When it was done, and Ramzan emerged from the woods after speaking with the Cossack colonel for the second time, he forced himself to walk to Dokka’s house. An ache radiated from his temples. He closed his eyes. What did you do with that gun, Dokka? You stupid man. I can’t buy your life this time. With each step he discarded a piece of himself. Even as he gave up his neighbors, he cocooned himself in the rationale of exigency. Whether eating scavenged food or selling an old friend, they had all shamed themselves to survive. Greed didn’t motivate his informing, at least not primarily; primarily, he informed by necessity, to survive, for his love and hate and above all awe of the power wielded by the interrogating officer with less shiny shoes. But by giving away Dokka and the girl, he had stepped into full accountability, and lost the shadows that had saved him.
A few seconds after the knock, the door opened by the ingenious foot-operated pulley system Dokka had designed from a timber saw band, a shopping-cart wheel, and a stirrup.
Dokka welcomed him, invited him in. Not a trace of suspicion. Dokka, he realized with painful clarity, was the only person, besides the Feds, who would speak with him. The only person who tolerated his voice, who would listen and respond, and it was at that moment, he would later realize, that the universe went silent. He could have pinned the gun on Akhmed, on anyone. Why, this one time, had he told the truth? Again Dokka invited him in. Only then, with Dokka’s hospitality, friendship, and conversation before him, did Ramzan understand why he had inflicted this visit upon himself.
“Oh, no,” Ramzan said, when Dokka beckoned to the kitchen table. “I just stopped by to see if you needed any firewood.”
“You left a heap in the backyard just the other day.”
“Yes, I know, I just wanted to see if …” He bit his lip and glanced to the threshold, scuffed and worn by the feet of hundreds of passing refugees. It would record the footfall of those who would disappear Dokka and his daughter that night. He looked up into Dokka’s brown eyes.
“Are you all right?” Dokka asked. “You look ill.”
I’m sorry, Dokka. Look at you. I’m sorry.
“Ramzan?”
I came to say good-bye, he thought. “I came to say hello,” he said.
CHAPTER
19
“SO THIS IS why they keep you around?” Akhmed said to the one-armed guard, who just then, in the hospital parking lot, floundered under the weight of a heavy box. A blue throbbing vein surfaced on the guard’s valiant left forearm. “Do you moonlight as a professional mover?” Akhmed asked. He leaned against the jeep, casually smoking a cigarette. “Half-off moving?”
“May I shoot him, Dr. Sonja?” the one-armed guard asked, hopefully.
She smiled at these two buffoons—the one-armed guard threatened to kick Akhmed’s ass with his two working legs—and they had to be buffoons, because every hospital employee with a kopek of common sense had left. “I need his arms,” she called after the guard, who was chasing Akhmed across the parking lot. “Don’t shoot him until we get all the supplies inside.”
When they finished unloading, she went to the canteen cupboard. Behind the shoebox of loose cash, the clattering ID cards, the plastic bag of heroin, stood the good stuff: cans of sweetened condensed milk. The sweet syrup gurgled from the cut triangle, a thick coating on her gums, and for a few succulent seconds her mind narrowed to the width of that sugary stream. “Sweetened condensed milk will rot your mouth but preserve your soul,” advised her father’s aunt Lena, who died in a Grozny nursing home at the age of one hundred and three, having outlived two husbands, six children, three grandchildren, and thirty-two teeth. The maternity ward was empty, the trauma quiet, and Sonja closed her eyes, slipped into this unexpected peace as she would warm, cleansing water.
She climbed to the fourth floor. The swinging doors of the old maternity ward crooned as she entered. The droplet flame of her cigarette lighter guided her to an oil lamp and expanded to fill the glass chamber. When she lifted the lamp the light peeled back the shadows. In the years since their completion, Natasha’s murals had faded and smudged as if a fog had fallen across the city. Even so, the degree of detail still amazed her. There, in the window that held half of City Park, a dog had been, for eight years now, relieving itself on a commissar’s leg.
“You didn’t show me this on the tour.”
