A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,43
the passport she still carried with her, in the money belt around her waist, each time she left her house?
“Yes,” she said. The air hummed. The yellow clouds watched indifferently. “I’ll have one of your cigarettes.”
She took that cigarette and smoked it while walking to the bazaar, where several days later, on a trip in search of fabrics, she stumbled upon an industrial ice machine at the stand of a Wahhabi arms dealer. It was a great gray piece of machinery with a plastic interior the color of potato broth and fretwork ventilation at its back end. The steel lid held her unfocused reflection within the logo of the Soviet Intourist Hotel. Three half brothers, now sixteen, eleven, and eight, had been conceived on that steel lid, none yet aware of the others’ existence. A merchant with nicotine-stained fingernails, wire-rimmed glasses, and the long beard of a Wahhabi described the machine. “Gorbachev, Brezhnev, and the Bee Gees all had their drinks cooled with the ice produced by this magnificent machine. It is a celebrity among ice machines, envied and admired among its kind. All around Chechnya ice-cube trays have photographs of the Intourist Hotel ice machine pinned on their freezer walls, and they are all told that if they work hard, and believe wholeheartedly in the ideology of ice, they may someday rise to its ranks. And you might say, ‘But Mullah Abdul, I don’t need an industrial ice machine that can provide twenty cubic meters of ice an hour, when required.’ To that I counter, what about clean water? You see, pure flawless H2O freezes at precisely zero degrees, the temperature at which the carefully calibrated thermometer of this magnificent colossus is set. Water containing minerals and sediments and bacteria and parasites freezes at slightly lower temperatures, and thus remains liquid and flows out the drainage. The frozen water left behind is as pure as the virgins in Paradise, with whom I hope to soon be acquainted, should God see me fit.”
Sonja nodded, not unimpressed. On the card tables beside the freezer lay guns of all sizes and caliber, brass belts of ammunition, septic pipes fashioned into homemade Stinger RPG launchers, land mines, and VHS recordings of Baywatch.
“What are you looking for?” the merchant continued. “Fragmentation grenades? Hollow bullets? If you give me a few days, I could find a C-4 vest that would fit you nicely.” She remembered him as the chemistry professor who had slapped her behind three times in as many months, and expected her—a first-year university student then—to thank him for saving her from the invisible bee that lived in his office. He’d been a different man back then, arriving to class each morning with freshly shaved cheeks and a stale-smelling corduroy jacket, but she recognized his delicate bee-swatting hands, now curled around the butt of a rifle. “Perhaps it would be better if I spoke to your husband,” he said. “I’d like to have a word with him about how he allows you to dress.”
“Fuck off, you disgusting little man,” Sonja said, in English.
“She speaks in tongues, too,” the merchant muttered to himself. “Another sign of the end times. Listen to me, woman. This is serious business. If you dress with your hair and your face uncovered for the devil himself to see, the Russians will come back, make no mistake, and you women will be responsible.”
Had he not had the contents of a small armory in arm’s reach, she might have kicked him squarely in his now-pious balls. Instead she shook her head and turned toward the fabric stand.
She returned home with sheets of green and purple cloth, and unfolded them across the floor of her bedroom. As a teenager, she had declined her mother’s offer to teach her to tailor her own clothes; even at that age, such a domestic skill had insulted her ambitions. Now, eyes downcast, glaring as though a pair of trousers might materialize from the cloth by force of her concentration, she felt like Sonja the Idiot. Only one idea came to her. She took her measurements with a ruler and drew them on the cloth and cut outlines of her legs with nail scissors. For the next half hour, she stitched together the two cutouts with the same stitch she used to close wounds. When finished, she examined her creation. The stitching held tight when she pulled the seams, and her pinky just fit through the holes of the button fly. She envisioned pockets, perhaps even belt