A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



27





BENEATH THE STARS, without the interference of cloud or wind or leaf cover, the low rumble of diesel engines murmured through the open window where Khassan waited and listened. When the nightstand clock read 12:15 A.M., the splayed headlights of three trucks parted the darkness. A minute later, in front of Akhmed’s house, the trucks were parked, engines idling, passengers disembarking, men from the security forces, whom Khassan, with his head craned out the open window, saw only as black silhouettes lit up by the headlights before returning to shadow. It was 12:16. Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion. At 12:17, the knocking began. Khassan couldn’t see the masked security forces first pound then kick at Akhmed’s door, and at this distance the thuds might be mistaken for a less violent act, an insomniac carpenter, a couple keeping themselves warm in bed, but a minute later came the unmistakable splintering of wood, twisting of door hinges. Khassan gripped the sill. He could see nothing but the pale flood of headlights. You are a coward, Mirza had said a half century earlier, and he heard her as if she stood just behind him. You are a coward. But what could he do? Run out? Reason with the masked men now entering Akhmed’s house? At best, they would arrest and take him wherever they were taking Akhmed. At worst, both would be shot for his intervention. And Havaa, what would happen to her? His face broke out in a cold sweat and his hands tightened their grip against the sill. He tried moving his feet toward the doorway, but they weren’t listening. Not once in his seventy-nine years had he felt more useless, more powerless, more afraid. You are a coward, Mirza said in his ear, but she didn’t know what they do to people in the Landfill. At 12:21 came a burst of twelve gunshots, enough to kill twelve Akhmeds, but no shadows crossed that wide wound of headlight. Unable to see, unable to move, he tuned his ear to the frequency of Akhmed’s broken bones, his bruised flesh, his gouged eyes, his ruptured organs, his snapped fingers, his busted cheeks, his smashed temple, his collapsed skull, his sobs, his surrender, his defeat, his gasps, his pleas, his promises, his prayers, his final breaths, his last memories, of his mother’s embrace or Ula’s thigh or a dog’s bark or a bullet rushing through a pink brainy cloud, whatever Akhmed might hold to as the whispers cease and the silent ascension begins. Akhmed’s pain would be the only sound loud enough to break through Mirza’s flat incantation, you are a coward a coward a coward, but Akhmed made no shout, no plea, no call for mercy that Khassan could hear. The only sound to escape the house was the clatter of dishes, the white plates with chipped edges, the small saucers Akhmed used to use to fool his stomach, the teal blue teacup, the one with the crimson rim from which Khassan had sipped the fancy Indian tea someone’s in-law had given one of them, and how could a teacup shatter when padded in so many layers of memory, how could this be happening again, how could Khassan stand at this same open window where four nights earlier he had listened to the same smashing dishware, had stared into the same unblinking headlights, had felt the same disgrace rip through him when Dokka was disappeared? At 12:27, shadows lumbered into the stream of headlights and among those shadows was a flailing form, so faint a contortion no one save Khassan would recognize it as Akhmed. A moment and the shadow vanished back into blessed darkness, and the truck doors snapped closed, and Mirza’s accusation clamped him to the windowsill, and the headlights pulled the trucks back to the underworld they had emerged from. As the last truck passed Khassan’s open window, Akhmed’s muffled cry finally reached him.

The sun had risen by the time his mind slowed enough to slip away. He dozed, but didn’t rest. In his dreams he wandered through grass frozen into fields of stiff white ribbon. He had hated Kazakhstan so much. He’d never imagined he might look back on exile as his happiest years.

At ten he woke and for three hours stared at the ceiling as he marshaled the courage to stand. The house was silent. He slid through Ramzan’s half-opened door, as he had dozens of times before when he had something to tell his son. Ramzan lay on the bed, mouth agape. Khassan crept to the bureau, where he withdrew the kinzhal from the top drawer. He had received it from his father, and his father had received it from his father’s father, and so it went, a century and a half of fathers and sons. It was the oldest thing he had ever owned not counting the trees in back. Near the handle the blade went brown with the blood of an Imperial conscript, or perhaps it was just rust. His father had taught him to thrust it forward, turning the blade before ripping it out, in case Tsar Alexander II might rise from the dead to pillage Eldár.

