A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

CHAPTER twelve as though you were not a person but a people,” one letter said. “If you write on the fatherland, your words will face the heavens,” said another.

No longer did he write in his son’s company. Ramzan had learned to speak, though Khassan wished he hadn’t. The boy used his voice like a rubber mallet; can I was the only question that escaped his mouth, never what or how or why. Ramzan wasn’t clever or kind or imaginative, or even overly obedient or cruel or dull, and Khassan built his aversion upon the empty cellar of what his son was not. In the historical sources there were kings and princes whose distaste for their progeny took more sadistic forms than Khassan’s indifference; compared to Ivan the Terrible, he was a paradigm of good parenting. You can choose your son no more than you can choose your father, but you can choose how you will treat him, and Khassan chose to treat his as if he wasn’t there. He chose to write when he should have spoken, to speak when he should have listened. He chose to read his books when he should have watched his son, to watch when he should have approached. One day when Ramzan was eight he entered Khassan’s office and asked his father to teach him to ride a bicycle. “You’ll fall,” Khassan said, without looking up from the page. The moment would haunt him later. What if he had looked up?

Brezhnev appeared to be on his deathbed ten years before he finally passed, but on November 10, 1982, the country’s beloved grandfather smoked his last white-filtered Novost cigarette. Brezhnev was buried in his marshal’s uniform along with the two hundred medals—everything from Hero of the Soviet Union to the Lenin Prize for Literature—he had accrued in his eighteen-year tenure as General Secretary. Watching the mournful proceedings with his family (they all searched for Galina Brezhneva among the mourners to see if she would cause scandal even at her father’s funeral), Khassan finally accepted the futility of his endeavor. He had traveled farther than Herodotus but had written no Histories, had witnessed more combat than Thucydides but had written no History of the Peloponnesian War. His son sat on one side, his wife on the other, and they watched the tributes paid to a man whose tepid mediocrity encapsulated the era. For years he had relegated history to the past, where it was time-dulled and safe and ever-receding, but history was right there, in that moment, on the television screen, where balding and bejowled politicians paid their respects before determining the shape of the empire, where the flat, embalmed face of the beloved grandfather went translucent under the spotlights, and where finally they caught a glimpse of the daughter of the departed, her dress a scandalous pink.

Yuri Andropov replaced Brezhnev, only to die fifteen months later, and Konstantin Chernenko replaced Andropov only to die thirteen months after that. Again Khassan watched the funerals with his family; state funerals were the only times they came together. He couldn’t have known this would be the final televised funeral of a General Secretary, but later, when remembering the gloomy cavalcade, he would imagine that the entire Soviet state was buried in Chernenko’s casket. Gorbachev at least looked like he might live more than a year on the job, and soon after his ascension to General Secretary, Khassan received a call from a new, reform-minded editor, who had deposed Khassan’s previous editor. The reform-minded editor had found Khassan’s original manuscript from 1963 and thought it a more accurate and readable document than any of his subsequent revisions. “All that’s left is honing and updating,” the editor said. “Now is the time. A few years ago you would have been sent to Siberia. Today you’ll be lauded.”

Even the renewed fervor of his revisions couldn’t keep pace with the deluge of declassified information released by state agencies. For a quarter century his book hadn’t been published because it was too accurate. Now it wouldn’t be published because it wasn’t, and couldn’t be, accurate enough. A three-thousand-page draft took years to write. He couldn’t possibly analyze and incorporate the disclosures that, on a daily basis, changed the way a Soviet historian was allowed to interpret his material. Even so, he finished a draft he was reasonably pleased with in the late summer of 1989. A few months later, when the Berlin Wall fell, not even a news agency as reliably incompetent as Pravda failed to speculate on its consequences. The reform-minded editor loved the new draft and wanted to schedule publication for the following year, but Khassan demurred. The morning headlines made the previous day’s work obsolete; publishing the book now would be like building nine-tenths of a roof. The rind of buffer states diminished as republics peeled away. All of central Europe had shrugged off communist leadership, and now the Baltic states, the Black Sea states, even Moldova was discussing secession. For the first time in two millennia Chechnya had a chance at sovereignty. Everything was changing. It had to go into his book.

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.


