A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



18





THE SILVER MAKAROV pistol was all Ramzan thought about for the two weeks preceding Dokka’s disappearance, in which he failed to produce a single bowel movement. Each morning, venturing into the cold in nothing but a robe and lambskin boots, he turned the corner of the house, passed icicles filling the gutter’s missing segments, passed the frostbitten fingers of fallen birch limbs, and waded down the sharp incline to the scattered pinecones that had amassed into an ankle-deep mound at the outhouse door. Inside, he sat with his elbows burrowed into his knees, a full-bodied clench that left him red-faced and winded. Snow flurries fell through the roof’s missing half, landing on the back of his neck, and melted into sweat. His scrotum was an empty coin purse flattened between his legs. He was unable to father even a soft dollop of excrement. As the stagnant days stacked one atop the next, he altered his diet, already limited to what his father hadn’t thrown to the dogs. He stopped eating his favorite meal of cured beef spiced with paprika, chilies, and coriander, the one sumptuous dinner his father allowed him each week. He left the butter off his bread and by daylight ate only the apples his father once favored. He yearned for vegetables. Vegetables! Raw and leafy, flavorless and coarse, yes, cucumbers and turnips and beets. Haunted by what he knew to be feminine cravings, he was unmanned for a second time, but not even the intimacy of his shame could repel his yearning for cabbage and sprouts, for roughage sweeping through his system like the bristles of an enraged broom. Even if he broke down, debasing himself by requesting greens in his biweekly provisions from the state security forces, he would receive only a few yellow heads of frozen lettuce, which his father would, no doubt, feed to the yapping beasts in the yard. But he felt increasingly certain that it was neither the surplus of cured meats, nor the dearth of vegetables in his diet, but rather the conversation with the Cossack colonel that had fossilized his lower intestines. He considered prayer, but asking for spiritual laxative was surely sacrilege. Inspired by the long, leaky shits he’d taken as an eighteen-year-old Red Army private, he performed post-fajr calisthenics. He vomited twice from the exercise, but still failed to coax even a pale, watery squirt. The weather, at least, provided solace. If ever there was a season for constipation it was winter. Beneath the wooden toilet box, the cesspool had frozen into scentless stone. Surely that was preferable to the fecal fever baking beneath the wooden seat in summer. He sat. He pushed. Struggling against his body, he came to the dismaying conclusion that his viscera had betrayed him. Even when his rear end felt tied closed with drawstrings, he checked himself. But each time he examined the rough square of military-issue toilet paper, it was white. Even after he spoke with the colonel for a second time, two weeks after their initial conversation, and gave up Dokka, no relief arrived. And three days after Dokka disappeared, when Ramzan closed the satellite phone and ended the last of the three conversations he would have with the Cossack colonel, he considered what his father had suggested that morning about Akhmed. Could it really be true? No, it couldn’t be, not really, and he couldn’t believe it, couldn’t allow it, because it was no more than a ploy to trick his conscience into mercy. But would his father break his two-year vow of silence to tell a lie? Not that it mattered now. Ramzan had given the Cossack colonel Akhmed’s name. The plea spoken from his father’s prideful lips earlier that day had quickly betrayed itself, degenerating from appeal to denunciation, and yes, he would take away the one person in the village his father loved if only to teach his father what it was to be alone. Wherever Akhmed was, wherever he had hidden the girl, he was no more than a ghost still ignorant of his death.


It was the Cossack colonel, Ramzan came to believe, who had tied the knot in his intestines. His deep timbre could constipate the Volga. The smoke of three daily packs blew through his sentences. He spoke with a velvety menace as he asked Ramzan if the sun was shining over the village, and the collision of the colonel’s tone and the childlike question gave Ramzan the impression that to the man on the other end of the line death was an unremarkable hazard of his trade. The sun was shining, beaming even, yet Ramzan felt compelled to lie, to say the cloud cover sat as thick as spoiled milk, as though enough small lies would absolve him of the larger truths divulged. But he didn’t lie. He said yes. The sun shone. The colonel grunted in approval, then read from the military meteorological report for the village. Static breathed through the transmission. Ramzan lifted the antenna toward the sky like a lightning rod pulling the full force of the colonel’s voice from the heavens. When reception returned, the colonel asked about the silver Makarov pistol.

But when Ramzan left his house in early December 2004, two weeks before Dokka was disappeared, he still had forty-five minutes before hearing the Cossack colonel’s voice for the first time. A blue nylon duffel bag the size and slump of a dead cat dangled from his wrist; inside swung the satellite phone. He opened the back door and, stepping into the wind, crossed the field. The sun filled the frozen slant of the outhouse half roof, but the privy hadn’t yet consumed his hope and dread, as it soon would, and he passed without looking back, walking as snow hardened into the deep treads of his leather boots, following the narrow corridor of bedsheets left stiff on the clothesline, over the brittle yellow grass, over his grandparents’ plot, to the uneven edge of the field and into the forest.

Snow had thickened the ground. The quiet of his house followed him into the woods. Two hundred meters in, raising his head in a long scream, he tore a hole in the silence through which he could walk more freely. His father, he hoped, would mistake it for the wounded bawl of his pack. Before the wars, the winter had been warmer. A meteorologist might beg to differ, but weather prediction was an act of infidel witchcraft that could not be trusted.

For the duration of the three-kilometer hike, he scanned the snow but found no tracks wider than a rabbit’s foot. The conditions that allowed the forest to flourish had devastated its wildlife. The village economy depended upon logging, and when the enterprise and its administration vanished with the Soviet flag, the villagers were left without the means or infrastructure to extract any real money from the forest. So they hunted. Aided by the wartime influx of munitions, they hunted deer, wild boar, brown bears, and wolves like men who believed they would always be hungry and the forest would always be full.

The cell of subsistence hunting eventually metastasized into the gun-running operation that would take Dokka’s fingers and transform Ramzan into a man who hiked three kilometers in December to make a phone call. His first taste of trading came when he worked for a small crafts concern that bloomed under the relaxed regulations of perestroika. He scavenged the mountains for the stone sculptures of shaman artisans. The hamlets he found were no more than high-altitude islands in a sea of mining waste, and he exchanged petrol, medical supplies, and tinned food for the carved stone. The artisans always chose to bargain through a shura of elders, upon whom time had acted like a substance that repeatedly dissolved and refroze their faces, and Ramzan, in his early twenties, felt like a foreigner among these aged creatures, and nearly always gave much more than the carvings were worth. To his mind, the stone sculptures of goat hooves, a child’s hands, and a mutilated deer weren’t worth the last spittlely sip of a shared vodka bottle. He took the sculptures to an industrial park outside of Grozny, where they were examined, priced, crated, and shipped to distant countries where wealthy cosmopolitans would pay vast sums to display the hoof of a Chechen goat.

In 1999, years since Ramzan had ventured into the mountains for sculptures, he traded cured meat for shotgun shells in a neighboring village. A welder there made homemade ammunition. New buckshot was prohibitively priced on the black market, so the ingenious man packed the casings with ball bearings cannibalized from trolley wheels. They exchanged words before ammunition and meat, and soon realized that each had worked in the industrial park. The welder explained that immediately following the birth of his first son he had begun working as a night watchman at the industrial park so he could, at the very least, get a good night’s sleep. They talked about how, in 1991, the crafts concern had stopped purchasing authentic mountain sculptures and begun mass-producing them in Grozny with the help of a professor at the Fine Arts College and the serf-labor of his undergraduate sculpture class. The recollection was a tunnel through which trust traveled. They shared nothing in common but the memory of the industrial park, and it was enough. Ramzan took the welder fresher cuts of meat, and in exchange the welder gave Ramzan a Kalashnikov. Ramzan returned to the welder several days later with the hind legs of a brown bear bleeding in his truck bed.

