A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,72

your parents on the divan, and you’ve never seen them hold hands, but they kick off their slippers, and on the floor their little toes touch? With your father’s snores turning the hall into an echo chamber you walk through to reach the bathroom, warm enough you don’t think of wrapping yourself in a blanket when you get out of bed? With toothpaste? With your sister’s pencil scratches coming through the shadow-thin plaster walls, the mumble of rote memorization, her nightly prayers to a god you neither know nor comprehend? With your belief that no matter how badly you fuck up, you will always belong to these people, and that they will never let you disappear?

She went to Sonja’s bookshelf. Extra brackets supported the heavy textbooks, and her index finger brushed past the spines of books too heavy to hold in one hand. How had civilization survived long enough to accumulate the knowledge contained in these books? The slimmer volumes stood on the upper shelf, a yellowed Red Army field manual the most useful of the bunch. Scanning the shelf, she recalled how Sonja always read the last page of a book first, how her sister had to know what would happen, where the story led, to see if it was worth the effort. She didn’t open the torrid romance novels at the end of the shelf. The worn bindings had an intimacy absent from the rest. She imagined Sonja lying in bed, reading melodrama with an ache in her chest she couldn’t quantify or explicate, and thus couldn’t understand. Instead, she took a slender volume entitled Origins of Chechen Civilization: Prehistory to the Fall of the Mongol Empire by Khassan Geshilov.

She read by the slow burn of candlelight. Folklore said God had scattered ethnicities across the earth with a saltshaker; the shaker had slipped from his fingers when he reached the Caucasus, and a few grains of every nation had landed in its valleys. Other origin theories: the Chechens had descended from Scythian hordes, from the daughters of Genghis Khan, from a penal colony established by Alexander the Great, from a lost Roman legion. After finishing the first chapter, she flipped to the dust jacket. According to the three-sentence biography, Khassan Geshilov taught at Volchansk State University and lived in Eldár. This book was the first of a proposed multivolume history of the Chechen lands. In his photo he had clear brown eyes, a thick mustache silvered with gray hair, and a smile suggesting he was thinking of a flaky pastry or a woman’s smooth calves rather than ancient hordes. Until the candle died, she read of ancient invasions: the Scythians in 850 B.C., the Greeks two centuries later, the Romans in the first century B.C., the Baltic Goths in A.D. 240, the Asian Huns in A.D. 370, the Avars, Khazars, Circassians, Mongols, and finally, ultimately, the Russians.

Without electricity or gas, the kitchen became a twilight mausoleum of dead appliances. One day, Natasha had an idea. Wearing latex gloves she found in Sonja’s room, she scrubbed the innards of the oven and refrigerator with steel wool and bleach. She cut a broomstick to the width of the refrigerator compartment, jammed it in below the thermostat control, and pulled out the plastic shelves. In her bedroom, she gathered clothes from the floor in sweeping armfuls and deposited them before the refrigerator and the oven. Ever since she had begun working for the shuttle trader, her wardrobe exceeded her closet space. She hung silk evening dresses and cashmere sweaters on the broomstick bar, set folded jeans and blouses on the oven rack. When finished, she opened the doors to her new closet and bureau and felt pleased with her ingenuity. This is how you will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space.

Smoke turned the days into twelve-hour twilights. In the afternoons, when the chance of aerial bombing was the greatest, she wandered through the suburbs. She thought of her sister often. In their weekly conversations, Sonja described her boyfriend, Brendan, a Slavic Studies PhD candidate from Scotland, whose Russian was worse than Sonja’s English. She described the international dormitory, which housed students from thirty-four different countries, none of whom tried to kill each other. She described pubs and monuments, black taxies that looked like bowler hats on wheels, a massive obelisk supporting the statue of a tiny man in Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace guards who wouldn’t shoot her even if she openly mocked