In the following years he lost his publisher, then his university job, then his wife, who one Tuesday morning passed away as meekly as she had lived; he didn’t notice until eleven hours after her final breath. The chain saws went silent and the forest grew back, and one war came and then another, and Khassan had his son and his book, and the prospect of finding fulfillment in either seemed as unlikely as the prospect of either surviving the decade. But Khassan still had them, and at a time when all belief dissolved, the act of possession was more important than what was possessed. The things in his life that caused him the most sorrow were the things he’d lived with the longest, and now that everything was falling they became the pillars that held him; had he a thirty-two-year-old toothache rather than a thirty-two-year-old son, he would have treasured it the same. But that, too, had its time. The unseasonably warm afternoon one year, eleven months and three days earlier, when Dokka and Ramzan returned from the Landfill—Dokka missing all ten fingers, Ramzan missing only his pes—was the last day Khassan had spoken to his son.

First Ramzan feigned indifference, then shouted, then pleaded for his father’s conversation. How could Ramzan have known he would miss his father’s monosyllabic disapproval? How could he have known that he lived in reaction to his father’s expectations, needed them to know precisely the person he had failed to become?

“I’m doing this for you as much as for me,” Ramzan had said with the desperate logic of the unconvinced. “We have a generator, electric lights, food on the table. Is it such a crime to give you insulin? To have clean drinking water?”

But Khassan, a career apologist, was fluent in the rhetoric of justification and accustomed to ignoring his son. By the fifth month his son’s anger burned away, and a dense depression descended. Ramzan’s footsteps filled the night. Soon painkillers and sleeping pills joined the hypodermic needles, cotton balls, alcohol swabs, and insulin brought back from the military supplier. The ovular green pills left Ramzan comatose for sixteen hours, and in these spells, when the house exhaled and the floorboards went silent, Khassan entered his son’s room.

On earlier excursions, he had explored the drawers, closet, and shelves. In the upper left bureau drawer, he found the thirty-centimeter blade of the kinzhal he’d given Ramzan on his sixteenth birthday, a knife his father had given him, and his grandfather his father. Within the pages of an algebra textbook a list bore the names of those Ramzan had helped disappear. The list contained three names when he first found it neatly folded between pages 146 and 147, farther into the textbook than his son had ever ventured in school. The last time he checked, a few weeks before Dokka’s was to be added, twelve names were listed. But most mornings, like this one, the second morning after Dokka disappeared, Khassan had no need or desire for further incrimination. Instead he sat on the bed, and held Ramzan’s hand, and spoke to him.

“I saw Akhmed this morning and he ran away from me,” Khassan said. “He ran into the forest and hid behind a tree because I am your father.”

In these moments when his son lay encased beneath the surface of a chemically sustained slumber, when his words were extinguished like sparks released into a vacuum, Khassan spoke freely. He told stories from his youth, begged clemency for certain villagers, and once suggested Ramzan drink peppermint tea for his cough. What else could he do when honor-bound to shun his son, when disavowal was his last vestige of paternal authority? The one-sided conversations were long treks across bridges leading nowhere, but he knew no other way to span the divide; he enjoyed the spoils of the collaboration he condemned, disavowed his son for lacking the compassion he had never taught him. “Let Akhmed be,” he whispered. “Let the girl be. Forget their names. They are gone.”

In the bureau he found the kinzhal sheathed unceremoniously in an undershirt. Three paces away, Ramzan’s Adam’s apple nodded like a bobber on the tide. One slice was all it would take. He had told Akhmed as much a few hours earlier. He could have taken one step, then the next, and the third. He could have lodged the butt of the handle against his breastplate and fallen forward and so taken gravity as his accomplice. There would have been blood, but he could have stomached it; a Chechen, he knew, had more blood in him than a Russian, but far less than a German. He could have, as he could have other times; but he pulled a green apple from his pocket and sliced through that instead. The core sat in two blocks of pale flesh and with the undershirt he wiped the juice from the blade and wished he had the fortitude to make the juice blood. What father fantasizes about killing his son? Even murderers, rapists, and politicians deserve fathers who separate love from repudiation, but Khassan couldn’t manage that; like dye poured into water, what he felt for Ramzan was a singular, inseparable opacity. Uncomfortable with only three paces between the kinzhal and the neck, Khassan carried the apple outside. He sat on the shoveled back steps and whistled three times.

He surveyed the yard while waiting for the dogs to emerge from the woods. The slate grave markers and stone perimeter of the herb garden were no more than dips and rises in the snow. The garden had been his wife’s suggestion, one of the few he acted on in their twenty-three years of marriage. Sharik, a pup then, had followed his nose around the yard as though pushing an invisible ball, and Khassan had planted seeds in rows marked with bent wire hangers. The dishes his wife had cooked for years soon tasted new, as though prepared by another woman, and Khassan had imagined that other woman when he made love to his wife five times that spring. Now she lay buried at the far end of the garden, beside the brown suitcase containing the bones of his parents, commemorated by a slight depression in the snow and a frozen dog turd.