And one day the welder vanished to join the independence fighters. For the next year, Ramzan struggled to survive. The task, already a great challenge, was compounded by his diabetic father. In a country where clean water was scarce, insulin should have proved impossible. But Ramzan found a way.

In a small, unassuming collective farm, known locally as the Miracle Fields, Ramzan worked as a petrol farmer for the insurgents, or the Feds, or more likely both. The pipeline running through the untended pear orchard conveyed oil from local wells to a regional refinery, but the pipe was riddled with so many bullet holes that the refinery had long since ceased operations. The reek of rotting, unpicked pears filled the air as Ramzan dug pits, called barns, alongside the pipe. Dark fountains of oil filled the barns, which fed into a system of irrigation channels that, in earlier times, had been used to water the pear trees. Perhaps as much as half of the oil seeped into the soil, into the groundwater below, but the oil spouted from the pipe in such abundance that no one ever thought to seal the barns with concrete or plastic. Twice a day, a tanker truck arrived to siphon the oil through a long rubber hose and distribute it to covert factories, where the crude oil was refined into a highly sulfuric diesel with eighty-year-obsolete machinery looted from the National Museum of Oil Production. The women who bottled the diesel in glass jars and sold it on street corners were the nearest entity to a working gas station for several hundred kilometers. Sometimes the moonshine diesel worked, and sometimes it caused the cars to explode, but it always filled the coffers of the insurgents, or the Feds, or more likely both. Ramzan, for his part, was well paid, and he used his earnings to buy insulin and syringes on the black market. Due to regular territorial disputes along the pipeline, the work was more dangerous than the war itself, and Ramzan was sustained not by love for his father but by the fear of failing him.

In 2001, when a band of wounded rebels briefly occupied the village, Ramzan recognized the welder among their ranks. They embraced as brothers, as though bonded in a crucible more dramatic than an industrial park. The welder introduced him to the field commander, a man with very bad teeth and dental-floss stitches in his chest. Impressed by Ramzan’s familiarity with the mountains and eager to set up supply routes for the coming winter, the field commander referred Ramzan to a Saudi sheikh who had come to Chechnya to support the holy warriors in their ghazawat against the infidel oppressor.

The sheikh wasn’t the first foreign Wahhabi Ramzan had seen break sharia law, but he was the first to break it in the name of Internet poker. “The Qur’an specifically says, ‘He who plays with dice is like the one who handles the flesh and blood of swine,’ but makes no mention of playing cards,” the sheikh explained at their initial meeting, conducted between bets in the midst of the quarter-final round of one of his tournaments. The sheikh had perhaps the only working computer in Volchansk, and connected to the Internet—a technology that surely allowed far too much freedom to be pious—via a portable satellite dish. The sheikh, a short, brimming, gourd-like man, smiled at the computer screen. “I play in the morning,” he said, “when it is still late night in Western Europe and America, and the judgment of the other players is clouded by whiskey. All my winnings, of course, go entirely to jihad.”

No fundamentalist undercurrent ran through the national culture before the first war. Sufism had always been the predominant Muslim sect, and Wahhabism was a foreign, wartime import. A few times a year, Arab Wahhabis came through the village in search of recruits. They promised rations, shelter, an eternity in Paradise, and, until that day of glorious martyrdom, a monthly salary of two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars. Few young men followed the monochromatic Wahhabi faith, but many were quite willing to be radicalized for a monthly salary that eclipsed what they would otherwise earn in a year. The war of independence so quickly conflated with jihad because no one cared about the self-determination of a small landlocked republic. Arab states would gladly fund a war of religion, but not one of nationalism. And in this way it didn’t matter who won the war between the Feds and fundamentalists: the notion of a democratic and fully sovereign Chechnya would be crushed regardless. Martyrdom was the easiest way to make a living, but death didn’t appeal to Ramzan, and he was pleased when the sheikh, gleeful after winning the ten-thousand-dollar tournament, crossed his spindly legs and offered a different proposal.

The real war was one of supply, explained the sheikh, who had been trained as a tax attorney before giving his life to Allah, and would return to tax law in five and a half years, when Allah failed to warn him, for the final time, of his opponent’s full house. The dzhigits had to be restocked and rearmed, the sheikh said, and failing to do so was more destructive to morale than a barrage of mortar rounds. At times, the sheikh continued, when the fighters were encamped in mountain caves, without the firepower to defeat a pack of wolves much less the Federal army, the jihad subsisted purely as a prayer in the hearts of its devout adherents. By this point, it was difficult to pretend that a few thousand men hiding in the mountains could overcome one of the world’s largest armies. Yet they had to pretend. The illusion of victory in the minds of the newly converted was, in itself, victory. And morale was essential in maintaining this ancillary conquest for Chechen souls. If the foot soldiers died in bomb blasts, they would blame the Russians. If they died of hunger, they would blame the Wahhabis. Trustworthy transportation was needed more than all the prayers of the Arab world, yet was so difficult to obtain, for the sheikh was a foreigner and didn’t know the land. Ramzan did. In the end, he was easily coaxed. The sheikh gave him an envelope with ten pale green twenty-dollar bills and Ramzan pinched the money with his fingertips. For some reason, he’d always imagined American bills would be thicker.

While his neighbors slogged farther into the forest in search of game, Ramzan drove to Volchansk, Shali, even Grozny. The weapons he would deliver to rebel encampments all came from Russian munitions factories. Some he purchased in bulk from a crooked Federal captain who would order his company to attention when Ramzan arrived, and would then walk down the line with an open parachute bag as Ramzan read aloud from the sheikh’s handwritten list of needed munitions; in reports to his superiors, the captain would refer to such incidents as rebel ambushes in which his soldiers had no choice but to surrender. Others came through the smuggling routes that ran through the border regions like veins through marble. One day, when discussing supply routes, the sheikh showed him a map of the entire republic, pasted together from a dozen low-resolution pages printed from the Internet. “What’s wrong?” the sheikh asked when Ramzan goggled at the misaligned segments held by peeling tape. It was the first time he had seen a map of his own country. The Soviets had banned maps of the entire republic for fear that such a symbol would serve to foment national solidarity, or, at the very least, make long-haul truckers a little too complacent. In the frenzied smuggling following the Soviet collapse, no one, to Ramzan’s knowledge, had ever thought to sneak a map across the border. And here was one, right in front of him. His country looked like a rectangle drawn by a man suffering from delirium tremens. He hadn’t known that. It did make him feel patriotic. “This is a beautiful map,” Ramzan answered, at last. The sheikh let him keep it.

Over the sixteen months he worked for the sheikh, Ramzan transported semiautomatics, machine gun belts, Makarov pistols, aluminum pails of loose bullets divided by caliber, telescopic sniper rifles, hand grenades, clothes-hanger trip lines, brown paper–wrapped blocks of Semtex, stopwatches, coils of multicolored rubber-coated wires, black-and-white photographs of Russian military bases, maps redrawn to include road blocks and checkpoints and ruins, jars of thick dark grease, red plastic jugs of petrol, batteries, butane lighter fluid, compasses, bandannas, powdered soap, iodine tablets, cigarettes, sacks of rice, spotted potatoes, plum jelly, dried apricots, condensed milk, lentils, ground pepper, communiqués, translucently thin rice paper, pens, envelopes, letters from family members, pay, prayer rugs, paperback Qur’ans, and steel septic pipes used to launch homemade rockets, which he also transported. Compensation was subject to the exigencies of combat. Sometimes it came in envelopes: U.S., Russian, British, or E.U. currency. Other times as a cut of the delivered goods: a pair of dull leather military boots, a basket of fresh corn, a boar’s hide, a sheepskin overcoat, a silver Makarov pistol. When he felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime.

