A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,106
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