He had changed into those ridiculous woman-sized scrubs and leaned against the doorframe, trying and failing to act casual. Buffoons, imbeciles, orphans, lunatics, and visionaries; family. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For earlier today.”
He shrugged; was there no end to the number of shrugging shoulders she was asked to decipher? “What is this?” he asked, glancing to the walls.
“The old maternity ward.”
“On the fourth floor?”
“The genius of Soviet engineering,” she said, shaking her head. “The hospital was designed in the early Brezhnev years entirely without the input of practicing physicians. After the Feds shot a rocket at the storage closet, we finally decided to move everything to the first floor.”
The shadows slipped from his face as he stepped into the pool of lantern light.
“Did you draw these?” he asked, nodding to the nearest window mural.
“Natasha did.”
“What was she like?” he asked, tilting his face to her.
She had described Natasha to border guards, camp officials, and aid workers. Hazel eyes, brown hair, one hundred seventy centimeters in height, sixty kilograms in weight, no tattoos or piercings, no visible scars but cigarette burns clustered on her left shoulder; she incanted the litany, scribbled it on paperwork as an unconscious doodle, but how could an instrument as blunted as language express one as strange and fleeting as Natasha? Metaphors failed her; Natasha could not be summarized. What she possessed were losses: the loss of Natasha’s laugh, the loss of Natasha’s scorn, the loss of Natasha’s begrudging love; and as a phantom limb can ache and tickle, her lost Natasha was still laughing, still scornful, still loving begrudgingly, burgeoning with enough life to make Sonja wonder if she, herself, was the one disappeared.
“Natasha was complex,” she said finally, which was as near to the truth as she could articulate.
“Is,” he corrected. “She will come back. Like a George Bush.”
Smiling stupidly, she shrugged, at long last discovering the gesture’s utility. Akhmed’s cheeks bunched at the corners of his grin. His confidence was so big and brash she might believe it if she wasn’t careful. It was that hope, lingering in the slimmest margins of possibility, that hurt her more than the loss; unlike Natasha, it never disappeared entirely. “Talking about it doesn’t do any good,” she said, glad, at least, that Natasha wasn’t there to hear her admit it.
“Dokka was disappeared once, and he returned. Without his fingers, but still. I hope he does again.”
This is the hardest part, she could have told him, before time dulls the loss to a manageable ache. But he and the girl still joked with a levity Sonja couldn’t have summoned a year after Natasha left, and that capacity for joy unsettled her.
“Would you love her,” she asked, unable to mask her unease, “if you had children of your own?”
“It’s hard to know,” he said. “I’ve always loved her. But she is mine, now, more than anyone’s. If I had a family, I might know better what to say. But she’s mine. That I know.”
Once, after she had renounced her family in a childhood tantrum, her father had said, “Your family isn’t your choice.” Nearly thirty years later, while walking through City Park, she had seen two homeless men wedged into a single sleeping bag, their soot-stained arms wrapped around one another, and finally understood what her father had meant.
“It’s funny,” he said, walking to the window. “A friend of mine told me about this mural years ago.”
“Did he have a child delivered here?”
“I doubt it.” He stood in reverent concentration a hand’s width from the ply boards. �
�He’s nearly eighty.”
“She worked on them for such a long time. I’d never seen her devote so much of herself to anything. I was so proud of her. Deshi and Maali helped her.” Natasha had once described it as transcribing their memories, a turn of phrase so lovely Sonja was unwilling to share it with him.
“I’d forgotten completely, otherwise I would have asked to see them sooner. When Khassan told me about them, I was so moved that someone would go to the trouble. It seemed like such a big beautiful waste of time. You can imagine how much that would appeal to me. So I did something similar.”
Her heart rose a centimeter. Even disappeared, Natasha was still surprising her. “Because of my sister’s murals?”
“Yes, I suppose so. I told you about the wounded rebels that occupied the village? The Feds came next. Forty-one of my neighbors were disappeared. I remembered what Khassan had told me about the room with its view recreated on boarded windows, and I drew portraits of all forty-one on plywood boards and hung them throughout the village.”
