A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (6 page)

“I’m hungry,” she said. “I don’t want to wait that long.”

He pressed his lips to his wife’s forehead and let them linger until the kiss became a conversation between their shared skin. How could his wife’s sickness both repulse and bind him to her? His love, pity, and revulsion each claimed her, each occupied and was driven from her, and even now, as he sealed a postage stamp–sized square, he was afraid that in moments, when he broke away, his disgust would overwhelm the imprint of his lips.

“I’m hungry,” she repeated. Reluctantly he leaned back. Leaving the lantern beside the bed, he crossed the darkness to the kitchen. After a decade without electricity, his soles knew the way. Eight steps to the living room, a quarter turn, six to the kitchen threshold, two to the stove. He set firewood on the previous night’s ashes, aimed a squirt gun of
petrol at the white wood, and struck a match. He prepared a pot of rice and a saucer of powdered milk as the firelight lapped against his legs. While waiting for the rice to cook he pulled a stool to the iron stove and leaned toward the light. He wanted to say something consoling to Dokka, and when his words burned in the stove chamber he hoped the sentiment would rise up the chimney pipe, carried by wind or wing to Dokka’s ears, but even if Dokka could hear him, he didn’t know what he would say, and he said nothing.

When the rice was moist he scooped it into a ceramic bowl and left the spoon slanting against the rim as he carried the bowl and the mug of powdered milk for two steps, six steps, and a quarter turn in blindness. Was this how a child felt in the womb? He had delivered dozens of newborns, but he couldn’t imagine those first few moments. A tear in the shroud and suddenly colors, shapes, coldness, a world of hallucinations.

The lantern cast a circle on the floor and he entered it reluctantly to reach her. He sat beside Ula and brought small spoonfuls of rice to her mouth. Sonja’s skill and Deshi’s experience didn’t matter; neither could care for Ula as he could. “Was anyone looking for me today?” he asked. She shook her head. “Are you sure? No knocks at the door? Nothing?”

“I don’t think so. I was sleeping.”

“But you would remember if Ramzan called from the door?”

“Oh, yes. Ramzan. He’s such a nice man. He always asked my opinion,” she said, and took a sip from the blue mug. “I think the milk has turned.”

He washed the dishes, undressed, and slid beneath the sheets. Her fingers crawled through the covers for his.

“Things are getting worse, aren’t they?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing is getting worse.”

“I don’t have much time left, do I?”

These moments were the least bearable, when her meandering trail of questions led to clarity and he couldn’t say what was lost to her. Did she really think he’d spent the day shearing sheep sold, slaughtered, and
consumed long ago? Had she already forgotten Havaa sleeping beside her, the girl’s slender body like a splinter of warmth in the dark room, or was the girl the material of dream itself, burned away by morning light? An equally disturbing thought: what if she consciously participated in these delusions to placate him?

“None of us does,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

When her breaths stretched into sleep, he slid his fingers from her loosened grip and contemplated the next day. What would it be like to treat a patient again? Was he capable? Six months had passed since he had last treated patients at the clinic, but he remembered their reluctance as he led them into the examination room, as they realized their bodies had betrayed them once by sickness, and again by forcing them to rely on an incompetent physician. Sometimes he wondered if his own self-loathing manifested itself as harm to his patients, as if some dark part of his heart wanted them to suffer for his failures. And, now, to be confronted with Sonja, a surgeon whose renown had even reached Eldár. She had asked what he would do with an unresponsive patient, and he, in a blundering moment, had taken it to mean
quiet
or
unwilling to talk
, and had thought of the mute village baker, who communicated only through written notes—which had proved problematic the previous winter when the baker suffered from a bout of impotence he was too ashamed to write down, even to Akhmed. Akhmed had resolved the problem—shrewdly, he thought—by giving the mute baker a questionnaire with a hundred potential symptoms, of which the baker checked only one, and so had saved the baker’s testicles, marriage and pride. But Sonja didn’t know that; he’d been too flustered and embarrassed to explain. She had glared at him, knowing that an imposter like him could never belong to the top tenth. She hadn’t asked how he had come by her name, why he’d come to her specifically. He hadn’t intended to hide the truth from her, but when she didn’t ask, he saw no reason to tell her about the chest stitched together with dental floss.

