A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (45 page)

When she finished dusting, she turned her attention to the bed. “Several hours after death the sphincter and bladder muscles relax,” she said softly. “It isn’t right to spend an eternity in soiled underwear. I’ll clean you, okay?” She pulled back the covers and stripped off the nightdress. Wearing the socks like gloves she washed the woman’s thighs and buttocks, and then dressed her in a tan skirt, a garden-hose-green sweater, and a burgundy headscarf. She looked like a bouquet of roses. Akhmed had told her that his wife hadn’t walked in more than two years, so after pulling on the last pair of clean socks, she wedged the woman’s feet into a pair of sneakers. “Now you can walk wherever you want.”

After cleaning and dressing the woman, she returned to the manila envelope and collection of pages she’d found hidden beneath her body. The manila envelope was addressed:
For K, 56 Eldár Forest Service Road
. This K, whoever he was, lived only a handful of houses away. She set it aside and picked up the fastened pages. They appeared to form a letter or journal entry. The first sentence read:
This is about your father
. She flipped to the last page to read the last sentence, as was her custom, then moved up to the last paragraph, and then the last page:

There is little ink left in the pen, even less energy in my hand, and the time has come. This story ends where you begin. You were born in a hospital. I drove your mother and father in the truck I purchased my son for his sixteenth birthday. Your mother’s face was as red as the paint. Your father kept telling me to drive faster. The maternity ward was on the fourth floor of the hospital. Your father and I helped your mother climb the stairs. When her feet failed, we carried her. She was worried her hips would crush you. Even before you were born, she worried for you. It was amazing to see her love you before you even met. Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn’t create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written. For their entire lives, even before they met, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree. You were their rain and sun, their morning and night
.

In the maternity ward the nurse put your mother in a bed and I held her left hand and your father held her right. Custom says that a man shouldn’t be present at a birth, but we didn’t listen, we were there. On the boarded windows were drawings of a city that no longer existed. You were born within the memory of a kinder past. Your mother’s screams opened her jaw so wide you could have come from her mouth. Never have I seen your father so afraid. Then, you arrived. We were all there, waiting for you. The nurse held you in her hands. You didn’t breathe. We held our breaths waiting for you to find yours. And when your mouth opened, and your lungs burst, we knew they would never be empty. And your father, I have never seen a man more joyful
.

The nurse who delivered you was named Natasha. All these years later I remember her name because she had remembered mine. She had read my book
, Origins of Chechen Civilization,
one of the four score who ever had. Hers were the first hands to hold you. When you were suffocating, she taught you to breathe
.

Your mother’s were the second hands. She looked at you as if she had been born to you. She passed you to your father. The corners of his eyes crinkled. His heart had been the acorn. Now it was the oak tree
.

Those are the first three pairs of hands that held you. How I hope you will live long enough that I will never know the final three
.

“What is her name?” the nurse asked, as your father held you to his chest
.

“Havaa.” He spoke your name like the rhythm of a pulse
.

When they took him, he held your name right there in his chest, and you were with him, even if you didn’t know it. When he reached the end, he did not die. He called your name and began to live in you
.

She set down the letter. If her pounding heart spoke a name, it was one she didn’t recognize. Her sister had delivered hundreds of newborns in the seven years she had worked in the maternity ward, hundreds of Havaas, and they were her patients, not her children, neither more nor less loved than the other lives begun and ended, saved and lost, revived and mourned within the gray granite walls of Hospital No. 6. But Sonja couldn’t name those countless others, had not shared with them a mattress or a room or an energy bar, would not recognize their faces on the street or in the bazaar or at the cemetery, did not wish for them what she wished for Havaa, a need, newly made, to save this one life her sister had brought into the world.

Before leaving she surveyed the rooms a final time. Akhmed’s wife lay peacefully, her hands at her sides, her bright white tennis shoes ready to take her anywhere. Sonja propped the front door as best she could and wondered who would enter next. The vacant house would become a haven for refugees who had heard of a hostel in the 30-block of Eldár Forest Service Road. It would never again be as clean as it was the afternoon Sonja left, as one might expect, as some three thousand souls were yet to shelter there.

