Read Online A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra - Free Book Online

desk, was written in the careful cursive of a condolence letter. Akhmed found it one afternoon while his father and Khassan sat outside, gossiping like married ladies beneath a June sun.Each afternoon, while Khassan taught at the city university, Akhmed snuck into the living room and stole a single page. He read it at night, after completing his homework, and exchanged it the next afternoon for the following page. Khassan had begun his history in the time before humanity, when the flora and fauna of Chechnya had existed in classless egalitarianism. In a twenty-page account of Caucasian geology, Khassan proved that rock and soil adhered to the same patterns of dialectical materialism proffered by Marx. A seven-page explanation of natural selection compared kulaks to a species that failed to adapt to environmental changes. Akhmed read seventy-three pages in total, only reaching the Neolithic period before Khassan realized pages had gone missing: the three Akhmed had lost, the two he had turned into paper airplanes, and the one, a description of Eldár Forest before man invented chainsaws, that had been too beautiful for him to return. Believing the culprit to be a secret police informant, Khassan had burned the pages in his wood stove.
    “But you need to finish it,” Akhmed urged, unsure if Khassan was serious. The Khassan obsessed with a history book that, even if published, no one would read was the only Khassan he knew. Khassan could renounce his legs and sound no more ridiculous.
    “You’re right,” Khassan said. His parted lips revealed a row of teeth the color of cooking oil. That city dentist had been so in love with the teeth of his young women patients, he couldn’t look inside the mouth of an old man for more than a few moments without feeling a wash of revulsion and betrayal; he had never told Khassan to floss. “And I’m sorry, Akhmed. For Dokka.”
    “Was he taken to the Landfill?”
    Khassan’s shoulders sloped in a shrug. They both knew the answer but that didn’t make it any easier to admit. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
    “Can you ask Ramzan …” Ask him what? Ramzan had no answers;the blindness he walked through was a shade darker than theirs. “Can you ask him to let the girl be? She’s gone.”
    “Ramzan hasn’t heard my voice in the one year, eleven months and three days since he began informing. I’ve counted every day of silence. It’s stupid, I know, but silence is the only authority I have left.”
    Each looked past the other, into the woods stretching on either side of the road, uncomfortable and ashamed. “I’m a pariah. The father of an informer,” Khassan continued. “You and my son are the only people in the village willing to speak to me, and I can’t speak to him. In one year, eleven months and three days the only conversations I’ve had have been with you. You still speak to me. Why?”
    Akhmed focused on the trees. He didn’t know. He didn’t know that when Khassan returned home that morning he would write down what he remembered of their conversation in a shorthand his son couldn’t decipher, or that later Khassan would read it quietly, without speaking a single word aloud, and even on the page their exchange would lift that blanketing silence like tent poles. What he did know was that Khassan was his friend, a decent man, and that was as rare as snowfall in May.
    “You ran away from me just now,” Khassan said, before Akhmed could answer. “I understand. My son is weak and cruel. That’s fine. You know, I’ve been thinking of the Festival of the Sacrifice recently. In the resettlement camps we celebrated in secret, slaughtering a wild dog in place of a lamb. I wonder if Ibrahim’s palms were damp as he walked his son to the summit. Did he tell him they were going on a hike? Did he take water? I think he must have glared at the knife until his reflection was part of the blade. I think relief must have replaced his horror when he unsheathed