Текст книги "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"

Автор книги: Anthony Marra

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

“No, about Grozny.”

“Did you or did you not boil these for ten minutes?”

“Yes, but are we going to Grozny?”

She frowned, seeming to think hewas the one talking in circles. “You don’t get to ask any more questions,” she said. “A question mark in your mouth is a dangerous weapon.”

“So are we?”

She gave a defeated sigh. “Yes.”

“Why?”

She pulled a cigarette lighter from her pocket. “Do you smoke?”

“I am an excellent cigarette smoker.” It had been seven weeks since his most recent cigarette, and two months more since the one before that, and technically those had been papirosi, capped with a filterless cardboard tube and jammed with coarse tobacco that left him violently nauseous for the rest of the day.

Perhaps inspired by his earlier display of professionalism, she waited until they reached the parking lot before lighting up. She passed him the square pack. He knew the Latin alphabet, but hadn’t used it in years. “Duh …”

“Dunhill,” she said.

He selected one from the two erect rows and leaned it into Sonja’s lighter. The first drag slid into his lungs without the paint-scraper harshness of his two most recent cigarettes, and he stared at the slowly burning ember, admiring the quality of the tobacco and the quality of the flame, pleasantly surprised that he didn’t feel ill. “Where did you get these?” he asked.

“Grozny.”

“We’re going there to get cigarettes?”

She smiled. “I can’t believe you’d really use that plane ticket to go there.”

“I’ve never been.”

“It’s something else.”

“So why are we going?”

Farther down the street the side of a building had crushed all the cars in a parking lot. He was thirty-nine years old and had hoped to own a car by this age.

“I go once a month to pick up supplies,” Sonja said. “Not just cigarettes. About everything in the hospital comes through a man I know in Grozny with connections to the outside. I also call a friend of mine who lives in London and updates me on what’s been going on in the world.”

“What’s happening out there?” he asked. By now the wider world was no more than a rumor, a mirage beginning at the borders. Thirty-two years earlier, in the rancid air of his primary school – built on a block bookended by a sewage treatment facility and a lumberjack brothel – his geography teacher had expected him to believe that the world was the same shape as a soccer ball. He had been the first of his classmates to accept it, not because he knew anything about gravity, but because the air was more nauseating than usual that afternoon, and he wanted to leave. For the rest of her career that geography teacher would pride herself on being the first to recognize Akhmed’s aptitude for the sciences.

“Last month he told me that George Bush had been reelected,” Sonja said.

“Who’s that?”

“The American president,” Sonja said, looking away.

“I thought Ronald McDonald was president.”

“You can’t be serious.” There it was again, condescension thick enough to spread with a butter knife. His mother was the only other woman to have spoken to him like that, and only when he was a child – and only when he wouldn’t eat his cucumbers.

“Wasn’t it Ronald McDonald who told Gorbachev to tear down the wall?”

“You’re thinking of Ronald Reagan.”

“English names all sound the same.”

“That was fifteen years ago.”

“So? Brezhnev was General Secretary for eighteen.”

“It doesn’t work like that over there,” she explained. “They have elections every few years. If the president doesn’t win, someone else becomes president.”

“That’s ridiculous.” The wind lifted the ash from his cigarette and scattered it across the empty parking lot.

“And you can only be president for ten years,” she added.

“And then what? You become prime minister for a bit and then run for president again?”

“I think you just step down.”

“You mean Ronald just stepped down after ten years?” he asked. She had to be putting him on.

“He just stepped down and George Bush became president.”

“And then George Bush shot Ronald Reagan to prevent him seizing power?”

“No,” she said. “I think they were friends.”

“Friends?” he asked. “It makes me wonder how we lost the Cold War.”

“Good point.”

“And so George Bush has been president since Ronald Reagan?”

“There was another guy in there. Clinton.”

“The philanderer. I remember him,” he said, pleased. “And then George Bush became president again?”

“No, the George Bush who is president now is the first George Bush’s son.”

“Ah, so that’s why they don’t shoot the previous president. They’re all related. Like the Romanovs.”

