A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



21





AT DAYBREAK KHASSAN left for the service road half hoping to intercept Akhmed, but all he found was a fresh set of footprints. Not knowing what else to do, he walked back and forth, urging the dogs to do likewise, and together they turned five kilometers of snow into a riddle no one could solve. Khassan had taken off his gloves, periodically oiling his fingers with butter, and for five kilometers lapping tongues warmed his knuckles. The bald one, Kashtanka, shivered like a prenatal rat, and several times Khassan paused to reattach the blanket tied by twine around the dog’s pale torso. In summer he bathed the dogs. If one fell sick he cared for it. At the village edge, he knelt and they gathered to him, leaping, licking his cheeks, leaning their paws on his back and panting in his ears, diseased, unwashed, his, his, his. When he stood, all six followed with Sharik at the rear. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock. The day stretched out and his path in it lay as meandering and meaningless as the one he had left. Before the bend in the road he saw Akhmed’s house and across from it the gap that had been Dokka’s. If he had seen Akhmed that morning, he would have had to ask permission to visit Ula; if he had asked permission, he might have been denied. It was a better excuse than the frigid air to stay curled under the covers those extra minutes.

The dogs lounged in the snowy lawn to wait for him. He crept through the shadows of the living room, careful not to disturb the curtains, and into the bedroom where Ula slept fitfully. He hesitated to wake her, as if he were no more than her troubled dream and would dissolve if he touched her. Her hair clumped in greasy cords and she smelled of talcum powder. In the kitchen he filled a stew pot with clean water and set it beside the bed. He drew the covers to Ula’s chin, so when she woke she wouldn’t worry about her decency. Then, reluctantly, he rubbed her arm.

“Why are you here?” she asked without even the suggestion of surprise in her face.

“Do you remember me?” he asked, more urgently than he had intended.

She narrowed her eyes.

“I must have lived a thousand lives before this. I was a bird. I was a bug. I lived in the leaves. I don’t know which life is the hallucination.”

“You’re Ula,” he said. “You’re married to Akhmed.”

“Why are you here?” Again she asked the question; again he didn’t answer.

Because his son was the reason she spent the day alone. Because keeping her comfortable, keeping her company, caring for her was the least he could do. Because he was lonely. Because he had forgotten a woman’s companionship. Because the thought of talking himself senile to a pack of feral dogs didn’t appeal to him this early in the day. He looked to the stew pot of water beside the bed. Because she forgot. Because she forgot everything he said. “I’m here to wash your hair.”

She nodded and he peeled back the blanket, her skin whiter than a Russian’s. Sometimes Akhmed carried her outside to the rocking chair and she would sit without rocking, swathed in blankets even in the sticky summer months. Khassan turned her so her hair hung off the side of the bed and into the water. The soap gave a fine lather, and he ran his fingers through the water, and broke the bubbles against her scalp, and washed away the grease and dead skin. After it was washed and rinsed, he wrapped her hair in a towel and propped her upright against the headboard.

“You look like a sheikh with that turban around your head,” he said.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I’m here to finish telling you a story.”

She smiled, pleased with his answer. “You might have to repeat things. You may not know but my memory isn’t what it once was.”

He began where he had stopped, on the steppe, where the next morning he and Mirza boarded the train from Kazakhstan to Chechnya. Eldár was a ghost town when the survivors among its former residents returned. Soviet soldiers tasked with building a new thoroughfare had uprooted all the tombstones from the village cemetery. Khassan entered the village on a street scrawled with epitaphs. Dust added an extra half centimeter of height to the tabletop, the shelves, and floor. The air was too thick to breathe, and so on his first night home, he slept outside. The next morning, under an awning of bulbous gray clouds, he buried the brown suitcase in the back garden.

He was thirty-one years old and enrolled in the history doctoral program at Volchansk State University. On the day of Mirza’s wedding, he barricaded himself in the university library. He had considered kidnapping her, as Chechen grooms had done since time immemorial when failing to receive the approval of a bride’s parents. But he didn’t want to earn a reputation as a bride kidnapper, particularly not among his professors, and besides, it was too late. That afternoon she would marry the botanist she’d been betrothed to since her ninth birthday, and if botany wasn’t bad enough, the man also had a clubfoot and a collection of pressed flowers. All through the day Khassan read thick philosophical tomes, but not one explained the injustice of a world in which he would lose Mirza to a clubfooted botanist with a passion for pressed flowers. The botanist was a decent man, but Khassan was in love, and thus capable of infinite hate.

