A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



24





HAD HE SLEPT on the divan, he would have seen the letter to Havaa. Had the side lamp still held even a spark of electricity, he would have seen the letter to Havaa. Had he risen an hour later, when dawn threw its bright beams across the floor, he would have seen the letter to Havaa. But he hadn’t seen it, and now Havaa was galloping across the waiting room, her face a flower head, a moon, a cannonball, and then it was there, punching into his gut, knocking the breath from his lungs, and only then, with her arms belted around his waist, did he remember the letter from Khassan which he had forgotten to bring.

“You’re here,” she proclaimed to his hip bone.

“Where else would I be?” He didn’t fully appreciate what the girl knew, that here was a special, unlikely place. She thought he could have disappeared by now, too. That he could be with her father, wherever that was, and whatever that meant. But he was here. The sharp sting of bleach preceded Sonja’s footsteps and they both looked to the door before she appeared. Her bright white scrubs could belong to a doctor in Moscow or London or Berlin. Should he ever disturb a sleeping land mine, or cross the path of a bullet, he would want to be treated by a doctor wearing those scrubs.

The previous night, as he had sketched the portrait of her sister, he had fought the urge to lean in so his left knee would touch her right. Two years had passed since he last touched a knee like that. And before that? When had he touched Ula’s knees with anything like desire? Caretaking had refined his passion, once as raw and combustible as crude oil, into a dimmer, longer-burning love.

“So this is the Tolstoy book?” She nodded to the chair where Hadji Murád lay. That, he hadn’t forgotten.

“Yes, the one he wrote about Chechnya.”

Pulling back a stray lock of hair, she drew a question mark around her ear. He handed her the book. She flipped to the last page.

“What are you doing? Don’t read the last page.”

“I always read the last page first,” she said, without looking up.

“That ruins everything. The whole book is working toward the last page.”

Her lips pursed to a pebble. The paper cover bent in her grip, as if she were steadying her hands. The amphetamines? But she spoke in a flat, uninspired tone. “If it’s not an ending I think I’ll like, then I won’t read the book.” She handed it back to him.

“Are you serious?”

“He gets decapitated on the last page. That’s not an ending I want to read.”

She was harder to pin down than the last pickle in the jar. Here he had thought he would impress her, thought they would have conversations about the book’s images and themes, a literary salon in a city without electricity.

“But it’s the great book. It’s a century and a half old and still the best book about the first and second wars.”

“Why would I want to read what I’m living?”

“You prefer escape?”

“You’ve been here four days,” she said. “Keep coming back, and we’ll see if you still think books are worth arguing over.”


Akhmed, Deshi, and Havaa went to the weekly aid distribution point, so shortly after eight, when a man was carried in with a tailpipe lodged in his chest, Sonja received him alone. The man, an army contractor, had been plagued by asthma for all of his twenty-one years. After living his life as a drowning man, his final breath, nineteen seconds after the car bomb detonated, entered him effortlessly, the easiest inhalation of his life, through the metal trachea jutting from his chest, and into his collapsed lung.

But Sonja only knew him as a corpse. The handful of amphetamines that had propelled her through a sleepless night lingered in her veins. She wheeled him into the trauma ward on a hospital bed, and sat beside him as moths fluttered overhead. His head lolled to the side and his eyelids snapped open. She began speaking with the corpse—who was, in all respects, a wonderful listener—and became so engrossed in the hallucination she lost track of the real world behind her where Akhmed’s footsteps sounded in the corridor.

“Honor the dead?” Sonja was saying, her face level with that of the corpse. Akhmed watched from the doorway. “Yes, but only if the dead are honorable. No, of course I’m not casting aspersions. It’s okay if you feel rotten. You just died. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Now, I must ask if you can see my sister down there. Yes, I know it’s crowded, but please have a look. I can wait. And while you’re at it, would you save me a chair? Oh, I should have known it would be standing room only.” Akhmed couldn’t see her face, but her exhausted voice was enough to make him ache. “You say you’ve had trouble breathing?” she said, speaking into the tailpipe as if into a microphone. “It appears you have a bronchial growth.” When she took the man’s face in her hands, Akhmed stepped into the room to save her from whatever was happening inside her head. “There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man,” she told the corpse. “But I can tell we would have had a grand time, you and I.”