“Something like that,” she said distractedly.

“Then who is Ronald McDonald?”

“You know, Akhmed,” she said, looking to him for the first time in several minutes. “I’m beginning to like you.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“You used the word, not me.”

A blast rippled from the east, a long wave breaking across the sky.

“A land mine,” she said, as if it were no more than a cough. “We should get going.”

He dropped his cigarette without finishing it, the first time he’d done so in six years, and was careful to avoid the glass shards as he followed her back to the entranceway.

“Sew the pockets of your trousers before you come in tomorrow,” she advised. “We’ll pass a dozen checkpoints to reach Grozny and with that beard you look like a fundamentalist. I don’t want the soldiers to plant anything on you.”

Akhmed looked to the clouds before following her into the corridor. It wouldn’t matter even if he had found a plane ticket. Ten and a half years had passed since he had last seen commercial aircraft in the sky.

The man dragged into the waiting room wasn’t the first land-mine victim Akhmed had ever seen, not the first he’d seen accompanied by an incomprehensible woman, not even the first he’d seen dragged on a tarpaulin along a slick scarlet trail; he wasn’t the first man Akhmed had seen writhing like a lone noodle in a pot of boiling water, not the first he’d seen with half his shin hanging by a hinge of sinew. But when Akhmed saw this man it was like seeing the first man for the first time: he couldn’t think, couldn’t act, could only stand in shock as the air where the man’s leg should have been filled the floor and the room and his open mouth. The woman tugging at the corner of the tarpaulin spoke a language of shouts and gasps and looked at him as if he could possibly understand her. What a volume her chest produced. The true color of her dress was indistinguishable for the blood. When he finally remembered how to use his feet, he walked right past the woman and the writhing man, to the corner chair, where he draped a white lab coat over Havaa’s head.

Then the man’s pulse was a haphazard exertion against his finger. The woman was asking one question after the next. Her dress was showing the curves of her legs. Her breath was on his left cheek. An artery was severed. His face was pale yellow. Sonja was there. She was strapping a rubber tourniquet below the knee. She was rolling him on a gurney and into the hall. The gurney was turning into the operating theater and Deshi was taking the man’s blood pressure. “Sixty over forty,” she was calling out. The blood pressure meter was velcroed to the young man’s arm. The bulb was swinging above the gurney wheel. The wound was wet with saline.

With swift, well-rehearsed movements, Sonja inserted IVs of glucose and Polyglukin into the man’s arms. She pulled a surgical saw from the cabinet and disinfected the blade as Deshi called out blood-pressure readings. At seventy over fifty, she injected Lidocaine just above the tourniquet. Deshi anticipated her requests, and the clamps he’d boiled were in her reach before she asked. She worked without looking at the man’s face or hearing his cries as though her patient were no more than his most grievous wound. Blood reached her elbows but her scrubs remained white. The man, and he was a man, it was so easy to forget that with all his insides leaking out, had graduated from architecture school and had been searching for employment when the first bombs fell. When the land mine took his leg, he had already spent nine years searching for his first architectural commission. Another six and three-quarter years would pass before he got that first commission, at the age of thirty-eight. With only twenty percent of the city still standing, he would never be without work again.

“Come here,” Sonja called. Akhmed looked over his shoulder to summon a more capable ghost from the Brezhnev-beige wall. “Akhmed, come here,” she repeated. He stepped forward, wiggling his toes in his boots. One step and then the next, with an immense gratitude for each. The skin was peeled back toward the knee. The calf muscle, cut away. The bone wasn’t wider than a chair leg.

