A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,107

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