The edge followed the grooves in his palm, his life line, his love line. He carried it to the bed and wrapped the blade in the blanket so it wouldn’t wake Ramzan prematurely. He took a breath and the air filled him completely. The previous night was a place he wouldn’t return from. After the headlights had faded, he had crossed and uncrossed his fingers, picked up and set down the water glass, and amid these trivial gestures, he had died. “You are nothing without love and pride and family,” he had once told Akhmed. The first two had disappeared the previous night in the back of a truck; he was on his way, fingering the blade that would soon cut through the third.

“Did I ever tell you the story of the cobbler’s drunken son?” he softly asked. Ramzan heard nothing. “When I was a child, our village was plagued by a cobbler’s son, an eighteen-year-old who inflicted more property damage than could be expected from a man who couldn’t make his two feet move in the same direction. The cobbler was respected throughout the village until his son discovered the effects of fermented beet samogon. The liquor made pariahs of them both, proving right the aphorist who first stated that as the son inherits from the father, so the father inherits from the son. For years the cobbler appealed to the imam, apologized to the fathers of the women his son dishonored, and paid for, replaced, or returned the stolen goods. He offered to mend the shoes of any soul his son had wronged. So it was. But there came a point when the son’s capacity for ruin outpaced the cobbler’s capacity for restitution. He was in debt. Half the village walked on shoes paid for by his son’s drinking. One day the son vanished. No mention of him, no funeral, no gossip of work on a distant collective farm; he just disappeared. A month later my grandfather visited the cobbler with the village elders. They took him honey and raisins and welcomed him back. I, still a boy, was told to honor and respect the cobbler, as all the villagers were, because he had put the good of our small society, our teip, above his own. His son’s name became a blasphemous word, erased from the collective memory, stricken from even the whispers of women. The story, when told, always ended at this pinnacle of honor and sacrifice. It never went on to tell how the cobbler, who didn’t mend another boot in his life, lived to the age of ninety-nine as a hermit, drinking himself senseless every day and night, alone but for the ghost of his son, whom he pleaded with in unbearable calls that I could hear from the far side of the village.

“They never tell you about that part, about how long you might live with it,” Khassan continued. He held Ramzan’s limp fingers. Thirty-two and three-quarter years had passed since he had first felt those fingers and they had astonished him, delicate as sparrow feet and holding on to his thumb as if he were the sturdiest branch in the forest. “They never tell you about that part.”

For two long years he had hated himself for imagining this moment. Disappearance by disappearance he had tallied the lives his son had extinguished—and if Ramzan hadn’t snuffed them, he’d held them to the wind—Alman, Musa, Omar, Aslan, Apti, Mansur, Aslan the Hirsute, Ruslan, Amir, Amir Number Two, Isa, Khalid, and Dokka, postponing this inevitability until the next day, the next disappearance, until he watched Akhmed’s beaten shadow eclipse the flood of headlights, and knew the next day would be the last. Twenty-one years and five months earlier, Ramzan had bounded from this bed and out that door to the kitchen, shirtless and wide-eyed with awe; he had pointed to a single hair sprouting from his underarm, as thrilled as if he’d found a diamond there. “You were right about the trumpet blast,” Khassan said. The regret was already there, a blank wall he’d spend the rest of his life staring at. “These are the end times. There can be nothing after this.” Now that it had arrived, all his talk of mountaintop sacrifices seemed the absurd, grandiose fantasies of a confused old man. There was no voice in the sky.

Ramzan’s chest rose and fell, oblivious to the decision already made by the hand holding his. Khassan had held that chest when it was no wider than a chicken’s, had held it to his own and felt something so tender and precious pass between them that he would have done anything for this boy. But this? Had the bottle of sleeping pills not sat open on the nightstand, he would have acted sooner. But from the many times he had perched on the mattress, he knew the pills would keep Ramzan comatose until evening. He could wait. Now that he had, in his heart, stepped over the edge, it didn’t matter how long he fell before hitting the ground. “I want to tell you something,” he said. “But I don’t know what. I don’t know.” Pride wouldn’t allow apology, not even now. “You are my son. You are mine,” he whispered, as a spell, as a gift, a last lullaby, a branding. Ramzan’s head turned, so slightly, into the pillow, and it nearly broke Khassan to see this shimmer of life. Sleep, just a while longer, that’s it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering? Khassan lay on the bed and breathed with his son. He followed Ramzan’s lead. Together they drew from and gave to the communal air, his open hand on Ramzan’s chest, rising and falling in this silence they made.

