A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,41
as a summer picnic. She admitted to having spoken with a psychiatrist at the women’s shelter in Rome—the one that had provided the six-month supply of Ribavirin, which Sonja found in the bathroom, which was generally used to treat hepatitis, which Natasha refused to admit she had, which Sonja thought was total bullshit.
“She spoke Russian in this ridiculous Italian accent,” Natasha said. “I was always afraid she’d start singing an opera.”
“I never make promises to my patients, but I promise that whoever I find won’t speak a word of Italian.”
And she tried. She combed through her contacts only to find that every psychiatrist in the city was dead, exiled, or missing. The ranks of the hospital staff didn’t contain a single mental-health professional. She fumed one afternoon in the hospital parking lot, wanting to punch the clouds from the sky but instead venting on a closer object, the hood of an ’83 Volga so decrepit she felt the sickening thrill of beating a wounded animal to reiterate its pain. How had she got to this point? She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat. In the months before the repatriation her heart had hardened around her sister’s absence, letting her love Natasha in memory as she could never love her in reality. The fact was that her exile had prompted Natasha’s. The fact was that she had left Chechnya first. The fact was that she had escaped the war Natasha had endured alone. It only made sense that her sister would attempt the same transaction with the only currency she possessed: her body. But now she was home and needed medical care Sonja couldn’t provide. Being a bad sister was one thing; being a bad doctor was the more serious sin. Deshi found her out in the parking lot, beating the rust off the Volga hood. Her tears turned brown when she wiped them with her knuckles. “Do you want to talk about it?” Deshi asked. “Go to hell,” she replied.
At dinner Natasha took the news with typical smugness. “It’s just as well,” she said. “Head doctors are a decadence unsuited to a country like ours. They are the bidets of the medical profession.”
“You could talk to me,” Sonja offered with enough snarl in her voice to ensure that Natasha would demur. Which she did. In seven years and three weeks, when Natasha disappeared for a second time, Sonja would orbit that moment, circling every angle without ever touching down: what if she had tried harder, been kinder, gentler?
As the street noise filled the gap in the conversation, Sonja gave up. If the world was determined to drown her, she’d stop swimming. She lengthened her hours at work, then lengthened her commute. At the bazaar, vendors sold everything that could be lifted and carted away: emergency rations, grain sacks, spools of uncut cloth, raw wool, floorboards, industrial kitchen appliances, abandoned Red Army munitions, traffic lights, and oil-refining machinery. She wandered past racks of used shoes that had clocked more kilometers than the average Federal fighter jet, past blocks with more craters than her sister’s left shoulder blade, past exoskeletal scaffolding, workmen hoisting wheelbarrows of masonry, all the way to Hospital No. 6.
And as eighteen days turned to twenty, forty, sixty, the trauma ward became the capital of the reconstructed republic. Each day patients arrived with heart attacks and kidney stones, the lesser emergencies of peacetime. When a man limped in with a soccer injury she kissed his cheek; that man and his wife would create the plaque honoring the hospital staff of the war years, which was to be set into the sidewalk eleven years later to little official fanfare. The war was over; no one knew it was only the first. Still, the scarcity of medical supplies remained a constant problem.
She contacted the brother of a man with a mustache made of dead spider legs whose life she’d saved when a land mine had lodged eight ball bearings, four screws, and three ten-kopek coins in his left leg. The brother met her in the backseat of a Mercedes that drove in tight circles on a tennis court–sized slab of asphalt just outside his Volchansk garage, the only unbroken stretch of road worthy of such a fine Western automobile. He pinched a Marlboro filter between his manicured fingernails. She didn’t need to look past his first knuckle to verify his access to the smuggling routes snaking through