She gestured with her scalpel. “For a below-the-knee amputation, you want to keep in mind that stumps close to the knee joint will be difficult to fit for a prosthesis. Long stumps are also difficult to fit and can lead to circulation issues. First, you’ll need to make a fish-mouth incision superior to the point of amputation. You want a posterior flap long enough to cover the padded stump and to ensure a tensionless closure when sutured.” She described how to isolate the anterior, lateral, and posterior muscular compartments in dissection. She showed him how she had ligated the tibial, peroneal, and saphenous veins, and noted that the blood pressure always rose after the peroneal artery was tied off. She transected the sural nerve above the amputation line and let it retract into the soft-tissue bed to reduce the phantom limb sensation. With a clean scalpel she incised the dense periosteum. She gave directions in the flat, bored tone of a carpenter teaching a child to measure and cut wood, and Akhmed heard her without listening. All her Latin words and surgical jargon couldn’t mitigate the helplessness he felt while watching her finish what the land mine had begun.

“Leg amputations are normal business here,” she said, and handed him the saw. He held it, expecting her to ask for it back. She looked to it and nodded. No, she couldn’t be serious. She didn’t expect him to do that, did she? She barely trusted him to fold bedsheets properly. “You should get comfortable with this procedure as soon as possible.”

He gazed from the blade to the bone. The bone was a disconcerting shade of reddish gray; he’d expected it to be white. He had been six years old when he first realized that the drumstick he slurped the grease from was, in principle, the same as the bone that allowed him to walk, run, and win after-school soccer matches. He hadn’t eaten meat again for two years, so great and implacable was his fear that another carnivore would consume his own leg in reprisal. “I’m not qualified for this,” he stammered.

“This is the deal,” she said calmly. She reached for his hand. That grip held more of her compassion than the past two days combined, and then it was gone, replaced by hard pragmatism, and her fingers wrapped his around the foam grip. “This is what we do. This is what it means for you to work here.”

His hands shook and hers steadied them. The last leg surgery he had performed had been after the zachistka, on a boy named Akim. He had tried his best, he really had, but he couldn’t be faulted for his lack of supplies and experience, for the lack of blood in the boy’s body and the great abundance drenching the floor, for the bullet he didn’t shoot, or for the war he had no say in; if anyone had bothered to ask his opinion, he would have happily told them that war was, generally speaking, a bad thing, to be avoided, and he would have advised them against it, because had he known that not one but two wars were coming, he would have dropped out of medical school in his first year, his reputation be damned, and gone to art school instead; had he known a domineering, cold-hearted Russian surgeon would one day ask him to cut off this poor man’s leg, he would have studied still-life portraiture, landscape oil painting, sculpture and ceramics, he would have sacrificed his brief celebrity within the village, if only to safeguard himself from this man’s leg.

“There’s only one amputation now, but what about next time?” Sonja said. “There could be five, ten.”

He exhaled. Sweat pasted his surgical mask to his cheeks. Sonja pushed his hand forward. The blade grated against the bone. The vibration of each thrust ran up the blade, through the handle, to his hand, and into his bones. The name of the bone was tibiaand it was connected to fibulaand patella. He had studied the names that morning, but what he knew wouldn’t push the saw.

“Press harder,” she instructed, steadying the bone for him. “This isn’t a delicate operation.”

Halfway through, the blade unexpectedly went red with marrow. He stopped sawing.

“What’s wrong?” Sonja asked.

He could have answered that question several different ways, but he shook his head, and kept sawing. “I didn’t know human bone marrow is red. I thought it would be golden. Like a cow’s.”

“The marrow of a living bone is filled with red blood cells. If we were to shake a little salt and pepper on this bone and roast it in the oven, the marrow would turn golden in about fifteen minutes,” she said.

He feared he might vomit.

“Fine work,” she said, as he sliced through the tibia. “Just one more bone to go.”

He set the blade on the fibula and his quick hard saw-strokes spat into the air a fine white bone dust that drifted toward him, drawn by his breath, eventually dissolving into his damp surgical mask. Sonja’s dark eyes leered at him in his periphery, and he pushed the saw harder, faster, wanting Sonja to see in him more than his helplessness, wanting to finish before he fainted. A dozen strokes later the foot dropped to the table. He held the remnant by the ankle, and without pause or consideration, he flipped it on its end, and blood and marrow coated his fingers as he counted six shards of glass glinting in what was left of the man’s sole.

