Chechnya

A STORY
BY ANTHONY MARRA

A F T E R H E R S I S T E R , Natasha, died, Sonja began sleeping in the hospital. She

returned home to wash her clothes a few days a month, but those days became fewer
and fewer. No reason to return, no need to wash her clothes. She only wears hospital
scrubs anyway.
She wakes on a cot in the trauma unit. She sleeps there intentionally, in anticipation
of the next critical patient. Some days, roused by the shuffle of footsteps, the cries of
family members, she stands and a body takes her place on the cot and she works on
resuscitation, knowing she is awake because she could dream nothing like this.
“A man is waiting here to see you,” a nurse says. Sonja, still on the cot, rubs the
weariness from her eyes.
“About what?”
The nurse hesitates. “He’s right out here.”
A minute later in the hallway the man introduces himself. “My name is Akhmed.” He
speaks Russian without an accent, but by now Sonja feels more comfortable conversing
in Chechen. A short beard descends from Akhmed’s face. For a moment she thinks he’s a
religious man, then remembers that most men have grown their beards out. Few have
shaving cream, fewer have mirrors. The war has made the country’s cheeks and chins
devout.
He gestures to a small girl, no older than eight, standing beside him. “My wife and I
cannot care for her,” Akhmed says. “You must take her.”
“This isn’t an orphanage.”
“There are no orphanages.”
The request is not uncommon. The hospital receives humanitarian aid, has food and
clean water. Most important, it tends to the injured regardless of ethnicity or military
affiliation, making the hospital one of the few larger buildings left untargeted by either
side in the war. Newly injured arrive each day, too many to care for. Sonja shakes her
head. Too many dying; she cannot be expected to care for the living as well.
 “Her father was taken by the rebels on Saturday. On Sunday the army came and took
her mother.”
Sonja looks at the wall calendar, as if a date could make sense of the times. “Today is
Monday,” she says.
Akhmed glowers. Sonja often sees defiance from rebels and occasionally from
soldiers, but rarely from civilians.
“I can’t,” she says, but her voice falters, her justification failing.
“I was a medical student before the war,” Akhmed says, switching to Chechen. “In my
final year. I will work here until a home is found for the girl.”
Sonja surveys the corridor: a handful of patients, no doctors. Those with money, with
advanced degrees and the foresight to flee the country, have done so.
“Parents decide which of their children they can afford to feed on which days. No one
will take this girl,” Sonja says.
“Then I will keep working.”
“Does she speak?” Sonja looks to the girl. “What’s your name?”
“Havaa,” Akhmed answers.

S I X M O N T H S E A R L I E R Sonja’s sister, Natasha, was repatriated from Italy. When

Sonja heard the knock and opened the door, she couldn’t believe how healthy her sister
looked. She hugged her sister, joked about the padding on her hips. Whatever horrors
Natasha had experienced in the West, she’d put fat around her waist.
“I am home,” Natasha said, holding the hug longer than Sonja thought necessary.
They ate dinner before the sun went down, potatoes boiled over the furnace. The army
had cut the electric lines four years earlier. They had never been repaired. Sonja showed
her sister to the spare room by candlelight, gestured to the bed. “This is the place you
sleep, Natasha.”
They spent the week in a state of heightened civility. No prying questions. All talk was
small. What Sonja noticed, she did not comment on. A bottle of Ribavirin antiviral pills
on the bathroom sink. Cigarette burns on Natasha’s shoulders. Sonja worked on
surgeries, and Natasha worked on sleeping. Sonja brought food home from the hospital,
and Natasha ate it. Sonja started the fire in the morning, and Natasha slept. There were
mornings, and there were nights. This is life, Sonja thought.

