50 pages • 1-hour read
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
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Chapters 19-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary
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. Sonja demands that Akhmed stop.
Chapter 20 Summary
For eight months between 1995 and 1996, Natasha is sold to a number of brothels. She is given shots of heroin and eventually becomes addicted, making it difficult for her to function or leave. Natasha is “not the high-priced, high-class call girl she had imagined, borne by limousine to fancy hotels” (277). The men all call her Natasha, and she discovers that this is the name they give to every girl from Eastern Europe. Eventually, Natasha escapes and ends up in a women’s shelter in Italy.
Chapter 21 Summary
Khassan visits Ula again after he knows Akhmed has left for the day. Khassan tells Ula that he is there to wash her hair. After Khassan washes Ula’s hair, he continues his story.
Khassan and Mirza traveled by train from Kazakhstan to Chechnya. In Chechnya, Khassan enrolled in the history doctoral program at Volchansk State University. Mirza was engaged and eventually married someone else. For seven years, Khassan obsessed over his love for Mirza. One day, they ran into each other again when Mirza’s bus broke down outside of the university library where Khassan was studying. Khassan invited Mirza to lunch at the school cafeteria. Khassan and Mirza met twice a week at the university. Eventually they began an affair. Mirza became pregnant with Akhmed. Khassan doesn’t know if Akhmed is his son or Mirza’s husband’s, but Khassan will always think of Akhmed as his son either way. Later, Khassan got another woman pregnant, and they married and raised Ramzan.
After telling his story, Khassan returns home. Ramzan, thinking Khassan won’t respond, reveals that he hasn’t had a bowel movement in weeks. Khassan speaks to Ramzan for the first time in two years, saying it could be because of the villagers Ramzan turned over to the Feds. Ramzan and Khassan get into an argument, and Ramzan accuses Khassan of neglecting him and his mother, and for being ungrateful for the insulin Ramzan continues to provide for Khassan. Ramzan tells Khassan that he gave names to the Feds “so that we’ll survive together. You’re the only person I have. You’re my family” (291). Khassan reveals that there is a chance that Akhmed could be his son too.
Chapters 19-21 Analysis
Connection and isolation are big themes in these chapters. After their earlier confrontation, Sonja and Akhmed continue building rapport through open, honest conversation, and they reveal closely guarded truths to each other. In contrast, Natasha struggles to make any meaningful connections while working in the brothels. That all the Eastern European girls are called Natasha threatens her sense of individual identity, making her just another body out of many.
Khassan, who typically only interacts with the village’s stray dogs, experiences both connection and isolation in Chapter 21. Throughout the text, stray dogs symbolize Khassan’s loneliness. After Ramzan becomes an informant for the Feds, everyone in the village stops speaking to Ramzan and Khassan, and Khassan stops speaking to Ramzan as well. As a result, stray dogs are the only creatures Khassan can speak to. Khassan takes care of the sick dogs and gives them baths and food, but on his way to visit Ula, he admits to himself that “the thought of talking himself senile to a pack of feral dogs didn’t appeal to him this early in the day” (282). This reveals that even though Khassan takes care of the dogs, he misses human company and interaction, which lends greater significance to his conversations with Ula and Ramzan. However, after Khassan and Ramzan get into a fight, Khassan leaves the house, noting that “outside, his dogs were waiting for him” (292). With no one else to speak to, Khassan returns to the dogs as a substitute for human companionship.
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