Combat enlarged the resupply journeys beyond the simple calculations of time and distance. Covering a hundred kilometers could take weeks to prepare for and days to execute. He packed his truck to capacity and used only a frayed blue blanket to conceal its contents. It didn’t matter if the Feds caught him with a butter knife or an atomic bomb. A gunshot would announce the same sentence. He drove toward ridges that sawed farther into the sky as he approached. Danger resided beneath, on, and above the main roads—land mines, patrols, and helicopters—and so he instead followed the trails of shepherds, flattening the tall grasses. Plains grew to foothills and foothills to mountains. He ascended switchbacks so sharp they required three-point turns. Both side-view mirrors snapped off. The rock scraped the paint from the door. Now and then he’d glance down to the gullies of indefinable green funneling toward slivers of water that marked the depth and decline of the land. Cloud cover dwarfed distant cities and villages. Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.

He drove until the mountains no longer let him. Then came the shortest and most arduous distances. He loaded the supplies on a plywood frame and strapped the frame to his shoulders with strips of canvas and bungee cord. If properly balanced he could carry forty kilograms up the mountain. The rebels would not assist him, believing such labor beneath men of their pious patriotism, and he carried the forty kilograms up boulders and bluffs while the drop of the valley glared up at him. Every ten minutes he checked the compass and mountain line. He tied a bell to his wrist so the lookouts would hear his approach before their scopes saw him. They materialized in camo fatigues faded to the same moss-spotted tan of the stone. Beards hung from their sun-darkened faces and the martyrs greeted him with imperious gratitude. Depending on where the rebels were camped and where the road ended, he would invite Dokka, never Akhmed, to join him.


There.

The hoofprints of an elk.

He squatted to the ground, stopped by a set of prints that marked the snow like a long ellipsis leading nowhere. The tracks hadn’t yet frozen and the elk was likely within a few hundred meters. To come upon an elk again. To admire rather than shoot. He stood and checked his watch. The sunlight turned the silver hands golden. Twenty minutes before he was due to check in. Staring down the trail of prints, he tried to follow its line through the birches and pines. Somewhere in that distance of frost and shadow, movement disrupted the stillness and the disturbance had carved a distance within him. He continued. The call couldn’t come late. Not even the sighting of an elk would excuse it.

The trees opened to the most recently clear-cut swath of forest. Already the saplings had grown taller than him. They loomed over the short, frost-buried stumps of their antecedents. His footprints wove among them, larger and more apparent than the elk’s, halting at the deep-treaded tires of a dilapidated logging truck. The loggers had abandoned the truck when they fled, and in the intervening decade its yellow paint had faded, chipped, and been recolored in a maroon coating of rust. The tire treads were so deeply cut he used them as rungs to climb to the cabin. Spiderweb fractures spread across the windshield, but the glass still held the snow. Seated in the driver’s seat, he unzipped the duffel bag and assembled the phone. The satellite consisted of three metal rectangles coated in hard resin, which, when set up and positioned at a fifteen-degree angle on the cabin roof, looked like a cooking sheet basking in the sun. He connected two black rubber wires to the satellite. One led to a battery pack, which he left sitting beside the satellite on the roof, and the other ran through the cracked window and attached to the receiver. The pea-green keypad lit up. Three minutes remained before his call was due. Though wrapped in shame and remorse, these phone calls constituted the best moments of his month; for nearly two years, the military men on the other end had been the only people interested in speaking to him. He measured the cold by the length of his breath, which grew and vanished, like a tusk that kept dissolving from his face. The entire forest’s quiet was concentrated in the cabin.

Later he would store the memory of this moment with that of his mother’s rolling pin, how just the sight of it emerging from the kitchen cabinet would make him salivate. He would treasure it as he treasured the ball of yellow yarn, still attached to the amputated sleeve of a sweater she had been knitting for him when she died. He would weave those three minutes into the fabric of his mother’s memory, because she had loved him, and believed him a kind and generous child, and died before she could see the half man he had become. For nearly two years he had worked as an informer for the state security forces. He had given up neighbors who had wished him a happy birthday every year of his life. And still he believed himself the victim as much as the perpetrator of his crimes.

At eleven o’clock he punched the nine-digit number into the keypad. An adjutant answered, and in the cramped cold of the cabin his voice trilled like a clarinet. The adjutant passed the phone to the colonel, whose voice—if he were being honest—had no effect on his bowels until it spoke of the silver Makarov pistol.



Nearly two years earlier, in January 2003, he drove into the mountains for what would be the final time. The morning of his departure, he woke early and performed his ablutions and prayers on the trapezoid of dawn light that lay like a prayer rug on the floor. The winter sun kept the same hours the Soviet post office once did, and he prepared to leave without even the light of a kerosene lamp. Nine years had passed since the house he shared with his father had received reliable electricity, and darkness no longer felt like an absence, but rather a thickening in the air, a viscosity that slowed his movement and called upon his spatial memory. His long underwear had stretched in the knees and as he pulled the elastic band to his hip, he mourned the fact that he could obtain a crate of Special Forces sniper rifles more easily than a decent pair of thermal underwear. Before leaving his room, he reached into a wicker basket of unwashed clothes. The wool socks and gray undershirts parted and compressed as he pushed through them, but at the bottom, the Makarov pistol kept its shape.

In the kitchen, steam surged from the kettle spout. Ramzan opened the stove door and cupped his hands in the orange heat. Pages rustled in the living room. His father knew he would leave for the mountains today. A fan of mustard light fell from the living room doorway, and after preparing a cup of tea, Ramzan walked toward it. The light rose from the floor to his feet and up his legs, outlining the droops in his long underwear and then jaundicing his hands, wrists, forearms, elbows. “You are leaving soon,” his father said with a foreknowledge that made a statement of the question. His father sat at his desk in the pool of lamplight. Ramzan took a seat on the brown ottoman; the backside had paled from years facing the morning sun.

“What are you reading?” Ramzan asked.

His father gave an abashed smile, as if caught eating manti from the pot with his fingers, and tilted the cardboard cover toward the light. It was a conspiracy story about an inept American spy who infiltrated the Kremlin and was discovered by a commissar whose proletariat spirit and exceptional good fortune compensated for his lack of deductive reasoning. His father only read these potboilers when Ramzan was in the mountains. For a man whose life revolved around academic texts, the shift to pulp fiction announced his paternal worry with the volume of a bullhorn.

“You’ve read it before?”

“Twice.”

“Who wins? The Americans or the Russians?”

“Both,” his father said, glancing to the frost-filled windowpane.

“Then who loses?”

“Everyone else.”

“I should be back in a week.”

His father nodded, and looked down to his book. Two years would pass before he had another conversation with his father.

“I’ll see you soon,” Ramzan said. His father marked his place with a pencil, stood, and wrapped his arms around Ramzan’s shoulders. His father’s breath warmed his cheek like a small, surviving cloud of summer humidity. On the desk, beneath the novel, the typewritten carcass of his manuscript bled red ink. “If you were writing your book instead of reading others, you might be finished by now.”

“Perhaps,” replied his father. Their embrace didn’t break off so much as dissipate, an exhalation releasing whatever tenderness was briefly held between them. His father’s hug was an act of precaution rather than love, so that if Ramzan did not return from the mountains, his father would have the consolation of knowing his final gesture toward his son had been one of kindness rather than disappointment.

In his bedroom he popped two rigged floorboards and felt through the shadows for the frayed tail of rope. Coiling the rope around his wrist, he drew the wooden pallet across the concrete foundation. A duffel bag with his most treasured possessions sat on the pallet. In it were three fragmentation grenades, a Kalashnikov and eight full magazines, a hunting knife, an old membership card to the village banya, two hundred thousand rubles divided in eight shrink-wrapped stacks, and a small sandalwood box containing a single yellow sweater sleeve still attached to the yarn ball.

