A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,5
hidden from Sonja’s view.
“She needs a place to stay,” Akhmed said.
“And I need a plane ticket to the Black Sea.”
“She has nowhere to go.”
“And I haven’t had a tan in years.”
“Please,” he said.
“This is a hospital, not an orphanage.”
“There are no orphanages.”
Out of habit she turned to the window, but she saw nothing through the duct-taped panes. The only light came from the fluorescent bulbs overhead, whose blue tint made them all appear hypothermic. Was that a moth circling the fixture? No, she was just seeing things again.
“Her father was taken by the security forces last night. To the Landfill, most likely.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He was a good man. He was an arborist in Eldár Forest before the wars. He didn’t have fingers. He was very good at chess.”
“He is very good at chess,” the girl snapped, and glared at Akhmed. Grammar was the only place the girl could keep her father alive, and after amending Akhmed’s statement, she leaned back against the wall and with small, certain breaths, said is is is. Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.
Akhmed summoned the arborist with small declarative memories, and Sonja let him go on longer than she otherwise would because she, too, had tried to resurrect by recitation, had tried to recreate the thing by drawing its shape in cinders, and hoped that by compiling lists of Natasha’s favorite foods and songs and annoying habits, her sister might spontaneously materialize under the pressure of the particularities.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated.
“The Feds weren’t looking for Dokka alone,” he said quietly, glancing to the girl.
“What would they want with her?” she asked.
“What do they want with anyone?” His urgent self-importance was familiar; she’d seen it on the faces of so many husbands, and brothers, and fathers, and sons, and was glad she could see it here, on the face of a stranger, and not feel moved. “Please let her stay,” he said.
“She can’t.” It was the right decision, the responsible one. Caring for the dying overwhelmed her. She couldn’t be expected to care for the living as well.
The man looked to his feet with a disappointed frown that inexplicably resurrected the memory of b) electrophilic aromatic substitution, the answer to the only question on her university organic chemistry exam she’d gotten wrong. “How many doctors are here?” he asked, apparently deciding to try a different tack.
“One.”
“To run an entire hospital?”
She shrugged. What did he expect? Those with advanced degrees, personal savings, and the foresight to flee had done so. “Deshi runs it. I just work here.”
“I was a GP. Not a surgeon or specialist, but I was licensed.” He raised his hand to his beard. A crumb fell out. “The girl will stay with you and I will work here until a home is found for her.”
“No one will take her.”
“Then I will keep working here. I graduated medical school in the top tenth of my class.”
Already this man’s habit of converting entreaty to command annoyed her. She had returned from England with her full name eight years earlier and still received the respect that had so surprised her when she first arrived in London to study medicine. It didn’t matter that she was both a woman and an ethnic Russian; as the only surgeon in Volchansk, she was revered, honored and cherished in war as she never would be in peace. And this peasant doctor, this man so thin she could have pushed against his stomach and felt his spine, he expected her acquiescence? Even more than his tone of voice she resented the accuracy of his appraisal. As the last of a staff of five hundred, she was engulfed by the burden of care. She lived on amphetamines and sweetened condensed milk, had regular hallucinations, had difficulty empathizing with her patients, and had seen enough cases of secondary traumatic stress disorder to recognize herself among them. At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.
“The top tenth percent?” Sonja asked with no small amount of skepticism.