On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and tookher father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.
Later, this imagery will be expanded upon to reveal some explication. The place in the ocean where anemones dwell is deep; so deep that even sharks don’t go near. So, in essence, dreaming of sea anemones is a dream of safety and security. Which seems like a good place to be when the Feds are burning down one’s house.
Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One-hundred billion cerebral neurons.
This itemizing of what is known about every the body of every woman who reaches adulthood is a penetration into the mind of Sonja and an existential contemplation of the ability to ever really know another person. A laundry list of what binds and connects every single adult woman who has ever lived throughout the history of time offers no solution to the mystery of what goes on inside any one of them. One of the themes running through the narrative is this ironic connection that also binds every single person who ever lived together: we share so much that can be recorded and predicted, but not one single person can honesty account for what goes on inside any other single person.
Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
Perhaps less surprisingly in light of the previous quote, the title of the novel does not derive from astronomy, but rather anatomy. This quote is found circled by Natasha in a book titled “The Medical Dictionary of the Union of Soviet Physicians.” She keeps constant vigil over this definition of life as a means of trying to understand how it could possibly have to be that she had managed the unthinkable: outliving the Soviet Union.
Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.
In this end, this single philosophical pondering—a musing made on the road of an resupply expedition that would mean certain death if discovered by the wrong people—could well stand as the overarching statement of the novel’s central theme. Wars will continue to be fought for the most and least glorious of motivations, but time will erase them both with equal lack of dignity for the winners and the losers, the power and the rebels, the bystanders and the patriots and everyone the war ever touches in any way.