Two hands, on her shoulders, pulled her gently from the corpse before it could answer, before it could tell her if Natasha was down there with him.

“Not you, too,” Akhmed said, wearily. His skin was a degree or two warmer than the corpse’s. His navy pes, a size too small, still roosted on the back of his head. “Someone here has to stay sane.”

The big oaf led her to the office that was her bedroom. He was like a pool of water she’d fallen into; she hit, hit, hit and he was still there, around her. She’d been awake forever. The flap of moths was overwhelming. In the office, he pushed her into the overstuffed executive chair. “You need to rest,” Akhmed said, in a tone of authority obviously an imitation of her own.

“And who do you think you are to order me around?” she asked. Already she missed the corpse. He was a much better conversationalist.

“I think I’m someone who slept last night.” He scanned the bookcase, selected the thickest book from the bottom shelf, and dropped it on the desk. “A medical dictionary. If you won’t read Tolstoy, read this. It will put you to sleep in no time.”

When the door closed behind him, she scrutinized the dictionary, wary of subterfuge. She hadn’t opened the book in years. A surgeon of her skill had no need. Slowly, fearing further hallucinations hid between the covers, she opened the book. It was just as dull as she remembered.

But she was already in, and the crowded little script calmed her. The definitions had the stately reassurance of orthodoxy, reminding her of the prewar years, when she had relied on the reference book to complete her weekly assignments, when she had sat at her desk, her ears plugged with cotton balls, as that awful thudding Natasha called music had pounded from the next room, when she still believed the meaning of a thing was limited to a few tersely worded clauses, but nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all other things to fulfill its own.

Her fingers shadowed the thin pages and the words appeared written on her skin: the average weight of a hand, interpretations of a knuckle. A shawl of post-high drowsiness wrapped itself around her. She hated to admit it, but Akhmed had been right. Then, halfway through the book, at the bottom of the 1, 322nd page, circled in red ink:

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

The breaking sky could release no more striking a pronouncement. She repeated it to the unmade bed, to Havaa’s still-packed suitcase, to the desk of the former geriatrics director. Not once had she ever marked a dictionary, but here this was, encircled by the same red pen she’d kept on her nightstand. She stumbled into the corridor, reached out but couldn’t find a wall. Her legs felt as stiff as they had been on the day she had tried to make her own trousers, but when she lost her balance, when she fell forward, Natasha wasn’t there to catch her.


When she woke on the floor, the insides of her cheeks felt like the insides of lemon rinds. She rubbed her temples and checked the unlit overhead lights, but, thankfully, the ceiling was still. In the storage room she pulled a pack of Marlboros from the fresh carton. The crinkle of plastic wrap followed her down the corridor. At the door the one-armed guard declined her offer of a cigarette. Shards gleamed in his ashtray. His name was Mohmad. He didn’t particularly enjoy this job, but he knew enough to know that any man was fortunate to have work these days, particularly amputees. In Ingushetia he had an eleven-year-old daughter he didn’t know about, who was waiting for him to call. In two and a half years he would hear her voice for the first time.

She smoked three cigarettes before Akhmed appeared behind her, warming his hands around a mug of steaming water. “Marlboro?” she offered. He lit the cigarette from her ember.

“You look much better,” he said. The corners of his lips inched toward a grin.

“Shut up.”

“Nothing like a little beauty rest.”

“I’ll light your scrubs on fire if you say another word.”

The incipient smile sagged into an expression of surrender. “They came back for him,” he said. “Whoever dropped him off.”

“Bringing a dead man to a hospital. Do they think we’re magicians?”

“Medical miracles are the only miracles most of us will ever see.”

He had her on that one. “You’re a believer,” she said. That explained his incompetence as well as anything.

“I believe in some things.”

“In God.”

He shook his head.

