A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,101

rungs. The sludge had frozen to a snowy dampness that only reached his ankles. The pit held two dozen others. Over the coming days, he would pray to the sky with them all, but only his conversations with the blue-eyed imam would remain etched in his memory. The guards lowered food and fresh water in tin pails attached to yellow cords that came irregularly, sometimes five in a day, sometimes one, sometimes in the middle of the night when the men would wake, gather, and divide the provisions. The one thing the pit had no shortage of was space. Ramzan spent the daylight hours walking alongside its walls, wondering if somewhere the Feds had a modern prison, with electricity, bunks, cells, and roofs, in which they housed not prisoners but banana peels, and potato skins, and broken shoelaces, and apple cores, and last year’s calendars, and deflated tires, and balled-up paper, and used tissues, and cigarette butts, and the last worthless slivers of bar soap. Some compassionate guard, whose soul the imam would teach Ramzan to honor, had tossed in thin wooden planks, and a sidewalk the width of a balance beam stretched around the pit’s perimeter. The names and villages of captives were carved into the clay walls. Men packed snow on the walls as far up as they could reach to moisten the clay, and after a few minutes scraped it off and identified themselves in block letters drawn by stick or finger. Information the Feds would torture them for was written here on the walls for all to see. It was well understood among the men that the Feds had as much sense as two bricks smashed together. It was also understood that pain, rather than information, was the true purpose of interrogation.

In the afternoon of the fourth day, Ramzan balanced on the slender sidewalk when the blue-eyed imam stopped him.

“Give me a boost,” the imam asked, nodding his bearded chin toward the wall where he had written half his name. At first, Ramzan refused. Since arriving he had done his best to keep his distance from the filthy, brutalized men, as though his refusal to acknowledge them were the tightrope he walked upon, saving him from falling into their ranks.

“Are you a general, hmm?” the imam asked. “Or a Persian prince? Are your hands too delicate to help an imam old enough to be your uncle?”

“I’m not a Persian prince.”

“Then climb down from your throne and help me.”

The imam placed his muddy boot in the stirrup of Ramzan’s woven fingers. He hoisted the imam, whose weight, held in Ramzan’s straining hands, was greater than his size suggested. After an endless moment, the imam tapped him on the forehead with a muddy finger and Ramzan let the old man drop to the ground.

“Take a good look at it,” the imam said, pointing to his name and village. “If it turns out you are a Persian prince, and they let you leave, you must remember me.”

“If they let me leave, I will forget everything here.”

“No,” the imam protested, wagging his muddy little finger at Ramzan. “You must remember.”

“Why?”

“So that my nephews will know where to buy my corpse.”

Ramzan nodded.

“I can afford it, you know,” the imam said, proudly. “I still have my retirement account.”

When Ramzan turned, the imam asked, “What did they get you for?”

“Smuggling weapons. You?”

“Height.”

“Height?”

“Well, the lack of height. The Feds came to my village for a counter-terrorist operation. They were looking for some Wahhabi mastermind that was supposedly hiding there, but their only physical description of the man was that he had a beard and was less than two meters tall. They rounded up every short, bearded man, and many adolescents who didn’t have beards but met the height description. On the reason-for-arrest line of my report, they wrote too short.” The imam shook his head and stared up at his name written in the clay wall, now beyond his reach. Ramzan was glad he’d stopped to lift the imam.

“It’s funny,” the imam continued. “My generation grew up in the Kazakh resettlement camps, and because protein was so scarce, it’s not at all uncommon for men of my age to be short, but I’ve always been ashamed of it. My younger brother used to tell me that my shortness wouldn’t kill me. He was only two centimeters taller than me, but I swear, he lived his entire life in those two centimeters, lording them over me, always asking if I needed help reaching the upper