He slid a stack of bills into the upper right pocket of his old Red Army jacket—a jacket that appeared to be composed entirely of pockets—and slid his arms into sleeves that felt like the largest of the pockets. He looked like a fisherman. He pulled the silver Makarov from the wicker basket, wrapped it in an undershirt and set it in the duffel bag, to keep for himself. The sidearm was one of the twenty he was supposed to transport to the mountains that day, a small gratuity he had awarded himself. In three weeks, he would teach Havaa to shoot it.

Outside, the rising sun flashed on the frost as he stomped toward his truck, carrying his backpack and the teakettle. He popped the hood and, after letting the kettle cool in the snow, filled the radiator. Antifreeze was an unaffordable luxury, so each evening he drained the radiator and each morning refilled it, and he did this until spring. The weapons and supplies—the nineteen other Makarov pistols among them—were already packed in back. It was a risk leaving the weapons outside overnight, but less of a risk than bringing them in. The temperature difference could easily fracture the rifle operating rods. His father stood in the doorframe, his frown the largest wrinkle on his face.

In two minutes his home was indistinguishable from the other snowcapped dwellings scattered in the rear view. He honked twice when he reached Dokka’s. Through the living room window, an argument between Dokka and his wife halted with the second horn blast. Havaa stood in the doorway, watching Dokka forlornly as he slung a knapsack over his shoulder and clomped through the snow to the passenger’s side.

“Difficult morning?” Ramzan asked.

Dokka smiled. “I’m married. What morning isn’t?”

No vehicles had passed since the last snowfall and without tire tracks to follow he couldn’t be sure where the road was. As long as he didn’t run into a tree, he figured, he was going the right way. Slouched in the passenger seat, Dokka pushed a pebble in small circles around his palm.

On the road, the snow rose from ten to twenty centimeters as they drove south. Ramzan kept at forty kilometers an hour for so long the two digits seemed skewered on the speedometer needle. They stopped to eat lunch and relieve themselves beside a thicket of pines, whose snowy boughs provided camouflage for the red truck.

“The snow is like my wife’s mother,” Dokka said, kicking it over the tire tracks. “She will name every place we’ve been.”

“Have a cigarette.”

“You haven’t hunted this year. You’ve forgotten that a buck is easiest to track in fresh snow.”

Ramzan hoisted himself on the warm engine hood. What accounted for Dokka’s sudden anxiety? Yes, they would likely be shot if discovered by the Feds or state security forces, but that could happen as easily in Eldár or Volchansk, in their homes or in the street, while they slept, or while they played chess, a fate so likely to befall a Chechen man it seemed silly to worry about it too much.

Before them stretched a white field that had, for eight years now, grown nothing but weeds and dust. The snow erased all measure of distance and the field expanded past the horizon, wide enough to extinguish the sun.

“You won’t be able to do this much longer either,” Dokka said. “The war is over. Grozny has fallen. These skirmishes are final breaths.”

“You’re an optimist, Dokka.”

Night fell and they drove through terraced valleys until they reached a hamlet built of the same pale stone that crowned the slopes. Centuries earlier, the hamlet had been home to several thousand; but in 1956, when the Chechens returned from Kazakh exile, Soviet authorities prohibited them from returning to their ancestral homes, and this hamlet of pristine ruins was one among hundreds scattered throughout the highlands. It seemed so unnatural to Ramzan to see a village decimated not by bombs and bullets but by time and neglect. The thirty-nine residents who gathered around the truck shared the blood of common great-great-grandparents. The men wore lambskin hats and tall leather boots, the older women wore gray and black headscarves and long plain dresses, and the younger women wore blue and pink hijabs folded to the width of a hunting blade. The children stood just outside the splay of headlight, afraid it might burn them.

They were met by the tall, arboreal elder, known for eating snow to numb his stomach ulcer. After washing in a tin basin, they dined at his home. Slabs of white stone sealed with clay-lime mortar formed the walls. Weathered petroglyphs adorned each stone: spokes of light jutting from plum-sized suns. In the main room they ate on the mats they would later sleep on. They chewed differently here. Their bowls full, their bites unrationed. No need of words when the tongue could converse with mutton.

Unaccustomed to such portions, Ramzan and Dokka finished last. As soon as they set down their bowls, the women filed in through the backdoor. The women waited for the men to leave before taking their places on the lambskin blankets. Ramzan, the last out, heard whispers and suppressed laughter as the door closed behind him and very much wished he could have remained behind. The men followed a deer trail past the ice-glazed remnants of a stone tower. In earlier centuries, it had been a fortress, watchtower, signal light, and anchor to the long-since-scattered teip. Past the tower they reached a clearing. A series of elevated planks formed a flat, dry, tire-shaped platform in the center of the clearing. Its axle was a ring of stone containing the ashes of a bonfire. The men carried logs from a lean-to deeply entrenched in the hillside. Within minutes the fire reached above Ramzan’s head, so bright he could count the rings of the logs yet unconsumed. It had been years since he had last participated in a zikr.

Ramzan and Dokka removed their boots and joined the others in a circle around the fire. The elder began the zikr with prayer. A steady call, the voice of a man, he thought, in a country bereft of men. La ilaha illallah, la ilaha illallah. The elder repeated the cry, and its slow rhythm sliced the words into syllables that stood alone as if locutions of a higher language. Voices on either side joined in harmonies that buoyed the elder’s call. Then clapping, not to keep the rhythm, but to propel it. The silver of the moon and the orange of the flames entwined on the elder’s tilted face. There is no god but Allah. The men swayed from side to side as the pace increased. Swaying grew to stomping, and sawdust rose from the shaking platform, and the men shed their outer garments. Against the burn of bonfire, the men combusted. The flailing arms of overcoats, the falling hands of woolen gloves, but the cries were not the cries of a land mine or shelling, and the pain of the elder’s call was the merciful ache of longing. There is no god. But Allah. No god. But Allah.

Ramzan clapped and he stomped and he shouted as sweat slicked his face. Without warning, a man three down from Ramzan let out a long wail, and though Ramzan couldn’t tie one word from the string of utterances twisting from the man’s throat, he understood precisely what the man meant. The man’s eyes were closed, and the uncommon serenity of his features suggested he had seen all that could be seen. The elder’s voice dropped an octave and in unison the men’s stamping became a dance. They marched joyously, counterclockwise, sliding the left foot across the platform and dropping hard on the heel of the right. In unison they spun. Three hundred and sixty degrees flattened to an indivisible plane. The pressure had built in his chest and he tried to contain it with reminders that he was no longer Sufi, that these weren’t his people, that human sorrow was the prophecy of an empty heaven, but it built, and built, like the memory of a long extinguished orgasm, and the pressure closed the space between his cells, and he was released. No melody ran through his wail. His voice was hoarse and broken and he raised it. The other men took no note above the tremble of palms and planks, but Ramzan’s next breath brought peace.

The following morning Ramzan woke with a sore throat. After breakfasting on nuts, dried fruit, and goat’s milk, the elder led Ramzan and Dokka to their truck. In exchange for the hospitality, he gave the elder ten kilos of rice and a liter of butane. The elder refused any offer of munitions besides buckshot, and despite his protestations, Ramzan pressed the issue. He couldn’t recall when he had last felt so moved to ensure the safety of a stranger. But the stiffness of the elder’s frown made it known that he would never be persuaded of a hand grenade’s safety. Driving away, Ramzan struggled to focus on the road. The lives lived behind him were so small and anonymous they had escaped the notice of state socialism, of the first and second war. The previous night, for the first time in a long time, he had felt whole, and his eyes returned to the rearview, where his dignity was held within a few square centimeters of glass.