“But I’ve seen you pray at noon.”

“That’s like asking if I believe in gravity,” he said. “It doesn’t require belief.”

“I’ve always thought Marx’s view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.”

“If you step on a land mine,” Akhmed said, “the crutch becomes the leg.”

Westminster Abbey was the only steeple she’d ever stood beneath, a tourist guidebook, rather than a prayer book, in hand. God, like everything kind and good, lived in London. She dropped her gaze to her hands and picked at the white calluses that scalloped her palm.

“My goodness. These belong to a lumberjack,” he said, lifting her hands, examining them with a mixture of awe and pity. “Woodsman hands.”

“I hate my hands.” Aloud it sounded as small and petty as it had in her head, but they were horrid things, these hands, a crime for which she felt the immediate relief of confession. “How could such things grow from a woman’s wrist?”

“You’ve chosen the wrong profession. If not a lumberjack, you would have made a marvelous strangler.” With the unexpected sensitivity of a surgeon, his fingers drifted up her forearm.

“I keep thinking in Latin,” she said. He paused on her ulna. “The names of bones.”

“Latin is a problem with which I have no experience.” He squeezed her bicep. “You should think about anatomy like I do. This is your arm. It’s only your arm. This is your shoulder, nothing less than your shoulder. Your neck is only your neck.” His finger rose to a chin that was simply her chin, cheeks that were her cheeks, a nose that belonged to no one else. “And lips,” he said, leaning to her. “Our lips.”

A moment and she pulled away, frowning back at the hospital and smoothing out her scrubs. Of the varying shapes of love, grief, anger, and terror that had inhabited these scrubs, optimistic anticipation was a new one. She looked to his big, stupid face, blushed, and turned away. What would Deshi say if she saw her like this? The shock might very well make her act on her ten-year-long threat to retire.

“I’m going to the fourth floor,” she said, finally. “You could meet me there in a half hour.”

“Even though I’m not a very good doctor.”

“Even though you are criminally incompetent.”

He opened his hands. Not one callus.

“Don’t make fun of my lumberjack hands.”

“I’m not,” he said.

“You are,” she said.

He squinted across the parking lot to the armored truck, thinking of the previous day, perhaps, how she had ambushed him in Grozny, how repellant a woman she was for putting a gun to his head one day and her lips to his the next. When he asked for the keys to the truck, claiming he had forgotten his scarf in the passenger seat, she felt too relieved to dwell on the fact that he hadn’t worn a scarf the day before.


Their footsteps from the previous evening were still evident in the dust of the fourth-floor maternity ward. Natasha’s murals seemed to study her, as if she were their creation. Unsettled at the thought of standing alone among these ghosts, she went to the corridor and opened the storage room door for fresh air. The smashed city stretched to the frozen river. International law prohibited the targeting of medical facilities, which explained why, in a city where eighty percent of freestanding structures had been flattened, the hospital still stood. The shell that had crashed into this very room had been an act of reprisal rather than war. Natasha had collapsed with the walls, fallen with Maali, kept aloft by momentary updrafts, then plunged ever downward, until the earth had yawned open and she had entered it. Sonja knew the two had been coconspirators and confederates, sisters to ambitious, demanding women. She knew Natasha hadn’t been right after Maali’s tumble. She didn’t know that Maali, eighteen minutes Deshi’s junior, had lived her sixty-seven years in those eighteen minutes, finding room there for every dream, fear, and exasperation, setting her watch eighteen minutes ahead so she could pretend she had Deshi’s experience, always wondering what her life would have been like if she were just eighteen minutes older. Natasha had loved Maali for this as much as for her demented enthusiasm for amputation, but Sonja didn’t know it. In four months, when cleaning out a file cabinet, she would find municipal buildings drawn on the back of payroll forms. Long, uneven lines of Maali’s penmanship disfigured Natasha’s sketches, her critiques sometimes playful, sometimes damning, but always invested, and in those sketches, framed and hanging in the waiting room, as they would be within an afternoon, Sonja would see what the two younger sisters meant to each other.

