A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,7

never worn scrubs before.” He turned from her, but the mirror held his blush.

“How could you go through a residency without wearing scrubs?”

He closed his eyes and his blush deepened. “My professors didn’t have much faith in me. I never had, exactly, what you would call a residency.”

“This isn’t what I want to hear right after I take you on.”

“I just feel privileged to work here.” The sleeves showed off his pale biceps. “I always thought these would be looser.”

“They’re women’s scrubs.”

“You don’t have any for men?”

“No men work here.”

“So I’m wearing women’s clothes.”

“You’ll need to wear a hijab, too.” His face paled. “I’m kidding,” she added. “A headscarf is sufficient.”

He nodded, unconvinced. Clearly, she had hired a buffoon, but a buffoon who could wash linens, make beds, and deal with relatives was better than no buffoon at all. “Have you ever been here before?” she asked, disinclined to give more than a brief tour of the hospital.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“I was born here.”

She took him through the ghost wards: cardiology, internal medicine, endocrinology. A layer of dust and ash recorded their path. “Where is everything?” he asked. The rooms were empty. Mattresses, sheets, hypodermics, disposable gowns, surgical tape, film dressing, thermometers, and IV bags had been moved downstairs. All that remained was bolted to the floor and built into the walls, along with items of no practical use: family portraits, professional awards, and framed diplomas from medical schools in Siberia, Moscow, and Kiev.

“We moved everything to the trauma and maternity wards,” she said. “They’re all we can keep open.”

“Trauma and maternity.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it? Everyone either fucking or dying.”

“No, not funny.” He stroked his beard, burying his fingers to the first knuckle. His fingers found their way to his beard in moments of trouble or indecision, trawling the thick dark hair but rarely touching upon wisdom. “They are coming and they are leaving and it is happening here.”

They climbed a stairwell washed in blue emergency light. On the fourth floor she led him down the corridor to the west side of the building. Without warning him she opened the door to the storage room. Something gleeful and malicious shot through her when he took a step back, afraid of falling. “What happened?” he asked. The floor broke off a meter past the doorframe. No walls or windows, just a cityscape muraled across the winter air.

“A few years back we harbored rebels. The Feds blew off the wall in reply.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Maali. Deshi’s sister.”

“Only one person?”

“A benefit of understaffing.”

On days when both sides abided by the ceasefire, she came to this doorway and looked across the city and tried to identify the buildings by their ruins. The one that flickered with ten thousand pieces of sunlight had been a sheet-glass office building in which nine hundred and eighteen souls had labored. Beneath that minaret a rotund imam had led the pious in prayer. That was a school, a library, a Young Pioneers’ clubhouse, a jail, a grocery store. That was where her mother had warned her never to trust a man who claims to want an intelligent wife; where her father had taught her to ride a bike by imitating the engine growl of a careening municipal bus sure to run her over if she didn’t pedal fast enough; where she had solved her first algebra equation for a primary school teacher, a man for whom Sonja’s successes were consolation whenever he pitied himself for not having followed his older brother into the more remunerative profession of prison guard; where she had called for help after witnessing one man spear another on the university green, only to learn they were students rehearsing an Aeschylus play. It looked like a city made of shoeboxes and stamped into the ground by a petulant child. She could spend the whole afternoon rebuilding it, repopulating it, until the hallucination became the more believable reality.

“Before, you couldn’t see the river from here,” she said. “This hospital is the tallest building in the city now.”

There had been tall buildings and plans to erect taller ones. After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., oil reserves had promised prosperity for Chechnya in the coming capitalist century. Yeltsin had told the republics to grab as much sovereignty as they could swallow, and after two thousand years of foreign occupation, it had seemed the republic would finally achieve independence. Her grandparents had moved to Volchansk in 1946 after Stalin added lorry drivers and seamstresses to the expanding list of professions requiring purging, but she