They drove another five hours, through mountain passes so narrow the side mirrors would have snapped off, had they not already, and back down to valleys; five hours of listening to Dokka praise his wife’s resourcefulness and her gardening and her talent for creating sumptuous dishes with only a third of the requisite ingredients, five hours of compliments so lavish and exaggerated that Dokka could only mean them as insults, for why else sing the praises of marriage to a man who could never marry, why else recite the wonders of companionship if not to wound Ramzan, who, for those five long hours, felt so deficient he would have given his right hand in dowry for a wife who could neither cook, nor sew, nor raise children, a wife who committed adultery and passed gas in public, a wife who treated him like an animal—yes, he would take it and be fine with it because a disgraced man is still a man, and Ramzan wasn’t a man, not really, yet the whole world expected him to be one; and the neighbors, dear god, why haven’t you married, a handsome man like you still living with your father—and when his quiet demurrals spawned rumor—he doesn’t like women, that’s why he’s thirty-one years old and unmarried, he couldn’t decide if truth or rumor dishonored him more, but ultimately, he decided it better to allow the hearsay of homosexuality to flourish so long as his silence could cast doubt upon the whole matter, and yes, his silence engendered doubt, though mainly in himself, converting shame into rage and propelling it through his veins, his kidneys, his forearms, his little toes, and then returning to that second heart on which the names of those who slandered him were etched, and much later, he would recite those names over a satellite phone and those who had created those stories would fall victim to his own stories, homosexuality replaced with rebel sympathies, Wahhabism, jihad; but those stories were still unspoken, still unimaginable, and the purgatory of Dokka’s wife, within which he was the unfortunate audience, remained interminable even after five hours of driving when he crested a hill and slammed on the brakes because right there, not two hundred meters away, was a platoon of Russian troops, and he viewed them as both conquerors and liberators, who might kill him but would free him at least from the perdition of Dokka’s voice, and trembling with terror and gratitude he spoke the words that had been on his tongue for five hours. “Stop talking, Dokka.”

A welcome quiet suffused the cabin, and Ramzan basked in it before fear retook him. There were two armored personnel carriers, two UAZ jeeps, and a tank crowned with a machine-gun turret.

“Turn around!” Dokka shouted and shook Ramzan’s arm by the sleeve of his jacket. “What are you doing? Let’s go!”

But he kept the ball of his foot pressed to the brake pedal. “They have already seen us.”

It was true. The machine-gun turret had swiveled to face them and snow shot up behind the jeeps as they accelerated toward the crest.

“If we run, we’re f*cked. If we wait and are reasonable, we might survive. We’re just sitting here. It’s not yet a crime to be alive. You might even get a chance to finish telling me about your wife.”

The jeeps stopped twenty meters ahead and idled, while behind them, the tank gradually ground up the incline. The soldiers who emerged were not the tattooed kontraktniki, like those Ramzan remembered from the zachistka; no, compared to those hulking Russian bears these were half-starved jackals. We may live to see the sunset, he thought.

Four soldiers bearing machine guns approached. He raised his open palms to the Feds. Dokka followed suit.

“You went to a filtration camp before. You survived. They didn’t hurt you,” Dokka stammered, unable to convince even himself. Ramzan wanted to grab Dokka by his ears and shake that stupid self-deluded skull until its one grain of logic rang out. Leaning forward, he felt the empty space between his legs.

“Stop speaking, Dokka. Just be quiet.”

One of the soldiers approached the driver’s door. He had gone at least a week without shaving, but the growth couldn’t conceal the concavity of his cheeks. All around the snow stretched indifferently.

“Water,” the soldier croaked. Misunderstanding the request, Ramzan held out his identification card.

“Water,” the soldier again said. “We’ve been eating muddy snow for days. We need clean water. Can’t you speak Russian?”

“I think we should give him water,” Dokka whispered, his opened hands still facing the windshield. It was the first sensible thing Dokka had said that day.

“I have water at my feet,” he told the soldier. “Don’t shoot me.”

The soldier accepted the grease-smeared canteen, sighing as he brought the brim to his lips, and his relief became Ramzan’s. The soldier didn’t suspect that the water had spent the previous day circulating through the engine radiator.

Dokka’s hands remained skyward when they were ordered out of the truck. Ramzan protested briefly and halfheartedly; he had, after all, given that first soldier a canteen of water, and was this how his hospitality was to be repaid? But he dropped the remonstration when that first soldier, his thirst now quenched, pressed the gun barrel to Ramzan’s forehead. They lay facedown in the snow with their wrists bound behind their backs in plastic zip-strips. To keep his head above the snow, Ramzan had to arch his back and puff out his chest and flail like a beached whale. From that uncomfortable vantage, he watched the soldiers unpack the sacks of rice and grain from the truck bed. A few more seconds and they would find the Makarov handguns, fragmentation grenades, Semtex bricks, and lead wires, and he would die here, flopping like a goddamn sea mammal, many kilometers from home. How he wished he had stitched his address into his trouser inseam. He hadn’t taken the precaution for fear that the security forces would implicate his father, but now, with snow melting through his jacket, he could think of no inhumanity grimmer than an unmarked grave. Perhaps he would be forced to lie upon Dokka to save ammunition. Such a death would insult the gunrunner. He would demand his own bullet. For the water canteen, they could at least do him that small honor. Beside him, Dokka had given up. The heat from his face had thawed a soup bowl in the snow. He wept into it.

“Don’t worry,” Ramzan said. His tone surprised him. He could see the end and he was calm. “Today, we’ll find out whether the imams or commissars were right.”

“You’re brave,” Dokka said. “Here I am, crying. I dishonor you.”

How often is immense unhappiness mistaken for courage? He opened his mouth and filled it with snow. It melted as he listened to Dokka’s sobs. The soldiers at least would remember which of the two had faced his bullet with clear eyes.

But the soldiers, in an act of unexpected compassion and restraint, decided not to summarily execute them. After finding the weapons, they pulled Ramzan to his feet, then Dokka. Shaking their heads at the mucus frozen to Dokka’s lip, they turned to Ramzan, and spoke only to him. They were lost. Three nights earlier, the cold had killed their radio, and they had driven through blanketed fields in vain search for human habitation. They hadn’t been tracking the red truck. It was an accident. As the gun barrels pointed them toward the UAZ jeep, the commanding officer asked, “Are you familiar with the Landfill?”

Ramzan nodded.

“Can you give us directions?”

“Directions?”

“I told you. We’re lost.”

He could not believe it.

“If you take us there, you’ll live. At least until we get there. That much, I guarantee. And likely after. I know a lieutenant there.”

“Okay.” He didn’t know what else to say. The commanding officer beamed gratefully. Afraid the man would kiss him, Ramzan made the first move to the jeep. His captors followed.

The soldiers led them down the hillside, tenderly, so they didn’t lose their balance. The commanding officer opened the jeep door for Ramzan and cut the zip-strip with the serrated edge of a hunting knife.

“Watch your head,” cautioned the commanding officer, who would never tell another soul of his military service. The woman he was to wed in three and a half years would know him as a hundred people—a husband, a father, a churchgoer, an elementary school teacher, a charity worker—and would never find a commanding officer in that population she so dearly loved.

Ramzan slid to the far side of the seat. Dokka sat beside him. A few uncomfortable minutes passed before the commanding officer reappeared in the passenger seat with a Marlboro Red, the rebel field commander’s favorite brand, dangling from his lips. The officer and other soldiers watched him expectantly.

“What?” Ramzan asked.

“You haven’t fastened your seat belt,” the commanding officer observed.

“My seat belt?” He glanced around. All the soldiers were wearing seat belts.

“We’re not going anywhere until you buckle up,” the commanding officer said.

Ramzan nodded, yes, of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe. He buckled up, and took a compass from his jacket pocket. “Turn around,” he said. “The Landfill is behind us.”

Within an hour Ramzan directed the jeep to the road that would take them to the Landfill. Ovals of melted snow appeared in the fields. Strangely curvaceous patches of damp dirt. The sun shone. At one point he yawned and felt the nudge of Dokka’s elbow. The hollow-cheeked, grease-lipped soldier dozed beside him.