The stairwell door slammed shut. They walked to each other until their silhouettes converged. In the darkness she found his eyebrows with her thumbs. They went to the third maternity bed, and she sat on the edge, and he stood between her legs. Her thighs clasped his hip bones. From the far side of the room the lantern dimly bathed them.

“I think there is a bee on my behind,” she said.

“You’re still hallucinating,” he said.

“You should slap it away, just in case,” she said.

She reached under his shirt, spread her hand across his abdomen, and tried not to think of which organ lay beneath which finger. “This is your stomach,” she said, mimicking his tenor. “Not your brother’s stomach, not Stalin’s stomach, but your stomach.”

“You make me sound like a serious man.”

“You certainly aren’t that.”

They undressed by degree, a button here, shirtsleeve there, making a show of their shortcomings, their bodies androgynous with deprivation. It was remarkable to trust someone enough to be silly like this. She lay back. It was dark. Her lips found his.


“Good night to you and your ugly nose,” Deshi told Akhmed as he was leaving. A buoyant confidence swelled in him and as he stepped into the navy twilight and trekked toward the village he finally felt part of the top tenth percentile. Never had he been so honored by being addressed in the second person.

But the radio antenna listing from the hood of Ramzan’s truck, parked before his house, punctured the sweet feeling inside him. Akhmed smiled sadly and trudged forward, balling his fists in his coat sleeves. The coat was fifty-eight years old, canvas military grade, about the only thing the Red Army had ever done right. It kept him as warm as it had kept his father and his father’s father and the idea of three generations sheltered by the same stiff, unyielding fabric gave him greater comfort than the coat itself ever could.

Again Ramzan questioned him, and again he claimed ignorance.

“You disappoint me, my friend,” Ramzan said. Ramzan’s coat was six months old. It would never warm another set of shoulders. “You’re a doctor. Think logically. Think about your wife. Think about yourself. Think about your silence. It’s reckless.”

“I owe Dokka my silence more than I owe you anything,” Akhmed said.

“Owe? We’re beyond obligation,” Ramzan said. “We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are. I know you think you are being noble, that this is some terrific act of sacrifice. You probably believe that because you f*cked Dokka’s wife two years ago, you owe it to him to save his child. But let me be clear, Akhmed. You don’t. She is not yours.” Ramzan’s voice cracked, and he steadied himself with two deep breaths. It wasn’t an act. “I know you think I’m a traitor and a coward, Akhmed. And you’re right. But that doesn’t make me wrong. I’m telling you this because we were friends. You don’t owe this to Dokka.”

Akhmed hadn’t lusted for Esiila before the wars, hadn’t thought of her as more than the wife of his closest friend. She could have been anyone. He had just wanted to hear his name breathed in his ear, a body warm and damp beneath him, whole and alive and a world away from pain. Was it such a sin? No, of course not. But Dokka. There was Dokka. Now he stood up for them, as if he were a hero rather than a hypocrite, as if he hadn’t betrayed, dishonored, and broken the family whose last living member he now offered his life to save. Ramzan stood across from him, but he knew that in their hearts, they stood on the same side.

Pale moonlight fell across his snowy boot tracks, and Akhmed suddenly saw the fragility of the plan he’d designed over the past day. The girl would be safe, he had assumed, if he severed the link between the village and the city, and the link was him. But this meant trusting that Sonja would care for the girl. It meant trusting an erratic, overextended surgeon, who had put a gun to his back a day earlier, with the girl’s life. It meant pushing through his endless doubts and trusting, however misguidedly, the decency he believed was buried inside Sonja.

“Why do they want the girl, Ramzan? You still haven’t tried to explain.”

“Revenge,” Ramzan said flatly. “Dokka f*cked up.”

“But what did he do?”

“Akhmed. So many questions. If you had learned to keep your mouth shut, your eyes on your feet, you would have had a happier life.”

“They already have Dokka, Ramzan. Why do they need the girl?”

Ramzan shook his head. “Because the life of a Russian colonel doesn’t equal the life of a Chechen arborist.”