Feral and matted, whittled by deprivation, the dogs loped toward the back steps. They had belonged to the neighbors his son had disappeared, and even in this state he knew them by name. They trotted through the hole he’d clipped in the fence and gathered before him in a tight semicircle, jostling and snapping at the thin slivers of apple falling from the kinzhal blade. He held out his hands and they licked the juice from his fingers. Like them, he was unwelcome at the homes of his neighbors and avoided on the street. Like them, he was a pariah. He nuzzled the snout of a brown mutt, reaching from the dog’s muzzle to her ears, and before he knew what was happening, he was holding her as he hadn’t held a human in years. The mutt—which had been a husband’s tenth-anniversary gift to his wife, who had been expecting something smaller, inanimate, and in a box—licked the grease from his hair.

“You think I’m wonderful, don’t you? You think I’m the kindest, bravest, most generous man ever given a pair of feet to step into the world,” he said, and the dog kept licking his hair in reply. “That’s because you’re a stupid dog.”

He went to the kitchen, returned with the meat of two chickens and a lamb shank, and laid it in the snow, his hair sticky with saliva, the king and benefactor of their open maws. He would never forget his son’s face the morning after Ramzan’s fifth trip to the military supplier, when Ramzan opened the refrigerator and found nothing but condiment jars basking in the thirty-watt glow. Ramzan had stormed to the backyard, where the dogs lay on the ground, swollen stomachs pointed skyward, unable to roll, let alone stand, let alone run, and Khassan lay right there among them, his own navel aimed at the clouds, turning the dead grass into confetti, such a lovely and peculiar carelessness known only to elderly men who have napped with feral dogs. Ramzan screamed at him, picking up a thigh bone gnawed clean, pulling the gristle from the slack jaws of a blind wolfhound, and a distant happiness returned to Khassan like a word he could define but not remember. From that day, a year and a half earlier, his disapproval had expanded from silence to sabotage. If Ramzan used food to justify the disappearances, Khassan made sure it all went to the dogs. Canine affection and his son’s exasperation became his only sources of pleasure. In response, Ramzan began stashing food around the house, but he soon realized that even processed meat spoiled. Then he bought a fancy refrigerator lock invented for fat Westerners without self-control; each morning he set aside enough for Khassan to eat that day, and locked up. But Khassan would give his three meals to the dogs and go hungry himself, and when he lost enough weight, Ramzan abandoned the tactic. Next Ramzan only brought foods to which dogs are allergic: chocolate, raisins, and walnuts. But Ramzan’s teeth began aching, his shit began looking like fancy Swiss candy bars, and with one glance to the insulin bottle Khassan reminded him that a diabetic couldn’t live on sweets. They were wonderful days; how he enjoyed terrorizing his son. In the end his boy surrendered. Couldn’t outwit his father. For the past year they had communicated by the glares of a resentful truce. Khassan fed the dogs as his only family, and always left enough for Ramzan, though no more than the average villager could hope to survive on in these difficult days.

Khassan stood and smiled at the six dogs, muzzles to the ground, tails wagging languidly. One was bald, another blind. From time to time a dog would race toward the fence, chasing invisible rodents; in the vaporous insanity that had fallen across the land, even dogs hallucinated. A white shepherd dog stood at the back. He tossed him the finest cut.

“Sharik,” he said, but the dog didn’t recognize his name. Three years earlier, before his son’s treachery allowed them food to spare, he had let the dog go. His claws had danced frantically on the floorboards, and Khassan had had to kick twice before he scampered out the open door. For three days the dog had paced the fence, head hung, waiting for Khassan to call him back. Khassan hadn’t left the house until Sharik finally had disappeared into the forest. When Ramzan had arrived with the first cardboard boxes of food, he had tried to entice the dog home, but whatever trust had existed between them was dead. Only by caring for the pack could Khassan care for his dog. That was the gift Sharik had given, and Khassan thanked him every morning with the finest cuts.

The dogs followed him around the side of the house, through weeds winter couldn’t kill, to the tire tracks furrowed in the road. They clambered behind him, trusting him as people did not, and when he unclenched his fists and wiggled his fingers, he felt cold wet noses and the warmth of their tongues.