“I think Akhmed is sleeping with my wife,” Dokka said. Ramzan turned back to the window. Silvery branches darted past. The following summer would be beautiful. He had heard all he cared to hear about Dokka’s wife.


Early December 2004. Two weeks before Dokka disappeared. In the cabin of the abandoned logging truck. The first conversation with the Cossack colonel.

“Ramzan Geshilov?”

“Reporting, sir.”

“Do you recognize my voice?”

“I don’t, sir. Are you filling in for Captain Ivan Fyodorovich?”

“Is he the officer you report to?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, who?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have f*cked the wife of your superior officer eighty-seven times, and only the first three were before they married. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am told you are among our less incompetent assets in the Volchansk region. Is that true?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“At last, someone who tells the truth.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s the weather like in Eldár Forest?”

“It is … it’s sunny. And cold.”

“That’s what the meteorological report states. I’m glad that the meteorologists are honest, at least for today.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where are you this very moment?”

“The cabin of an abandoned logging truck. Three kilometers from the village proper. Sir.”

“Good. You are speaking with me rather than the cuckolded captain because a situation has arisen of the utmost importance. Since the captain can’t solve the case of his missing wife, who disappears into my bed each Thursday, I wouldn’t trust him with this. You see, the ballistics report has come back on a gun used in the assassination of an FSB colonel last year.”

“Last year?”

“Yes. A year to get a simple ballistics report. It’s December 2004, and it’s just come in. When I was last in Moscow I read that Chinese assembly plants can produce a new car in a few hours. And it takes a year for us to produce a ballistics report that connects the bullet in the head of an FSB colonel to the gun lying meters away.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The report has come back, and I want you to find where the gun came from.”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Did you break wind?”

“No, sir.”

“Then don’t waste a request for my pardon.”

“Yes, sir. It’s just that I’m not sure how I’ll find the origin of a gun fired a year ago.”

“It’s one of those needle-in-a-haystack situations, is it?”

“With all respect, sir, it’s a needle in a needle-stack.”

“On that account, you’re in luck. It’s one of your needles.”

“You must be mistaken. I haven’t run so much as a toothpick in the past two years. Ask the captain, sir.”

“How about I ask his wife instead. No, I’m not concerned about what you claim not to be selling, but rather about what you’ve already sold. You see, the serial number on the Makarov pistol used to kill the colonel in December 2003 corresponds sequentially with the serial numbers of the Makarov pistols found in the back of your truck when our brave lads ambushed you and took you to the Landfill in January 2002.”

Silence.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Sir.”

“This puts us in a rather difficult situation. In seeking information on the supplier of a gun used to assassinate an FSB colonel, we are immediately led to a person whom we pay to provide us with just that information.”

“I swear I had nothing to do with it, sir. Who was the assassin, sir?”

“A Black Widow. A shahidka. A separatist trained and sent by those animals in the mountains.”

“Was she taken alive … sir?”

“The shahidka was detained at a filtration point. Cleverly, she seduced the colonel, a man, I am told, so very well endowed that only the cavernous cunt of a Chechen has the latitude to accommodate him. No doubt hearing of the colonel’s great girth, the shahidka used her powers of seduction. When they were alone, she shot him.”

“But, sir, why wasn’t she checked for weapons?”

“If you still had a pair of stones between your legs, you would know that the average cunt of your womenfolk is capacious enough to conceal a rocket launcher. The colonel was a fool, no doubt, but nonetheless, he was still a colonel.”

“Yes, sir, but wouldn’t it be more prudent to trace the shahidka, rather than the gun?”

“A gun can be identified more easily than a person. There is a lesson in that.”

“But the shahidka …”

“Irrelevant.”

“I’ll do what I can, sir.”

“No, you will not do what you can do. You will do what you are told.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Numbers are the amoral language of absolute truth. These serial numbers do not lie. At some point you were in possession of that Makarov, and I will know the name and location of the next hands who held it. I was promoted to replace the departed colonel. I now hold his rank and command, and so, understandably, it is my chief priority to kill the architects of his assassination. Should I fall victim to a similar fate, and should the cuckolded captain be given my rank, I truly fear the fate of the Russian nation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see from your file that you have a father.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he lives with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He turned seventy-nine this year?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He survived the Great Patriotic War?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the deportations to Kazakhstan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And eleven years there on the steppe?”

“Twelve, sir.”

“And you would like him to see his eightieth birthday?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then give me names, Ramzan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Or I’ll sew your stones back on just to chop them off twice.”


The Landfill filtration camp was so named for having been built, or rather sunken, into the site of a partially constructed garbage dump. Once, when Ramzan passed the site as a younger man, he watched a brontosaurial backhoe bite into the soil and scoop out a bathtub’s worth of loose earth. But after the collapse, and the subsequent wars, plans to finish the landfill were postponed then abandoned completely. Only two of the eight proposed pits, each twenty meters deep, with the surface area of a soccer field, had been excavated. The concrete and plastic foundation, which would have trapped runoff effluvia, was never installed, and so rain and snow dissolved into a knee-deep sludge at the bottom of the two earthen pits. When Ramzan was taken there in the first war, he spent three days in Pit A before two guards lowered a sixty-rung ladder, doused his feet and legs in frigid water, and led him to the two-story white building whose entranceway still bore the sign REFUSE DISPOSAL ADMINISTRATION. Petitions calling to fill in the pits circulated after the first war. An unfortunate group of sixteen women widowed by the Landfill shoveled for a month, but failed to visibly alter the swampscape. Ultimately, the symbolic benefit of filling the two pits didn’t hold up to the actual benefit of rebuilding roads, houses, schools, power plants, refineries, and hospitals. No one imagined the pits might again be used. No one imagined there would be a second war.

But there was a second war, and now, in January 2003, having encountered the lost Federal patrol, Ramzan was imprisoned for the second time. He spent eleven days belowground, this time in Pit B, while Dokka was taken to Pit A. At the very least his ears would receive a welcome rest. He descended the now-rusty sixty-rung ladder and the guard shook him from it before he reached the final rungs. The sludge had frozen to a snowy dampness that only reached his ankles. The pit held two dozen others. Over the coming days, he would pray to the sky with them all, but only his conversations with the blue-eyed imam would remain etched in his memory. The guards lowered food and fresh water in tin pails attached to yellow cords that came irregularly, sometimes five in a day, sometimes one, sometimes in the middle of the night when the men would wake, gather, and divide the provisions. The one thing the pit had no shortage of was space. Ramzan spent the daylight hours walking alongside its walls, wondering if somewhere the Feds had a modern prison, with electricity, bunks, cells, and roofs, in which they housed not prisoners but banana peels, and potato skins, and broken shoelaces, and apple cores, and last year’s calendars, and deflated tires, and balled-up paper, and used tissues, and cigarette butts, and the last worthless slivers of bar soap. Some compassionate guard, whose soul the imam would teach Ramzan to honor, had tossed in thin wooden planks, and a sidewalk the width of a balance beam stretched around the pit’s perimeter. The names and villages of captives were carved into the clay walls. Men packed snow on the walls as far up as they could reach to moisten the clay, and after a few minutes scraped it off and identified themselves in block letters drawn by stick or finger. Information the Feds would torture them for was written here on the walls for all to see. It was well understood among the men that the Feds had as much sense as two bricks smashed together. It was also understood that pain, rather than information, was the true purpose of interrogation.

In the afternoon of the fourth day, Ramzan balanced on the slender sidewalk when the blue-eyed imam stopped him.

“Give me a boost,” the imam asked, nodding his bearded chin toward the wall where he had written half his name. At first, Ramzan refused. Since arriving he had done his best to keep his distance from the filthy, brutalized men, as though his refusal to acknowledge them were the tightrope he walked upon, saving him from falling into their ranks.

“Are you a general, hmm?” the imam asked. “Or a Persian prince? Are your hands too delicate to help an imam old enough to be your uncle?”