“You can’t mean that—”

“A few days after we returned from the Landfill, Dokka asked me for a pistol. He wanted to be able to protect his family, so I gave him one of the Makarovs I’d kept from our final f*cked-up gun run. That same Makarov was later used to assassinate a colonel.”

“But Dokka couldn’t have been an insurgent. He couldn’t hold a gun in his hand, much less fire it!”

“That doesn’t matter when the serial number on the pistol used to kill a colonel sequentially matches the serial numbers of the guns those lost soldiers took off us before they left us at the Landfill. The Feds made the connection. I couldn’t give Dokka up, because they already had him.”

“But why do they want the girl?”

Ramzan gave him a sad smile. “You know the saying, As the son inherits from the father, so the father inherits from the son? The Feds have made it official policy. There is a campaign to disappear not only suspected insurgents but their relatives as well. The idea being that you are less likely to go into the woods with the rebels if you know that your house will burn and your family will disappear. Rebel recruitment has plummeted in recent months. It’s part of the new hearts-and-minds strategy. It’s how they will win the war on terror. They will kill Havaa and call it peace.”

Akhmed’s head hummed with the shock of how not shocked he was. What Ramzan said made sense to him. He understood why the Feds would want to kill a child. Accompanying that understanding was a second, equally shameful recognition: this incomprehensible war would take from him even the humanity to find it incomprehensible.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I’m trying to save you.”

When Ramzan returned from the Landfill the first time, with that wound between his legs, Akhmed had saved him. They never said it, Ramzan never thanked him for it, but they both knew that the week he spent treating the infection was just that. If a stranger were to put his ear in the space between them, he would hear the dull roar of that knowledge.

“Isn’t it too late for that?” Akhmed asked.

“No, not yet.”

“Yes, it is.”

“If you give up like this you really will be the stupidest doctor in Chechnya.”

Akhmed allowed himself a smile. This was the Ramzan he remembered. “That honor has been mine for some time.”

“You probably think you are a hero or a martyr, don’t you?” Ramzan asked. “You probably think you are a saint for refusing the Feds. I know, Akhmed, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that by refusing me you’re refusing them. But let me tell you, my friend, I am nothing. I am no one. I am so much easier to refuse than those to come. You’re thinking that you will be as silent to them as you are to me. But you won’t, Akhmed. You just won’t. You might believe that you will be brave, that you will hew to your convictions, but you have never been to the Landfill. They won’t ask you where the girl is. They will make you bring her to them, and you will watch yourself do it. Look at me, Akhmed. Once I was like you, and soon you will be like me. They are in the business of changing lives, Akhmed, and they are the very best.”

This was his greatest fear. Could he stay silent? Could he withstand what awaited him? He told himself that his love for the girl would fortify him against any torture, but this, like so much of what he told himself, was a lie. After all, he was squeamish at the sight of blood; what would he say when lying in a puddle of his own? But he saw no other way. He would pray for the strength to stay silent, for a quick heart attack, and leave the rest to God.

“You remember in ninety-five, my first trip to the Landfill?” asked Ramzan. “It was my twenty-third birthday and I had the bad luck of bicycling to the city on the day of a rebel ambush. That’s the only reason they took me. I was a young Chechen man on the day rebels decide to attack the Feds outside of Gudermes, so they took me to the Landfill and you know what they did. You stitched me back together. For so long I worried you or my father would ask why it happened, and I was always afraid of it, afraid of the asking and how I would answer. But neither of you ever did. You’re both too polite. But don’t you want to know what happened? You’re always asking why, Akhmed, so let me tell you. It happened because they asked me to inform on my friends and neighbors, Akhmed. When they threatened to beat me, I said nothing. When they threatened to electrocute me, I said nothing. When they threatened to castrate me, I said nothing. I said nothing, Akhmed. Whatever you think of me, you remember that once I said nothing when a wiser man would have sung. And the interrogators, they couldn’t believe it. They called in others to examine me. I was there on the floor, and above their faces were dark ovals silhouetted by the ceiling lights. They had beaten me hard and I couldn’t hear right, but I kept saying no, with every breath I had. The only reason they let me go, the only reason they didn’t shoot me right there was out of perverse respect, some sort of professional courtesy. But I wish they had shot me, Akhmed, because the good part of me died there, and all this, everything since, has been an afterlife I’m trying to escape.”

