A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,1

across the walls. So passed the longest two minutes of Akhmed’s life until the soldiers reappeared in the doorway with Dokka. The duct tape strip across his mouth wrinkled with his muted screams. They pulled a black hood over his head. Where was Havaa? Sweat formed on Akhmed’s forehead. His hands felt impossibly heavy. When the soldiers grabbed Dokka by the shoulders and belt, tumbling him into the back of the truck and slamming the door, the relief falling over Akhmed was quickly peeled back by self-loathing, because he was alive, safe in his living room, while in the truck across the street, not twenty meters away, Dokka was a dead man. The designation 02 was stenciled above the truck bumper in white paint, meaning it belonged to the Interior Ministry, meaning there would be no record of the arrest, meaning Dokka had never officially been taken, meaning he would never come back. “Where’s the girl?” the soldiers asked one another. “She’s not here.” “What if she’s hiding beneath the floorboards?” “She’s not.” “Take care of it just in case.” The drunken soldier uncapped a petrol jug and stumbled into Dokka’s house; when he returned to the threshold, he tossed a match behind him and closed the door. Flames clawed their way up the front curtains. The glass panes puddled on the sill. Where was Havaa? When the truck finally left, the fire had spread to the walls and roof. Akhmed waited until the taillights had shrunk to the size of cherries before crossing the street. Running a wide circle around the flames, he entered the forest behind the house. His boots broke the frigid undergrowth and he could have counted the rings of tree stumps by the firelight. Behind the house, hiding among the trees, the girl’s face flickered. Streaks of pale skin began under her eyes, striping the ash on her cheeks. “Havaa,” he called out. She sat on a suitcase and didn’t respond to her name. He held her like a bundle of loose sticks in his arms, carried her to his house and with a damp towel wiped the ash from her forehead. He tucked her in bed beside his invalid wife and didn’t know what to do next. He could have gone back outside and thrown snowballs at the burning house, or lain in bed so the girl would feel the warmth of two grown bodies, or performed his ablutions and prostrated himself, but he had completed the isha’a hours earlier and if five daily prayers hadn’t spared Dokka’s house, a sixth wouldn’t put out the flames. Instead he went to the living room window, drew open the blackout curtains, and watched the house he had helped build disappear into light. And now, in the morning, as he tightened the orange scarf around her neck, he found a fingerprint on the girl’s cheek, and, because it could have been Dokka’s, he left it.

“Where are we going?” she asked. She stood in the frozen furrow of the previous night’s tire tracks. The snow stretched on either side. Akhmed hadn’t prepared for this. He couldn’t imagine why the Feds would want Dokka, much less the girl. She stood no taller than his stomach and weighed no more than a basket of firewood, but to Akhmed she seemed an immense and overwhelming creature whom he was destined to fail.

“We’re going to the city hospital,” he said, with what he hoped was an assertive tone.

“Why?”

“Because the hospital is safe. It’s where people go when they need help. And I know someone there, another doctor,” he said, though all he knew of her was her name. “She’ll help.”

“How?”

“I’m going to ask if you can stay with her.” What was he saying? Like most of his plans, this one seemed so robust in his mind but fell like a flightless bird when released to the air. The girl frowned.

“He’s not coming back, is he?” she asked. She focused on the blue leather suitcase that sat on the street between them. Eight months earlier, her father had asked her to prepare the suitcase and leave it in the closet, where it had remained until the previous night, when he thrust it into her hands and pushed her out the back door as the Feds broke through the front.

“I don’t think so.”

“But you don’t know?” It wasn’t an accusation, but he took it as one. Was he so incompetent a physician that she hesitated to trust him with her father’s life even in