“Everyone here is a fucking artist,” she said, shaking her head. “If you people spent more time fighting and less time drawing, you might win a war now and then.”
“It was medical school that did it to me.” He leaned to her and dropped his voice to an exaggerated, conspiratorial whisper. “I used to skip lectures and labs to sit in on art classes. That’s why I’m a better drawer than physician.”
“I can’t believe you told me that.”
“I’m trusting you with my darkest secret,” he said, so pleased with himself she couldn’t avoid laughing with him.
“I could lose my job for knowing that and keeping you on. Criminal neglect.”
“Obviously you are a criminal, look at the company you keep. International smugglers and amateur artists.” His left arm had steadily edged toward hers. “You could fire me.”
“It’s too late for that,” she said, and focused on the women’s scrubs cinched around his biceps, how ridiculous he looked. There had been fourteen since the elevators last ran: four Russians, six Chechens, two Ingush, one French physician, and a Finnish journalist, who she fucked before granting an interview. None knew her surname or patronymic; anonymity was the most comprehensive prophylactic. And the sex itself, infrequent and illicit and often awkwardly impersonal, fulfilled her more wholly than anything a husband could provide. As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn’t exist exclusively to feel pain.
“Even before those portraits, people from neighboring farms and villages would come to my clinic, people who didn’t have photographs of their lost ones. I’d draw them.” He said it as if it had happened centuries ago.
“Like a police sketch artist?”
“If I must be an -ist I’d prefer portraitist.”
And then it was so obvious.
“Draw her for me,” she asked. “Now. Draw the face of the woman who told you my name.”
When he returned with a notebook and pencil, they sat at the counter. He opened the notebook.
“I only barely remember her,” he said, in apology or indemnity, she couldn’t tell.
She nodded at him to begin. If she opened her mouth, if she tapped that reservoir, nothing would stopper it. He folded the notebook at the spine and drew a line so soft it looked halfway erased. An oval. It could be anyone’s head, even Natasha’s. Next he drew two smaller ovals, right in the middle of her head, too long, until she imagined bangs. The two eyes watched her from the page. When he began drawing the wrong nose, she squeezed his wrist.
“That’s not …” She struggled to push words into the sentence. She would regret this. She knew she would. But she hadn’t seen her sister’s face in twelve months, two weeks and three days, and even more than Natasha’s face, even more than her return, she wanted Natasha to end. “Her nose was smaller,” she said.
For the next half hour she gently corrected him whenever he strayed. He hadn’t forgotten her face, she told herself; she was only helping him remember. And if she was deluding herself, so what? Weren’t delusions better than desperation, false hopes better than none at all? As Natasha’s calm, untroubled face emerged, Sonja’s heart climbed her ribs. It drummed against each one, then rose to her neck, pressing against her throat. In a refugee camp or foreign country, somewhere far away, Natasha was safe. He drew a chin she would recognize in a crowd of thousands, then down to her perfect, unblemished neck. Not one cigarette burn; she hadn’t told him to put them there. Something spectacular was happening in her chest. She hadn’t expected this. On one sheet of paper in a notebook of two hundred and twenty, and with no more than a few millimeters of pencil lead, he returned Natasha to her and to the maternity ward.
“Please stop,” she said.
“I thought you wanted this?”
He reached for her shoulder and she turned away. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said after a moment.
“Take this with you.”
He lifted Natasha from the counter and carried her from the maternity ward.
