A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER



5





KHASSAN GESHILOV COMPLETED the first draft of his Chechen history on the one day in January 1963 when it didn’t snow. The manuscript was 3,302 pages. When he submitted it to the city publisher in Volchansk he was told he needed to send it to the state publisher in Grozny, and when he submitted it to the state publisher in Grozny he was told he needed to send it to the national publisher in Moscow; and when he submitted it there he was told he needed to send three typed copies. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes as he looked at his poor, battered fingers. But he purchased the postage, paper, typewriter ribbons, and cigarettes such a monumentally monotonous activity required, and eighteen months later he received a phone call from the head editor of the history section, Kirill Ivanovich Kaputzh.

“We’re launching a thrilling new series called ‘Prehistories of Soviet Autonomous Republics’ and we would like to publish your book as our lead title,” Kirill Ivanovich said. Even in his surprise and excitement, Khassan asked what the publisher meant by prehistory; the book he had written ended in 1962. “Prehistory,” Kirill Ivanovich explained, “is the time before the cultural and political presence of the Russian state.”

“But for Chechnya that would mean 1547.”

“Indeed.”

“But that’s just the first CHAPTER of my book.”

“You must be delirious in your excitement, Citizen Geshilov. That is your entire book.”

“No, that is the first two hundred twenty-eight pages. Some three thousand follow it,” Khassan insisted. He had never imagined that the joy of being published at all and the despair of being published poorly could be tied together like opposite ends of a shoelace.

“Yes, in your joy and astonishment you have become confused. Go and celebrate your achievement, Citizen Geshilov. Accept my congratulations and best wishes. Not everyone has the opportunity to publish a two-hundred-twenty-eight-page book.”

And so Origins of Chechen Civilization: Prehistory to Fall of the Mongol Empire appeared the next year with little fanfare. The sole review, written for the university newspaper by one of his students, called the book “more interesting than the average reference book.” No one wanted to read pre-Russian history books, which was precisely why Moscow was so eager to publish them. By the time Khassan reworked the remaining three thousand pages into a lopsided companion piece—burning a partial draft after pages began disappearing—Khrushchev had been deposed; in response to murky shifts of politics, Kirill Ivanovich Kaputzh, receding farther into the safety of the past, decided to publish only pre-human geological surveys. They were heady days for Khassan’s earth-science colleagues.

Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver. Each passing year the publisher waded farther into the morass of human history, first allowing histories of the Sumerians, then the Ancient Egyptians, and by 1972, the year Ramzan was born, publishing books on the Hellenic age. Sensing the border of 1547 might be crossed within the decade, Khassan revised his tome under the title Chechen Civilization and Culture Under Russian Patronage. He wrote as the voice of appeasement, justifying, glossing over, but never forgiving the four centuries of Russian depredations, believing all the while that he might slip three thousand pages of subtext past censors so sensitive to insinuation they would expurgate rain clouds from an International Workers’ Day weather forecast. In a knee-height cradle, Ramzan, skull-capped and swaddled, dozed while Khassan wrote. He would never feel closer to his son than he did then, when the rustle of Ramzan’s sleep accompanied the scratching of his pencil, and with one hand on the page and the other dipping into the crib he was the wire connecting this halved legacy; much later, he would remember those months when he and his boy could spend the whole day in the same room and mean nothing by the silence.

In 1974 Kirill Ivanovich provisionally accepted the book for publication, with the stipulation that two thousand pages be cut, before he was fired and briefly imprisoned for being too conservative with his edits, too vocal with his own opinions, and too Polish; eight months later, on hard labor duty some four thousand kilometers east of Poland, Kirill Ivanovich would stumble upon the artifacts of an ancient settlement while digging the foundation for a prison latrine, and would remember his assistant, a young man for whom he harbored the pangs of love that time and captivity hadn’t blunted, a young man whom Kirill Ivanovich had listened to, as he read aloud passages from Khassan Geshilov’s history of early civilization, passages Kirill Ivanovich kept intact in his memory, like jars to hold and preserve the beautiful voice of his assistant. Kirill Ivanovich’s successor, an editor whose aquiline nose pointed toward the prevailing political winds, decided the book required more radical revision to conform to the tedium of the era. And so began a decade of rewrites that mirrored the plummeting Brezhnev reign. The new editor stressed that the book didn’t need to be more concise—if anything it should be longer, the editor said, so reviewers would dismiss its shortcomings as the price of ambition—and Khassan reupholstered the paragraphs he’d stripped under Kirill Ivanovich’s guidance. He wrote tracts on nineteenth-century threshing techniques, the history of Chechen meteorology. The new editor would respond with changes so vague and inconsistent it took weeks to divine a politically safe interpretation. “Rewrite