A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Read Online Free PDF Page A

apologizes to a woman.”
    His eyes were watery by the time Sonja interrupted the exchange. He looked more shocked than he had when she opened the door to the fourth-floor storage room, and through her laughter, she couldn’t help feeling guilty for exposing the man to Deshi without warning. “Enough,” she said. “Akhmed, this is Deshi. Deshi, Akhmed. Let’s work.”
    “It’s a pleasure,” Deshi said, and returned to the desk beside the incubator.
    “What’s wrong with her?” Akhmed asked when the nurse was safely out of earshot.
    “And now he thinks there’s something wrong with Deshi,” Sonja said. A look of horror sank into his face. She assured him she was joking. “She once fell in love with an oncologist. It didn’t work out.”
    A woman with dark greasy hair lay in the first bed with a child suckling her left breast. 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

    W ITHIN 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 hermouth. 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