A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,9

She pulled the bedsheet past the child’s head when she saw them approach.

“It’s okay,” Sonja said. “He’s a doctor too.”

“But he’s a man,” the woman countered.

“This hospital is a madhouse,” Akhmed said, as he turned away. The woman glared at his back, unamused by the implication that her three-day-old son was a lunatic, and then edged the bedsheet down her chest to reveal the child’s scrunched face fastened to her nipple.

“The baby is hungry,” Sonja said.

“He’ll get used to it,” the woman said, and closed her eyes.

The mother in the next bed slept on her side with her face half swallowed by the pillow. An incubator on a metal cart sat beside her bed. Inside, the infant was underweight and overheated, more like a crushed bird than a human.

“Poor nutrition in utero?” Akhmed asked.

“No nutrition in utero. Since the second war began, we’ve only had a handful of mothers healthy enough to give birth to healthy children.”

“And I imagine their fathers aren’t civilians?”

“It’s not our policy to ask those questions.” She walked to the door. In the corridor she stopped at a darkened lightbulb. “Do you see any moths there?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. In five weeks she would find a moth flapping in the canteen, and wouldn’t believe it real until its wings crumpled under her palm. “The trauma ward is just down the hall.”

CHAPTER

2

WITHIN DAYS AFTER the proposal of the Khasavyurt Peace Accord, Sonja broke up with her Scottish fiancé, resigned from her residency at the University College Hospital, and sat through connecting flights from London to Warsaw to Moscow to Vladikavkaz. The backseat of the gypsy cab she took from the airport had been removed to allow room for luggage, and her single suitcase slid with the curvature of the road, thudding again and again against the back of her seat, as if to reiterate the lesson that despite the illusions she’d entertained while Brendan’s chest rose and receded against hers, her life was small enough to fit inside a piece of luggage. Fuck me, she thought, what am I doing back here?

Dark plumes drifted from distant smokestacks, a chain of wind-rounded mountains, the taste of post-Soviet air like a dirty rag in her mouth. When they reached the bus terminal, she waited until her roller suitcase was safely on the ground before paying the driver. The Samsonite, a final gift from Brendan, might as well have been a neon-lit billboard advertising her foreignness as she rolled it past the imperial-era steamer trunks of other travelers. The nationalized bus line no longer ran routes into Chechnya, but after she had waited for an hour in a three-person line, a clerk directed her to a kiosk that sold lesbian porn, Ukrainian cigarettes, Air Supply cassettes, and tickets on a privately owned bus that made a weekly journey from North Ossetia to Chechnya. The next departure wasn’t until the following morning. Though tired from travel, she knew she wouldn’t sleep. She sat through the night on a wooden bench with one of her shoelaces tied around the suitcase handle to discourage gypsy children from rolling off with it.

“I am driving you all to your graves,” the bus driver announced as he walked down the aisle to collect tickets at a quarter past six in the morning. He leaned back as though balancing an invisible shot glass on his round stomach. “If given the opportunity, I will sell you all to the first bandit, kidnapper, or slave trader we come across. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. I wouldn’t have to drive this bus to that country if you hadn’t purchased these tickets, and for that I will drive over every pothole and divot to make the ride as miserable for you as it will be for me. And no, we will be making no bathroom breaks, and yes, it is because I know the pain a pothole causes a full bladder.”

She dozed for an hour with her head resting against the window. Every bump in the road was transferred through the glass and recorded by her temple. The sharp pitch of brakes, followed by the bullhorn-amplified instructions of a Russian border guard, brought her back to sudden consciousness. The soldiers were all fear and peach fuzz. They ordered the passengers off the bus and demanded each open his or her luggage in a field twenty meters from the road, while they, the waiting soldiers, crouched with their arms wrapped around their legs and their eyes clamped tight, as if jumping into