A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“As he refolded the note and dropped it into the trash can, he wanted to reach out, to snatch the tumbling rectangle before it landed and was lost among the last words of two dozen others who died far from their villages, who were pitched by strangers into furnaces, who were buried in cloud cover and wouldn’t return home until the next snowfall.” 

Many characters, Akhmed included, sew their home address inside their clothing so that their bodies can be returned home if they are found dead. This note was found in an article of donated clothing, meaning the body was unclaimed and cremated. In this moment, Akhmed reflects on the many people separated from their homes and lost due to the war.

“The name of the bone was tibia, and it was connected to fibula and patella. He had studied the names that morning, but what he knew wouldn’t push the saw.”

As Akhmed performs his first amputation, he realizes that his studies haven’t prepared him for the reality of being a doctor. A person can only learn so much from studying; some lessons and skills are only achieved through real-life experience.

“You can choose your son no more than you can choose your father, but you can choose how you will treat him, and Khassan chose to treat his as if he weren’t there. He chose to write when he should have spoken, to speak when he should have listened. He chose to read his books when he should have watched his son, to watch when he should have approached.” 

Khassan and his son Ramzan never had a strong relationship. Khassan ignored his son because he couldn’t raise a baby with the woman he really loved and because he devoted his time to his manuscript instead of his family. Now that Khassan and Ramzan are no longer speaking, Khassan reflects on the fact that he could have been a better father.

“And as eighteen days turned to twenty, forty, sixty, the trauma ward became the capital of the reconstructed republic. Each day patients arrived with heart attacks and kidney stones, the lesser emergencies of peacetime.”

After the first war, Sonja believes that things are improving because fewer and fewer patients come in with major wounds or injuries. The kinds of patients who pass through the hospital represent the political situation in the community.

“She could feel him testing her, ready to blunt the slightest edge of moral outrage with a lecture on relativism in war.”

This is the moment before Sonja accepts stolen medical supplies for the hospital. Even though Sonja is a moral person, she recognizes how hard it is to come by medical supplies during the war and thinks it would be foolish to refuse these supplies, even if they were stolen, if she can use them to help others. The question of right and wrong during wartime comes up multiple times throughout the novel.

“Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.”

As Sonja struggles to remember the Natasha she once knew, she realizes how hard it is to hold on to memories. Throughout the novel, characters try to preserve the memories of people they once knew while also realizing that it is impossible to live in the past and that they must keep moving forward.

“‘There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.’”

Characters do many things to preserve each other’s memories throughout the novel. Akhmed draws portraits, Havaa collects souvenirs, and Khassan works on his manuscript. However, it is impossible to be remembered forever, especially with each passing generation. As Khassan gets older, he reflects on his relationships with others and realizes that he won’t be remembered forever.

“If he had the flat face of an ogre, or the many heads of a hydra, Akhmed might understand. If he had a cleft tongue of a devil, or the snake-hair of a Medusa, or the matted hair of a wolf-monster, Akhmed might understand. But Ramzan had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, pairs of arms and legs and ears, hair greasy but not slimy and certainly not slithering, and Akhmed did not understand.”

Akhmed does not understand why Ramzan would turn his own friends over to the Feds, something that is unthinkable to him, Khassan, and most others. Here, Akhmed wonders how Ramzan ended up betraying his friends despite their shared background.

“News came third-, fourth-, fifth-hand. Fact was indistinguishable from hearsay, so all was believed and all was disbelieved and all were right.” 

We often think of war in terms of the facts, but for the affected civilians, it is sometimes impossible to follow or understand everything that is happening. Alone in Volchansk, Natasha never gets a clear understanding of why the war is happening; she only knows that she could be affected by it, just like many other members of her community.

“‘Chechens have family […]. They have their teips and their ancestral homes in the highlands to flee to. The barbarians. It’s nearly the millennium and they still live in clans. Even now, in the middle of all this, they don’t believe orphans or vagrants can ever exist because the teip will provide. The barbarians. What do we ethnic Russians have? No teip.’”

One of the major causes of war in Chechnya is discrimination by ethnic Russians against the Chechens. Here, even though Lidiya is making an assumption about the Chechen people based on their ethnicity, this passage reflects her own feelings of loss, loneliness, and isolation amid the violence in Volchansk.

“Only one entry supplied an adequate definition, and she circled it with red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.” 

Natasha finds this definition in a dictionary and circles it, finding some solace in this explanation for why she is still alive despite so much violence. This passage, which contains the novel’s title, explores how characters hold on to survival and connection amid war and destitution.

“When he felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime.” 

Ramzan smuggles weapons for the rebels, a job he knows is not only illegal but also morally reprehensible. However, Ramzan is willing to do something illegal if it means supporting himself and his father. This quote illustrates how the line between right and wrong can blur during wartime.

“It didn’t matter if the Feds caught him with a butter knife or an atomic bomb. A gunshot would announce the same sentence.”

This quote illustrates the violence of the Federalist forces. The severity of the crime doesn’t matter; the Feds consider anyone who violates their rules a criminal. Ramzan justifies his illegal smuggling job using this logic, knowing that the Feds are against him no matter what he does wrong.

