A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,138
A trail of glass led to the kitchen where the kettle and two cans of evaporated milk were the only intact containers. In the bedroom, a body rested beneath the sheets. A hypodermic needle lay on the floor beside the bed. Akhmed’s wife, Sonja realized. She slowly peeled back the sheet. Out of habit, she felt for a pulse. The woman’s hair smelled of pears. Her hands were smooth, uncalloused, beautiful. Pressing her fingertips to the woman’s forehead, she found herself for the first time in many years standing before a corpse without guilt, a mourner rather than a failed surgeon.
She didn’t know the woman’s favorite color, or her favorite food, or whether she had, as a child, preferred her father’s company to that of her mother; she didn’t know the sound of the woman’s voice, whether it was as small as her body suggested, or much larger, growing as her flesh shrank. She didn’t even know the woman’s name. But she knew this woman had a husband, and he had been a decent man, yes, had been. Akhmed died the moment she saw his wife in bed. He wouldn’t return. Whoever came upon this house next would find fallout, chaos, and would not see the way Akhmed had lived; a stranger, a refugee, would discover this place and never the man and woman it had belonged to.
She found a broom and dustpan in the kitchen closet and swept up the broken dishes and jars and teacups. She righted the living room bookcases and, unsure of how Akhmed had ordered the books, she arranged them alphabetically. She wiped up the plaster shaken loose by gunfire and nailed a wooden board over the bullet holes. She scrubbed the black grime from the basin with steel wool. For more than two hours she tidied the house. The rooms contained so little they were quickly restored, and by early afternoon she had no choice but to face the bedroom. Dust blanketed the bureau, carpeted the floor, filled the frame of their wedding photograph. She pulled a fistful of white athletic socks from the drawer. “Do you mind if I borrow these?” she asked, and took the silence as permission. She cleaned the bureau, floor, windowsill and panes. The edge of the bed, rim of the lamp, and the books stacked beside the nightstand. Hadji Murád was among them and she set it aside knowing this once she’d break her long-standing policy against sad endings. In one of the bureau drawers she found several dozen charcoal-drawn portraits of the woman now lying dead in the bed. In the drawings her cheeks were fuller, her eyes open and clear. In every one she smiled.
When she finished dusting, she turned her attention to the bed. “Several hours after death the sphincter and bladder muscles relax,” she said softly. “It isn’t right to spend an eternity in soiled underwear. I’ll clean you, okay?” She pulled back the covers and stripped off the nightdress. Wearing the socks like gloves she washed the woman’s thighs and buttocks, and then dressed her in a tan skirt, a garden-hose-green sweater, and a burgundy headscarf. She looked like a bouquet of roses. Akhmed had told her that his wife hadn’t walked in more than two years, so after pulling on the last pair of clean socks, she wedged the woman’s feet into a pair of sneakers. “Now you can walk wherever you want.”
After cleaning and dressing the woman, she returned to the manila envelope and collection of pages she’d found hidden beneath her body. The manila envelope was addressed: For K, 56 Eldár Forest Service Road. This K, whoever he was, lived only a handful of houses away. She set it aside and picked up the fastened pages. They appeared to form a letter or journal entry. The first sentence read: This is about your father. She flipped to the last page to read the last sentence, as was her custom, then moved up to the last paragraph, and then the last page:
There is little ink left in the pen, even less energy in my hand, and the time has come. This story ends where you begin. You were born in a hospital. I drove your mother and father in the truck I purchased my son for his sixteenth birthday. Your mother’s face was as red as the paint. Your father kept telling me to drive faster. The maternity ward was on the fourth floor of the hospital. Your father and I