A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra

The self-doubt that had unfolded from the envelope with every hospital rejection letter again stole Akhmed’s breath. “No,” he said, dispirited. In three and a quarter years, when Sonja was to offer him a job, Akhmed would finally find that breath.

zachistka’s

kontraktniki

that time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years,

But standing before the portrait she felt something wrap around that hatred as a flame wraps around a candle-wick, and soon there was nothing but a burnt taste in her mouth, his solemn face staring back at her, and the awful fact that it would never laugh again.

“My Natasha,” she would say, running her fingers through the girl’s long brown hair with a possessiveness suggesting the strands were an extension of her own. Natasha’s eyes were brown spattered with glimmers of emerald and uncut diamond. Hazel, technically. Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label.

echelons

obsequious

magnanimity,

It was this—her ethnicity as a Russian, the stalwart minority defending the borders of Western civilization from the barbaric Muhammadans—that let her slip through her adolescent years with freedoms her Chechen classmates didn’t enjoy. She could harbor lascivious thoughts of Ivan Yakov—a man her sister would revive three times in the second war—who was far more handsome than any literature teacher had a right to be. She could shave her legs without worrying if a prudish deity would smite those parallel beams of smooth skin. Overnight, it seemed, electrical lines were laid in her veins as she realized that the awkward, self-conscious boys around her were growing into men. The complications of puberty weren’t further complicated by culture or religion. Only when comparing herself to her classmates, many of whom were subject to arranged marriages, did she come to understand that in Chechnya gravity pressed upon women with heavier hands. Her Russianness exempted her from its grip, and so yes, often she floated.

There, red velvet ropes created a ten-square-meter dance floor where the young, well-dressed, and secular could press against each other, shrieking and shaking in epileptic spasms of floodlight, freedom found in the ruins of empire.

metastasized

The two men with whom she’d been intimate previously had treated her like a slight, fragile thing, as if trying to fuck a Grecian urn. Sulim held her as if unafraid of crushing her kidneys. In her shoulders, he left perfect molds of his imperfect teeth that would turn red in the morning. He asked her to scratch him and her longer nails drew a tiger’s coat on his back. Her body by itself seemed a beautiful but useless instrument. Sulim’s grip on her wrists, his canines gnawing at her clavicle, this pressure in her chest, this flushed flesh.

Natasha left the phone off the hook for days and the soft throb of the dial tone became the voice of stability in her solitude.

Based on the average life expectancy of a Soviet woman, she could expect to live for another forty-eight years, but the Soviet Union had died, and she hadn’t, and the appendices couldn’t explain this discrepancy in data, when the subject outlasted its experiment.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.