A K H M E D I S T R U E to his word. Five minutes after Sonja accepts the girl, he is

washed and suited in scrubs. Sonja takes him on a tour of the hospital. All but two wings
are closed for lack of staff. She shows him the cardiology, internal medicine, and
endocrinology wards. A layer of dust covers the floors, their footprints leaving a trail.
Sonja thinks of the moon landing, how she saw the footage for the first time when she
arrived in London.
“Where is everything?” Akhmed asks. Beds, sheets, hypodermics, disposable gowns,
surgical tape, film dressing, thermometers, IV bags, forceps—any item of practical
medical use is gone. Empty cabinets, open drawers, locked rooms, closed blinds, taped-
over windowpanes, the stale air remain.
“The trauma and maternity wards. And we’re struggling to keep them both open.”
Akhmed runs his fingers through his beard. “Trauma, that’s obvious. You have to keep
trauma open. But maternity?”
Sonja’s laugh rings down the empty hall. “I know. It’s funny, isn’t it? Everyone is
either fucking or dying.”
“No.” Akhmed shakes his head, and Sonja wonders if he’s offended by her profanity.
“They are coming into the world, and they are leaving the world and it’s happening
here.”
Sonja nods, wonders if Akhmed is religious after all.

Plot Summary
Published in 2002, Journey to the River Sea is a children's historical fiction novel by Eva
Ibbotson. Set in the early 1900s, the story follows Maia, an English orphan who is sent to live
with relatives in Brazil near the Amazon River. Ibbotson was a British novelist known for her
imaginative adventure stories; Journey to the River Sea was written as a tribute to her late
husband, a naturalist. The book won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize and was shortlisted for
several other awards, including the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.

Orphaned Maia lives in England at the Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies, a boarding school
paid for by her parents' trust fund. When Mr. Murray, her lawyer, informs her that she will be
moving to Manaus, Brazil, to live with some distant cousins, she is thrilled. She imagines
herself in a wonderland of colorful birds and "curtains of sweetly scented orchids trailing from
the trees." Her classmates are not so optimistic; they tell her it is a land of man-eating
crocodiles and vicious Indian tribes.
As Maia sails from England to Brazil with her governess, Miss Minton, she meets a fellow passenger
who does not share her enthusiasm for their journey. Jimmy Bates is a boy known by his stage name
Clovis King. He is traveling with the acting troupe run by his adoptive parents, but all he wants is to
return to England and his foster mother. Maia promises that she will come to see his troupe's play.

When Maia arrives in Brazil, she does, indeed, find the wonderland she envisioned. However,
her new family leaves much to be desired. English-natives, Mr. and Mrs. Carter seem to hate
the land they live in. They stay inside almost exclusively, fearing bugs and germs. Their
children, twin girls named Beatrice and Gwendolyn, are selfish and spoiled and share their
parents' views of the country.

When the day of Clovis's play arrives, naturally, the Carters wish to take their children to see
the performers from their beloved England, but that does not include Maia. Although she is left
at home, she sneaks out of the house and tries to walk to the theater. Soon she is lost, and she
must rely on a kind Indian boy to show her the way. Clovis is wonderful in the performance of
Little Lord Fauntleroy, but at a key moment, his voice begins cracking. The rest of the play is a
disaster.

As the days pass, Maia begins to feel that she cannot stand life with the Carters for much longer. They
keep her trapped inside and unable to explore the beautiful world around her. Even worse, they do not
really care about her, but only about the monthly stipend they receive from Mr. Murray. Fortunately,
Maia again encounters the Indian boy who helped her on the night of the play. She discovers that he is
a half-British, half-Xanti Indian named Finn Tavener.

Currently, Finn is on the run from two men, Mr. Trapwood and Mr. Low (whom Maia
nicknames "the crows"), who are searching for the heir to Westwood, the wealthy Tavener
estate back in England. Finn has heard his father's unhappy stories of living in Westwood, and
so he is running from the crows who wish to force him to go there. Instead, Finn wants to sail
down the Amazon river, which the locals call "the River Sea," to look for the Xanti, his
mother's tribe.

