A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,147
they ate, Sonja described the chopsticks people in Asia use to eat rice. The girl attempted it with two pencils, and after five minutes of failure, declared Asia an invention of Sonja’s imagination. When they finished, Sonja led her to Natasha’s room. Out of habit she knocked before opening the door. The bed was still made. The desk chair sat at an angle, as though its owner would return any moment to write a note, a letter, an explanation, or an apology.
“This is where you’ll sleep,” Sonja said. She set the suitcase on the edge of the bed and cleared the lower drawer of Natasha’s jeans and sweaters. Natasha had taken the burgundy cardigan Sonja had given her for her eighteenth birthday, the one she hated and never wore, and wherever she was, Sonja hoped the temperature dipped enough for her to try it on. “You can put your things here.”
“Am I going to live here?”
Sonja hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Do you want to?”
The girl surveyed the room, inspected the closet, checked under the bed. “I get the whole room?”
“The whole room.”
“And I don’t have to share it?
“It’s all yours.”
The girl slowly nodded and leaned into Sonja, listening to the gurgle of her organs, these marvelous things we ignore, forget, and take for granted. “Come on,” Sonja said. “You should unpack before either of us changes our minds.”
Havaa unlatched her suitcase and pulled out balled gray socks, a sweater, a skirt, two headscarves, white underwear patterned with little pink bows. Then came the strange and wonderful artifacts. A marriage license from 1942, given by a couple who had been married for sixty-one years and no longer needed the document. A photograph of a slender man wearing a pea jacket that now hung in a closet in Saudi Arabia. The eighty-first draft of a love letter. The uncanceled stamp that would have sent the unwritten eighty-second draft. A prayer book opened by two hundred and six yearning hands.
“What is all this?” Sonja asked. In three weeks, when she would help Havaa build a case to display these treasures, Sonja would use her surgical saw, for the first time, to create something.
“My souvenirs,” Havaa replied. She spaced them across the drawer with greater reverence than she’d shown her clothes. “From the refugees that stayed at our house.”
There was a silver ring that had made a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two feel like the most glamorous woman in Grozny. An address book that an unfaithful husband had given Havaa so his wife’s ghost wouldn’t find it among his possessions. A dried seahorse that a father gave his six year-old daughter in lieu of a pony. A Taj Mahal keychain that a refugee in southern Russia regretted giving away. A tie clip that a cosmonaut carried to space and back. And a Buckingham Palace Guard nutcracker.
“What’s that?” Sonja barely got it out.
“That’s Alu,” the girl said. In three weeks and one day, with her palm aching wonderfully from sawing through wood, Sonja would tell her about Buckingham Palace. “He’s an idiot.”
“Who gave you Alu?”
“One of the women who stayed at our house.”
“One of the refugees?” Sonja asked. In eight months, she would begin telling the girl about Natasha, and it would take her the rest of their time to finish the story.
“I introduced her to Akim,” the girl said. “She was nice.”
“What was her name?”
“I can’t remember. Lots of people stayed at our house.”
“But you remember Alu’s name.” In eight and a half years, she would have already taught the girl every lesson she had scribbled in her secondary school notebooks. In ten and three-quarter years, the girl, then a first-year biology student at the newly constructed Volchansk State University, would begin teaching her.
“Alu didn’t leave.”
“But what did she look like?”
“She had all her fingers.”
“What else? What else?” In twelve and a third years, the girl, now a woman, would accompany Sonja on a five-day holiday to London. When the night porter asked, “Would your daughter care for an herbal tea?” it wouldn’t cross Sonja’s mind to correct him; it wouldn’t have crossed her mind for some time. At the end of five days, they would leave London. Sonja would never see the city again. Havaa would.
“She was very pretty. I was nervous she wouldn’t think I was pretty.”
“Was she happy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where was she going?” When the girl, she would forever be the girl to Sonja, went to Lake Baikal for two years to write her dissertation on the effects of climate change