A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (43 page)

“Who’s Akim?”

Too young to explain in words, the girl’s face was old enough to show the loss that was that name. Natasha, not understanding what this
meant, was briefly annoyed, believing it profligate to expend pity on a scarecrow when there were more deserving life forms, but of all people, who was she to judge how a girl disburses her empathy. She wrapped her arm around Havaa. The whole of the girl’s bony shoulder fit in the cup of her palm, and the girl reached up and held on to her fingers. If Akim could have seen the two of them, he would have taunted them for weeks.

After dinner that evening they were joined by a man, tall, slender, and bearded, in whose presence Dokka grew aloof. His name was Akhmed. He asked about the hospital, showing particular interest in the hiring process. The hospital hadn’t adhered to those formalities since before she arrived—she had never even taken a first-aid course, she confided—and if he still wanted to work there Sofia Andreyevna Rabina would surely hire him. The brilliance building behind his eyes faded when she added that no hospital employee had received a salary in many years. And then he asked a peculiar question: had she ever used dental floss for stitches? Natasha was questioning his sanity when he described a rebel field commander who, two years earlier, had arrived in the village with his chest held together by dental floss. That would be Sonja, Natasha said, she could stitch a lion to the back of a wildebeest. He had never seen finer stitching of any other material, much less dental floss, and could vividly recall the twenty-three stitches curving along the crescent wound, which the commander had called the grin on his chest, and the memory had haunted him, reminding him of the unexpected wonders a capable mind might conceive. Natasha wholeheartedly agreed, and encouraged his misconception that Sonja worked miracles, not from malice, but from a budding pride that stretched all eleven kilometers home.

Dokka didn’t say a word to Akhmed, not even in greeting or farewell, and when the man left, Natasha asked if he had come invited.

“He comes once a week,” Dokka explained. “Usually when travelers
are staying. He likes talking to people, getting news from the outside.

And he helps with the tasks Havaa’s hands are too small to perform. Chopping firewood and the like.”

“But you don’t care for him?”

Dokka gave a sad smile. “He was my closest friend once. It pains me that I can’t decline his assistance.”

In the bedroom, Natasha undressed under the girl’s inquisitive stare. “Did they take you to the Landfill, too?”

“No,” Natasha said.

“Then why are there marks on your shoulders?”

Instinctively she reached back and covered the knotted scars. Some three dozen stippled her left shoulder and neck, and had Sergey not switched to nicotine gum, there would have been some three dozen more. “It’s nothing,” she said, quick to throw on a nightdress. “I fell asleep in the sun once. I couldn’t sleep on my back for months after. Just a reminder of my foolish younger self.” After she brushed her teeth, she asked, “Did the scarecrow walk into the woods by itself?”

“I helped him,” the girl boasted.

“He must have been heavy.”

“It took me three days. I dragged him along the road and hid him each night so no one would take him.”

“Why?” Natasha asked.

“For Akim.”

“You mentioned him earlier. Who is he?”

“No one really.”

“Is he like an imaginary friend? My sister and I, when we were children, we pretended we had an imaginary sister.”

“No!” the girl said, horrified by the suggestion. “Akim’s not imaginary.”

“I’m sorry, I was just asking.”

“You’re mean.” Natasha felt like she had stepped into a foreign country whose customs and manners she didn’t comprehend, where
her gestures of concern were taken as affronts. The Samsonite was still unzipped from when she had retrieved her wool sleeping socks, and through the opening she saw the black fake fur hat of the Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker. Without pausing to consider the thousands of kilometers the souvenir had already traveled, or that she might need this totem to draw strength in the uncertain days, she pulled the toy from the suitcase and presented it to the girl in appeasement.

“Here,” she said. “A souvenir.”

The nutcracker was as wide as the girl’s hand and twice as long. As she studied it, her curiosity consumed her anger. “Who is this?” she asked.

What was the name they had given this little wooden man that never laughed? She lay back, more afraid of losing the name than the nutcracker itself, but there it was, years since she last spoke it and it was right there.

“Alu,” she said.

