A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Read Online Free PDF

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 theireyes clamped tight, as if jumping into a lake. The poor driver swayed from side to side. Since he was a boy, living on the banks of the Terek, he had dreamed of owning his own tour boat. Six and three-quarter years earlier, just a week before the Berlin Wall fell, the driver had sunk his life’s savings into a tour boat, never built, and a contract, never fulfilled, to ferry Party members along the Terek. Now he sat on the ground and rested his back against the tires of the bus, but the land was a swelling and uncertain ocean and he would feel seasick for many years.
    The checkpoint left Sonja charged, and as they crossed from Russian-controlled North Ossetia into Chechnya, she stared through the window she had slept on. On the crater-consumed road the driver made good on his pledge. They passed deserted fields. A toppled farmhouse. A plow resting at the end of a furrow, four months past sowing season. A burning oil well. At the horizon the mountains wore skullcaps of snow. It took ten hours to drive the two hundred kilometers to Volchansk. Checkpoints dotted the highway more regularly than the boarded petrol stations. At each one she carried her suitcase twenty meters from the road and opened it as soldiers held their ears in anticipation.
    She spoke to the elderly woman sitting beside her, rolling each word in her mouth like an olive pit before spitting it out, and the woman was a wonderful listener, quiet and attentive as Sonja unfastened the latch to what had been her life until two days prior. She cataloged Brendan’s shortcomings—his unclipped hangnails, his habit of singing Rodgers and Hammerstein while peeing, his reluctance to correct her grammatical errors—but even as she tried to convince the old woman that Brendan would have made a lousy husband, she missed the way he would write his initials in the pad of her thumb with his hardened hangnails, the way the flush of toilet water accompanied the hiiiiiiilllllls are aliiiiiiiiive with the sound of muuuuuusiiiiic , the intentional grammatical mistakes he would make, to see if she would catch them, as they took a sledgehammer to the rules of English and reassembled the pieces into alanguage only they understood. It was wonderful to unburden herself to a sympathetic ear. An hour passed before the old woman pulled a notepad from her purse, scribbled on it, and passed it to Sonja. I thought you would have realized , the old woman had written. I’m deaf .
    The four-story Volchansk terminal was now a one-story rubble heap. The bus driver held out his hat for tips as they disembarked. “You will all die in this hellscape,” he cheerfully announced. “Would you rather your rubles go