A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,137

on the counter. If you find my body, it said, return it for burial. She crushed the note into her pocket but then took another look. The full address was 38 Eldár Forest Service Road. Akhmed’s village. Was this what he had kept stitched in his trousers? Sixteen hours earlier they had lain on the narrow maternity ward bed and held each other so neither would roll off. When he stood and hitched up his trousers, she had noted a small tear near the knee, which he had blamed on a stray line of razor wire, even though she didn’t ask. She ironed out the wrinkled slip of paper with her thumb. It was the penultimate message she would receive from him. In a shoebox in the canteen cupboard, atop six dozen others, his ID card was to be the final message, though she wouldn’t find that for another five days.

With the note now folded in her jacket pocket, she drove to Eldár. Bereft of leaves, the trees looked skeletal. This was the road Akhmed marched down to and from the hospital. The one he marches down, she corrected, careful to keep him alive while she still could. Clouds veined the sky. Grain stalks swayed with what little breeze there was. The forest had overtaken much of the farmland, but as the road curved through a field, she came upon the frozen carcass of what had been a wolf.

Eldár was no more than a saucer beside Volchansk, the type of village one would only stumble upon when lost. Save for the street portraits, its name was all that distinguished it from a thousand other ruined villages. She tracked the addresses, no small feat when so few doorways stood, and parked in front of number 38. Across from Akhmed’s house, frozen ash stretched beyond the charred foundations of a house, across the field, and into the woods. It had been Havaa’s home, and the realization pulled a wire of grief straight through her stomach. Havaa and Akhmed had only become real when they were plucked from nowhere and deposited in her life. She knew what had happened to Havaa’s father and her home, but here the girl materialized in her mind as she hadn’t before. She turned her back on the ruin.

The door to number 38 hung from its top hinge. As she entered her stomach clenched, as it did each time she stepped into the operating theater knowing she couldn’t save the life before her.

For her first nine years, she had traveled to her maternal grandmother’s flat in Grozny for Christmas and New Year’s. Her grandmother had moved from Moscow to Grozny in the late forties, among the ethnic Russians sent to repopulate the republic after the deportation, and had taken with her the goose-down mattress she had inherited from her parents. The grandmother’s parents, Sonja’s great-grandparents, had hidden the goose-down mattress in a haystack for three years following the Revolution, when the price of owning such an extravagance had been nine grams of lead. The grandmother’s parents had lost to the state nearly everything of lesser value than their lives: the farmland, the farmhouse, nearly all their clothing and furniture, even the donkey they had named Vladimir Ilyich. Through it all the goose-down mattress lay beneath the haystack that neither the commissars nor the Cheka agents had thought to disturb. When they moved to Moscow, they prized their rescued mattress as a happy memory of what life had been like before a band of angry men overly fond of facial hair had deigned to liberate them. Even in the Great Purge, when they hid the goose-down mattress beneath their bed and slept instead on a thin mat of straw, they pulled it out on birthdays and anniversaries to remember the way life once had been. Sonja’s grandmother was conceived on that mattress, birthed on that mattress, and sixty-four years later she died on that mattress. For its long life, a life that outlasted the Soviet Union, the mattress retained the damp reek of haystack. It marked Sonja’s first nine Decembers, and now, in her thirty-fifth, she pushed open the rickety door of Akhmed’s house and found the scent of her grandmother’s mattress inside.

The living room had been violently shaken. A fallen bookcase leaned against the divan. On the floor were twelve kopek-sized circles connected by slender shafts of light to twelve bullet holes in the ceiling. She called his name, but the house wouldn’t respond with even an echo.