Sonja had made a bedroom of the office of the former geriatrics director, a man she’d never seen but whose tastes conjured an image so defined—browline glasses, a wardrobe predominantly tweedy in character, finely sculpted features, dainty hands—she could have identified his body among the dead. The gerontology department had been closed in the first war due to a scarcity of resources and the general consensus that prolonging the lives of the elderly was a peacetime enterprise. But the director, a bachelor who devoted a healthy portion of his monthly paycheck to office décor, had the most extravagantly furnished office in the hospital, so of course Sonja was quick to make it hers. A vermillion Tajik rug sprawled across the floor. At the end of the desk stood an antique vase swathed in ornate Persian patterning, beneath which she had found a photograph of a woman framed against the Black Sea, smiling curiously, undated and unidentified, a ghost of the director’s life that survived him. Here, the director had spent his life loving a woman he hadn’t seen since his twenty-first year, when his father had married her to a Ukrainian for fear of ruinous scandal; the woman was his half sister, and the love he felt for her caused him so much confusion he could only express it as love for the bewildered and incoherent elderly. The desk was pushed against the wall and on it lay a final payroll still awaiting the director’s signature. Six mattresses stacked three abreast formed Sonja’s bed, where, after Akhmed had left, she found the girl clothed in limp latex gloves.

“What have you done?” she asked. It was a remarkable sight. The girl had stapled cream-colored latex gloves to her sweatshirt, to her trousers, had pulled them over her feet, and even wore one on her head like a five-fingered mohawk. “I repeat, what have you done?”

“See?” the girl asked and stood up. See? See what? She didn’t think she needed another reason to renounce children, but here it was: they speak in riddles. “I see a tremendous waste of medical supplies and I very much wish I wasn’t seeing it.”

“See what I am?” the girl asked.

“A nuisance?”

“No, a sea anemone.”

The girl spun in circles. It seemed she was hoping that the gloves would inflate and reach out like tentacles, but those gloves would barely open when Sonja jammed her fingers in them, and they just flailed limply against the girl’s chest, back, and legs. The whole production seemed so sad that Sonja couldn’t muster the anger this profligacy deserved.

“Sea anemones don’t talk. Now change into your other clothes.” Sonja nodded to the blue suitcase, still standing beside the mattress where she had left it six hours earlier.

“No. It’s my just-in-case suitcase.”

“Just in case what?”

“In case there is an emergency. So I’ll have the things that are important to me.”

“There was an emergency,” Sonja said. She sighed. The child was as dense as a block of aged cheese. “That’s why you’re here.”

“There might be another one.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Sonja said, rubbing her eyes. “Change out of this ridiculous thing and you won’t sleep in the parking lot.”

The girl, who, the previous night, had watched her father’s abduction, feared many things, but this ornery and exhausted doctor wasn’t among them. She glanced down to the drooping latex gloves; her father would have found her performance enchanting, would have scooped her up in his arms and called her his sea anemone. His approval sparked magic into the blandest day, could layer her in the self-confidence and security she otherwise might lack; and without it, without him, she felt small, and helpless, and the idea of sleeping in a parking lot suddenly seemed very real. “I’ll change,” she told Sonja with a defeated sag of her shoulders. “Only if I don’t have to unpack.”

“I insist you don’t,” Sonja said, turning as the girl undressed. “It’s my greatest wish that you and your suitcase will have vanished into the sea by morning. What’s so important in there that you can’t unpack?”

“My clothes and souvenirs.”

“Souvenirs? Where have you been?”