“Did I ever tell you the story of the cobbler and his son?” he asked the brown mutt. “Yes, you’ve already heard it. Sharik tells it best.”

He walked to the gap in the block where Dokka’s house had stood. The dogs wouldn’t follow him onto the frozen charcoal. He found the corner where Dokka’s bookcase had stood, and there he bent down and scooped a handful of ash into his coat pocket. The dark dust dissolved into his palm. “A bunch of big tough wild dogs,” he said to the pack, which waited for him on the banks of the frozen debris. “But too afraid to follow me …” To follow him where? Where was he?

Across the street the curtained windows were two black eyes on the face of Akhmed’s house. If Akhmed had left at dawn, and said he would be gone all day, who was looking in on Ula? The most painful revelations were the quietest, those moments when the map opened on the meandering path that had led him here. An ailing woman would spend the day alone; he hadn’t envisioned that.

“I could call on her, see if she is all right, if she needs anything,” he said, glancing to the dogs for approval. They were all ripples on the same pond. “If I’m looking after a bunch of dogs, the least I can do is look after her. Don’t take that tone with me. I am not breaking in. I have the key right here.” He displayed the spare key Akhmed had given him with a grin, nine years earlier, on the day the bank that owned four-fifths of Akhmed’s house was bombed into oblivion. The dogs cocked their heads, unconvinced. “No, I haven’t been called for, but that’s beside the point. Are you sure you want to discuss etiquette? I have a lot to say about ass-sniffing as a way to say hello.”

Two paces toward the house a burgeoning worry spread through him. What if the dogs thought he was leaving them for human company? Well, he was, but he had to break it to them gently. They were sensitive souls, even if they occasionally dug up and ate newly buried bodies. He dropped to one knee and opened his arms. All but Sharik licked the aftertaste of oats from his breath, and he told them how much he loved them, how much he needed them, how he would never leave them. Then the bald dog sniffed his ass.

His highly critical canine audience observed as he knocked at the front door. “See?” he said to them. “I have no choice but to use the key.”

He pushed open the door and crossed the thick mustiness to the bedroom. A pair of slender legs, no more than sheet creases, shifted beneath the covers. For three minutes he watched her from the threshold, a second slice of his day spent watching a second addled mind at rest; then she rolled over. He looked into her eyes and they took their time looking back.

“You’ve gotten old, Akhmed,” she said, and he couldn’t suppress his smile. Like a child, this one.

“I’m not Akhmed,” he said. Akhmed had been eight days old when they first met in the living room of Akhmed’s parents in 1965. He had held the infant in his arms and a relief profound as any he would ever feel had seeped right through him. Akhmed’s eight-day-old eyes had held the reflection of ten thousand possible lives. Khassan wasn’t an emotive or superstitious man, and nothing like it had ever happened again, but he had found, layered in the infant’s half-lidded eyes, innumerable, wanting faces, none of which he had recognized.

“I’m sorry,” Ula murmured. “My head isn’t right.”

He sat on the bed beside the bone of her hip. “Don’t apologize. I spent the morning talking to dogs.”

“If you’re not Akhmed, then why are you here?”

“I wanted to see if you needed anything. If you wanted someone to talk to. Akhmed won’t be back for a while.”

“He won’t be back?” she seemed to ask, but he wasn’t sure. She had but two notes in her, and on the wire stretching between them her questions and answers warbled the same.

“Not for a little while,” he said. Three full water glasses and a bowl of hardened rice sat on the nightstand.

Sensing his uncertainty, she again asked, “Why are you here?”

“I miss speaking to people,” he said. When he admitted it aloud he wanted to laugh. It was that simple. He was that lonely. He had come to an invalid woman to offer the help he needed. “I miss being able to speak. For nearly two years Akhmed has been the only person I’ve had a conversation with.”

“You said you spent the morning talking to dogs.”

He smiled and nodded. “I didn’t think you’d remember that. He must be the only person you’ve talked with in that time, too.”

“Who?”

“Do you know my name?” he asked. She strained but came back with nothing. “That’s okay,” he said. “That’s just fine.”

“Tell me a story,” she said.

“A story?”

“There were the stories of paintings. All true.”

He frowned. He didn’t know the stories of any paintings. “I only know one story,” he said. “I can say it happened, but I can’t say if it’s true. Did you ever meet Akhmed’s mother?” He took her empty stare for a no. “I’m glad you remember that because you couldn’t have met her. Cancer took her when Akhmed was seven. Her name was Mirza.”