She drove to the address marked on the manila envelope. A red pickup truck parked in front of the house was better kept than any others on the block. Green antifreeze beads lazed in the sludge of the half-shoveled walk. She knocked on the door. A minute passed before an elderly man opened the door and gaped at her, his unhinged eyes filled with such bewilderment she wondered if he saw her as a ghost.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Akhmed’s …” What? Employer? Supervisor? Colleague? Lover? Five-day acquaintance? She held out the manila envelope. “I’m his friend. Are you K?”

“Khassan,” the old man mumbled. He reached for the envelope as if it weren’t there, as if his hand would pass through the paper, through her, into eternity. “Where did you …”

“In his house. I found it there. He was taken last night.”

“I know. And Ula?”

“Ula?”

“His wife,” the old man said.

“She’s there, but she’s gone too.”

The old man nodded, barely there. He squeezed the manila envelope and traced the address with his index finger.

“Are you okay?” she asked. He looked like he might fall over.

“Thank you for bringing me this,” he mumbled.

She was halfway to her truck when she heard the manila envelope tear behind her. Her truck was right there, next to the red pickup, and she just wanted to leave. That manila envelope contained a final message, but it wasn’t hers, and she didn’t want to know what it said. She slid the letter to Havaa in the glove box, between the letters of safe passage, without noticing that two were missing. Driving away, she fit her lips around the round, sonorous name.
Ula. U-la
. The name made her lips pucker, waiting to be kissed by the reply. Had she known the name earlier, she would have dressed the wife in a gown and shawl, rather than a skirt and a sweater, so she would, for all time, look as elegant as she sounded.

CHAPTER
27

B
ENEATH THE STARS
, without the interference of cloud or wind or leaf cover, the low rumble of diesel engines murmured through the open window where Khassan waited and listened. When the nightstand clock read 12:15
A.M
., the splayed headlights of three trucks parted the darkness. A minute later, in front of Akhmed’s house, the trucks were parked, engines idling, passengers disembarking, men from the security forces, whom Khassan, with his head craned out the open window, saw only as black silhouettes lit up by the headlights before returning to shadow. It was 12:16. Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion. At 12:17, the knocking began. Khassan couldn’t see the masked security forces first pound then
kick at Akhmed’s door, and at this distance the thuds might be mistaken for a less violent act, an insomniac carpenter, a couple keeping themselves warm in bed, but a minute later came the unmistakable splintering of wood, twisting of door hinges. Khassan gripped the sill. He could see nothing but the pale flood of headlights.
You are a coward
, Mirza had said a half century earlier, and he heard her as if she stood just behind him.
You are a coward
. But what could he do? Run out? Reason with the masked men now entering Akhmed’s house? At best, they would arrest and take him wherever they were taking Akhmed. At worst, both would be shot for his intervention. And Havaa, what would happen to her? His face broke out in a cold sweat and his hands tightened their grip against the sill. He tried moving his feet toward the doorway, but they weren’t listening. Not once in his seventy-nine years had he felt more useless, more powerless, more afraid.
You are a coward
, Mirza said in his ear, but she didn’t know what they do to people in the Landfill. At 12:21 came a burst of twelve gunshots, enough to kill twelve Akhmeds, but no shadows crossed that wide wound of headlight. Unable to see, unable to move, he tuned his ear to the frequency of Akhmed’s broken bones, his bruised flesh, his gouged eyes, his ruptured organs, his snapped fingers, his busted cheeks, his smashed temple, his collapsed skull, his sobs, his surrender, his defeat, his gasps, his pleas, his promises, his prayers, his final breaths, his last memories, of his mother’s embrace or Ula’s thigh or a dog’s bark or a bullet rushing through a pink brainy cloud, whatever Akhmed might hold to as the whispers cease and the silent ascension begins. Akhmed’s pain would be the only sound loud enough to break through Mirza’s flat incantation,
you are a coward a coward a coward
, but Akhmed made no shout, no plea, no call for mercy that Khassan could hear. The only sound to escape the house was the clatter of dishes, the white plates with chipped edges, the small saucers Akhmed used to use to fool his stomach, the teal blue teacup, the one with the crimson rim from which Khassan had sipped the fancy Indian tea someone’s in-law had given one of them, and how could a teacup shatter when padded
in so many layers of memory, how could this be happening again, how could Khassan stand at this same open window where four nights earlier he had listened to the same smashing dishware, had stared into the same unblinking headlights, had felt the same disgrace rip through him when Dokka was disappeared? At 12:27, shadows lumbered into the stream of headlights and among those shadows was a flailing form, so faint a contortion no one save Khassan would recognize it as Akhmed. A moment and the shadow vanished back into blessed darkness, and the truck doors snapped closed, and Mirza’s accusation clamped him to the windowsill, and the headlights pulled the trucks back to the underworld they had emerged from. As the last truck passed Khassan’s open window, Akhmed’s muffled cry finally reached him.