Akhmed had never been in a fight before, but right then he had to concentrate on controlling his hands. On their own they would have strangled Ramzan to keep him from saying one more word. Whether this was confession or ruse, Akhmed couldn’t say, but the anguish was there for him to see in Ramzan’s face. “Why did you start saying yes?”

Ramzan looked like a small, trembling package tied off beneath his folded arms. “A second war. A second trip to that place. I knew what was coming. I knew it never stops. They put a shame inside you that goes on like a bridge with no end, the humiliation, the f*cking humiliation of knowing that you are not a human being but a bundle of screaming nerve endings, that the torture goes on even when the physical hurt quiets. People treated me differently when I came back the first time. They gossiped, told rumors about me because I still lived with my father, couldn’t marry, and then I was a f*cking joke to those for whom I’d sacrificed a wife, children, family, a life. When the Feds took Dokka and me to the Landfill, when I said yes, when I told them what they wanted, when I agreed to inform on anyone, I wished I had done it in ninety-five, in the first war, that is my biggest regret. If I had said yes from the beginning, I would still be a man. I’m not asking for your friendship or forgiveness, Akhmed, just tell me you understand. Please give that much to me.”

Ramzan stepped forward to embrace Akhmed, and in the moment before he came to his senses, before he planted his hands on Ramzan’s chest and gave him a sharp shove to the ground, Akhmed wanted to take Ramzan in his arms, as a patient, as an old friend, and fix all that had gone wrong in him.

“I don’t,” he said as he pushed Ramzan. Ramzan tumbled and the next moment Akhmed knelt over him, fist raised, ready to beat Ramzan as the interrogators had beaten him, for what he had done to Dokka, to Havaa, to the entire village, to himself. Ramzan covered his face with his hands and tried to crawl away on his elbows. “Don’t hurt me, don’t do it, don’t hurt me, mercy, have mercy,” he pleaded, eyes closed, collapsing into a fetal position, weeping into the brown snow. Akhmed stood, disgusted with himself, with the man at his feet, with the war that had reduced them to this. “I don’t understand,” he said, but Ramzan could hear nothing above his own calls for mercy.


After checking on Ula, he drew closed the blackout curtains and lit the living room oil lamp. Khassan’s letter lay on the divan, where he had left it the previous evening. How could he have forgotten it? He really was an idiot. Through the closed door he could still hear Ramzan’s faint crying. The previous night Khassan had asked his advice, and he thought he had understood what was the right and honorable answer, but no longer. Crammed in his jacket pocket were the two letters of safe passage he had taken from the glove box of Sonja’s truck that afternoon on the pretext of searching for a nonexistent scarf. The glove box held dozens of letters of safe passage and he hoped she wouldn’t miss or need these two. He slipped them into the larger manila envelope that had held Khassan’s letter, added a one-word note to Khassan, then sealed and addressed it: For K, 56 Eldár Forest Service Road.