She nodded because she was expected to.

“If I tell you this story, do you promise you will forget it?”

“I can’t promise anything,” she said distantly. He held her wrist, felt its plodding pulse. A mind too feeble to tell the time of day can still get the right blood to the right places, he thought. He’d never told anyone about her. “I will tell you about Mirza.”

He heard about the mass deportation nearly two years after it occurred, he told Ula, only after he himself had been deported to Kazakhstan. On February 23, 1944, Red Army Day, a day when Khassan had been shooting Nazis in eastern Poland, the Soviet NKVD rounded up Chechens in their town squares and forced them into Lend-Lease Studebaker trucks. Those who resisted or whom the NKVD deemed unfit for transport were shot. Packed into a coal wagon, Khassan’s parents and sister slept on maize sacks and ate dry maize meal as the trains slowly steamed eastward. Local soldiers cut their hair and dusted them with delousing powder when they arrived on the Kazakh steppe. Khassan never knew what happened to his sister, only that she had been seen climbing into the coal wagon in Grozny but hadn’t been seen climbing out. His parents slept in a kolkhozniki dormitory cellar, on a bed of dry mattress straw, and when hungry they made a flour of the mattress straw and fried thin powdery slabs that left them feverish but full. When they ran out of straw, they slept on the stone floor and made soup from grains picked from horse manure. By the time Khassan reached Kazakhstan in autumn 1945, conditions had improved but his parents had already perished, and he pieced together the story of their last year from the memories of their neighbors and friends, and from Mirza.

Mirza had been a child when Khassan left for war, and in 1947, when he came upon her straining water through cheesecloth, he didn’t recognize her as the girl who, at the age of eight, had been brought up on criminal charges for drawing a charcoal mustache on her lip and goose-stepping around the barnyard, ordering livestock to become more active builders of communism. “Let me have some,” he said, thirsty after his long way. “Go f*ck yourself,” she said simply. It was their first conversation. She would become the love of his life, but he couldn’t have known that as he turned and stepped into dung so deep it reached the knot in his laces. He couldn’t have known it as he pried the pail from Mirza’s fingers and washed his boot in her clean water.

A year later the schoolmaster died and Khassan replaced him. He was without qualification or experience, but after the war, the squabbles of children approximated peace, and he was happy. Among his pupils was Mirza’s youngest sister, a quick-witted girl, with fingernails bitten so short she couldn’t lift a kopek coin from a counter, who once set a tack on the chair of the commissar’s chubby son to see if he would explode. Though he saved the commissar’s son from the tack—and thus Mirza’s sister from a bullet—he recognized that thread of recklessness running through her family just asking to be snipped short.

For May Day 1950, Khassan organized a children’s parade. Adults lined the stone-marked road to cheer their children and avoid the penalty of ten years’ hard labor for nonattendance. Twenty-three of the ninety-six children marching that day wouldn’t live to see their native Chechnya. The commissar’s son would be among them because the cholera ward, without respect for political class, was the nearest to an egalitarian society that most of them would ever come. Mirza’s youngest sister was one of the four who held on a raised pallet the plaster bust of Stalin. Mirza glared from across the street, her hands at her sides, the only pair there not brought together in applause. Her contempt passed through him as light through vapor. The following afternoon she confronted him in the schoolhouse with a look that would have severed weaker necks. “You are a coward,” she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy. It was their second conversation.

In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, the Chechen ethnicity was rehabilitated by the pen stroke of a distant bureaucrat. On the evening of the day the first trains arrived to transport them home, Khassan followed the pale stone road to the pale stone cemetery, carrying with him a spade and the brown suitcase his parents had last packed twelve years earlier. The earth was hard and dry, and it took several hours to reach them. His mother’s index finger pointed at him through the dirt. The burial shroud had replaced their skin. They were lighter than he had expected, their muscles hard in desiccation. He folded their arms, pulled on their legs until the tendons snapped; he was as reverent as possible. He packed them tenderly within the discolored suitcase lining. Their bones lay bowed and prostrate. He performed no ablutions, and the brown of earth and decay had rusted his hands, but God would forgive him these lesser blasphemies. They had given him as good a life as they could. He wished he could have given them a better death. He decided, then, that he would write a history of his parents, of his people, of this sliver of humanity the world seemed determined to forget. Standing in the mounded dirt the spade was a slender tombstone. He wasn’t alone. Hundreds of others had come to raise and return their dead, and the dust reddened the night.

