A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra

the taste of post-Soviet air like a dirty rag in her mouth.

“Your life’s work could be scrubbing piss from a toilet bowl. Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”

Truth was only one among many hallucinations.

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.

There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.”

“I saw an ice machine at the bazaar the other day,” she said. Laina didn’t look up from the scarf she was knitting, afraid to raise her eyes with so many visions crowding the air. “It once cooled the glasses of the Bee Gees, or so said the freezer merchant. Never turn your back to him, Laina. There is no bee.” “You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man,” Laina said, without lifting her eyes from the needle tips. “You know that song?” “Of course. People used to recite it in the war. I didn’t know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur’an.” Sonja smiled, glad she could still be surprised.

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

“I’ve always thought Marx’s view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.” “If you step on a land mine,” Akhmed said, “the crutch becomes the leg.”