About the time he began writing the book that would occupy his life, Khassan embarked on a smaller, secondary project of historical reclamation. On notecards he recorded the recollections friends, neighbors, and distant relations had of his family, and pinned them to the walls of what had been his sister’s room. All were small and ordinary—his sister’s hiccupping laugh, his father’s wish for the smallest denominations of change so his pockets would jingle like a rich man’s—but when he read them, alone in the house they once had shared, these unremarkable memories returned with an unforeseen force. When one wall was covered from floor to ceiling, he began populating the room with artifacts of Mirza, as though she too had receded into the past that had claimed his family. He followed her. When, at the bazaar, she purchased a ball of ruby-red yarn, he purchased the tangerine ball adjacent; when she wore a gray cardigan with silver buttons, he found that same gray cardigan, with brass buttons. While the clubfooted botanist collected flowers, Khassan collected his wife. The notecard-papered room soon filled with the headscarves she’d never worn, the cigarettes she’d never smoked, and in the evenings he would flop into the teal-striped armchair, so similar to the navy-striped armchair in her living room, and would read while sipping from a teacup a centimeter narrower than hers, and for a few moments, if lucky, he would forget and she would be standing just out of sight, refilling the samovar, or perhaps knitting a pair of tangerine mittens, and his happiness became the one real artifact in the room.

So it went. Seven years passed before he spoke again to the real Mirza, on an autumn afternoon as uninspiring as every afternoon that autumn, when the blast of a Volchansk bus horn broke the silence. He had just left the library in a frantic search for matches when he heard the punched blare. He turned, and had the Prophet himself stood there, he would have been no more surprised. She wore the gray sweater; the silver buttons really did look better than brass. The flailing ends of a ruby-red scarf tossed at her shoulders. The bus had braked less than a meter from where she stood; he could have bowed down and blackened his lips on that hallowed pavement. Their eyes met. She blushed; not with surprise or astonishment, but with the downcast embarrassment of one who has been caught.

He invited her to the university cafeteria. They picked awkwardly at a pastry plate, and she tried to convince him that she had come to the city for a dental appointment, and he gave assurances that he believed her. But her sheepishness dissolved as quickly as the spoonful of sugar in her second cup of tea. Her short, filed fingernails darted across the partition of silverware. They spoke for two hours, and when the cafeteria lady’s disapproving glances lingered too long, Mirza asked for a tour of the library. She hurried from one stack to the next, wide-eyed and awed, and only later, when he’d checked out a dozen books for her, did he learn that this was her first time in a library. He carried them to his office, which did not, he could safely say, have the same impact. It was, quite literally, the broom closet. The brooms were gone—he’d thrown them out when he’d been assigned the office—but the closet was barely wide enough to accommodate the smallest university desk, which was wedged in so tightly tissue paper couldn’t have slipped between it and the wall. Her days were empty, she confessed; would it be possible to come to the university a few days a week and read in his office? This Mirza was entirely different than the younger one who had smashed Stalin’s plaster nose with the heel of her boot. Perhaps he had changed, too; but he loved her no less.

Twice a week they met at the corner, mindful of oncoming buses. He saw her in the gray sweater with the silver buttons, the blue sweater with the fake ivory buttons, the green sweater with no buttons. They passed a cigarette back and forth, and when he felt the damp of her lips on the filter, the world became big and beautiful. His office could only accommodate one chair, so she would read her books there while he worked in the library. One afternoon he returned a half hour earlier than usual and found her hunched over a huge stack of typewritten paper. From the flipped-over pages, he could see that she was at least two-thirds through his manuscript. A breeze would have broken him. “This is wonderful,” she said, standing, as if baffled that he was capable of anything wonderful. His tilted gaze found her ankles. They were lovely ankles. She praised his book and he embraced her from gratitude rather than lust, but she didn’t let go. Neither did he. She kissed his cheek, his earlobe. For months they’d run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. The circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed. She sat on the desk, between the columns of read and unread manuscript, and pulled him toward her by his index fingers.

It was over in ninety seconds. He walked her to the marshrutka stop. When she boarded the shared taxi-bus, he followed. He sat beside her and angled his leg against hers, and they rode silently, two strangers with a secret held like a sheet of paper between their knees. She met him at the back of his house and at the door she stood red-cheeked and shivering, and he took her hands. She was his home. The only land that bound him. He led her to the notecard-papered room and didn’t have to explain a thing. She saw the yarn and knew. She unwound the ruby scarf from her neck and added it to his collection. This time they undressed before making love. The birthmark he remembered so vividly was still there, a purple ink-spill across her kidney, the only part of her that hadn’t aged. The affair lasted another eleven months, until she became pregnant. For several years she had tried with her husband, who had resorted to root-based aphrodisiacs brewed by an elderly widow—after the story spread, the widowed herbalist received enough business to become the wealthiest woman in the village, and soon received a number of marriage proposals herself—and whether the father was he or the root-remedied botanist, Khassan never knew. Akhmed was born on July 1, 1965; that was all that mattered. Mirza died when she was thirty-nine. Akhmed was seven. The cancer in her stomach was just eight months old. After she passed, Khassan and the botanist became friends. Both shared the same object of love and loss, and though they never discussed it, Khassan suspected the botanist knew. The botanist allowed him to be an uncle to Akhmed, a figure whom Akhmed could love without having to rely on, and in this way, regardless of true paternity, he was a better father to Akhmed than he ever was to Ramzan.