CHAPTER
20
SHE WAS SOLD to a brothel within bullet range of Kosovo, and from there south through the cinderblock city of Tirana and across the Adriatic, where, rocking on the dull green water, she saw the face of the moon for the first time in five weeks. It, too, was cratered with cigarette burns. Her passport was her deed, her title, and bill of sale, carried by whoever owned her today, traveling within reach of her hand but never in it. Through it all, she could count on a ritual as fixed in the day as sunrise and set. Every morning a shot of heroin inflated her head so it floated a meter above her neck until noon. By afternoon she’s itching. By evening she’ll do whatever they ask to get a shot that night. She’s not the high-priced, high-class call girl she had imagined, borne by limousine to fancy hotels, where she knows the doormen by name and tips them generously when she saunters into the night a free woman. She couldn’t buy a full bag of groceries with what the johns pay for thirty minutes. It feels like autumn, but maybe it’s spring. She can’t tell, fifteen stories above the nearest leaf. She can’t remember the year or the city, the taste of fresh air or the feel of her passport, her sister’s voice or the love and desperation that compelled her to flee, but she stands by the window and remembers the view; in eight months, when it’s all over and she’s taking three-hour showers in a women’s shelter, she will walk to the bathroom mirror and, angle by angle, she will draw it on the steamed glass. The men call her Natasha, but she doesn’t know how they know her name. Finally Katya tells her that’s what every girl from Eastern Europe is called, we’re all Natashas to them. An average day consists of ten men, three cheeseburgers, eight glasses of tap water, and two shots. A toothbrush, no toothpaste. A roll of Certs, one after each man. The repatriated women are right: modern-day slavery, but there’s nothing modern about it. Eight of you sleep on four bunk beds crammed into a bedroom. In the early morning, midafternoon, whenever the clouds part, when the heroin slithers into your blood and you forget your name, you stand at the window and thread the eternity of sky through needle-head retinas. Block after block the city goes on and every last building, right up to the horizon, stands. Sergey, the pimp, whose brother was sent back from Grozny in a zinc can, quit smoking last week or last month and the spent pieces of his nicotine gum, spat out and dried on the floor, look like little gray brains. One Natasha died, seven Natashas left; a new Natasha walked in the room and asked if this was where the au pairs slept. You are all replaceable, all disposable. Sergey reads business books and listens to lectures on free-market capitalism and, sometimes, in the middle of it, you can hear the lectures through the wall, through the grunting flab atop you, and listening to free trade and commodity economy leaves you with a rich nostalgia for the relative generosity of totalitarianism. There is the night, the last night, the next night. The belt around your ankle, the two taps of the syringe, the blood into the barrel, the p
lunger pushing in. There is the woman named Anzhela but called Natasha. The woman named Nadya but called Natasha. The woman named Natasha, called Natasha.
CHAPTER
21
AT DAYBREAK KHASSAN left for the service road half hoping to intercept Akhmed, but all he found was a fresh set of footprints. Not knowing what else to do, he walked back and forth, urging the dogs to do likewise, and together they turned five kilometers of snow into a riddle no one could solve. Khassan had taken off his gloves, periodically oiling his fingers with butter, and for five kilometers lapping tongues warmed his knuckles. The bald one, Kashtanka, shivered like a prenatal rat, and several times Khassan paused to reattach the blanket tied by twine around the dog’s pale torso. In summer he bathed the dogs. If one fell sick he cared for it. At the village edge, he knelt and they gathered to him, leaping, licking his cheeks, leaning their paws on his back and panting in his ears, diseased, unwashed, his, his, his. When he stood, all six followed with Sharik at the rear. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock. The day stretched out and his path in it lay as meandering and meaningless as the one he had left. Before the bend in the road he saw Akhmed’s house and across from it the gap that had been Dokka’s. If he had seen Akhmed that morning, he would have had to ask permission to visit Ula; if he had asked permission, he might have been denied. It was a better excuse than the frigid air to stay curled under the covers those extra minutes.
The dogs lounged in the snowy lawn to wait for him. He crept through the shadows of the living room, careful not to disturb the curtains, and into the bedroom where Ula slept fitfully. He hesitated to wake her, as if he were no more than her troubled dream and would dissolve if he touched her. Her hair clumped in greasy cords and she smelled of talcum powder. In the kitchen he filled a stew pot with clean water and set it beside the bed. He drew the covers to Ula’s chin, so when she woke she wouldn’t worry about her decency. Then, reluctantly, he rubbed her arm.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Page 26