“Nowhere.” This was the first night she’d ever spent away from the village. “The souvenirs are from people who’ve stayed at my house.”

When the girl finished changing, Sonja said, “You have a dirty fingerprint on your cheek. No, not that cheek. The other cheek. No, that’s your forehead.” Sonja licked her thumb and rubbed the sooty fingerprint from the girl’s cheek. “Your face is filthy. It’s important to stay clean in a hospital.”

“It’s not clean to wipe spit on another person’s face,” Havaa said defiantly, and Sonja smiled. Perhaps the girl wasn’t as dense as she had assumed.

They ate in the canteen at the end of the trauma ward, where Sonja flaunted the hospital’s most sophisticated piece of technology, an industrial ice machine that inhaled much of the generator power but provided filtered water. The girl was more impressed by her warped reflection on the back of her spoon. “It’s December. The whole world is an ice machine.”

“Now you’re practical,” Sonja said.

The girl made a face at the spoon. “Can fingers ever grow back?” the girl asked, setting down the spoon.

“No. Why do you ask?”

The girl thought of her father’s missing fingers. “I don’t know.”

“How do you know what a sea anemone is, anyway? The nearest sea is a few countries over.”

“My father told me. He’s an arborist. He knows everything about trees. I’m still a minimalist.”

“Do you know what that is?”

Havaa nodded, expecting the question. “It’s a nicer way to say you have nothing.”

“Did your father tell you that?”

Again, she nodded, staring down to the spoon head that held her
buckled reflection. Her father was as smart as the dictionary sitting on his desk. Every word she knew came from him. They couldn’t take what he had taught her, and this made the big, important words he’d had her memorize, recite, and define feel for the first time big and important. “He told me about minimalists and arborists and marine biologists and scientists and social scientists and economists and communists and obstructionists and terrorists and jihadists. I told him about sea anemonists.”

“It sounds like you know a lot of big words.”

“It’s important to know big words,” the girl said, repeating her father’s maxim. “No one can take what’s inside your head once it’s there.”

“You sound like a solipsist.”

“I don’t want to learn new words from you.”

Sonja dunked the dishes in a tub of tepid water. Behind her the girl was quiet. “So your father is an arborist,” she said as she scrubbed their spoons with a gray sponge. It was neither a question nor a statement, but a bridge in the silence. The girl didn’t respond.

Back in the geriatrics office she gave the girl a blond-haired Barbie doll from the lost and found. It had belonged to the daughter of a devout Warsaw Catholic who believed the makers of department-store toys were conspiring to turn his ten-year-old girl into a heathen, and so he had boxed up all but her Nativity figurines and, filled with the spirit of Christian charity, sent them to a heathen country where they could do no harm to the souls of children already beyond salvation. The doll, dressed in ballroom gown and tiara, appeared surprisingly chipper given her emaciated waistline. The girl inspected the doll, distrustful of this vision of humanity.

“Why is she smiling?” the girl asked.

“She probably found that tiara on the ground and plans to sell it for a plane ticket to London.”

“Or maybe she killed a Russian.”

Sonja laughed. “Sure, maybe. She could be a
shahidka
.”

“Yes, she’s a Black Widow,” the girl said, pleased with the interpretation. “She snuck into a Moscow theater and took everyone hostage. That’s why she’s wearing a dress and jewelry.”

“But where are her hostages? I don’t see any. Why else might she be smiling?”

The girl concentrated on the doll’s unnaturally white teeth. “Maybe she’s starving and just ate a pastry.”

“What about a cookie?” Sonja asked, as the idea came to her.

“She’d probably smile if she ate a cookie.”

“Would you?”

The shadow of the girl’s head still bobbed on the wall when Sonja found a chocolate-flavored energy bar in the upper left desk drawer, a new addition to the humanitarian aid drops, designed for marathon runners. The girl chewed the thick rubber and grimaced. “What is this?”