A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (42 page)

When the men broke through the door, he was on his knees. He prayed for his wife, that in Paradise Allah would give her a body that worked. He prayed for Sonja, that she would find companionship. He prayed for Havaa, that she would live to die a natural death. He prayed for Khassan, and for Dokka. But when the men started beating him, when they taped his mouth and threw him in the back of the truck, he prayed only for himself.

CHAPTER
25

T
HE
T
UESDAY
N
ATASHA
departed had been the third warmest December day in living memory. Sonja’s coat still hung on the coat stand, where she had left it earlier that morning, after raising the window sash to test the air. The illness Natasha had claimed, when Sonja tapped on her door with fingers still warm from their reach into sunshine, was, in fact, withdrawal. Ever since Maali had fallen with the fourth-floor storage room, Natasha had numbed herself with pinches of heroin. Not counting the first dose, stolen from the syringe intended for Maali’s forearm, she only snorted the powder. No more than once or twice a month for the first year, infrequent enough for her to believe, with some justification, that she was in charge of the heroin rather than the other way around. But then there was the time she delivered three stillborns in one week, the time the winter freeze slid right into the third week
of May, the time an ache crept its way into her left ankle and stayed for months, the time she woke feeling as rotten as sunken squash and twice as ugly. The world must have grown crueler, because soon she was finding reasons to snort on a daily basis. Maali’s fall, Sonja believed, was the cause of her malaise, as if Natasha had been tethered to the nurse, as if her regression could be so neatly explained. Even as Natasha broke her standards faster than she could lower them, one was immutable: she would never use a needle again. So late the previous night, when she had found herself planting a syringe in that familiar place between her toes, she had promised herself she would leave the next day. To her great surprise, she woke in the morning. To her greater surprise, she kept her promise.

She made her bed, cleaned her room as best she could, and packed what she needed in Sonja’s black Samsonite. Before leaving she sat at the kitchen table her father had built for them himself from ash wood. It was a rickety thing, with nails that kept falling out and matchbooks under two of the table legs, a table the poorhouse would refuse, but one she had eaten from her entire life because spilled tea and tetanus wouldn’t kill anyone as fast as a pride-wounded father. She tried to draft a note to Sonja but all alphabets failed her. What could she say? Wouldn’t any excuse read like an insult to the sister that had, she could now acknowledge, given up a decent life in London for her? No, better to say nothing for now. She would get word to Sonja from the camps, when she had gone too far to turn back. Had she known the heartache her wordless departure was to cause, she would have written down the sentence pounding in her head:
Thank you, Sonja
.

She marched down the service road away from the city, toward the border, on the trodden path of some fifty thousand previous refugees. Where would she go from the camps? Turkey, Armenia, or Azerbaijan most likely, but she would rather go to China or Hawaii, a country where no one could speak Chechen or Russian. She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.
The wet leaves paving the service road caught in the suitcase’s wheels. Such a warm day, but she was cold. By sunset she had walked only the eleven kilometers to Eldár.

The last time she passed through Eldár had been in the bed of a canvas-canopied truck with five women. She hadn’t known its name then. The service road widened into the trunk of the village road, from which unnamed side streets branched into the shadows. Even if the overhanging electrical lines carried a current, no streetlamps stood to light those crevices. She came to a porch where two women knitted and gossiped in the warm air and she asked for a room. They nodded down the road.

A third of the houses were ruined by fire or explosions, or even by the former occupants themselves, who, like farmers sowing their fields with salt, believed destruction to be the final act of ownership. Portraits hung eerily from electrical poles and doors, their faces staring blankly at her. She asked an elderly man for a room and he directed her farther down the road to a house with a green door where a man named Dokka kept beds for refugees traveling toward the border.

The man named Dokka opened the front door with his foot. He regarded her suspiciously, and she worried her skin, paler since September, revealed her ethnicity. But then his hesitation burst into a firework of recognition. “Natasha!” he exclaimed, opening his arms in welcome. Attached to them were two hideous, fingerless hands. She stepped back. He knew her name, but they had never met. Those things at the ends of his wrists wouldn’t have slipped her mind.

He asked if she remembered him.

“I’m sorry. How would I?’

He laughed, loud and brightly, while she stared at his hands. Those, at the very least, were no laughing matter. “I met you seven years ago in the maternity ward of Hospital No. 6. I’ll never forget you, not for the rest of my life. I am Dokka. You delivered my daughter, Havaa.”

She repeated the name, but couldn’t match it to the several hundred
newborns in her memory. Behind him stood a little girl with almond-brown hair, green eyes, and ten fingers, all there. Natasha began to ask about the refugee beds, but Dokka cut her off. “Come inside. You can stay as long as you’d like.”

The rooms themselves appeared amputated at waist height; nothing stood out of a child’s reach. Dokka, politely declining her offers of assistance, used his hands like forceps as he bustled around the kitchen. He pinched a matchstick between his teeth, struck it against the wall, and spat it into the open stove. Over four years he had brewed tea for perhaps two thousand refugees, but there had been no pot he wanted to taste finer than this one. Again she offered help, but he had brewed tea for two thousand without faltering, and only needed her help drinking it.

“You’re going to the refugee camps?” he asked. She nodded. She’d heard stories of overcrowded camps, where a single spigot left running would supply water for three thousand souls, but the blessing of rumor was its boundlessness, and she could disbelieve what she wanted. Despite all that had happened, Sonja’s description of London lured her. She wanted to live there.

“You shouldn’t be traveling alone. There are soldiers and bandits, often the same people. You should travel in a group with at least one man.”