“I’m not a Persian prince.”

“Then climb down from your throne and help me.”

The imam placed his muddy boot in the stirrup of Ramzan’s woven fingers. He hoisted the imam, whose weight, held in Ramzan’s straining hands, was greater than his size suggested. After an endless moment, the imam tapped him on the forehead with a muddy finger and Ramzan let the old man drop to the ground.

“Take a good look at it,” the imam said, pointing to his name and village. “If it turns out you are a Persian prince, and they let you leave, you must remember me.”

“If they let me leave, I will forget everything here.”

“No,” the imam protested, wagging his muddy little finger at Ramzan. “You must remember.”

“Why?”

“So that my nephews will know where to buy my corpse.”

Ramzan nodded.

“I can afford it, you know,” the imam said, proudly. “I still have my retirement account.”

When Ramzan turned, the imam asked, “What did they get you for?”

“Smuggling weapons. You?”

“Height.”

“Height?”

“Well, the lack of height. The Feds came to my village for a counter-terrorist operation. They were looking for some Wahhabi mastermind that was supposedly hiding there, but their only physical description of the man was that he had a beard and was less than two meters tall. They rounded up every short, bearded man, and many adolescents who didn’t have beards but met the height description. On the reason-for-arrest line of my report, they wrote too short.” The imam shook his head and stared up at his name written in the clay wall, now beyond his reach. Ramzan was glad he’d stopped to lift the imam.

“It’s funny,” the imam continued. “My generation grew up in the Kazakh resettlement camps, and because protein was so scarce, it’s not at all uncommon for men of my age to be short, but I’ve always been ashamed of it. My younger brother used to tell me that my shortness wouldn’t kill me. He was only two centimeters taller than me, but I swear, he lived his entire life in those two centimeters, lording them over me, always asking if I needed help reaching the upper shelves. I wish he were still alive, just so the Feds could arrest him for being too short, too.”

“What can one do?” Ramzan said, shrugging.

“Pray,” the imam said.

The imam held court in the southwest corner of Pit B, perched on the seat of honor, an upturned water pail that had come loose from its cord. Each morning he led prayers and performed ablutions with snow that turned his hands a numb white. He insisted that God, in His mercy, would forgive their unclean state. He had memorized the entire Qur’an and lectured on the nature of evil, which, like a shadow, cannot exist independently of the good it silhouettes. Unlike the sheikh and mujahideen, he never tied politics to Qur’anic verse, and instead explained the righteousness of the faithful and the wisdom of the Prophet and the joyousness of a Paradise that is the summer to the winter of the world. Above all, he spoke of the end times and God’s judgment.

But the interrogator would judge Ramzan before God would, and it was the interrogator’s judgment that he feared. Each day he watched the ritual of men called forth. First the sixty-rung ladder was slid down the wall of the pit, and then the name of the summoned was magnified through a bullhorn speaker, so loud and static-laced it sounded like it truly came from the heavens. If the summoned hesitated, a warning shot was fired. The summoned climbed all sixty rungs to the sixty-first, street level, a place so distant the sky seemed closer. None of the summoned returned. An optimistic man might believe they had been found innocent, released, sent home to their families; but not even Dokka, in whatever comparable perdition he lived, would be capable of such optimism. As soon as the summoned reached the top of the ladder and stepped onto the snowy soil of the sixty-first rung, the imam began the funeral. The service was unlike any Ramzan had attended. No body. No shroud. No friend or neighbor who had known the summoned in any but this desperate condition. They were all dead, just a step or two behind the summoned, and they honored him not as one who departs, but as one who has fully entered. The imam congregated the others around the damp plaque where the summoned had written his name and village. They read the name aloud, softly at first, then growing to a chant that rivaled the zikr, and made prayer from the name and sent it skyward. For twenty-four hours, or as close as they could calculate, the name and village of the summoned was left on the clay wall. At the twenty-fifth, the men gathered around the inscription. Each took a palmful of earth from the thawing ground and pressed it to the wall. Without the body, they could only bury the name, and when they could no longer read it, they knew the man was gone.

“According to hadith, he who nightly recites the sixty-seventh surah will be spared a torturous death,” the blue-eyed imam lectured one evening from the upturned bucket. “You must all know that. You must all count on that. The surah describes the Merciful’s creation of all seven heavens, each one above the other. The Throne of God sits atop the highest heaven, and lanterns adorn the lowest. The lanterns are our stars and comets, this firmament above our very heads.”

He glanced to the sky and lowered his face. He pulled a matchbook from his pocket and struck it. Soft yellow light gloved his hand. “Take heart, my friends; we are already among the righteous. We are already with God.” He raised the match to his face, and his shadow was cast across the Landfill clay. “Here is the lantern of our lowest heaven.”

From somewhere far above them, a name was called through the bullhorn speaker. The imam stepped down from the bucket and walked toward the ladder. “With God,” he said, as he stepped onto that first and lowest rung.

Night fell. The moonlight covered Ramzan like a flimsy bedsheet. He lay on a strip of once-burgundy carpeting, which would capsize in the mud if he sat up, turned over, yawned, or thought too hard. The stars shone much brighter here. The gauzy light of the Milky Way canopied Pit B, the nearest thing to a roof. 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. He held on to this one truth the next morning when his name was called through the bullhorn. He held on to it as he climbed the ladder and saw, framed by the rungs, the names of those to follow. When ordered to disrobe, he complied. When one of the interrogating officers wanted a better view of the cratered skin that had been his scrotum, he complied. Those scars were seven years old. During his first detention in the Landfill, in 1995, in the first war, he had refused to inform. They had wrestled down his pants, shown him the bolt cutters, and still he had said no. Screaming, thrashing, with his manhood half severed, he had said no. He had done that, and now he was ready to start saying yes.

He would have confessed everything, but they didn’t ask, weren’t interested, threatened to cut out his tongue and put pliers to his teeth if he spoke one more f*cking word. Electric wires were wound around his fingers. A car battery was drained into his bones. God might have been watching, but it wasn’t God’s finger on the battery switch. The interrogating officers didn’t speak. Instead he was an instrument they played, performing a duet, and in their own way they conversed through his sobs. They both wore very shiny shoes. That was all he would remember.

He passed out and was resuscitated by buckets of cold water so frequently that even the electricity in his veins couldn’t warm him. The interrogating officers stepped out of the room to have a rest, and new officers entered. He had been in interrogation for three hours and they still hadn’t asked him a single question. In a moment of calm, when the interrogators were asking each other about their weekends, he tried to find the beat of his heart among the burps and squelches, real and unreal, emanating from his blistered body. Before the second car battery was attached, the new interrogator guided Ramzan to the next room. He had trouble walking. He had forgotten torture could be so exhausting. The new interrogator, the one with less shiny shoes, held him upright, using his whole body as a crutch, and helped him walk. He carefully wiped Ramzan’s forehead with a handkerchief before opening the door to the next room. A white wooden table scored with fingernail scratches stood in the center of the room. In this realm of ceased expectation, the aquarium at the far end didn’t surprise him. The blue-eyed imam was brought through another door. He didn’t recognize Ramzan, or if he did, he refused to acknowledge the fact of his shame before a disciple. The imam was held down against the table. One of the guards pulled down his trousers and underwear. The interrogator with less shiny shoes, who had, moments earlier, so tenderly guided Ramzan down the corridor, went to the aquarium. He put on a pair of thick rubber gloves. He reached into the aquarium. The blue-eyed imam didn’t know what was happening. From his vantage, he saw only the wall and the arms holding him. The imam couldn’t see what Ramzan saw. He couldn’t see the interrogator with less shiny shoes approach with the bucking, writhing black belt in his gloved hands, and the interrogator couldn’t see the imam’s face. The imam didn’t understand what was happening, and neither did Ramzan. But when the interrogator with less shiny shoes pressed the eel, teeth first, between the imam’s pale buttocks, it could be nothing else. The room went blurry, then black, and the imam’s shriek followed Ramzan into unconsciousness. When he woke, he was back in the first interrogation room. The interrogator with less shiny shoes crouched behind him. His hands were wet. Ramzan promised everything, and the interrogator, like the parent of a child too old to believe in ghosts, watched him with disappointment, his clear eyes saddened by Ramzan’s sincerity. The interrogator took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, laid the live wires on Ramzan’s chest and mapped the border of their shared humanity. Ramzan offered his soul. He begged to be enslaved. The known universe contracted to the limits of the cement floor, and on it, the interrogator was both man and deity, prophet and god. By ten o’clock the interrogator with less shiny shoes asked his first question. By eleven the electrical wires were unwound from Ramzan’s fingers. By noon he was allowed to dress. By one he was on the FSB payroll. He kept thanking the interrogator with less shiny shoes. Again and again and again, he thanked the man, and never before had he expressed such earnest gratitude. He would have followed the interrogator with less shiny shoes anywhere. It was God he found at the other end of the electrical wires. He was given a satellite phone and a three-hundred-page manual written in German, French, English, and Japanese. He asked after Dokka, asked if he could buy back his friend’s life. Yes, the interrogator with less shiny shoes told him, provided the village could raise a fifty-thousand-ruble ransom within a week; otherwise, the ransom would jump to seventy-five thousand for his corpse. Ramzan reached into one of the many pockets of the overcoat they returned to him, and timidly pulled out the plastic-wrapped bills. No one had thought to check his pockets. “This is only half,” the interrogator with less shiny shoes told him. “But I am, above all, a reasonable man.”

