A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (9 page)

He folded the sheet and set it beside the others. How long since he’d last changed Ula’s sheets? Ten days, at least. She rarely rolled from her side of the bed, and when he carried her to the living room divan and stripped the linens from the mattress, he found her tawny silhouette sweated into the fabric. That musky darkening was so particularly, irrevocably Ula that he would hesitate to wash it. But then, scolding himself for being sentimental, he would fill the basin with soapy water and submerge her outline and watch her disappear. He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray brown hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of bitten fingernails tossed behind the headboard, or a dark shape dissolving in soap. As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there. The dishes no
longer prepared or eaten, no more than the four- and five-ingredient recipe cards stacked above the stove. The walks no longer walked, the summer woods, the undergrowth unparted by their shins. The arguments no longer argued; no stakes, nothing either wanted or could lose. The love no longer made, desired, imagined, or mourned. The illness had restored to Ula an innocence he was unwilling to pollute, and the warmth of her flesh cocooning his was a shard of their life dislodged from both their memories.

It had begun in late spring 2002, a year after the
zachistka
that claimed the lives of forty-one villagers, on the morning she slept through breakfast. “I feel sick,” she mumbled, and he carried her tea to the nightstand. Had he known the cup was the first of hundreds he would take to her bedside, he would have made a more bitter brew. He took her temperature, pulse, and blood pressure: all normal. Her eyes were clear, her skin colored. When asked she couldn’t provide a coherent description of her pain. It was like a loose marble tumbling around her insides, migrating from her ankle to her knee to her hip, and back down. Some days her toes contained all her hurt. Or her fingers. Or elbows. Or kidneys. Eventually it settled somewhere between her chest and stomach, only leaking into her legs on Mondays. Pain is symptomatic rather than causal, even he knew that, and the only reasonable conclusion was that the sickness was seated in her mind. But while he didn’t believe she was physically sick, he couldn’t deny the reality of her suffering. A year earlier the
zachistka
had leveled a third of the village. Angels descended. Prophets spoke. Truth was only one among many hallucinations.

For the first few weeks he had resisted taking her to Hospital No. 6. He may have graduated in the bottom tenth of his class, but he was still a licensed doctor, and a decent one, even if he didn’t always know what he was doing. What would people say if they knew he couldn’t diagnose his own wife? Already his patients rarely paid their bills; if news of his ineptitude spread, they would starve. But a month passed without decline
or recovery and this static state, this purgatorial non-progression, finally convinced him that his wife’s illness exceeded his abilities. He tried to take her to the hospital. Three times they ventured to Volchansk in Ramzan’s red pickup, but army cordons blocked all roads into the city. He dreamed up and in his notebook drew ways of conveying her: a sedan chair, a tunnel, a kite large enough to lift her bed. After the fourth attempt, when an unspooled shell casing popped Ramzan’s tire ten meters past the house, he gave up. What would the hospital doctors say anyway? With so many real injuries to tend to, they would dismiss Ula and her phantom sickness. The thought of her forced to defend her pain made his fingers curl into fists.

For eight and a half months he cared for her with paternal devotion. But each morning as he set the teacup on the nightstand, he wondered if physical deprivation might revive her ailing mind, and so, ten days before Dokka lost his fingers, Akhmed left her teacup in the kitchen. As the day wore on she called his name in cries more confused and desperate with each iteration, until his name was no longer his but a word of absolute anguish. Unable to stand the call of his name, he stayed with Dokka’s wife and daughter for three nights. On the fourth morning he returned and found her on the bedroom floor. The beginnings of bedsores reddened her shoulder blades. In that moment he came to understand that he would spend the rest of his life atoning for the past three days, and that the rest of his life wouldn’t be long enough. He lifted her from the floor and set her beneath the sheets. He took her a glass of water from the kitchen, then five more. “You never have to get up again,” he promised her. He laid his head on her chest and her heart pattered against his temple. “Akhmed,” she said. “Akhmed.” His name was now a lullaby.