“Even you know that, Ula. You just have to look at how each turned out.”


When Khassan returned home, Ramzan was sitting at the table, though sitting generously described his posture, which slumped so low the chair back loomed over his head. The sharp reek of liquor coated the air. Perhaps it had dissolved his son’s spine.

Teetering against the table, Ramzan kept his voice steady; he still hadn’t seen his father at the door. “There’s nothing to eat and I can’t shit. I don’t understand it, do you? How can I be constipated when you’ve given all the meat to those filthy dogs? The sleeping pills. Maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe December has frozen my bowels.” He spoke in the vacant monotone of a man who knew no one was listening, and it was awful for Khassan to hear his son’s voice, whittled by loneliness, addressing an empty chair. A few years earlier, Khassan hadn’t been able to get him to answer a yes-or-no question; now no question Ramzan posed and answered was so simple.

If not for Ula, Khassan would have shut the door and returned to his dogs. He would have followed them through the alleyways, through the refuse-strewn gutters, to the thin strips of twig shadow that made mazes on the forest floor, until their upturned snouts pointed to him, eager, hungry. If not for Ula, he would have ignored his son’s voice in the morning and at midday and in the evening, when he said good-bye to his pack and returned home to prepare his insulin shot. The day would have silently joined the hundreds of others, if not for Ula. But he had spoken to Ula, and the relief of unburdening still lifted him, and today, he decided, would be the day he spoke to the one person who was waiting to hear from him.

“You can’t shit?” he asked softly. He had forgotten the tone of chastisement. “It could be the sleeping pills you take to fall asleep among ghosts. It could be Alman, or Musa, or Omar, or Aslan, or Apti, or Mansur, or Aslan the Hirsute, or Ruslan, or Amir, or Amir Number Two, or Isa, or Khalid, or even Dokka. Probably Dokka.” He layered his voice with all the animosity it could sustain. He had never spoken this way. For one year, eleven months, and four days the pleas, admonitions and prayers he had wanted to utter never left his lungs. The weight of all he hadn’t said hung like a dead organ in his chest. He could barely breathe. He, too, knew what it was to have waste you cannot dislodge.

Ramzan’s face lit with surprise. “I’ve been waiting to hear you say that,” he said. A beaming grin stripped the shadows from his features. Khassan’s silence had been so long and lonesome that to Ramzan this voice of denouncement was both victory and absolution. The sound of his father’s voice was all that mattered; its message was irrelevant. “But you can’t speak to me like that,” he added, clasping tightly to the thread and hoping argument would unspool more of his father’s voice.

“You’re telling me how to speak?” Khassan’s temples throbbed. “A son tells his father? A boy? A …” He stopped before belittling Ramzan’s manhood.

“You think you live ten centimeters off the ground, but who gets you the food you throw away to mutts?” Ramzan spoke with slow, savage joy, pinning each word to his father. “In fifty kilometers I couldn’t find enough aspirin to dull a hangover, but every other week I bring you insulin. You should be grateful. I allow you both to survive and to resent me for it.”

Khassan’s breaths couldn’t come fast enough. A dull, vise-like clarity crushed whatever fatherly affection survived the silence. For all the lies Ramzan lived by, he was still capable of speaking the truth, and it was for the truth, rather than the lies, that Khassan hated him. He had once held his hand over Ramzan’s bassinet and the boy’s fingers had wound around his like little vines. He had once lifted the boy and seen miracles in his deep, unblinking eyes. “You are nothing to me,” he finally said.

But Ramzan, still grinning, still unaccountably joyous, said, “Just like your book? Are you going to carry me to the woods and burn me?”

“I treasured that book more than anyone.”

“I know, more than my mother.”

“She knew exactly who I was when she accepted my proposal.”

“She thought you were Albert Einstein, that the honor of your genius would compensate for your neglect. You treat your dogs better.”

“That’s not true,” Khassan said, uncertain how the conversation had turned against him.

“A genius, she thought. As if Albert Einstein would forget his wife’s birthday.”

