A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (39 page)

“What are you doing?” he asked, supine on the hospital bed.

“Giving you shorts. You have lovely legs.”

“Where are my legs?”

“Still here. Don’t worry.”

She tried to be gentle, but shrapnel had cratered his left calf. “Hold on,” she said. “Just hold on.” Her sweat-slickened bangs stuck to her forehead. She wanted to ask his name, but what if he died and she was left here with his name? The name Natasha wouldn’t learn was Said. He came from a Grozny suburb, where his mother, a veterinary’s assistant, brought home the litters abandoned on the clinic doorstep. The war had already taken his mother, but he would live to return home to her cats, which had multiplied to the population of a village during the war years, feasting, as they did, on the burgeoning estate of rats and mice. Working odd jobs and sacrificing the comforts of wife and family, he would spend his life caring for the descendants of his mother’s cats. Eight hundred and eighty-two, all named for his mother, though he would never know that exact figure. In sixty-six years, on his deathbed, he would remember that distant afternoon, when the fingers of a beautiful nurse had mined metal from his legs. He would remember it as the moment of greatest intimacy he ever had had with a woman. Then he would remember his cats.

Natasha called to Sonja, asking for pain relief. The young man was incoherent, addressing his mother in a jar of cotton swabs. Across the room, the surgical saw paused, but Sonja didn’t look up from the half-severed arm. “You’ll have to get it yourself,” she said calmly. Given her history with the drug, Natasha never prepared or administered the heroin. Dreams of bent spoon handles persisted, and five years clean she was still afraid a cigarette lighter could reheat her cravings. But she peeled off the latex gloves and jogged to the canteen. Now wasn’t the time for caution, not with that boy on her hospital bed. In the cupboard, behind an armory of evaporated milk, she found it. It compacted in her grip, filling the corners of the plastic bag. Alu’s brother had claimed there wasn’t enough talc in the bag to powder a baby’s bottom. The Italian junk Sergey had shot into her had contained enough to service a nursery, and even that had laid electric lines where her veins had been.
But this? Ninety-eight percent pure? She spat in the sink; she was salivating. You
can
control your reactions. You
can
control your reactions, she repeated. It took two minutes to cook. She only had to take one syringe to the trauma ward, but for the twenty-meter walk, when she was alone with it, she felt vastly outnumbered.

When it came time to treat the commanding officers, the last packets of surgical thread had already disappeared into the limbs of their subordinates. The field commander, the last to receive medical attention, lay on Sonja’s cot. The blood of his command soaked the sheets, and when his bare shoulders touched it, he sighed. Between his beard and his eyes, a slim band of soil-colored skin suggested many months of sunshine and malnutrition. Natasha watched while her sister treated him. A long, semicircular gash split his left pectoral. “My chest is grinning at me,” he observed.

Sonja flooded the wound with saline and iodine. With forceps she pinched through the gash for shrapnel fragments. It had begun to clot, but wouldn’t heal without stitches. The rebels looked on with reverent interest.

“We have a problem,” Sonja said. The commander nodded to the ceiling. “We need to get you stitched up, but we’re out of surgical thread. We simply don’t have the supplies on hand to treat so many field injuries.”

“He can have mine,” murmured a thin man, whose beard was half shaven to accommodate thirteen stitches on his left cheek. A chorus of offers followed. Even those without a single stitch vociferously pledged their surgical thread.

“It isn’t sanitary,” Sonja said with a finality that ended debate. None appeared too disappointed that his offer was declined. “Don’t you have field medical kits? Anything we can sterilize and sew into you?”

A junior officer appeared with a small green bag. Natasha sifted through it while Sonja held a compress to the wound. She pulled out a pink toothbrush with a fan of gray bristles, a small bottle of nonalcoholic
mouthwash, a tube of fluoride whitening paste, five tubes of toothpaste, on which the five daily prayers were written in black marker, and three rolls of unwaxed dental floss.

“The floss,” Sonja said. “It might work.”

The field commander grimaced as the alcohol-wetted floss followed the needle through his skin. He refused the offer of pain relief. Natasha admired his abstinence.

“Have dentists begun enlisting?” she asked as Sonja slipped the needle in a fifth time. If he refused anesthetic, she could at least offer the distraction of conversation.

“No, it was a captain’s private supply.”

“Did he have fine teeth?”

“Yes,” the field commander said. His open mouth revealed a more relaxed philosophy toward dental hygiene. “They were beautiful, beautiful things. He brushed five times a day, always before prayer, as if performing an ablution on his mouth.”

“Was he conscious of his health in general?”

“Not really. He smoked no fewer than two packs a day.”

“He sounds like a strange man.”

“You get that way. In the first war I fought with a man who went through a roll of antacids every day.”

“That can cause an electrolyte disturbance: hypercalcemia. Stones, bones, moans, groans, thrones, and psychiatric overtones. That’s the mnemonic,” Natasha said, and repeated
psychiatric overtones
to herself. She wondered if Maali had a taste for antacids.

“I doubt it matters. He’s very dead now. Besides, we ate nothing but buckwheat kasha. No, he took antacids as a calcium supplement. He was terrified of osteoporosis.”

She nearly laughed. “How old was he?”

“Twenty-two.”

“You are all insane.”

The field commander winced as Sonja pulled the stitches tight. “It
just becomes easy to convince yourself that caring for a small part of your body will act to protect the rest. As though Allah wouldn’t be cruel enough to steal the life from a man with perfect teeth.”

“Did it work?”

“We left his mouth open when we buried him so that in Paradise he can flaunt his teeth to the angels.”