He never again tried to coerce Ula into health. It would end. Everything did. But when he emptied the bedpan in the backyard, or brushed her teeth despite her protestations, the afterglow of resentment still
smoldered. She was gone but still there, the phantom of the wife the war had amputated from him, and unable to properly mourn or love her, he cared for and begrudged her. And so the previous day, when he had offered to work at the hospital until other accommodations could be found for Havaa, he had hoped Sonja would agree for his sake as much as the girl’s. That morning, when he left Ula alone with four glasses of water and a bowl of lukewarm rice on the nightstand, he double-locked the door and entered the dawn chill with the confidence that Havaa’s future meant more than his wife’s, and he trudged eleven kilometers through a broken obligation that only a child’s life could justify.

When he folded the last sheet he ducked beneath the clotheslines and opened the cupboard. His trousers lay folded on the bottom shelf. Along the left leg inseam he found a familiar bulge in the stitching. If he were to die away from home, he hoped a kinder soul than Deshi would find him.

“Tomorrow we’ll go to Grozny,” Sonja announced as she strode through the canteen doorway, stopping at the counter to inspect the scalpels he’d boiled.

“Did Deshi tell you that?” he asked, unable to mask the panic building behind his eyes. “I was only kidding. Of course I’d use the plane ticket to go somewhere else. Tbilisi, even Istanbul.”

“You boiled these for ten minutes?”

“You’re joking, right?”

She gestured toward him with the scalpel blade, a little too casually for Akhmed’s comfort. “About ten minutes in boiling water? I’ve never been more serious.”

“No, about Grozny.”

“Did you or did you not boil these for ten minutes?”

“Yes, but are we going to Grozny?”

She frowned, seeming to think
he
was the one talking in circles.
“You don’t get to ask any more questions,” she said. “A question mark in your mouth is a dangerous weapon.”

“So are we?”

She gave a defeated sigh. “Yes.”

“Why?”

She pulled a cigarette lighter from her pocket. “Do you smoke?”

“I am an excellent cigarette smoker.” It had been seven weeks since his most recent cigarette, and two months more since the one before that, and technically those had been
papirosi
, capped with a filterless cardboard tube and jammed with coarse tobacco that left him violently nauseous for the rest of the day.

Perhaps inspired by his earlier display of professionalism, she waited until they reached the parking lot before lighting up. She passed him the square pack. He knew the Latin alphabet, but hadn’t used it in years. “Duh …”

“Dunhill,” she said.

He selected one from the two erect rows and leaned it into Sonja’s lighter. The first drag slid into his lungs without the paint-scraper harshness of his two most recent cigarettes, and he stared at the slowly burning ember, admiring the quality of the tobacco and the quality of the flame, pleasantly surprised that he didn’t feel ill. “Where did you get these?” he asked.

“Grozny.”

“We’re going there to get cigarettes?”

She smiled. “I can’t believe you’d really use that plane ticket to go there.”

“I’ve never been.”

“It’s something else.”

“So why are we going?”

Farther down the street the side of a building had crushed all the cars in a parking lot. He was thirty-nine years old and had hoped to own a car by this age.

“I go once a month to pick up supplies,” Sonja said. “Not just cigarettes. About everything in the hospital comes through a man I know in Grozny with connections to the outside. I also call a friend of mine who lives in London and updates me on what’s been going on in the world.”

“What’s happening out there?” he asked. By now the wider world was no more than a rumor, a mirage beginning at the borders. Thirty-two years earlier, in the rancid air of his primary school—built on a block bookended by a sewage treatment facility and a lumberjack brothel—his geography teacher had expected him to believe that the world was the same shape as a soccer ball. He had been the first of his classmates to accept it, not because he knew anything about gravity, but because the air was more nauseating than usual that afternoon, and he wanted to leave. For the rest of her career that geography teacher would pride herself on being the first to recognize Akhmed’s aptitude for the sciences.

“Last month he told me that George Bush had been reelected,” Sonja said.

“Who’s that?”

“The American president,” Sonja said, looking away.

“I thought Ronald McDonald was president.”

“You can’t be serious.” There it was again, condescension thick enough to spread with a butter knife. His mother was the only other woman to have spoken to him like that, and only when he was a child—and only when he wouldn’t eat his cucumbers.

“Wasn’t it Ronald McDonald who told Gorbachev to tear down the wall?”

“You’re thinking of Ronald Reagan.”

“English names all sound the same.”

“That was fifteen years ago.”

“So? Brezhnev was General Secretary for eighteen.”

