A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,144

could he rely on the comforts his son provided. He searched his closet for something to pack his clothes in but only found a laundry bag. He’d never thought to replace the brown suitcase after he buried it, never thought he would leave Chechnya again. At the center of his small bundle of clothes was the ruby-red scarf Mirza had unwound from her neck and placed in his hands, one afternoon, long ago. In the kitchen he packed alcohol swabs and syringes and insulin vials and all the food he could find in withered plastic shopping bags. On the kitchen table Ramzan’s keys radiated from their ring and he placed them in his pocket. He didn’t know where he would go. He had journeyed through Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He had, once, taken a victorious shit on a Reichstag commode. And from there to the Kazakh steppe, where, to the horizon, nothing sounded louder than the wind. He had traveled a quarter of the way around the globe without taking one step voluntarily. This was his home. For every barrack floor, muddy trench, outpost tarpaulin, bunker cot, and fallow field he had ever slept on, the memory of home was his only rest. Returning in 1956 he had vowed to never leave. Better to die here, he imagined, than endure another exile.

He crossed the hall to Ramzan’s room. Neither his kinzhal nor his boy had moved. If he could reach back he would hold his son, love his son, and untangle the knot his soul had become. He would find the ends. “Why are you my father?” the boy had asked one August afternoon, twenty seconds after asking, “Why is the sky blue?” and forty seconds before he asked, “Why do people get old?” They were sitting outside. Khassan had been teaching his son to eat shelled sunflower seeds and he held his breath long enough for the question to pass. “Why are you my father?” the boy asked again. It was two years before he stopped asking for a bike, five and a quarter before he stopped asking his father for anything. Khassan had never found an answer. If he could go back he would make one.

He closed Ramzan’s door behind him. The time for answering had ended and the peace of the afternoon articulated all he wanted for his son. The shopping bags, laundry bag, and two letters of safe passage waited at the front door, and as he reached for them, a question hit him like the face of a wall. Who was that woman and why had she come to deliver Akhmed’s answer? Had she known she would deliver him from his son? It didn’t matter. He would forever remember her as an angel dressed in an overcoat and scrubs, sent to stay his hand.

He locked the door behind him and crossed the packed snow to the red pickup. The dogs followed him, sniffing at the plastic bag of insulin, syringes, and chicken thighs. He set the bags in the passenger seat and turned to the dogs, six in all, lean-boned and matted and blind and bald.

“I’m leaving,” he said. His voice cracked with sorrow as the dogs tilted their snouts to him. Killing his son had seemed less reprehensible than abandoning these dogs. “I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what will happen.”

Tears fell down his cheeks. Two of the dogs ran after a hallucinated mouse, while the rest stared up at their broken benefactor with the same incomprehension that had made a home between his ears. “I can’t promise anything, but I will try to take care of you. If you want to come, I will take you.”

He climbed into the truck, set the two letters of safe passage in the glove box, and started the engine. He eased the brake and let the truck roll at a walking pace, waiting to see what would happen. In the rearview the dogs licked each other, tumbled on the ground, and went on in a world without him. Gravel shot back when he pushed the accelerator and the ears of the bald dog perked, and when she turned the other dogs noticed, and their snouts swiveled toward the truck as they galloped as one animal, a twenty-four-legged, twelve-eared beast, racing to reclaim their seventh head. He unlatched the back and one by one they jumped into the bed of the pickup truck, Sharik last.

Passing beneath the portraits of the disappeared he saw them as