A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,132
suddenly. “What’s wrong?” Natasha asked.
The girl nodded to a parting, twenty meters away, where two lengths of aquamarine lay like misplaced strips of sky. As they edged forward, Natasha saw the aquamarine didn’t belong to the sky, but rather to the legs of straw-stuffed blue trousers.
“A scarecrow?” Natasha asked. A faded Red Army–issue shirt languished above the trousers. Nine soldiers had lived and died in that shirt. The scarecrow, drunk, judging from its borrowed birch-trunk backbone, had been decapitated. Nailed to the tree, where the head should have been, was a moss-devoured board.
“No,” the girl said. “It’s Akim.”
“Who’s Akim?”
Too young to explain in words, the girl’s face was old enough to show the loss that was that name. Natasha, not understanding what this meant, was briefly annoyed, believing it profligate to expend pity on a scarecrow when there were more deserving life forms, but of all people, who was she to judge how a girl disburses her empathy. She wrapped her arm around Havaa. The whole of the girl’s bony shoulder fit in the cup of her palm, and the girl reached up and held on to her fingers. If Akim could have seen the two of them, he would have taunted them for weeks.
After dinner that evening they were joined by a man, tall, slender, and bearded, in whose presence Dokka grew aloof. His name was Akhmed. He asked about the hospital, showing particular interest in the hiring process. The hospital hadn’t adhered to those formalities since before she arrived—she had never even taken a first-aid course, she confided—and if he still wanted to work there Sofia Andreyevna Rabina would surely hire him. The brilliance building behind his eyes faded when she added that no hospital employee had received a salary in many years. And then he asked a peculiar question: had she ever used dental floss for stitches? Natasha was questioning his sanity when he described a rebel field commander who, two years earlier, had arrived in the village with his chest held together by dental floss. That would be Sonja, Natasha said, she could stitch a lion to the back of a wildebeest. He had never seen finer stitching of any other material, much less dental floss, and could vividly recall the twenty-three stitches curving along the crescent wound, which the commander had called the grin on his chest, and the memory had haunted him, reminding him of the unexpected wonders a capable mind might conceive. Natasha wholeheartedly agreed, and encouraged his misconception that Sonja worked miracles, not from malice, but from a budding pride that stretched all eleven kilometers home.
Dokka didn’t say a word to Akhmed, not even in greeting or farewell, and when the man left, Natasha asked if he had come invited.
“He comes once a week,” Dokka explained. “Usually when travelers are staying. He likes talking to people, getting news from the outside.
And he helps with the tasks Havaa’s hands are too small to perform. Chopping firewood and the like.”
“But you don’t care for him?”
Dokka gave a sad smile. “He was my closest friend once. It pains me that I can’t decline his assistance.”
In the bedroom, Natasha undressed under the girl’s inquisitive stare. “Did they take you to the Landfill, too?”
“No,” Natasha said.
“Then why are there marks on your shoulders?”
Instinctively she reached back and covered the knotted scars. Some three dozen stippled her left shoulder and neck, and had Sergey not switched to nicotine gum, there would have been some three dozen more. “It’s nothing,” she said, quick to throw on a nightdress. “I fell asleep in the sun once. I couldn’t sleep on my back for months after. Just a reminder of my foolish younger self.” After she brushed her teeth, she asked, “Did the scarecrow walk into the woods by itself?”
“I helped him,” the girl boasted.
“He must have been heavy.”
“It took me three days. I dragged him along the road and hid him each night so no one would take him.”
“Why?” Natasha asked.
“For Akim.”
“You mentioned him earlier. Who is he?”
“No one really.”
“Is he like an imaginary friend? My sister and I, when we were children, we pretended we had an imaginary sister.”
“No!” the girl said, horrified by the suggestion. “Akim’s not imaginary.”
“I’m sorry, I was just asking.”
“You’re mean.” Natasha felt like she had stepped into a foreign country whose customs and manners she didn’t comprehend, where her gestures of concern were taken as affronts. The Samsonite was still unzipped from when she had retrieved her wool sleeping socks, and through the opening