“Set that aside,” she said. “We’ll wrap it in plastic and give it to the family for burial.” She showed him how to round off the amputated bone and pad it with muscle. She pulled the posterior flap over the muscle-padded stump, trimmed the excess skin, and sutured it with black surgical thread.

When they finished, he peeled off his latex gloves and massaged the pink soreness of his right palm, where the skin between his thumb and forefinger had swollen from the handle’s pinch. Sonja noticed, smiled, and when she raised her right hand he wanted to be back in bed with Ula, where he could pull the covers over their heads and in the humidity of their stale breaths hold the one person who believed he was knowing, capable, and strong.

Calluses covered Sonja’s palm.

CHAPTER 5

KHASSAN GESHILOV COMPLETED the first draft of his Chechen history on the one day in January 1963 when it didn’t snow. The manuscript was 3,302 pages. When he submitted it to the city publisher in Volchansk he was told he needed to send it to the state publisher in Grozny, and when he submitted it to the state publisher in Grozny he was told he needed to send it to the national publisher in Moscow; and when he submitted it there he was told he needed to send threetyped copies. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes as he looked at his poor, battered fingers. But he purchased the postage, paper, typewriter ribbons, and cigarettes such a monumentally monotonous activity required, and eighteen months later he received a phone call from the head editor of the history section, Kirill Ivanovich Kaputzh.

“We’re launching a thrilling new series called ‘Prehistories of Soviet Autonomous Republics’ and we would like to publish your book as our lead title,” Kirill Ivanovich said. Even in his surprise and excitement, Khassan asked what the publisher meant by prehistory; the book he had written ended in 1962. “Prehistory,” Kirill Ivanovich explained, “is the time before the cultural and political presence of the Russian state.”

“But for Chechnya that would mean 1547.”

“Indeed.”

“But that’s just the first chapter of my book.”

“You must be delirious in your excitement, Citizen Geshilov. That is your entire book.”

“No, that is the first two hundred twenty-eight pages. Some three thousand follow it,” Khassan insisted. He had never imagined that the joy of being published at all and the despair of being published poorly could be tied together like opposite ends of a shoelace.

“Yes, in your joy and astonishment you have become confused. Go and celebrate your achievement, Citizen Geshilov. Accept my congratulations and best wishes. Not everyone has the opportunity to publish a two-hundred-twenty-eight-page book.”

And so Origins of Chechen Civilization: Prehistory to Fall of the Mongol Empireappeared the next year with little fanfare. The sole review, written for the university newspaper by one of his students, called the book “more interesting than the average reference book.” No one wanted to read pre-Russian history books, which was precisely why Moscow was so eager to publish them. By the time Khassan reworked the remaining three thousand pages into a lopsided companion piece – burning a partial draft after pages began disappearing – Khrushchev had been deposed; in response to murky shifts of politics, Kirill Ivanovich Kaputzh, receding farther into the safety of the past, decided to publish only pre-human geological surveys. They were heady days for Khassan’s earth-science colleagues.

Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver. Each passing year the publisher waded farther into the morass of human history, first allowing histories of the Sumerians, then the Ancient Egyptians, and by 1972, the year Ramzan was born, publishing books on the Hellenic age. Sensing the border of 1547 might be crossed within the decade, Khassan revised his tome under the title Chechen Civilization and Culture Under Russian Patronage. He wrote as the voice of appeasement, justifying, glossing over, but never forgiving the four centuries of Russian depredations, believing all the while that he might slip three thousand pages of subtext past censors so sensitive to insinuation they would expurgate rain clouds from an International Workers’ Day weather forecast. In a knee-height cradle, Ramzan, skull-capped and swaddled, dozed while Khassan wrote. He would never feel closer to his son than he did then, when the rustle of Ramzan’s sleep accompanied the scratching of his pencil, and with one hand on the page and the other dipping into the crib he was the wire connecting this halved legacy; much later, he would remember those months when he and his boy could spend the whole day in the same room and mean nothing by the silence.