The sun had risen by the time his mind slowed enough to slip away. He dozed, but didn’t rest. In his dreams he wandered through grass frozen into fields of stiff white ribbon. He had hated Kazakhstan so much. He’d never imagined he might look back on exile as his happiest years.

At ten he woke and for three hours stared at the ceiling as he marshaled the courage to stand. The house was silent. He slid through Ramzan’s half-opened door, as he had dozens of times before when he had something to tell his son. Ramzan lay on the bed, mouth agape. Khassan crept to the bureau, where he withdrew the
kinzhal
from the top drawer. He had received it from his father, and his father had received it from his father’s father, and so it went, a century and a half of fathers and sons. It was the oldest thing he had ever owned not counting the trees in back. Near the handle the blade went brown with the blood of an Imperial conscript, or perhaps it was just rust. His father had taught him to thrust it forward, turning the blade before ripping it out, in case Tsar Alexander II might rise from the dead to pillage Eldár.

The edge followed the grooves in his palm, his life line, his love line. He carried it to the bed and wrapped the blade in the blanket so it wouldn’t wake Ramzan prematurely. He took a breath and the air filled him completely. The previous night was a place he wouldn’t return
from. After the headlights had faded, he had crossed and uncrossed his fingers, picked up and set down the water glass, and amid these trivial gestures, he had died. “You are nothing without love and pride and family,” he had once told Akhmed. The first two had disappeared the previous night in the back of a truck; he was on his way, fingering the blade that would soon cut through the third.

“Did I ever tell you the story of the cobbler’s drunken son?” he softly asked. Ramzan heard nothing. “When I was a child, our village was plagued by a cobbler’s son, an eighteen-year-old who inflicted more property damage than could be expected from a man who couldn’t make his two feet move in the same direction. The cobbler was respected throughout the village until his son discovered the effects of fermented beet
samogon
. The liquor made pariahs of them both, proving right the aphorist who first stated that as the son inherits from the father, so the father inherits from the son. For years the cobbler appealed to the imam, apologized to the fathers of the women his son dishonored, and paid for, replaced, or returned the stolen goods. He offered to mend the shoes of any soul his son had wronged. So it was. But there came a point when the son’s capacity for ruin outpaced the cobbler’s capacity for restitution. He was in debt. Half the village walked on shoes paid for by his son’s drinking. One day the son vanished. No mention of him, no funeral, no gossip of work on a distant collective farm; he just disappeared. A month later my grandfather visited the cobbler with the village elders. They took him honey and raisins and welcomed him back. I, still a boy, was told to honor and respect the cobbler, as all the villagers were, because he had put the good of our small society, our
teip
, above his own. His son’s name became a blasphemous word, erased from the collective memory, stricken from even the whispers of women. The story, when told, always ended at this pinnacle of honor and sacrifice. It never went on to tell how the cobbler, who didn’t mend another boot in his life, lived to the age of ninety-nine as a hermit, drinking himself senseless every day and night, alone but for the ghost of his son, whom
he pleaded with in unbearable calls that I could hear from the far side of the village.