Ramzan waited for Dokka on the concrete stairs of the Refuse Disposal Administration. A hundred meters away, at the bottom of Pit B, his funeral was taking place. Perhaps one of the others sat on the imam’s upturned pail, intoning the name of Ramzan Geshilov, the good and righteous man who had refused to inform and had died for it in the Landfill seven years earlier and only now was having his funeral.

The pebbles at his feet were round and pockmarked. His bare toes curled around them. There was no guilt, no shame, those would come later, but for now, just the blanketing white noise of relief, of this breath, of non-pain. He wore the rings of ten burn marks on his fingers. For the first time in his life he believed without reservation in the existence of a kind and generous God, as desert thirst teaches one to believe in rain. After an hour his red truck turned the corner, followed by a dust billow that swept past when the truck stopped. Dokka’s gasps filled in the open passenger window. Leaving the engine idling, the interrogator with less shiny shoes climbed from the driver’s side. He held up a red plastic bag, like a fish he had proudly caught. Ten fingers floated in the blood. “Your friend gets these back when I get the other twenty-five thousand,” said the interrogator with less shiny shoes.

After Ramzan climbed into the driver’s seat, after he bandaged Dokka’s hands with bandannas and duct tape, he looked to the dash and saw that the interrogator—whose shoes, wet with blood, now shone in the afternoon sun—had left them with a full tank of gas.


And, now, two years later, December 2004, two weeks before Dokka disappeared, when the dial tone severed the Cossack colonel’s threat, and Ramzan packed away the satellite phone, and descended from the cabin of the abandoned logging truck, he did so with the same numbness that had allowed him to drive away from the Landfill two years earlier. Both times he heard Dokka’s beseeching voice, and both times he did his best to ignore it. For the two weeks after the Cossack colonel’s call, the two weeks in which his bowels clenched in a constipated fist, Dokka, not yet a ghost, haunted Ramzan. He ran through the twelve names he had already given the Feds, the twelve who had disappeared because he had become an informer two years earlier at the Landfill. What did a thirteenth matter? What did any one person matter when pounded against the anvil of history? He sat quietly and remembered Dokka as if he had already gone. Dokka always ended his questions with or, as if anticipating he would be denied: Would you like to play chess, or …? Will the G-3 rations be handed out tomorrow, or …? His generosity in opening his home to refugees, and his intransigence in demanding rent, even if payment was no more than a dull button, or a paper clip, or a piece of stationery for his daughter’s souvenir collection. His brown eyes had twice grown dull: first after he lost his fingers, then after he lost his wife. His paddle hands. His slender toes taught the dexterity of a left hand. He could clasp a pencil between his first and second toe, and write in awkward letters so large only a sentence would fit on the page. His genius for chess.

The more Ramzan thought about it, the more awful it became. The Dokka unearthed in no more than a trowelful of memory was enough to break his heart. Dokka insisted on wearing button shirts, and how he dressed each morning, if the girl helped him, if he was too proud to ask his daughter for help, if he woke before dawn to begin the long arduous task of buttoning his shirt with his toes, Ramzan didn’t know. On that frantic truck ride back from the Landfill, Dokka had thanked Ramzan for saving his life. Somehow they had survived and not even the agony of ten amputated fingers had been enough to make him forget his manners.

Two weeks after his first conversation with the Cossack colonel, he trekked back into the woods, back under the ice-encased branches, to the cabin of the corroded logging truck. He called the colonel and gave up Dokka, explaining that Dokka harbored refugees, and also likely rebel sympathizers, though he didn’t add that most Chechens sympathized. He described, truthfully, how Dokka had asked for a weapon when they returned from the Landfill because he had feared he couldn’t protect his family. He described, truthfully, how he had taught Havaa to shoot the Makarov pistol because Dokka no longer had the fingers to pull the trigger. It was the first unembellished account he had provided. The silver Makarov pistol was the sole piece of evidence, and though he gave extenuating circumstances, mitigating factors, and reasonable doubt, the colonel wasn’t interested in building a prosecution against Dokka. The colonel asked about Havaa, and Ramzan, with a tightening in his gut that promised no parole of his captive bowels, understood that when a man is implicated in the assassination of a colonel, his entire family must disappear, even if his entire family is an eight-year-old girl.

When it was done, and Ramzan emerged from the woods after speaking with the Cossack colonel for the second time, he forced himself to walk to Dokka’s house. An ache radiated from his temples. He closed his eyes. What did you do with that gun, Dokka? You stupid man. I can’t buy your life this time. With each step he discarded a piece of himself. Even as he gave up his neighbors, he cocooned himself in the rationale of exigency. Whether eating scavenged food or selling an old friend, they had all shamed themselves to survive. Greed didn’t motivate his informing, at least not primarily; primarily, he informed by necessity, to survive, for his love and hate and above all awe of the power wielded by the interrogating officer with less shiny shoes. But by giving away Dokka and the girl, he had stepped into full accountability, and lost the shadows that had saved him.

A few seconds after the knock, the door opened by the ingenious foot-operated pulley system Dokka had designed from a timber saw band, a shopping-cart wheel, and a stirrup.

Dokka welcomed him, invited him in. Not a trace of suspicion. Dokka, he realized with painful clarity, was the only person, besides the Feds, who would speak with him. The only person who tolerated his voice, who would listen and respond, and it was at that moment, he would later realize, that the universe went silent. He could have pinned the gun on Akhmed, on anyone. Why, this one time, had he told the truth? Again Dokka invited him in. Only then, with Dokka’s hospitality, friendship, and conversation before him, did Ramzan understand why he had inflicted this visit upon himself.

“Oh, no,” Ramzan said, when Dokka beckoned to the kitchen table. “I just stopped by to see if you needed any firewood.”

“You left a heap in the backyard just the other day.”

“Yes, I know, I just wanted to see if …” He bit his lip and glanced to the threshold, scuffed and worn by the feet of hundreds of passing refugees. It would record the footfall of those who would disappear Dokka and his daughter that night. He looked up into Dokka’s brown eyes.

“Are you all right?” Dokka asked. “You look ill.”

I’m sorry, Dokka. Look at you. I’m sorry.

“Ramzan?”

I came to say good-bye, he thought. “I came to say hello,” he said.