She couldn’t help smiling. “I’ve done that before. It didn’t work out.”

“And you’re ethnic Russian? No, no, no.” After a moment Dokka gave a knowing nod to the empty seat beside Natasha. “Before you leave, we will think of something.”

When the girl returned a half hour later with a treasure trove of pinecones, bird feathers, and dried leaves divided by color, her father, in a tone of familiar exasperation, asked her to remove her muddy boots. She carefully placed her findings on the kitchen table and followed them into the bedroom. She still hadn’t said a word to Natasha. Standing before the open closet, Dokka explained that his wife had died that spring. He missed her greatly, not least because her passing had left the household
with only one pair of functioning hands, still too small and weak to chop firewood, but he had a closet full of her clothes, which the moths would feast upon before Havaa could grow into them, so she should, he said while walking out, in short, have at it. As she undressed she turned to hide her burn scars, but the girl had seen worse and studied her without judgment or disgust. Without a mirror, she had to ask the girl’s opinion of each dress. The girl shook her head no, no, no. She had seen her mother in this dress and that dress, each one of which pained her to see worn by a stranger, and she nodded yes only when Natasha put on a maternity dress, the only one in the closet she hadn’t seen her mother wear.

After dinner, Dokka gave her a clean bedsheet and showed her to the room that had been his daughter’s. In the world beyond were two thousand and eighteen souls who had slept in that room, and remembered that room, and would harbor it in their thoughts for no fewer than ninety-nine years, when a little girl that Havaa had once watched sleep, the last living of the two thousand, closed her eyes for the last time.

Havaa lay on the bottom bunk of the bed beside Natasha’s, and, propped on her elbows, peering into Natasha’s upside-down eyes, asked to see Natasha’s hands. “You still have yours,” she said, bending Natasha’s fingers.

“I intend to keep them.”

“My mother kept hers and she still died.”

“They usually don’t play much of a role in that.”

The girl wasn’t so certain. “My father said your hands were the first to hold me.” She had stopped flexing Natasha’s fingers and was now holding them, squeezing them, firm.

“I helped your mother give birth. I made sure she was clean and comfortable. When you popped out, I made sure you were, too.”

“I saw baby rabbits once,” the girl said proudly. “Did I look like that?”

“No, not at all. You were beautiful.”

A grimace crowded the girl’s face. “I wanted to look weird.”

“You did look weird,” Natasha said, a beat too quickly.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Your legs were growing out of your shoulders, arms came out of your knees, and you were breathing out of your bottom. I had to fix everything. I missed lunch that day because of you.”

The girl beamed above her. “Are you going to help children in the camps?”

“It’s been a long day. Let’s talk about that tomorrow.”

The girl snuffed out the lamp and thin, tapering smoke unwound from the wick, drifting into Natasha’s yawn. She could count the bed slats through the limp mattress. The heavy blankets, gray, coarse enough to clean a skillet, smelled of every body they had ever warmed. Where was her sister right now? And was she asking the same question? There would be time for guilt, for second guesses, for turning back, but this was the time for rest, and as she slipped into sleep, a sleep so deeply peaceful not even the long fingers of dreams would reach her, she heard the girl say, “I’m glad you have yours. Otherwise I would have fallen.”

At breakfast Dokka urged her to stay for another night or two. Another group of refugees might pass through, one she might join. It was wisdom a child might summon, but coming from him, from his kindness and hospitality, she decided to stay, even though she was only a dozen kilometers from home. The girl hid her smile behind a spoonful of kasha. Havaa wanted to show her the forest, and after washing their dishes they returned to the bedroom to dress.

“Do you want to see my souvenir collection before we go?” Havaa asked. “I have a collection of all the people who’ve stayed here.”

She opened the drawer before Natasha could suggest they see it when not dressed in enough layers to roast themselves alive. There was a pressed flower head, plucked from Ukrainian soil twenty-two years earlier, the only entry in an otherwise empty journal. Three brass buttons that had fastened the blazer of a thrice bankrupted businessman, who, in Hoboken, New Jersey, had already put in the paperwork to
open the collection agency that would make him a millionaire in eight years’ time. A key ring with two keys that opened the front door to a house that no longer existed.

“You have to give me something before you go,” the girl said.

“I’ll give you the teeth from my mouth if we can just go outside now. There is a wetland forming in my underwear. I can feel tadpoles.”

Taking her by the hand, the girl led Natasha through the undergrowth until the forest forgot the service road and the birch trunks blocked out the village chimneys. The loose soil felt odd under her boots. When was the last time she’d lost the texture of asphalt, concrete, or linoleum beneath her toes? When she hiked over the border with five woman whose names she still didn’t know. This was nicer.

In piles of wet, rotting leaves they found maggots and larvae and crustaceous creatures, which they both agreed were better suited to oceanic depths. They found a mountain range of deer dung scaled and mined by a brigade of red ants. The sun was burning a hole in the middle of the sky, and Natasha was wondering if Dokka’s hands were capable of making
siskal
for lunch, when the girl stopped suddenly. “What’s wrong?” Natasha asked.

The girl nodded to a parting, twenty meters away, where two lengths of aquamarine lay like misplaced strips of sky. As they edged forward, Natasha saw the aquamarine didn’t belong to the sky, but rather to the legs of straw-stuffed blue trousers.

“A scarecrow?” Natasha asked. A faded Red Army–issue shirt languished above the trousers. Nine soldiers had lived and died in that shirt. The scarecrow, drunk, judging from its borrowed birch-trunk backbone, had been decapitated. Nailed to the tree, where the head should have been, was a moss-devoured board.

“No,” the girl said. “It’s Akim.”