Five nights and the refugees Dokka promised still hadn’t come; on the morning of the sixth day, she announced she was leaving. After breakfast Dokka asked her to join him in the bedroom. Six ribbons looped around the six dresser drawer knobs, and Dokka fit his wrist into the first, opening a drawer that contained jewelry, foreign coins, wristwatches, and billfolds, a more extravagant version of his daughter’s collection. “Right there,” he said. “You see the red bandanna? Take it.”

The bandanna wrapped around an L-shaped object. Its weight substantiated her fear the moment she lifted it.

“It’s a Makarov semiautomatic pistol,” he said. “You simply unlatch the safety, point at the target, and shoot.”

But for the beige handgrip, the gun was silver; a passing cloud dulled its luster. She had seen guns on television and at the bazaar, in the hands of rebels, soldiers, and gangsters, pointed at her in City Park and the
Breaking Grounds, but she had never stood on this side of the barrel before.

“I’m just as likely to shoot off my own head as anyone I aim at,” Natasha said. She didn’t want the gun and told him as much, but he insisted, saying Comrade Makarov would keep her safe on those dangerous roads. “Do you arm all your guests?” she asked with a smile.

“You’re our first.”

“Why?”

“After I lost my fingers, I thought Havaa should learn to shoot. But when I think about her shooting at the Feds, and what would come after that … She knows to run. It’s better if we don’t have the gun.”

“But why give it to me?”

“Because I want to protect the person who gave me Havaa.” She could think of no refutation. He insisted she keep it on her person, and it pressed against her left breast as she hugged Havaa good-bye. The girl clung to Natasha’s fingers, and Natasha shook them both away, with gratitude, and hurried into the cool daylight before their affirmations of goodwill crippled her. Her boot heels bit into her ankles but she wouldn’t stop to slip on extra socks before she had traveled far enough from Dokka’s house to preclude the possibility of returning. The wood, brick, and cinderblock dwellings grew smaller as she reached the village’s southern end. A stubble of dead grass filled the ungrazed fields. The forest closed around the road. Hanging from a tree was a final portrait, a woman with long, dark hair and an aquiline nose, whom Natasha recognized but couldn’t identify. Of all the village portraits, this was the most detailed and closely observed. In the center of the otherwise serene portrait, the woman’s lips opened, just a centimeter, revealing no more than a sliver of her tongue, the forty-second portrait, if Natasha were to count, the only one whose subject opened her mouth in speech or sigh, a word spoken and heard for eternity, or an expression of longing, though whether it belonged to the woman or the artist, Natasha couldn’t say. She stared at the portrait for several minutes before
understanding, belatedly, why the woman looked so familiar. Perhaps those chestnut-sized eyes recognized her. Natasha was, after all, wearing the woman’s maternity dress.

She made it twenty kilometers by the time the sun set. She had hoped to come to a village where she might enjoy a morsel of Dokka’s hospitality, but the scavenged remains of logging encampments were the only signs of prior habitation. All else was woodland. She went deep enough into the trees that not even the glimmer of a campfire could be seen from the road. Recalling the lessons of the City Park Prophet, she built a fire from dried branches and dead leaves. Dokka had given her a G-4 humanitarian aid ration: three cans of evaporated milk and one tin of processed meat. The Feds who doled out the G-series aid claimed it was enough food to support a man of average height and build for three days, thus corroborating her long-held suspicion that everyone in Russia was either a midget or a fucking idiot. She cut the evaporated milk with canteen water, shaking the concoction until it came out in glossy, fire-soaked dribbles that beaded the canteen lip like golden roe. When it came time to sleep, she extinguished the flames and, as the City Park Prophet had taught her, spread her sleeping bag across the charred ground so it would pleasantly toast her backside as she drifted away.

The next day she hiked ten or twenty or forty kilometers. The following day, maybe more, maybe less. A thousand times she considered turning back but the huff of every cloud in Chechnya was no bleaker than another afternoon in the hospital corridor, fighting the ten steps to the canteen cupboard. And my god, the Samsonite suitcase, why had she thought this was a good idea? Gravel and dirt caught in the wheels as it slowed from a rolling suitcase to a dragging suitcase to an anvil with a retractable handle. What sort of lunatic shows up to a refugee camp with a Samsonite? She packed so much emotional energy into that suitcase she had none left to consider what she had done to Sonja.