Three knocks broke it. Khassan sat up and carried the cavern in his chest to the front door. No one in the village, not even Akhmed, had visited the house since Ramzan’s collusion became known. Were his former friends standing on the other side with honey and raisins to welcome him back into society? You are too soon, he wanted to cry. I haven’t done it yet. I’m still climbing to the summit. He blotted his forehead with a purple handkerchief before opening the door.

On the other side stood a woman foregrounded against the teal sky. She wore a padded gray coat over scrubs. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Akhmed’s … I’m his friend. Are you K?” She passed him the manila envelope he had given Akhmed two days earlier. His pulse quivered as he accepted it; if it still contained his letter to Havaa he would give up. But his address was written on the manila envelope by Akhmed’s hand. The contained correspondence was thinner than his. “In his house,” she said in explanation. “I found it there. He was taken last night.”

That shadow floundering through light to the dark bank on the other side. The dementia that was to consume his memory in nine years would leave him that. When all else had faded, those headlights would still shine; they would be the light at the end. He could hardly speak, think, act, breathe. What was happening? What was this? He discovered Ula’s name between his lips. The woman dropped her eyes and shook her head, respectful but firm, perhaps accustomed to delivering bad news. As soon as she turned to the road, he tore open the manila envelope. It held two letters. One was written by an FSB colonel, the other by a rebel field commander. Each letter gave orders for the unhindered passage of its unnamed bearer. A third message lay at the bottom of the manila envelope, written on a scrap of paper so slight he nearly missed it. Mercy, the note read. Mercy.

The dogs, dozing beside the house, stretched their legs on the ground and lumbered after him, Sharik last, as he hurried to Akhmed’s house. He held the manila envelope against his chest, blocking it from the wind.

The front door was propped against the doorframe. He passed over a clean living room floor, an inexplicably alphabetized bookcase, and the dogs followed, Sharik last, because the front door wouldn’t close, and what did it matter, they were cleaner than the last beasts to enter.

Ula lay fully clothed on the unmade bed. After the past hour watching the rise and fall of his son’s chest, he knew immediately that she was gone. White tennis shoes jutted from the end of her baggy brown skirt, as if in death she would be reborn in good health, given a newly wired nervous system, allowed in her private paradise an afterlife of marathons. He closed the bedroom door, afraid the dogs might nibble at the body. Claw patter trembled through the thin walls. If he had to come back, he would be a dog.

For a moment he stood by the door, surprised by the scent of soap. Then one foot forward. Then the other. He folded her hands together and placed them on her stomach. The room was clean, as was the body, and though he could explain neither, he wasn’t surprised. A burgundy headscarf framed her face. Cupping her skull like a fragile bowl into which he had poured his most valuable possessions, placing his thumbs on her lids, he opened her to the dead afternoon light. She stared straight through him, to the unfolding infinities that bookended her thirty-five years, through him to the place where they would soon meet, when the trumpeter’s breath failed, when he would descend the notes of the final melody to the silence where Mirza waited.

He could have wrapped her in a white elasticated bedsheet, the nearest to a burial kafan in the depleted closet. The body was usually washed in scented water, but a martyr was buried unwashed, in the clothes she died in. He could have enshrouded her. She weighed so little. Even a man of his age could have carried her outside. In the backyard he might have set her on a cushion of snow. The ground was frozen. He could have plunged the spade head but the ground would hold. He knew no burial prayers, but he could have stood quietly and let canine panting mark the minute. He had spent his entire life burying, and unearthing, and reburying the dead, and he could have done it once more. The spade would have scraped through the frost. A shovelful of snow scattering on her torso. Three thousand years before a Russian empire existed, native tribes buried their dead in kurgans that grew so large they became part of the land, surviving the construction and collapse of subsequent civilizations. He would have thought of this as he entombed her. He would have shoveled until he couldn’t lift the spade, until the tomb reached his chest, until it compacted into a monument that would last until the spring thaw. But he didn’t have the energy to do more than close her eyelids, fluff the pillow beneath her head, and point her toward Mecca.

