A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Sonja and Akhmed return to the hospital with the car full of smuggled supplies from Grozny. Sonja climbs to the fourth floor to look at Natasha’s faded drawings along the walls of the former maternity ward. Akhmed follows Sonja upstairs, and Sonja explains how Natasha used to work so hard on the drawings of the city. Akhmed tells Sonja that his friend Khassan told him about the drawings along the maternity ward walls years ago. Akhmed says that the drawings inspired him to draw portraits of the missing villagers to hang around the village. Akhmed confesses to Sonja that part of the reason he failed so badly in medical school was because he used to skip lectures and labs to sit in on art classes. Sonja asks Akhmed to draw a portrait of the woman who told him Sonja’s name, hoping to see that it is Natasha. But as Akhmed draws, Sonja starts to correct him on small features, and “gently corrected him wherever he strayed. He hadn’t forgotten her face, she told herself; she was only helping him remember” (274). However, it eventually becomes too painful for Sonja to watch Akhmed draw.