face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger than the weakest boy, and with those ideas crowding your head no wonder subordination was the only inevitable outcome. She sat on the hospital bed beside the girl, remembering what it was like to have that face, and pitying it. “Listen, Havaa,” she said, summoning as much generosity as she could muster at this hour of night, “you can be exactly the person you want to be, okay? It may not seem that way, but things change when you get a little older. If you work hard, and give up certain things, and yes, resort to bribery now and then, you’ll be an arborist, or a sea anemonist, or anything else you want.”

And they kept talking, passing the stethoscope bell back and forth.

“Do you have any questions for me?” the girl asked at the end of the interview.

Since Akhmed had left that evening, Sonja had held the question as she would a long-awaited letter, terrified of what the envelope contained. “Did a Russian woman ever stay at your house?”

“Which one? Lots of people stayed with us.”

“Her name was Natasha.”

“Probably thirty Natashas at least.”

“She looked like me.”

Havaa gave her an appraising look. “Then no.”

“Like me only beautiful.”

The girl tilted her head. “I can’t imagine that.”

And it struck her. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? Akhmed’s sketch. She was upright and out of the room before Havaa could ask where she was going. Why had she asked him to take the portrait? Where would he have put it? She climbed to the fourth floor and worked her way back to her room, checking the new and old maternity wards, the land-mine man’s room, the empty administrative offices, the waiting room. While searching, her mind flashed to the day she had purchased the Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker. True to form it had endured flights across Europe, every bump of the Samsonite, and even the shame of Alu’s name, without once breaking composure.

She had found the nutcracker in a convenience store sticky with the residue of spilled soda, where she stopped for cough drops before attending a lecture. It was four weeks to Christmas. The first war wouldn’t officially begin for twelve more days. She had bought it without once thinking of Natasha, on a whim, because Buckingham Palace was what foreigners thought of when they thought of London and she, Sonja with a j, was nothing if not foreign. Gray clouds lined the horizon as she climbed the escalator at Holborn and crossed Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the Royal College of Surgeons. There, at a neurosurgery lecture, she transcribed the snaking syntax of British academia in a bright pink notebook she had found in a fifty-pence bin. Attached to the Royal College was a museum dedicated to the history of anatomy and pathology. After thanking
the lecturer, and pausing in the atrium for a cigarette and cough drop, she strolled through the museum’s curious exhibitions. There was a display detailing the history of non-Egyptian mummification. An alcove devoted to the tibia. One room exhibited the 1,474 skulls collected by nineteenth-century physician Joseph Barnard Davis. A fractured skull of a Roman woman found at Pompeii. The skulls of nine Chinese pirates hanged in Ningpo. Congolese from Leopold’s rubber plantations. But the skull that haunted her was that of a Bengali cannibal. Fully intact, the mandible still locked against the temporal, the twenty-two bones that constitute a human skull all accounted for. The eight bones forming the neurocranial brain case bathed in halogenated light. From the size of the plates, the prominence of the supraorbital ridge and temporal lines, as well as the overall size and solidity of the skull, she knew it belonged to a man. The skull appeared no different from those of the Chinese pirates, the Congolese plantation workers. She read the placard written a century and a half earlier by a Victorian phrenologist.
There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man
.

That morbid association between the cannibal and the nutcracker, one which she never mentioned to Natasha, was all she thought of while searching for the portrait. She finally found the notebook on the canteen counter, beneath a stack of folded linens. From the last page Natasha observed her calmly, through eyes unclouded by judgment or resentment, her hair held back with a headband she had never owned, her ears heavy with earrings that didn’t exist. Clearly Akhmed hadn’t met her.

Her footsteps, slowing to a processional as she neared her room, tapped like the last drops falling from a stopped faucet. She wanted to know and didn’t want to know; the two were always there, always tearing at her, a tug-of-war in which she was the rope. But that was okay, she told herself. The truth was one more rumor passed along the refugee lines, another hallucination she could freely disbelieve. When she entered the room the girl was already asleep. She slid the portrait into one of the drawers, thankful to postpone the answer for one more night.

CHAPTER
23

T
HE SECOND WAR
, when it came to Volchansk, came without bomb blasts or mortar rounds, tracer bullets or tank treads. It came through the bazaar at first, a few more kopeks per gram of cardamom, a few more rubles per carrot, the deprivation subtle enough to blame on currency inflation, or global markets, or natural disasters. Then the electricity went. But the municipal power lines, restrung after the first war, never had carried a current for more than two hours at a stretch anyway, as likely to come at daybreak as midnight, fifteen or twenty minutes for Natasha to charge her batteries, pull news from the airwaves, hop in the shower and blow-dry her hair before the lights flickered and the city collapsed back into darkness. The tap water went next. With the remaining civilians she drew buckets from unboarded wells and strained the water through pillowcases before boiling it. Then food shortages.
No milk, then no plums, then no cabbages, then no corn meal. Even the feral animals quieted, the dogs stopped howling, the songbirds stopped singing. And though Federal forces invaded Chechnya in August 1999, the second war didn’t begin for Natasha until the afternoon in 2001 when it marched through the doors of Hospital No. 6.