The rebels spent the night in the ghost ward. None snored; even in sleep they were wary. In the morning they pointed the hospital beds of their wounded comrades toward Mecca. Natasha ladled a dense pulp of oats and powdered milk into their bowls. With Sonja and the nurses, she checked the bandaged burns, stitched lacerations, the broken bones splinted between sterilized wooden strips. Only the rebel with the amputated arm would be left behind. The field commander prayed for him, then rooted through the man’s rucksack for anything that might connect him with the insurgency.

“You’re a civilian now,” the field commander said. “Enjoy the peace you have fought for. We’ll take your arm for burial, but must leave you here. If you want to stay, the lady doctor said the position of security guard has recently opened.”

Complying with his insistence to be treated last, Natasha served him the final bowl of oats from the canteen. The surface had cooled to a carapace the field commander tapped twice with his spoon before breaking.

“Where are you going next?”

“South,” the field commander said. “To the mountains.”

“Try to find a doctor or veterinarian before then. If this gets infected, the Feds will be your smallest problem.”

“In our condition we probably won’t make it farther than Eldár today.”

Only two of the field commander’s shirt buttons matched the brown fabric, whose original color would be anyone’s guess. Natasha pulled the shirt past his shoulder and covered the stitches with a fresh bandage.
The dental floss had worked. “I was in the mountains once,” she said. “I climbed right across the border.”

“In winter?”

“Spring.”

“The winter will be difficult. We need supply lines. Good middlemen. Maybe we’ll find someone in Eldár. You’re not looking for a new profession, are you?”

As his contribution to the hospital, the field commander left the bag of toothpaste. He stood stiffly by the door as his command shuffled out. Alone, he turned to the sisters.

“Thank you,” he said, bowing slightly. “You are kind, decent, and if I can risk impertinence, quite attractive. There must be some Chechen in you.”

“I have a favor to ask,” Sonja said. “Would you write us a letter of safe passage, so we can, should we need to, travel through rebel land?”

The field commander had two sisters of his own, older by one and three years, who teased and chided and always took care of him. He kept their names written on the sheet of paper stitched in his trouser seam. He trusted them with the name of his first crush and would trust them with his eternity. He smiled and searched for a pen.

When the field commander departed, and the double doors swung closed, Natasha returned to the maternity ward almost believing the war had left with him. Six days later the Feds would enter the city. They would launch a single mortar round at the hospital in retaliation for sheltering rebels. That round would hit the fourth-floor storage room. Maali would be searching for clean sheets. She would land atop the rubble, four floors below, her pulse slowing in her wrist. A syringe would be prepared and half injected, but death would relieve Maali’s pain before the drug took effect, and the senseless, screaming world would go quiet when Natasha slipped that same syringe between her toes, and with a push of the plunger, sent Maali’s blood into her own.

T
HE
F
OURTH AND
F
IFTH
D
AYS

CHAPTER
24

H
AD HE SLEPT
on the divan, he would have seen the letter to Havaa. Had the side lamp still held even a spark of electricity, he would have seen the letter to Havaa. Had he risen an hour later, when dawn threw its bright beams across the floor, he would have seen the letter to Havaa. But he hadn’t seen it, and now Havaa was galloping across the waiting room, her face a flower head, a moon, a cannonball, and then it was there, punching into his gut, knocking the breath from his lungs, and only then, with her arms belted around his waist, did he remember the letter from Khassan which he had forgotten to bring.

“You’re here,” she proclaimed to his hip bone.

“Where else would I be?” He didn’t fully appreciate what the girl knew, that
here
was a special, unlikely place. She thought he could have disappeared by now, too. That he could be with her father, wherever
that was, and whatever that meant. But he was here. The sharp sting of bleach preceded Sonja’s footsteps and they both looked to the door before she appeared. Her bright white scrubs could belong to a doctor in Moscow or London or Berlin. Should he ever disturb a sleeping land mine, or cross the path of a bullet, he would want to be treated by a doctor wearing those scrubs.

The previous night, as he had sketched the portrait of her sister, he had fought the urge to lean in so his left knee would touch her right. Two years had passed since he last touched a knee like that. And before that? When had he touched Ula’s knees with anything like desire? Caretaking had refined his passion, once as raw and combustible as crude oil, into a dimmer, longer-burning love.

“So this is the Tolstoy book?” She nodded to the chair where
Hadji Murád
lay. That, he hadn’t forgotten.

“Yes, the one he wrote about Chechnya.”

Pulling back a stray lock of hair, she drew a question mark around her ear. He handed her the book. She flipped to the last page.

“What are you doing? Don’t read the last page.”

“I always read the last page first,” she said, without looking up.

“That ruins everything. The whole book is working toward the last page.”

Her lips pursed to a pebble. The paper cover bent in her grip, as if she were steadying her hands. The amphetamines? But she spoke in a flat, uninspired tone. “If it’s not an ending I think I’ll like, then I won’t read the book.” She handed it back to him.

“Are you serious?”

“He gets decapitated on the last page. That’s not an ending I want to read.”

She was harder to pin down than the last pickle in the jar. Here he had thought he would impress her, thought they would have conversations about the book’s images and themes, a literary salon in a city without electricity.

“But it’s the great book. It’s a century and a half old and still the best book about the first and second wars.”

“Why would I want to read what I’m living?”

“You prefer escape?”

“You’ve been here four days,” she said. “Keep coming back, and we’ll see if you still think books are worth arguing over.”

Akhmed, Deshi, and Havaa went to the weekly aid distribution point, so shortly after eight, when a man was carried in with a tailpipe lodged in his chest, Sonja received him alone. The man, an army contractor, had been plagued by asthma for all of his twenty-one years. After living his life as a drowning man, his final breath, nineteen seconds after the car bomb detonated, entered him effortlessly, the easiest inhalation of his life, through the metal trachea jutting from his chest, and into his collapsed lung.