When he reached his cabin, a small shack within a perimeter of pale stone, he wanted to wash his hands. He didn’t. Instead he folded the shirts he’d won in cards from Red Army guards, the long underwear he’d stripped from a corpse, the marmot coat a Kazakh widow had traded for the promise that her departed husband’s name would remain on his tongue for nine years of nightly prayers. The brown suitcase stood at the door. He had inherited no other, nothing in which to pack the clothes so neatly folded on the floor. For eleven years he had dreamed of leaving behind his folded clothes for whatever Soviet ethnicity next fell from official favor, leaving behind all but his parents’ remains, and the following morning, when a locomotive whistle seared through his sleep, he awoke to that dream.

The cattle cars were filled by the time he reached the tracks. The refugees watched uncertainly as trains glided into the pale grasses of the steppe, becoming the only measure of scale. Balancing on a tie, beneath an exhaust cloud that rose like a locust swarm returning to God’s mouth, he found Mirza. “You’re still here,” she said. “I am,” he said. She lifted his brown suitcase. “It’s light,” she said. “It’s my parents,” he said. It was their third conversation.

The refugees camped along the tracks, afraid of missing the next transport, but Khassan, trusting the sky to convey the clatter of approaching trains, walked into the empty village beside Mirza. Trails of clothing, furniture, and dishware flowed from the open doors of cabins and huts. The commissar and his entourage were the first to flee, and the Party headquarters, the most architecturally sound building for many kilometers, was abandoned. They passed through meeting rooms papered with bulletins announcing the repatriation, and into the commissar’s office. Three upholstered chairs encircled a coffee table where a golden fountain pen stood at attention in its reservoir. Behind them, hanging over the doorframe, the plaster bust of Stalin observed them coolly. Khassan lifted it from its perch—two taps to Stalin’s forehead echoed in the hollow cranium—and wrapped it in a burgundy drape. Mirza’s face was unrecognizable in its approval.

Khassan carried the bust to the steppe and when he set it down the tall grasses radiated around the dead dictator’s face. Mirza dropped her heel through Stalin’s temple—and what could he do, when she looked at him like that, but become her accomplice? He crushed the big brown mustache, and she joined in, stamping out the left eye; their feet engaged in this fourth conversation until their boots were white with plaster dust, and they had finally committed the treason for which they had been sentenced twelve years earlier. They shrieked and whooped until their voices were hoarse and their lungs ached and the wind was carrying off the dust and it was all celebration. Finally, he spread the burgundy drape across the grass. She reached for his cheek and he reached for her shoulder. On her stomach, to the left of her navel, an oval birthmark spread like a tipped inkwell. He placed his mouth on it.



Ula had closed her eyes, but in the quiet he felt the relief of confession like a current carrying him after he stopped kicking. It felt wonderful to be heard and forgotten. He wanted more. He wanted to erase the past he had spent his life recording. Later, in his study, he gathered his notes, rough drafts, red-line edits, everything, and set them in a bedsheet and carried them into the woods. It would take many trips, many tied bedsheets, but he would erase every word he had ever written. The dogs accompanied him, and behind them followed the memory of Mirza’s accusation, now stronger, fortified by the testimony of four decades spent as a Soviet apologist. And after the fire had read his pages, and the dogs basked in the warmth, and the ashes grayed the snow, what would he write? Not a history of a nation that had destroyed history and nationhood. Something smaller. A letter to Havaa. His recollections of Dokka. He would begin with his favorite memory of Dokka, then go back to the first time he had met him, and end with Havaa’s birth. It would be the first true thing he had ever written.





CHAPTER



6





AT THAT MOMENT, Havaa hated the hospital. She hated the chemicals that sharpened the air and burned her throat just like the bleach her mother used to launder sheets, when there had been bleach, and sheets, and her mother. She hated the patients, who were bruised, who were broken, who took so, so, so long to die. She hated Deshi. The nurse was old, the nurse was boring, and if she were the face of life, no wonder so many patients chose death. She frowned at the stupid yellow linoleum; what was Akhmed doing? She hated him, too. He’d thrown a lab coat over her and left her to sit by herself in the waiting room while the man hauled in on the tarpaulin filled the air with screaming and the floor with bleeding. Through the thin fabric of the lab coat, she’d watched the frantic shadows thrash about on the floor, straining to stopper everything that was pouring from that sad man. When they finished, they disappeared down the corridor, and left her there like a coat stand.

