A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,45
saw an ice machine at the bazaar the other day,” she said. Laina didn’t look up from the scarf she was knitting, afraid to raise her eyes with so many visions crowding the air. “It once cooled the glasses of the Bee Gees, or so said the freezer merchant. Never turn your back to him, Laina. There is no bee.”
“You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man,” Laina said, without lifting her eyes from the needle tips.
“You know that song?”
“Of course. People used to recite it in the war. I didn’t know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur’an.”
Sonja smiled, glad she could still be surprised. “I never knew the Bee Gees were so profound.”
“I saw six chariots in the sky today. I would have rather seen an ice machine.”
For the next hour Laina described abounding supernatural phenomena. The angel Gabriel had fluttered into a rooster-less henhouse in Zebir-Yurt, and the next morning a farmer found eight immaculately conceived eggs. A boy in Grozny defeated his grandfather, a chess master third class, ranked one thousand six hundred and eighty-fourth in the world, after a game lasting thirty-nine sleepless days and nights that left the grandfather so bewildered, proud, and exhausted he promptly died. A band of corpse-devils rose from the earth at the Dagestan border to hijack three Red Cross cargo trucks, leaving the drivers hog-tied and blindfolded and magically suspended three meters in the air.
“Stalin has been resurrected,” Laina said.
“I know,” Sonja replied. “He’s the prime minster of Russia.”
On her way to work a week later, when the black Mercedes found her, she was sure she’d wandered into one of Laina’s deliriums. The Mercedes braked sharply, drawing a curtain of dust along the street. The tires—before so dainty they could only drive in circles on a tennis court—were replaced with those of an armored jeep, raising the body of the car by a half meter. Swedish license plates, she noted, were still attached. The window descended and those gorgeous fingernails beckoned her.
“I thought we wouldn’t see each other again,” she said, pulling the door closed.
“And I keeping saying I’ll never see Alu again and he keeps on being my brother. You intrigue me. You lived in London for several years, if my information is correct, which it always is. Had you stayed, you would be eligible for citizenship now. Even I can’t get my name into one of those beautiful maroon passports. And yet you returned.”
“I have family here,” she said uneasily.
“I hide the toilet paper when my family visits so they won’t stay too long.”
“Could you get me back to London?”
“You could ask. But then who would I have to talk to? No one with your intelligence would return from London, which means you are either one of those idiot savants, light on the savant, or something entirely different. The only people who return are people like me, people who know how much money can be made.”
Through the window, the city limits gave way to brown fields tilled by tank treads. They were on the road to Grozny. “I’m not here to make money.”
“That’s why you are so intriguing.”
They reached the Grozny garage two hours later. Two dour-faced men met them at the door holding Kalashnikovs, one still three weeks from killing the other in an argument that would begin over driving directions, and Sonja feverishly hoped that the smuggler’s love for Alu the Turtle still surpassed his loathing for Alu the Unluckiest Younger Brother in History. Three trucks sat at the end of the concrete tarmac. The brother led her to the first truck, whose shot-off lock clung by a half-broken, glimmering grip. He lifted the door and shined a flashlight into the trailer. A Red Cross first-aid kit sat in the circle of yellowed light. The circle spread to illuminate torn cardboard boxes and hundreds, no, thousands of first-aid kits. “These were stolen,” she said.
“Of course they were, and not without some headache, I’ll have you know. But as you said, nearly all of what you asked for can be found in a first-aid kit.”
“What happened to the drivers?”
“Why do you care?”
She could feel him testing her, ready to blunt the slightest edge of moral outrage with a lecture on relativism in war, or maybe with another example of his contempt for Alu. She unsnapped the first-aid kit and surveyed the contents. Four absorbent compress dressings, eight adhesive bandages, a tube of