A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,104

the interrogator with less shiny shoes asked his first question. By eleven the electrical wires were unwound from Ramzan’s fingers. By noon he was allowed to dress. By one he was on the FSB payroll. He kept thanking the interrogator with less shiny shoes. Again and again and again, he thanked the man, and never before had he expressed such earnest gratitude. He would have followed the interrogator with less shiny shoes anywhere. It was God he found at the other end of the electrical wires. He was given a satellite phone and a three-hundred-page manual written in German, French, English, and Japanese. He asked after Dokka, asked if he could buy back his friend’s life. Yes, the interrogator with less shiny shoes told him, provided the village could raise a fifty-thousand-ruble ransom within a week; otherwise, the ransom would jump to seventy-five thousand for his corpse. Ramzan reached into one of the many pockets of the overcoat they returned to him, and timidly pulled out the plastic-wrapped bills. No one had thought to check his pockets. “This is only half,” the interrogator with less shiny shoes told him. “But I am, above all, a reasonable man.”

Ramzan waited for Dokka on the concrete stairs of the Refuse Disposal Administration. A hundred meters away, at the bottom of Pit B, his funeral was taking place. Perhaps one of the others sat on the imam’s upturned pail, intoning the name of Ramzan Geshilov, the good and righteous man who had refused to inform and had died for it in the Landfill seven years earlier and only now was having his funeral.

The pebbles at his feet were round and pockmarked. His bare toes curled around them. There was no guilt, no shame, those would come later, but for now, just the blanketing white noise of relief, of this breath, of non-pain. He wore the rings of ten burn marks on his fingers. For the first time in his life he believed without reservation in the existence of a kind and generous God, as desert thirst teaches one to believe in rain. After an hour his red truck turned the corner, followed by a dust billow that swept past when the truck stopped. Dokka’s gasps filled in the open passenger window. Leaving the engine idling, the interrogator with less shiny shoes climbed from the driver’s side. He held up a red plastic bag, like a fish he had proudly caught. Ten fingers floated in the blood. “Your friend gets these back when I get the other twenty-five thousand,” said the interrogator with less shiny shoes.

After Ramzan climbed into the driver’s seat, after he bandaged Dokka’s hands with bandannas and duct tape, he looked to the dash and saw that the interrogator—whose shoes, wet with blood, now shone in the afternoon sun—had left them with a full tank of gas.

And, now, two years later, December 2004, two weeks before Dokka disappeared, when the dial tone severed the Cossack colonel’s threat, and Ramzan packed away the satellite phone, and descended from the cabin of the abandoned logging truck, he did so with the same numbness that had allowed him to drive away from the Landfill two years earlier. Both times he heard Dokka’s beseeching voice, and both times he did his best to ignore it. For the two weeks after the Cossack colonel’s call, the two weeks in which his bowels clenched in a constipated fist, Dokka, not yet a ghost, haunted Ramzan. He ran through the twelve names he had already given the Feds, the twelve who had disappeared because he had become an informer two years earlier at the Landfill. What did a thirteenth matter? What did any one person matter when pounded against the anvil of history? He sat quietly and remembered Dokka as if he had already gone. Dokka always ended his questions with or, as if anticipating he would be denied: Would you like to play chess, or …? Will the G-3 rations be handed out tomorrow, or …? His generosity in opening his home to refugees, and his intransigence in demanding rent, even if payment was no more than a dull button, or a paper clip, or a piece of stationery for his daughter’s souvenir collection. His brown eyes had twice grown dull: first after he lost his fingers, then after he lost his wife. His paddle hands. His slender toes taught the dexterity of a left hand. He could clasp a pencil between his first and second toe, and