Back in the bedroom, he undressed Ula. He carried her to the bathroom and the water rose, so slightly, when he set her in the tub. She had never learned to swim. As a girl she would scoop carrots from her mother’s stew and feed them to the rabbit that lived in the back garden; her mother trapped the rabbit one autumn afternoon and made stew from it, and for all their time together, Ula refused to explain to Akhmed her aversion to carrots. He washed her neck and shoulders. He lifted her elbow and scrubbed the divot of soft underarm hair. Her mother had spoken of lust as if it were a loaded firearm, and when, one summer, the big-eared boy who lived across the village transformed into something right-sized and beautiful, she concealed her affection, holstered it to her chest, because she knew the shame of it could kill her mother. He washed her elbows and wrists. With a toothbrush he scoured the rims of her fingernails. He washed her nape and her back and slalomed his fingers down her spine. Her older brother was born touched, kept in a room with the curtains always drawn shut, this wailing, incomprehensible heart beating against the walls of the family house. For nearly as long as she had feared him, she had been ashamed of her fear, and wanted to reach through his madness to the part of him that could, at times, be so gentle, and embrace it. He washed her chest, the skin that had been breasts. He washed her hips, her stomach, swirling soap into her navel. She had been so afraid of Akhmed when she met him for the first time, on a June morning, on her porch, the branches clutched by blackbirds. In the eight years since their betrothal he had become a local celebrity. He could have any girl. He could have anyone. Her mother invited him in without fear of embarrassment because a cousin had taken her older brother for the day. He washed her pubis, vagina, and anus. He washed her thighs. He washed her knees. He washed her calves. For as far back as anyone could remember, she had wanted to be a mother. He washed the tops of her feet, her soles, all ten toes and the gaps between. She would have had eight girls, treated them like the very reason her lungs drew breath, whether they were normal or touched, whether they ate carrots or not, she would have loved them, and given herself to them; she would have given each a pet rabbit; a mother, she would have been a mother if her body and Akhmed’s had only worked the way they were supposed to work. When he finished, they were both clean.

He wrapped a towel around her shoulders and with long, vigorous caresses, rubbed her dry. He couldn’t stop worrying that she might catch a cold. Four hours earlier, he had come inside Sonja, and now he was brushing his wife’s hair. Nagging doubt was the nearest he came to guilt. He looked into the eyes of the wife that had become his ward. A smile was buried in his beard. He had never loved her more.

He helped her into a nightgown, pulled the covers to her chin, and lay beside her. “Any visitors today?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I was waiting for your father, but he never came.”

So much of his marriage was a disappointment—childlessness, ailing health—but they were blessings, now, in the end, when he had to let go. Yet he’d grown to depend on the act of longing. He performed his nightly ablutions and prayed, but the ritual was empty, mechanized, and he recited the words as he would a recipe. The pearl of faith had dissolved, and at its core was a sand grain of doubt, and he held on to it, knowing that doubt, like longing, could sustain him.

Later that night the wind carried the low rumble of approaching trucks. He was fully dressed, wearing thick wool socks and his fifty-eight-year-old coat, because wherever they took him would be cold. By the time the trucks pulled up to his house, he’d already loaded the syringe with enough heroin to stop the heart of a healthy man. Her long, slow breaths filled the room. He took the time to disinfect her skin. Outside, truck doors slammed shut. Praise Allah for her hallucinations. Without them he wouldn’t have the strength to push the plunger and forever numb that precious vein. But she was convinced that his ten-years-dead father had visited her this week, so even when her eyelids flashed open, and a bleary, misapprehending plea poured forth, he looked away, because a woman who spoke with ghosts was nearly one herself and would forgive him for taking her the rest of the way.

Her breaths slowed. Her eyes drifted to the left, to whatever came next. He held her hand. It stayed warm. Once, three months after their wedding, he had held that hand through two kilometers of sunshowers that had left them drenched and shining and purified to each other. He closed her eyes. He put a small bandage on the pulseless vein. This was it. God could ask no more of him. The fists of the security forces pounded at the front door. The manila envelope containing the two letters of safe passage lay on the floor, beside the bound pages of Khassan’s letter to Havaa. Would she ever read it? Would she ever know her father made furniture from his book boxes? The pounding grew to splintering. The underside of a corpse was the only place the security forces wouldn’t look, and he slid the manila envelope and Khassan’s letter beneath Ula’s body. He kissed her forehead. She was gone and he still couldn’t say good-bye. “We will never be dry,” Ula had said. The sky was pouring. She was there.

When the men broke through the door, he was on his knees. He prayed for his wife, that in Paradise Allah would give her a body that worked. He prayed for Sonja, that she would find companionship. He prayed for Havaa, that she would live to die a natural death. He prayed for Khassan, and for Dokka. But when the men started beating him, when they taped his mouth and threw him in the back of the truck, he prayed only for himself.