Each day the mountains grew taller. Filtration points and checkpoints abounded, most manned by young soldiers too timid to investigate
movement in the woods. But on the evening of the fourth day, carrying on her shoulders all twenty-eight weary kilometers, Natasha came to a filtration point larger and better lit than the others. The chain-link fence, crowned with razor wire and stretching along the pasture and into the woods, prevented the usual circumnavigation. Had she arrived at the checkpoint when the sun warmed her bones, she might have turned back and taken the connecting road she had passed two hours earlier. Had it been summer, and the ground hadn’t needed to be warmed and dried by fire, she might have bedded in the woods and waited for the morning to illuminate her options. But it was neither earlier that day nor earlier that year. It was night; it was cold; her bones hated her; she just wanted to get to the other side, warm the ground, and sleep and sleep and sleep. Besides, she was a refugee destined for a refugee camp, and in her exhaustion she believed the soldiers would honor the international law guaranteeing her safe passage.

A halo of floodlight surrounded her; whether it guided or followed her, she couldn’t say. A bullhorn demanded she keep her hands in plain sight. Fatigue and haste had clouded her judgment, and only now, as she walked in that brilliant circle with one arm raised, the other pulling the suitcase, did she begin to worry. She’d imagined that homesick boys a year out of school would man the filtration point as they had the others. But when she saw the prison tattoos on their hands, when the bespectacled official frowned at the fifty-ruble note she presented in lieu of a passport, she saw her mistake beyond all doubt. These were
kontraktniki
, and this was the front line rather than a checkpoint. The Makarov weighed more every second it went undiscovered. The men found her sanitary napkins suspicious enough to inspect, yet hadn’t searched her. They gathered around her portable alarm clock like uncomprehending tribesmen. All the while the gun grew heavier on her breast.

She drew her mind to the Rome women’s clinic, which, despite every aspersion she had cast at it, was in memory another term for rescue. Her blood had been drawn and filtered through a vending machine
that flickered with red and yellow numbers. She had tested positive for a half dozen sexually transmitted diseases, all of which sounded like geometry terms. In group, listening to the confessions of women who missed their pimps, who were terrified of what their families would say, who didn’t sleep for fear of waking up in the brothel, she had nodded in recognition. Strangers from Poland and Turkey and Siberia had spoken with her breath. Her hope of rescue had taken so long to die. It had survived the Breaking Grounds, Kosovo, the beatings, rapes, and heroin. It had survived longer than denial and indignation, longer than three of her teeth. It had survived until the day a john’s wallet had fallen from his trousers, opening on the floor. The transparent plastic sleeve had held a portrait of a boy and girl dressed in matching sweaters and smiling uncomfortably. She had begged him, a father, a family man, to rescue her. But he had just looked at her as if she’d asked him to staple feathers to her arms. When her turn had come, she told the other women and they had looked at her and nodded.

But rescue was another country, and she didn’t know if she would make it there. The soldiers kept unpacking and unfolding, unraveling and unwrapping, while on her chest the Makarov grew to a Kalashnikov, then a Katyusha rocket launcher. The soldiers were ripping the wheels from her suitcase and still hadn’t touched her. As she tightened her headscarf, she finally understood. The soldiers thought she was a traditional Chechen woman.

An older officer, fragranced with enough aftershave to inebriate lesser men, emerged from the camouflaged outhouse that constituted the checkpoint office. Golden stars glimmered from his epaulets. A double-headed-eagle perched on his tie clip. His hair parted above his left ear and was plastered across his balding crown. Nothing escaped his wide blue eyes. The soldiers addressed him as colonel.

“I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said, in round-bodied Russian. “You will be on your way shortly.”

He spoke a hushed order to the soldiers. She had no reason to doubt him when the soldiers obligingly began to fold her clothes and tie her suitcase back together with twine.

“This way,” the colonel said. Guiding her by the arm as a gentleman might, he walked her toward the forest. “You need to sign a few pieces of paperwork before we can let you through. Unfortunately, it’s located at an outpost a half kilometer west of us.”