Maia introduces Finn to Clovis, and the boys see an opportunity to help each other out. Clovis
has run away from the acting troupe, but he lacks a way to return to England. The group
hatches a plan: Clovis will pose as the Tavener heir and go to Westwood with the crows, while
Finn will stay behind as Clovis and be free to search for his mother's tribe. The plan goes off
without a hitch, and Clovis departs for England.

One day, Miss Minton leaves to pursue a new job as a governess with a Russian family. She intends to
take Maia with her in a bid to remove her from the awful Carter household, but Maia is unaware of this.
She is devastated, believing herself abandoned. When the twins accidentally start a fire that destroys
the Carters' house, the family is taken to the hospital, and Maia is left behind. Seizing the opportunity,
she finds Finn and leaves with him on his adventure down the Amazon.

Meanwhile, in England, Clovis reunites with his foster mother, and she encourages him to
reveal his true identity. He tries several times to tell Sir Aubrey, and when he finally manages
it, Sir Aubrey is so shocked that he has a heart attack. Clovis eventually tells him that it was a
joke, deciding to remain the Westwood heir.

Miss Minton soon returns, accompanied by her friend Professor Neville Glastonberry. When
they find Maia missing, they pursue the pair down the Amazon, eventually finding them living
with the Xanti tribe. For a while, all are happy, but one day, Maia sings for the tribe. Some
nearby police hear her voice. Thinking her a captive, they burst in to save her, along with Miss
Minton and the Professor. The trio returns to Manaus but not to England, having decided to
stay in this beautiful country.

SHIMENAWA
“E tadaki mas,” my uncle said. Jiro picked up onigiri, a rice ball, with his hands and mashed it into his mouth.
Fish and rice on his plate, untouched. He stuffed another onigiri in his mouth, bits of rice falling.
“Jiro-chan…” A warning from my mother. Jiro opened his mouth wide, splayed his tongue covered in tiny
white beads of rice. Kazuya stood up and roughly pulled Jiro out of his chair.
“What are you doing?” My mother asked, getting up.
Kazuya went out the back door, carrying Jiro firmly under his arm. With the other hand, he picked up a circle
of rope hanging on the fence by the shed. In the yard was a large oak tree with heavy, twisted branches. He
wrapped the rope around my brother once, then pushed him to the trunk of the oak, winding the rope around
and around.
“He must eat his dinner properly.” My uncle tied a thick knot at the end. “He needs to learn to be a man.”
My mother was shouting at my uncle; Jiro was screaming, the sound flooding the sky. Kazuya went back into
the house, relaxed and entitled, as if he had just finished a long day’s work.

No one remembers the rest. My mother never forgave my uncle. My father wasn’t there. Jiro can’t recall any
of it. He jokes that the incident is possibly the reason he always, intuitively eats everything on his plate.

I invent my own ending. I imagine my mother struggling with the knot, with Jiro sobbing to be free. A
kodama, a tree spirit, in the form of an old woman, appears. She unties Jiro, embraces his small body, presses
her palm over his forehead as if to calm a fever. She banishes the event from his mind. Early next morning,
Jiro peers out the window. A shimenawa with paper streamers is tied around the base of the oak.

***

When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, I was living in Toronto. I called my parents in
Vancouver. My father picked up the phone. He usually passed the receiver to my mother once he’d said hello
because he hated talking on the phone, but this time, he was watching the news, the endless looping footage of
the destruction, the lineups for food and water and the brown water surging over houses and cars.

“Japan will disappear,” he said. “It’s going to disappear soon.”

He sounded like a child then, speaking in a voice I had never heard. He was trying to reach relatives in Tokyo
and couldn’t get through. Something in my father’s tone indicated an opening, a chance to compensate for a
lifetime of missed conversations. We could start with my uncle.

But I hesitated. I was too afraid to take the risk, to be evaded, dismissed. I told my father I’d call back later. I
hung up the phone and left the tangled cord spiraling from the edge of the desk.BW