“It doesn’t work like that over there,” she explained. “They have
elections every few years. If the president doesn’t win, someone else becomes president.”

“That’s ridiculous.” The wind lifted the ash from his cigarette and scattered it across the empty parking lot.

“And you can only be president for ten years,” she added.

“And then what? You become prime minister for a bit and then run for president again?”

“I think you just step down.”

“You mean Ronald just stepped down after ten years?” he asked. She had to be putting him on.

“He just stepped down and George Bush became president.”

“And then George Bush shot Ronald Reagan to prevent him seizing power?”

“No,” she said. “I think they were friends.”

“Friends?” he asked. “It makes me wonder how we lost the Cold War.”

“Good point.”

“And so George Bush has been president since Ronald Reagan?”

“There was another guy in there. Clinton.”

“The philanderer. I remember him,” he said, pleased. “And then George Bush became president again?”

“No, the George Bush who is president now is the first George Bush’s son.”

“Ah, so that’s why they don’t shoot the previous president. They’re all related. Like the Romanovs.”

“Something like that,” she said distractedly.

“Then who is Ronald McDonald?”

“You know, Akhmed,” she said, looking to him for the first time in several minutes. “I’m beginning to like you.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“You used the word, not me.”

A blast rippled from the east, a long wave breaking across the sky.

“A land mine,” she said, as if it were no more than a cough. “We should get going.”

He dropped his cigarette without finishing it, the first time he’d done so in six years, and was careful to avoid the glass shards as he followed her back to the entranceway.

“Sew the pockets of your trousers before you come in tomorrow,” she advised. “We’ll pass a dozen checkpoints to reach Grozny and with that beard you look like a fundamentalist. I don’t want the soldiers to plant anything on you.”

Akhmed looked to the clouds before following her into the corridor. It wouldn’t matter even if he had found a plane ticket. Ten and a half years had passed since he had last seen commercial aircraft in the sky.

The man dragged into the waiting room wasn’t the first land-mine victim Akhmed had ever seen, not the first he’d seen accompanied by an incomprehensible woman, not even the first he’d seen dragged on a tarpaulin along a slick scarlet trail; he wasn’t the first man Akhmed had seen writhing like a lone noodle in a pot of boiling water, not the first he’d seen with half his shin hanging by a hinge of sinew. But when Akhmed saw this man it was like seeing the first man for the first time: he couldn’t think, couldn’t act, could only stand in shock as the air where the man’s leg should have been filled the floor and the room and his open mouth. The woman tugging at the corner of the tarpaulin spoke a language of shouts and gasps and looked at him as if he could possibly understand her. What a volume her chest produced. The true color of her dress was indistinguishable for the blood. When he finally remembered how to use his feet, he walked right past the woman and the writhing man, to the corner chair, where he draped a white lab coat over Havaa’s head.

Then the man’s pulse was a haphazard exertion against his finger.
The woman was asking one question after the next. Her dress was showing the curves of her legs. Her breath was on his left cheek. An artery was severed. His face was pale yellow. Sonja was there. She was strapping a rubber tourniquet below the knee. She was rolling him on a gurney and into the hall. The gurney was turning into the operating theater and Deshi was taking the man’s blood pressure. “Sixty over forty,” she was calling out. The blood pressure meter was velcroed to the young man’s arm. The bulb was swinging above the gurney wheel. The wound was wet with saline.

With swift, well-rehearsed movements, Sonja inserted IVs of glucose and Polyglukin into the man’s arms. She pulled a surgical saw from the cabinet and disinfected the blade as Deshi called out blood-pressure readings. At seventy over fifty, she injected Lidocaine just above the tourniquet. Deshi anticipated her requests, and the clamps he’d boiled were in her reach before she asked. She worked without looking at the man’s face or hearing his cries as though her patient were no more than his most grievous wound. Blood reached her elbows but her scrubs remained white. The man, and he was a man, it was so easy to forget that with all his insides leaking out, had graduated from architecture school and had been searching for employment when the first bombs fell. When the land mine took his leg, he had already spent nine years searching for his first architectural commission. Another six and three-quarter years would pass before he got that first commission, at the age of thirty-eight. With only twenty percent of the city still standing, he would never be without work again.