“Nothing in this or the next world was worse than physical pain. In the afterlife, as no more than a soul, he would be without a body to beat, skin to peel, blood to flow, eyes to gouge, fingernails to pry, lungs to drown, ventricles to stop, and so the retribution of God would always be gentler than the retribution of man.”

Ramzan uses this logic to justify becoming an informant for the Feds. Having endured brutal torture, Ramzan believes that no loyalty is more important than his own survival and that after he dies, God will be more sympathetic to him than any human being.

“Natasha could not be summarized. What she possessed were losses: the loss of Natasha’s laugh, the loss of Natasha’s scorn, the loss of Natasha’s begrudging love; and as a phantom limb can ache and tickle, her lost Natasha was still laughing, still scornful, still loving begrudgingly, burgeoning with enough life to make Sonja wonder if she, herself, was the one disappeared.”

Throughout the novel, Sonja is haunted by her memories of Natasha and constantly searching for answers to what happened to Natasha after she disappeared. This passage explores the strange and unexpected ways people can be affected by the loss of loved ones.

“For years he’d lived with the fear of murder, torture, or disappearance, as all men of his age did, and it was the senselessness that truly frightened him; that the monumental finality of death could come arbitrarily was more terrifying than the eternity to follow. But if his death severed the connection between city and village, it would be neither futile nor insignificant, and he would be more fortunate than many thousands of his countrymen.” 

Akhmed has this thought after discovering that Ramzan has turned his name in to the Feds. Even though he is afraid of dying, and especially of disappearing like so many others have, he hopes that his disappearance will be the last one to affect his village. This shows a moment of introspection and acceptance in Akhmed before his imminent capture

“Her sister’s work was undeniably good, but its execution bothered Natasha. To work in these circumstances a surgeon must reduce each patient to her body, but this was an attitude shared by the traffickers, pimps, and johns populating Natasha’s private perdition.” 

Sonja is a skilled surgeon, but her bedside manner is sometimes cold and impersonal. Here, Natasha considers the balance between the personal and impersonal necessary in medical work. While Sonja can see her patients as just bodies, Natasha prefers to help out in the maternity ward, where she gets to witness life every day.

“‘It’s okay if you feel rotten. You just died. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Now, I must ask if you can see my sister down there. Yes, I know it’s crowded, but please have a look. I can wait. And while you’re at it, would you save me a chair? Oh, I should have known it would be standing room only.’” 

Here, Sonja speaks to a corpse that was brought into the hospital. This passage demonstrates how Sonja’s longing to find out what happened to her sister constantly affects her thoughts. It also reveals how much death Sonja has witnessed. Sonja has a sense of humor in this moment, but she’s also aware of the many people who have died as a result of the war.

“The definitions had the stately reassurance of orthodoxy […] when she still believed the meaning of a thing was limited to a few tersely worded clauses, but nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all other things to fulfill its own.” 

Sonja has this thought while looking through her old dictionary, but the sentiment can also be applied to other aspects of the novel. For example, Havaa’s souvenirs contain the memories of the people who owned them, and characters are often overcome by their memories of the people they have lost. Many unusual connections can make up a person or thing, and there is no one simple definition for anything.

“‘Owe? We’re beyond obligation […]. We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are. I know you think you are being noble, that this is some terrific act of sacrifice […]. You don’t owe this to Dokka.’” 

In this passage, Ramzan tells Akhmed that just because Akhmed and Dokka were friends doesn’t mean Akhmed has to protect Dokka’s safety over his own. Ramzan believes that he doesn’t owe any loyalty to anyone but himself. This passage gives some insight into why Ramzan betrayed his friends to protect himself. Ramzan may also be trying to justify to himself why he turned Akhmed over to the Feds.

“‘I am so much easier to refuse than those to come. You’re thinking that you will be as silent to them as you are to me. But you won’t, Akhmed. You just won’t. You might believe that you will be brave, that you will hew your convictions, but you have never been to the Landfill.’”

Ramzan, having twice experienced torture at the Landfill, tries to explain to Akhmed just how brutal the torture can be. While Akhmed might believe that he would never betray his friends, Ramzan explains that Akhmed can’t know how he will act when the time comes. In this passage, Ramzan tries to make Akhmed understand why he betrayed his friends.

“So much of his marriage was a disappointment—childlessness, ailing health—but there were blessings, now, in the end, when he had to let go.” 

This passage takes place during Akhmed’s last night at home before he is captured by the Feds. Even though Akhmed was unhappy in his marriage, disappointed by his bedridden wife, miserable due to the destitution of war, and unsuccessful in his career, he takes a moment to reflect on the love he once had for his wife and the positive things he’s experienced in life.

“Yet he’d grown to depend on the act of longing. He performed his nightly ablutions and prayed, but the ritual was empty, mechanized, and he recited the words as he would a recipe. The pearl of faith had dissolved, and at its core was a sand grain of doubt, and he held on to it, knowing that doubt, like longing, could sustain him.”

Though Akhmed has lost his faith, he tries to find something to hold on to before he is captured by the Feds. Akhmed knows that it is helpful to have something to believe in during difficult times, even if that thing is his own uncertainty and longing.