At home he picked three sets of clothes. Extra layers, heavy on wool; no longer could he rely on the comforts his son provided. He searched his closet for something to pack his clothes in but only found a laundry bag. He’d never thought to replace the brown suitcase after he buried it, never thought he would leave Chechnya again. At the center of his small bundle of clothes was the ruby-red scarf Mirza had unwound from her neck and placed in his hands, one afternoon, long ago. In the kitchen he packed alcohol swabs and syringes and insulin vials and all the food he could find in withered plastic shopping bags. On the kitchen table Ramzan’s keys radiated from their ring and he placed them in his pocket. He didn’t know where he would go. He had journeyed through Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He had, once, taken a victorious shit on a Reichstag commode. And from there to the Kazakh steppe, where, to the horizon, nothing sounded louder than the wind. He had traveled a quarter of the way around the globe without taking one step voluntarily. This was his home. For every barrack floor, muddy trench, outpost tarpaulin, bunker cot, and fallow field he had ever slept on, the memory of home was his only rest. Returning in 1956 he had vowed to never leave. Better to die here, he imagined, than endure another exile.

He crossed the hall to Ramzan’s room. Neither his kinzhal nor his boy had moved. If he could reach back he would hold his son, love his son, and untangle the knot his soul had become. He would find the ends. “Why are you my father?” the boy had asked one August afternoon, twenty seconds after asking, “Why is the sky blue?” and forty seconds before he asked, “Why do people get old?” They were sitting outside. Khassan had been teaching his son to eat shelled sunflower seeds and he held his breath long enough for the question to pass. “Why are you my father?” the boy asked again. It was two years before he stopped asking for a bike, five and a quarter before he stopped asking his father for anything. Khassan had never found an answer. If he could go back he would make one.

He closed Ramzan’s door behind him. The time for answering had ended and the peace of the afternoon articulated all he wanted for his son. The shopping bags, laundry bag, and two letters of safe passage waited at the front door, and as he reached for them, a question hit him like the face of a wall. Who was that woman and why had she come to deliver Akhmed’s answer? Had she known she would deliver him from his son? It didn’t matter. He would forever remember her as an angel dressed in an overcoat and scrubs, sent to stay his hand.

He locked the door behind him and crossed the packed snow to the red pickup. The dogs followed him, sniffing at the plastic bag of insulin, syringes, and chicken thighs. He set the bags in the passenger seat and turned to the dogs, six in all, lean-boned and matted and blind and bald.

“I’m leaving,” he said. His voice cracked with sorrow as the dogs tilted their snouts to him. Killing his son had seemed less reprehensible than abandoning these dogs. “I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what will happen.”

Tears fell down his cheeks. Two of the dogs ran after a hallucinated mouse, while the rest stared up at their broken benefactor with the same incomprehension that had made a home between his ears. “I can’t promise anything, but I will try to take care of you. If you want to come, I will take you.”

He climbed into the truck, set the two letters of safe passage in the glove box, and started the engine. He eased the brake and let the truck roll at a walking pace, waiting to see what would happen. In the rearview the dogs licked each other, tumbled on the ground, and went on in a world without him. Gravel shot back when he pushed the accelerator and the ears of the bald dog perked, and when she turned the other dogs noticed, and their snouts swiveled toward the truck as they galloped as one animal, a twenty-four-legged, twelve-eared beast, racing to reclaim their seventh head. He unlatched the back and one by one they jumped into the bed of the pickup truck, Sharik last.

Passing beneath the portraits of the disappeared he saw them as if for the first time. No one else would remember the artist’s face, but he would. When he reached the end of the block, he kept driving. When he reached the end of the village, he kept driving. Wind tossed the dogs’ tongues and they shook their heads wonderfully. The serrated ridge of mountains cut into the horizon and he drove toward it. The passing refugees had speculated wildly, believing any rumor large enough to hope on. He didn’t know what lay on the other side. He didn’t know that the disease that would in nine years erase every memory but the headlights was already brewing among his neurons. He didn’t know that his son would live alone in the village for three grief-stricken years, wondering and waiting for his return before moving to a mountain hamlet, where he would keep wondering what had happened to his father, without ever finding out, for another fifty-seven years. Khassan didn’t know and he drove. He was seventy-nine years old. He was beginning a new life.