What had possessed him to speak? Two more silent years would hurt less than one more minute of this. He had expected Ramzan’s vehemence, his blather, but hadn’t expected his concision. Hadn’t expected that the son who had destroyed his reputation, his name, his faith in human goodness, would find new ways to ruin him. More than his paternal failures, it was the grinning joy his son took in describing them that Khassan would remember. Eyes skewed with jubilation. Khassan recognized them as his own. It was the conversation he’d feared since Ramzan’s birth. Since the woman who wasn’t Mirza had said, in an exhausted ache, a word that should have wrapped them together: “Ours.” Since he had held him, no more than a bald head and blankets, and wished the child in his arms were Akhmed. You poor thing. You never had a chance.

“I haven’t been a good father, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know,” and he kept repeating it, the needle stuck on this one proclamation he stated and restated so Ramzan wouldn’t. “But I never hurt you,” he said finally. “I never laid a finger on either of you.”

“You were a mouth that only opened to eat. Just like now. And what’s worse is you squandered what you had. You were physically capable of having a wife and son, but you didn’t want us.”

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” he said. Even in apology he couldn’t name it. March 2, 1995, eight days after Ramzan’s twenty-third birthday, he’d never forget the day. The transport truck didn’t slow down when Ramzan was pushed from the back. The adult diapers they’d dressed him in were maroon. Finding his boy, right there, in the road, my god, his horror had left him speechless. Akhmed had treated Ramzan’s wound and was the only other villager to know of it. For weeks Khassan had tended to his son, taking him meals in bed, reading him pulp fiction, coaxing the spark of life from his dull, brutalized eyes. Ramzan had never recovered, not fully, not physically, not existentially. The Landfill had snapped him as cleanly as a branch and all the tea and small talk in Chechnya wouldn’t put his halves back together. He never spoke of what had happened there. His pride for what he had done and his disgrace for the consequence were so entwined that he couldn’t even tell his father that he had been castrated for refusing to inform on his neighbors. “I mourn the life you weren’t able to experience,” Khassan said. “For the father you might have become, for all our sakes.”

“And I mourn the father you might have been,” Ramzan said. The taunt peeled from his voice and behind it lay unvarnished, unfathomable need. Khassan’s face felt so heavy. He had expected false accusations, dissemblance; he hadn’t expected honesty. The floorboards ached as he turned to the door. In his head he heard the jingle from the television show that had followed the nightly news in the seventies, a stupidly cheerful song, sung by collective laborers, whose melody had once worked on his ears like a reverse alarm clock, a ringing that had let him know it was time to sleep, to rest, to dream; and though he hadn’t thought of the song in years, it came to him now, every note, and he hummed it beneath his breath as he held the doorframe, and wanted to die.

“You think I’m selfish, but I’m not,” Ramzan said, behind him, with unbearable sincerity. “I meant what I said about the insulin. This will all be over, eventually. We just need to survive it. You can’t survive without insulin. We both need food, right?”

“I’m seventy-nine years old. Seventy-nine. The rest of my life is not worth the rest of Havaa’s or Dokka’s or Akhmed’s.”

“I’m not holding a gun to anyone’s head.”

“Ramzan.” Khassan sighed. A wave of exhaustion seeped through him. “You’re putting the bullets in the chamber.”

“I’m just like you! You said you never laid a finger on my mother or me. I’ve never laid a finger on anyone either!”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Just a name over the phone?”

“That’s all!”

“Then another name, no? And another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and then Dokka?” He found his own bewilderment reflected in Ramzan’s eyes. His stupid, stupid child didn’t understand what he was doing or why any more than Khassan did.

“It was for us. So that we’ll survive together. You’re the only person I have. You’re my family.” It was the saddest, sweetest thing he’d ever heard. In another world he would have embraced Ramzan, kissed his forehead, held him so that his son’s heart beat indistinguishably against his own.

He walked to the table, cupped Ramzan’s shoulder. His grip was strong and consoling. He imagined Ibrahim on the mountaintop and the verses returned unbidden: My son, I dreamt that I was sacrificing you.

“You speak of family; then let Akhmed and Havaa be.”

“I know you want him for your son. I’ve known that my whole life.”

“And so what if he is, Ramzan?” Khassan asked, clutching Ramzan’s shoulder. “What then?”

Ramzan’s face went flat, cold, depthless. “None of us is bound to anyone by so trivial a distinction. Do you think paternity even matters? No, Father, no. We are the children of wolves. That’s all, Father. He could be your son, your brother, your nephew, your neighbor, your friend, and I wouldn’t save him.”

“And yet you save me. What a waste.”

Khassan walked to the door, opened it to the wind. He looked back. Ramzan watched him, as frozen and impenetrable as a winter pond. You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other’s miseries. It is that which makes us family.

Outside, his dogs were waiting for him.