A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,145

if for the first time. No one else would remember the artist’s face, but he would. When he reached the end of the block, he kept driving. When he reached the end of the village, he kept driving. Wind tossed the dogs’ tongues and they shook their heads wonderfully. The serrated ridge of mountains cut into the horizon and he drove toward it. The passing refugees had speculated wildly, believing any rumor large enough to hope on. He didn’t know what lay on the other side. He didn’t know that the disease that would in nine years erase every memory but the headlights was already brewing among his neurons. He didn’t know that his son would live alone in the village for three grief-stricken years, wondering and waiting for his return before moving to a mountain hamlet, where he would keep wondering what had happened to his father, without ever finding out, for another fifty-seven years. Khassan didn’t know and he drove. He was seventy-nine years old. He was beginning a new life.

CHAPTER

28

“IF YOU COULD go back, would you leave London?” Natasha had asked the question on a cool Tuesday morning in March 1998. They were on good terms that month, sharing the last drags of a cigarette in the hospital parking lot as loose debris rustled under what seemed too pleasant a shade of sky. “If you could go back, would you leave London?” Of the thousands of times she had considered and still would consider the question, that had been the only time it had been posed as if an answer lived on the other side of it. “If you could go back …” There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.

The visit to Akhmed’s had taken longer than she anticipated, and as she parked the truck and crossed the lot, the premonition of impending disaster pressed on her. But Deshi’s heavy, dozing breaths were the only sound in the waiting room. Sonja jiggled her chair. The knitting needles began working in her hands before Deshi opened her eyes.

“Anything?” Sonja asked.

“No, slow week. The land mine’s brother took him away, our only visitor.”

“That’s it? Nothing else?” She held the edge of the check-in counter, where a pen, long dry, remained tethered by a thin metal chain. How could it be that today, of all days, the emergencies of God and of man rested?

“Nothing else,” Deshi said, without lifting her gaze from the needle tips. “Not a single patient in the hospital.”

“We could shut it down.”

Deshi smiled; not a day passed that she didn’t regret asking Maali to fetch clean linens; not a day passed that she didn’t hold Maali amid the rubble of the falling fourth floor, holding her as she had when Maali fell from a swing set, four years before the deportations, when Maali was crying and Deshi was the only one who knew how to comfort her. “Where would she go?” Deshi asked.

“Holiday.”

“All that education and she finally says something smart.”

“I can’t remember the last time the hospital was empty.”

“No, I can’t either.”

“It won’t last.”

Deshi shook her head. “Why spoil such a lovely afternoon with talk like that.”

“I’m just being realistic.”

“I bet she’d be realistic on a summer day, too,” Deshi said.

“I thought you were done gambling?”

“I would have liked to play cards with Akhmed. I’d have won the trousers from his legs.”

Harboring the small joy of that achievement, Sonja smiled. “I’d have liked to see that.”

“I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing him again, will we?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“A shame,” Deshi said. That simple epitaph was the last they would ever say of Akhmed. A finger materialized from the tips of Deshi’s needles. “Who are you knitting that for?” Sonja asked.

“Our young friend. She’s had her hands balled in her sleeves all week.”

The girl. Sonja hadn’t considered what Akhmed’s disappearance meant for the girl, who had, in less than a week, lost everything she had known. The day had spared legs from land mines and hearts from cardiac arrest, but it hadn’t spared her. “Where is she?”

“I retired ten years ago,” Deshi said. Another ten would pass before she acted on it. Three after that she would die of throat cancer, but not before falling in love with her oncologist.