A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,109
seven Natashas left; a new Natasha walked in the room and asked if this was where the au pairs slept. You are all replaceable, all disposable. Sergey reads business books and listens to lectures on free-market capitalism and, sometimes, in the middle of it, you can hear the lectures through the wall, through the grunting flab atop you, and listening to free trade and commodity economy leaves you with a rich nostalgia for the relative generosity of totalitarianism. There is the night, the last night, the next night. The belt around your ankle, the two taps of the syringe, the blood into the barrel, the plunger pushing in. There is the woman named Anzhela but called Natasha. The woman named Nadya but called Natasha. The woman named Natasha, called Natasha.
CHAPTER
21
AT DAYBREAK KHASSAN left for the service road half hoping to intercept Akhmed, but all he found was a fresh set of footprints. Not knowing what else to do, he walked back and forth, urging the dogs to do likewise, and together they turned five kilometers of snow into a riddle no one could solve. Khassan had taken off his gloves, periodically oiling his fingers with butter, and for five kilometers lapping tongues warmed his knuckles. The bald one, Kashtanka, shivered like a prenatal rat, and several times Khassan paused to reattach the blanket tied by twine around the dog’s pale torso. In summer he bathed the dogs. If one fell sick he cared for it. At the village edge, he knelt and they gathered to him, leaping, licking his cheeks, leaning their paws on his back and panting in his ears, diseased, unwashed, his, his, his. When he stood, all six followed with Sharik at the rear. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock. The day stretched out and his path in it lay as meandering and meaningless as the one he had left. Before the bend in the road he saw Akhmed’s house and across from it the gap that had been Dokka’s. If he had seen Akhmed that morning, he would have had to ask permission to visit Ula; if he had asked permission, he might have been denied. It was a better excuse than the frigid air to stay curled under the covers those extra minutes.
The dogs lounged in the snowy lawn to wait for him. He crept through the shadows of the living room, careful not to disturb the curtains, and into the bedroom where Ula slept fitfully. He hesitated to wake her, as if he were no more than her troubled dream and would dissolve if he touched her. Her hair clumped in greasy cords and she smelled of talcum powder. In the kitchen he filled a stew pot with clean water and set it beside the bed. He drew the covers to Ula’s chin, so when she woke she wouldn’t worry about her decency. Then, reluctantly, he rubbed her arm.
“Why are you here?” she asked without even the suggestion of surprise in her face.
“Do you remember me?” he asked, more urgently than he had intended.
She narrowed her eyes.
“I must have lived a thousand lives before this. I was a bird. I was a bug. I lived in the leaves. I don’t know which life is the hallucination.”
“You’re Ula,” he said. “You’re married to Akhmed.”
“Why are you here?” Again she asked the question; again he didn’t answer.
Because his son was the reason she spent the day alone. Because keeping her comfortable, keeping her company, caring for her was the least he could do. Because he was lonely. Because he had forgotten a woman’s companionship. Because the thought of talking himself senile to a pack of feral dogs didn’t appeal to him this early in the day. He looked to the stew pot of water beside the bed. Because she forgot. Because she forgot everything he said. “I’m here to wash your hair.”
She nodded and he peeled back the blanket, her skin whiter than a Russian’s. Sometimes Akhmed carried her outside to the rocking chair and she would sit without rocking, swathed in blankets even in the sticky summer months. Khassan turned her so her hair hung off the side of the bed and into the water. The soap gave a fine lather, and he ran his fingers through the water, and broke the bubbles against her scalp, and washed away the grease and dead skin. After it was washed and rinsed, he wrapped her hair in a towel and propped her upright against the headboard.