A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

After losing his fingers in January 2013, Dokka never plays chess again. That summer, Havaa’s mother hides her waistline beneath bulky clothes. Dokka continues to let refugees stay at the house. Havaa spends her time in the woods with the portrait Akhmed drew of Akim, the man Havaa helped save by ligating an artery, though he died several hours later. The portrait survives the winter and spring, but eventually “his face slumped and faded. How the summer aged him” (222). Havaa takes apart an old scarecrow and attaches the portrait to its head, and this way “saved Akim for a second time” (224).

Late that summer, Havaa’s mother begins hemorrhaging. Akhmed and Dokka borrow Ramzan’s truck and try to rush her to the hospital, but they forget Havaa’s mother’s ID, and the sergeant at the checkpoint won’t let them through. Havaa’s mother dies as Dokka and Akhmed argue with the sergeant, “and the argument went on for several more minutes before anyone noticed” (226).

One and a half years later, the Feds arrive for Dokka. Dokka tells Havaa to take her prepacked blue suitcase and hide in the woods. In the hospital, Havaa wonders why she didn’t try to shoot the Feds using the Marakov pistol hidden in the back of a drawer. Havaa doesn’t know that the gun has been missing for some time.

Ramzan began trading for the first time in his early twenties, when he obtained stone sculptures from shaman artisans in the mountains to sell in an industrial park outside of Grozny. Once Grozny began mass-producing the sculptures, Ramzan began trading homemade ammunition. Later Ramzan worked as a petrol farmer, collecting petrol from an abandoned pipeline “for the insurgents, or the Feds, or more likely both” (234). Ramzan used his earnings to buy insulin and syringes for Khassan. When rebels occupied the village in 2001, the field commander offered Ramzan a job transporting weapons to rebel encampments. Though the work was dangerous and illegal, “when [Ramzan] felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime,” and he knew “it didn’t matter if the Feds caught him with a butter knife or an atomic bomb. A gunshot would announce the same sentence” (238). Ramzan soon began taking Dokka with him to transport weapons.

In January 2003 Ramzan and Dokka drove up into the mountains with a truck filled with firearms. Ramzan had stolen one gun, a Marakov pistol, to give to Dokka for protection, and left it behind at his home. That morning, Ramzan and Khassan spoke for the last time. The next day, Ramzan and Dokka are stopped by Russian soldiers. The soldiers admit that they are lost and say they won’t kill Dokka and Ramzan as long as Dokka and Ramzan take them to the Landfill, a prison dug out of a garbage dump. Ramzan and Dokka are imprisoned in separate pits in the ground the size of soccer fields, each holding dozens of others. Ramzan was imprisoned once before in 1995.

After 11 days, Ramzan is pulled out of the pit and tortured with electric wiring. Ramzan decides he will reveal any information he has at the first opportunity, remembering the first time he was imprisoned, when he refused to speak and was brutally tortured. Finally, Ramzan agrees to be an informant and gives the names of 12 people from his village who sympathized with the rebels, and the soldiers release him. Ramzan asks if he can buy back Dokka’s freedom. The soldier agrees, for a large sum. Ramzan gives the man all the money he has, half of what the soldier requested. The soldiers release Ramzan and Dokka, but they cut off all of Dokka’s fingers because Ramzan was unable to produce the full bail. The 12 were captured by the Feds over the next year.

In the winter of 2004 Ramzan speaks to a colonel on the phone. The man reveals that another colonel was shot with a Marakov pistol, and they can tell by the gun’s serial number that it was a part of the supply Ramzan had been carrying when he was captured. The Feds demand the name of the person who owns the gun. Two weeks later, Ramzan calls the colonel again and gives him Dokka’s name. Dokka disappears shortly thereafter. A few days later, Ramzan speaks to the colonel for the third and final time and gives up Akhmed’s name.