In 1974 Kirill Ivanovich provisionally accepted the book for publication, with the stipulation that two thousand pages be cut, before he was fired and briefly imprisoned for being too conservative with his edits, too vocal with his own opinions, and too Polish; eight months later, on hard labor duty some four thousand kilometers east of Poland, Kirill Ivanovich would stumble upon the artifacts of an ancient settlement while digging the foundation for a prison latrine, and would remember his assistant, a young man for whom he harbored the pangs of love that time and captivity hadn’t blunted, a young man whom Kirill Ivanovich had listened to, as he read aloud passages from Khassan Geshilov’s history of early civilization, passages Kirill Ivanovich kept intact in his memory, like jars to hold and preserve the beautiful voice of his assistant. Kirill Ivanovich’s successor, an editor whose aquiline nose pointed toward the prevailing political winds, decided the book required more radical revision to conform to the tedium of the era. And so began a decade of rewrites that mirrored the plummeting Brezhnev reign. The new editor stressed that the book didn’t need to be more concise – if anything it should be longer, the editor said, so reviewers would dismiss its shortcomings as the price of ambition – and Khassan reupholstered the paragraphs he’d stripped under Kirill Ivanovich’s guidance. He wrote tracts on nineteenth-century threshing techniques, the history of Chechen meteorology. The new editor would respond with changes so vague and inconsistent it took weeks to divine a politically safe interpretation. “Rewrite chapter twelve as though you were not a person but a people,” one letter said. “If you write on the fatherland, your words will face the heavens,” said another.

No longer did he write in his son’s company. Ramzan had learned to speak, though Khassan wished he hadn’t. The boy used his voice like a rubber mallet; can Iwas the only question that escaped his mouth, never whator howor why. Ramzan wasn’t clever or kind or imaginative, or even overly obedient or cruel or dull, and Khassan built his aversion upon the empty cellar of what his son was not. In the historical sources there were kings and princes whose distaste for their progeny took more sadistic forms than Khassan’s indifference; compared to Ivan the Terrible, he was a paradigm of good parenting. You can choose your son no more than you can choose your father, but you can choose how you will treat him, and Khassan chose to treat his as if he wasn’t there. He chose to write when he should have spoken, to speak when he should have listened. He chose to read his books when he should have watched his son, to watch when he should have approached. One day when Ramzan was eight he entered Khassan’s office and asked his father to teach him to ride a bicycle. “You’ll fall,” Khassan said, without looking up from the page. The moment would haunt him later. What if he had looked up?

Brezhnev appeared to be on his deathbed ten years before he finally passed, but on November 10, 1982, the country’s beloved grandfather smoked his last white-filtered Novost cigarette. Brezhnev was buried in his marshal’s uniform along with the two hundred medals – everything from Hero of the Soviet Union to the Lenin Prize for Literature – he had accrued in his eighteen-year tenure as General Secretary. Watching the mournful proceedings with his family (they all searched for Galina Brezhneva among the mourners to see if she would cause scandal even at her father’s funeral), Khassan finally accepted the futility of his endeavor. He had traveled farther than Herodotus but had written no Histories, had witnessed more combat than Thucydides but had written no History of the Peloponnesian War. His son sat on one side, his wife on the other, and they watched the tributes paid to a man whose tepid mediocrity encapsulated the era. For years he had relegated history to the past, where it was time-dulled and safe and ever-receding, but history was right there, in that moment, on the television screen, where balding and bejowled politicians paid their respects before determining the shape of the empire, where the flat, embalmed face of the beloved grandfather went translucent under the spotlights, and where finally they caught a glimpse of the daughter of the departed, her dress a scandalous pink.

Yuri Andropov replaced Brezhnev, only to die fifteen months later, and Konstantin Chernenko replaced Andropov only to die thirteen months after that. Again Khassan watched the funerals with his family; state funerals were the only times they came together. He couldn’t have known this would be the final televised funeral of a General Secretary, but later, when remembering the gloomy cavalcade, he would imagine that the entire Soviet state was buried in Chernenko’s casket. Gorbachev at least looked like he might live more than a year on the job, and soon after his ascension to General Secretary, Khassan received a call from a new, reform-minded editor, who had deposed Khassan’s previous editor. The reform-minded editor had found Khassan’s original manuscript from 1963 and thought it a more accurate and readable document than any of his subsequent revisions. “All that’s left is honing and updating,” the editor said. “Now is the time. A few years ago you would have been sent to Siberia. Today you’ll be lauded.”