And now Akhmed had gone home, had left her again. Would he return tomorrow? Yes, he had to. She couldn’t entertain other possibilities. Yes, Akhmed would return tomorrow; he would return tomorrow and he would go to Grozny, a place they always talked about going to together, and he would go with Sonja instead, whom he clearly liked more than her, because she was older and had breasts, and they would probably be doing something only the two of them would find fun, like inventing a way to scratch a phantom limb, and tomorrow, when he returned, she would hate him, and until then she would miss him.

A phantom limb. She still hadn’t taught the one-armed guard to juggle, as she had promised Akhmed, and she hated that she wanted to impress Akhmed even when he wasn’t with her. She found the guard at the hospital entrance, asleep on the bench. He wore the faded olive uniform of the rebels. She pressed her index finger into his stomach as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far, because he didn’t have much stomach to him. He woke with a grunt. “What do you want?”

“To juggle.”

He closed his eyes. “You don’t need my permission. Go forth.

Juggle.”

“No, I’m here to teach you to juggle.”

“You must be kidding.” He hadn’t opened his eyes again.

“You aren’t a one-armed freak that everyone feels sorry for,” Havaa said, as comfortingly as she could. When Akhmed had taught her to juggle six months earlier, he had used small rectangles of gauze that flapped and turned in the breeze like a shoal of starving white fish. They had stood in the middle of the street, the gusting headwind the nearest thing to traffic, the gauze strips slithering in it, and Akhmed hooting as she chased them. It had taken her all afternoon to learn to juggle one. The next day they had moved indoors. Juggling is more in your mind than your hands, Akhmed had told her; in the still air she had learned in minutes. “Juggling is more in your mind than your hand,” she told the one-armed guard.

“I died in my sleep, didn’t I? This is Hell, isn’t it?”

“You begin by throwing a handkerchief up in the air,” she said, and demonstrated in an exaggerated flourish.

The one-armed guard began praying. “Deliver me, Allah, from this cesspool of wickedness.”

“You want to make sure you cross the handkerchief, like you’re pinning it to the shoulder of an invisible partner. Like a phantom partner; that should be familiar to you!”

“Jesus Christ, hear my plea,” the one-armed guard chanted, in case the infidel god was more receptive.

“Then you repeat the same movement with your other hand.”

“She thinks I have another hand.”

“See how well I can do it?” she said, all three handkerchiefs aloft.

“My phantom hand is slapping you in the face.”

“I can’t feel it,” she said, proudly.

“Neither can I,” he said, glumly.

“You seem a little grumpy. Maybe you should take another nap.”

As she left the one-armed guard she hated Akhmed even more; if she couldn’t tell him, it was as if she hadn’t taught the one-armed guard to juggle at all. He had left her, just like her father had, and her mother, and she bandaged that wound with all the stubborn sullenness she could muster, so it would be hidden, well insulated, and so no one could see how in just three hours she had learned to miss him with the same incredible longing she reserved for her parents. She should have known Akhmed would forget her as quickly as he had her mother.

She didn’t hate Sonja, not as much as Akhmed. Sure, Sonja was curt and short-tempered, a humorlessist incapable of finding in an hour the fun Akhmed could conjure in a minute. But that was okay because Sonja was different. Sonja was the boss of this place, ordering everyone around, and even Akhmed went pale when she spoke. Not only was Sonja a doctor, she was the head of the entire hospital. Women weren’t supposed to be doctors; they weren’t capable of the work, the schooling, the time and commitment, not when they had houses to clean, and children to care for, and dinners to prepare, and husbands to please. But Sonja was more freakish, more wondrously confounding than the one-armed guard; rather than limbs she had, somehow, amputated expectations. She didn’t have a husband, or children, or a house to clean and care for. She was capable of the work, school, time, commitment, and everything else it took to run a hospital. So even if Sonja was curt and short-tempered, Havaa could forgive her these shortcomings, which were shortcomings only in that they were the opposite of what a woman was supposed to be. The thick, stern shell hid the defiance that was Sonja’s life. Havaa liked that.

And so she wandered along the corridor, wondering what she might be like if she lived like Sonja. Maybe she could be an arborist, like her father. She hadn’t thought that women were allowed to be scientists, but if Sonja could be a surgeon and hospital head, why couldn’t she be an arborist? Or a sea anemonist? She slowed to peek into the room where the legless man slept. Blood dried darkly on his bandages. His stump poked from the edge of the white bedsheet like a rotten log through snow cover. He slept. Somewhere in that hazy, heroin-induced slumber, he was already designing in dreams the monument to war dead he would, in twenty-three years, make of steel and concrete. He was the only person in the hospital right now she didn’t hate.

