A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,31

The rind of buffer states diminished as republics peeled away. All of central Europe had shrugged off communist leadership, and now the Baltic states, the Black Sea states, even Moldova was discussing secession. For the first time in two millennia Chechnya had a chance at sovereignty. Everything was changing. It had to go into his book.

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.

In the following years he lost his publisher, then his university job, then his wife, who one Tuesday morning passed away as meekly as she had lived; he didn’t notice until eleven hours after her final breath. The chain saws went silent and the forest grew back, and one war came and then another, and Khassan had his son and his book, and the prospect of finding fulfillment in either seemed as unlikely as the prospect of either surviving the decade. But Khassan still had them, and at a time when all belief dissolved, the act of possession was more important than what was possessed. The things in his life that caused him the most sorrow were the things he’d lived with the longest, and now that everything was falling they became the pillars that held him; had he a thirty-two-year-old toothache rather than a thirty-two-year-old son, he would have treasured it the same. But that, too, had its time. The unseasonably warm afternoon one year, eleven months and three days earlier, when Dokka and Ramzan returned from the Landfill—Dokka missing all ten fingers, Ramzan missing only his pes—was the last day Khassan had spoken to his son.

First Ramzan feigned indifference, then shouted, then pleaded for his father’s conversation. How could Ramzan have known he would miss his father’s monosyllabic disapproval? How could he have known that he lived in reaction to his father’s expectations, needed them to know precisely the person he had failed to become?

“I’m doing this for you as much as for me,” Ramzan had said with the desperate logic of the unconvinced. “We have a generator, electric lights, food on the table. Is it such a crime to give you insulin? To have clean drinking water?”

But Khassan, a career apologist, was fluent in the rhetoric of justification and accustomed to ignoring his son. By the fifth month his son’s anger burned away, and a dense depression descended. Ramzan’s footsteps filled the night. Soon painkillers and sleeping pills joined the hypodermic needles, cotton balls, alcohol swabs, and insulin brought back from the military supplier. The ovular green pills left Ramzan comatose for sixteen hours, and in these spells, when the house exhaled and the floorboards went silent, Khassan entered his son’s room.

On earlier excursions, he had explored the drawers, closet, and shelves. In the upper left bureau drawer, he found the thirty-centimeter blade of the kinzhal he’d given Ramzan on his sixteenth birthday, a knife his father had given him, and his grandfather his father. Within the pages of an algebra textbook a list bore the names of those Ramzan had helped disappear.