Even the renewed fervor of his revisions couldn’t keep pace with the deluge of declassified information released by state agencies. For a quarter century his book hadn’t been published because it was too accurate. Now it wouldn’t be published because it wasn’t, and couldn’t be, accurate enough. A three-thousand-page draft took years to write. He couldn’t possibly analyze and incorporate the disclosures that, on a daily basis, changed the way a Soviet historian was allowed to interpret his material. Even so, he finished a draft he was reasonably pleased with in the late summer of 1989. A few months later, when the Berlin Wall fell, not even a news agency as reliably incompetent as Pravda failed to speculate on its consequences. The reform-minded editor loved the new draft and wanted to schedule publication for the following year, but Khassan demurred. The morning headlines made the previous day’s work obsolete; publishing the book now would be like building nine-tenths of a roof. The rind of buffer states diminished as republics peeled away. All of central Europe had shrugged off communist leadership, and now the Baltic states, the Black Sea states, even Moldova was discussing secession. For the first time in two millennia Chechnya had a chance at sovereignty. Everything was changing. It had to go into his book.

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – the empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin – as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.

In the following years he lost his publisher, then his university job, then his wife, who one Tuesday morning passed away as meekly as she had lived; he didn’t notice until eleven hours after her final breath. The chain saws went silent and the forest grew back, and one war came and then another, and Khassan had his son and his book, and the prospect of finding fulfillment in either seemed as unlikely as the prospect of either surviving the decade. But Khassan still had them, and at a time when all belief dissolved, the act of possession was more important than what was possessed. The things in his life that caused him the most sorrow were the things he’d lived with the longest, and now that everything was falling they became the pillars that held him; had he a thirty-two-year-old toothache rather than a thirty-two-year-old son, he would have treasured it the same. But that, too, had its time. The unseasonably warm afternoon one year, eleven months and three days earlier, when Dokka and Ramzan returned from the Landfill – Dokka missing all ten fingers, Ramzan missing only his pes—was the last day Khassan had spoken to his son.

First Ramzan feigned indifference, then shouted, then pleaded for his father’s conversation. How could Ramzan have known he would miss his father’s monosyllabic disapproval? How could he have known that he lived in reaction to his father’s expectations, needed them to know precisely the person he had failed to become?

“I’m doing this for you as much as for me,” Ramzan had said with the desperate logic of the unconvinced. “We have a generator, electric lights, food on the table. Is it such a crime to give you insulin? To have clean drinking water?”

But Khassan, a career apologist, was fluent in the rhetoric of justification and accustomed to ignoring his son. By the fifth month his son’s anger burned away, and a dense depression descended. Ramzan’s footsteps filled the night. Soon painkillers and sleeping pills joined the hypodermic needles, cotton balls, alcohol swabs, and insulin brought back from the military supplier. The ovular green pills left Ramzan comatose for sixteen hours, and in these spells, when the house exhaled and the floorboards went silent, Khassan entered his son’s room.

On earlier excursions, he had explored the drawers, closet, and shelves. In the upper left bureau drawer, he found the thirty-centimeter blade of the kinzhalhe’d given Ramzan on his sixteenth birthday, a knife his father had given him, and his grandfather his father. Within the pages of an algebra textbook a list bore the names of those Ramzan had helped disappear. The list contained three names when he first found it neatly folded between pages 146 and 147, farther into the textbook than his son had ever ventured in school. The last time he checked, a few weeks before Dokka’s was to be added, twelve names were listed. But most mornings, like this one, the second morning after Dokka disappeared, Khassan had no need or desire for further incrimination. Instead he sat on the bed, and held Ramzan’s hand, and spoke to him.