“I thought I told her to find something to do,” Deshi said, entering the room with her customary frown.

“I was.”

“ ‘I was,’ she says. Was what?”

“Thinking,” Havaa shot out, like a pebble cast toward the nurse’s flat face.

“Find something more useful to do,” Deshi said. She knitted as she leaned against the wall. The yarn ball slowly rolled in her pocket.

“Does Sonja order you around like this?”

“Why would she say that?”

“Because Sonja runs the hospital.”

“Unbelievable,” Deshi said with a sigh. “I’ve been working here since before Sonja was a kick in her mother’s stomach, was already retired when I hired her, and she gets the credit for making this place run. They’ll take everything from you, even the respect of an orphan girl with too many questions in her mouth.”

“Why is the hospital run by women? What happened to all the men?”

“They ran away.”

“But they’re the brave ones.”

“No, they’re the ones that break your heart and leave you for a younger woman.”

“So you’re saying that sometimes women are braver than men. And better doctors.”

“I’m saying that if you want to keep a man, you better hide his shoes every night so he can’t walk out on you.”

“I don’t understand.”

Deshi shook her head. Her romantic advice was worth a foreigner’s ransom, and here she was, giving it freely to a girl who couldn’t appreciate the hard-earned wisdom. “Just stay away from oncologists, okay?” she said, and led the girl to the waiting room. “If you just remember that, you’ll spare yourself the worst of it. Now, why don’t you get your notebook out and draw something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Where would you most want to be right now?”

“My home,” she said. She thought the word meant only the four walls and roof that held her, but it spread out, filled in, Akhmed, the village, her parents, the forest, everything that wasn’t here. “A week ago.”

“And I’d rather be right here forty years ago, when they first offered me the job. I’d wag my finger right in the head nurse’s face and say, no, no, you won’t trick me, and I’d walk right out those doors.”

“It’s stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.”

“Why don’t you draw that map?”

“Only if you let me play on the fourth floor.”

“Child, if there was such a map, there would still be a fourth floor. Start drawing.”

The sharp, chemical-curtained corridor swallowed Deshi’s footsteps and Havaa was alone again. The notebook tilting on her legs, she thought of her father. She didn’t hate him. Thinking that, realizing it, feeling it crackle through her arm bones, her finger bones, feeling her arms wrapping around her chest, her fingers clasping her shoulders, this trembling inside her that was only the beat of her heart. Each night he would tell her tales about an alien green-bodied race whose faces consisted of a singular orifice through which they saw, ate, smelled, heard, thought, and spoke. Each night he told her a new chapter, and so many nights had gone by, so many chapters had been told, that they referred to it as chapters rather than story, because stories had endings and theirs had none. According to her father, the green-bodied aliens had destroyed their planet in an interstellar civil war and had migrated to the Moon to begin again. Each night, as civilization collapsed around them, he told her of a new one being built on the lunar surface. She hoped her father was there, among them, up on the Moon.

Sonja strode through the door, reeking of cigarette smoke, her eyelids puffy and her fingers jittering. “You’re here,” Sonja said, surprised.

“Yes,” Havaa agreed. “I’m here. This is the waiting room.”

Sonja glanced down to the floor, to the chairs, puzzling over this and then nodding. “You’re right. This is the waiting room,” she said, and sat in the folding chair beside Havaa.

“How was your day?” Havaa asked.

Sonja shrugged, sparked her cigarette lighter, and stared vacantly toward the wall. “It was an okay day. You?”

“It was okay.”

Sonja sighed, closed her eyes, and sparked her lighter in a slow, senseless rhythm.

“Are the Feds going to take me, too?” To ask the question was to acknowledge that it could happen, and in Havaa’s experience, any horror that could happen eventually did. Better to armor yourself with the unreal. Better to turn inward, hide in the dark waters among the sea anemones, down deep where the sharks can’t see you.

Sonja’s hand found hers between the chairs.

“Will the Feds take me to my father?” she asked, while knowing the question had no answer she wanted to hear. Her father was her door to the world; he was the singular opening through which she saw, heard, and felt. Without him she didn’t know what she saw, or what she heard, and what she felt; all she felt, was him gone.

“Let’s go to bed,” Sonja said. Still holding Havaa’s hand, she stood. “We close our eyes and there they are, right where we left them, in their own waiting room, waiting for us.”