The skies of the maternity ward mural were as placid as on the day she had drawn them when she mistook the first crack for thunder. Gunshots followed as quickly as her footsteps as she ran downstairs. In trauma, Sonja and the nurses huddled by the aluminum filing cabinets.

“We could evacuate them to a village,” Sonja suggested. “We have a truck.”

“No,” Deshi said. “We keep them here. This is a hospital. They belong here.”

Maali assented. “Let’s use them as human shields.”

Natasha tried to wedge herself into the conversation, but as usual the triangle wouldn’t widen into a square. She took a deep breath and turned. This isn’t about you, she told herself. Your reaction is the only thing you can control. Who would have thought those books Sonja had brought with her the day she found ice were worth reading? In the five years she had worked here her emotional spectrum expanded beyond the monochromatic depression that had tinted her early days of recovery.
Recovery
. What a strange, wondrous word. None better defined her gradual reintegration into humanity. Nearly nine months of confinement, forced prostitution, beatings and heroin addiction, but she had come back. No one was more surprised than she herself, and no one was happier than Sonja. When Natasha was a teenager she once fell asleep on the roof and woke the color of borscht. The following week all the popular girls at school came in sunburned, and a week later the girls that wanted to be popular, until the principal, in an impromptu assembly, explained that girls had been known to roast alive while sunbathing. The memory was still there, tucked away in folds of time, and she found it again, with a smile, on the afternoons she climbed to the hospital
roof to lie in the sun. Entire hours passed without her once thinking of Italy.

The nurses didn’t want to hear from her, but the patients did. An elderly woman, Xenia, patient number 29395, repeatedly asked
what is happening
, more confused and hesitant with each reiteration, as her neighbor, her first cousin, begged her to shut up because her insufferable voice would kill him faster than any bullet or bomb. When the Whites had swept through Volchansk eighty-one years earlier, Xenia had asked her cousin the same question and her cousin had answered. Xenia had been six, her cousin seven. Her voice had been lovely then.

“We’re figuring it out,” Natasha said. “Don’t worry. Can I get you some ice?”

Xenia gave her cousin a smug smile and nodded.

“Bring me the tongue depressor!” the cousin shouted after Natasha.

Two days earlier, when Xenia had arrived with pneumonia, Sonja had treated her lungs with the respect a plumber shows to blocked septic pipes. Her sister’s work was undeniably good, but its execution bothered Natasha. To work in these circumstances a surgeon must reduce each patient to her body, but this was an attitude shared by the traffickers, pimps, and johns populating Natasha’s private perdition. So while Sonja examined a cracked pelvis without once meeting the patient’s eye, or addressed the patient by placard number rather than by name, Natasha sequestered herself in the fourth-floor maternity ward, where whole days passed without their paths crossing, where the wails of newborns reminded her that life is louder than its pulse. While Sonja debated the merits of evacuation, Natasha fed Xenia crushed ice with a plastic spoon and told her exactly what was happening.

Boot fall, echoing down the corridor, ended the debate. The security guard ran through the double doors, his arms pumping, his shirt-tail flapping behind him. “They’re here,” he called. He ran right past Sonja and out the back door, announcing his immediate resignation in a breathless shout.

“Who?” Sonja called after him. “Feds or rebels?” No answer. Xenia held an ice cube in her mouth, afraid to break it. No one spoke. The shuffle of military boots paused at the closed double doors. The air was stretched so taut Natasha could have walked across it. A sharp kick, initially mistaken for a gunshot, jolted them all and flung open the double doors. Four bearded men entered with machine guns raised.

“I retired seven years ago,” Deshi said to no one in particular.

“We hereby liberate this hospital for patriotic use for the glorious campaign for national independence,” the shortest rebel declared. Dirt powdered his cheeks. Blood stained his shirt and trousers. He glared at the room, daring them to blink. “Who’s in charge?”

Across the room, with an exasperated roll of her eyes, Sonja raised her hand.

“I am the field commander of the fourth brigade of the National Military of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,” the shortest rebel said. He lowered his gun and took small, plodding steps to Sonja. “There are forty of us. Most need medical attention. Everyone needs food and water.”

“We could amputate all their legs,” Maali suggested, but the limping entrance of thirty-six more rebels made permission a formality. Sonja agreed to treat the wounded provided they removed their boots. They corralled the rebels in one of the ghost wards, sharing an unspoken consensus that the quicker the work was done, the better for all involved. The rebels asked for treatment by ascending order of rank, rather than by triage. The lower ranks were first into battle, the commander explained in a clipped northern accent, and thus had suffered the longest. Natasha’s throat tightened as she cut through the trouser leg of a curly-haired private. Nothing but pale down on his cheeks and pink clouds in his eyes. She hadn’t touched a man’s trousers in five and a quarter years.