An older officer, fragranced with enough aftershave to inebriate lesser men, emerged from the camouflaged outhouse that constituted the checkpoint office. Golden stars glimmered from his epaulets. A double-headed-eagle perched on his tie clip. His hair parted above his left ear and was plastered across his balding crown. Nothing escaped his wide blue eyes. The soldiers addressed him as colonel.
“I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said, in round-bodied Russian. “You will be on your way shortly.”
He spoke a hushed order to the soldiers. She had no reason to doubt him when the soldiers obligingly began to fold her clothes and tie her suitcase back together with twine.
“This way,” the colonel said. Guiding her by the arm as a gentleman might, he walked her toward the forest. “You need to sign a few pieces of paperwork before we can let you through. Unfortunately, it’s located at an outpost a half kilometer west of us.”
She didn’t know at which step the truth crystallized in her mind, whether it was the fifth step or the sixth, the eighth or eighteenth, but long before they reached the woods she knew what this man would do to her. The colonel, a man who blamed the wars on the fact that his first wife once lived here, still hadn’t decided.
The whole way the colonel spoke in the honeyed, empathetic tone of one every bit as frustrated by bureaucracy as she was, who would, of course, let so sweet a refugee pass through unhindered were such a decision his to make. He didn’t slur his words. His arm held her so gently she wanted to believe they really were walking toward an outpost in the middle of a forest filled with paperwork. Every so often, he smacked his bubblegum.
When they reached the edge of the woods, he told her to stop. The light of the filtration point shone in his eyes, but they were beyond even that questionable society. He untied her headscarf and slithered his fingers through her hair. His first wife had been the first of five. Each one met the others after her divorce and with each other they pieced their lives together. His five wives would be bridesmaids at each other’s second weddings. Their children by second husbands would be christened together, and much later, two of their thirty-nine grandchildren would join in a marriage that would not end in divorce. The friendship of his ex-wives was the one decent thing the colonel had created in his forty-seven years.
“Take off your clothes,” the colonel instructed wearily, as if this were one more duty the bureaucrats asked of him.
“No,” she said. She had never denied a man like that. Her mouth had gone dry and her whole body hummed as she said it again. “No.”
“Take them off,” the colonel repeated.
“No.”
The back of his hand crossed her cheek with a violent crack. He massaged his knuckles. Had he been angry or lustful, she might have surrendered, but his face revealed no emotion, nothing to suggest either of them was human. In four brothels she had met every shape of desperation God had given testicles, and the only men she couldn’t forget were those who needed to impart pain rather than receive pleasure. The colonel’s backhand burned against her cheek. Beneath that cemented hair, the colonel was every man in the Mediterranean she still remembered.
“Okay,” she said. “I will.” Even her surrender didn’t stoke a flicker in his eyes. She reached for her coat buttons. A marching band had taken residence in her chest. Her veins vibrated. She unbuttoned her overcoat but would not then, or ever, shrug it off. It took all her strength to lift the Makarov from her inner coat pocket. Her palm held the burden of battalions, the mass of a hundred thousand lost limbs, and her hand didn’t tremble. She unlatched the safety and aimed the pistol at the bridge of his nose. Judging from the colonel’s expression, she might have been aiming a pastry. He smiled. Had she not walked through all of Hell’s flames, she might have believed she could forfeit her dignity. But she knew better, and then he knew she knew better, and her glare crushed the air between them and in it was, for him, finally, the understanding that he would never return from here.
“I—” he began, and she squeezed the trigger without hesitating. More than anger or fear or hate, she felt a deep disappointment in the colonel for speaking. He should have known words wouldn’t lead them from the woods. She was a poor shot. Though she aimed at the man’s forehead, the bullet raked the left side of his skull. His ear yanked off as if held by wet clay. Mucus ran from his nose and melted into sweat, blood, tears, and whatever else pasted the moonlight to his skin. He shrieked, and she smiled at the great bellows he had hidden in his chest. His pain broke the register of adult expression, exiting his lips in the high-pitched and familiar wail of an infant. She knelt beside him. She leaned to his face. His screams rose in bursts of hot steam from his lips. So this is what it’s like. This is just how much you can make a person feel. She didn’t know she was the deepest wish come true of five women a half continent away. She pressed the pistol to his temple and stared into the wide wound of his eyes with the righteousness of one rendering a service to a stranger. She was patient. He stared at her and she waited until the terror of what was to come dissolved the stones of his eyes. Blood gurgled from the opening that had been his ear, but his hair, parted just above it, was unmoved.
“You’ll have to walk into the forest alone,” she said. He thrashed his arms before three squeezes of the trigger forever stilled them. A silence followed. She closed her eyes. Her hands finally began to tremble.
Then sprinting footsteps, shouts of colonel, parabolas of torchlight scanning the ground. The bare branches gestured welcomingly. She could flee, but how long would she last? A few hours? A day or two at most until tracking dogs pulled her scent by the lungful from the Samsonite and found her? No, she was done hiding, done bargaining. She had known that from the moment she reached for the pistol. To live with dignity meant a premature death. One of the roving circles of torchlight caught the fingers of the colonel’s outstretched arm. A few minutes later another flashlight fell upon them, and this time Natasha and the colonel were not overlooked. The shouts of shahidka, shahidka, made her smile. She stood firm, steadying herself against an oak tree, and managed to fire twice more before a machine-gun round opened her stomach and dropped her to her knees. It was supposed to hurt, but this much? The first-time mothers said it hurt more than they had ever imagined. And was it worth it, she would ask. Oh yes, they would say. Oh yes. The torchlight fell upon her again. The second bullet put a hole in her chest, and she felt her breath leave, but neither the third, nor fourth, nor fifth, nor sixth, nor seventh, nor eighth, nor ninth, nor tenth, nor eleventh, nor twelfth, nor thirteenth, nor fourteenth, nor fifteenth, nor sixteenth, nor seventeenth was seen, or felt, or heard.
CHAPTER
26
THE HOUR HAND reached eight, eight and a half, nine, nine and a half hours in the morning, and still no sign of Akhmed. The girl asked for him as soon as she woke, but Sonja had sidestepped his name as if it were a puddle on the road, and they hadn’t spoken of him since. “Talking accomplishes nothing,” Natasha had said, and for once, in her heart, Sonja knew her sister had been right. It was the fifth day after Dokka had disappeared.
When the hour hand reached eleven, Sonja went to the canteen for a glass of ice to calm her nerves, and found a slip of white paper on the counter. If you find my body, it said, return it for burial. She crushed the note into her pocket but then took another look. The full address was 38 Eldár Forest Service Road. Akhmed’s village. Was this what he had kept stitched in his trousers? Sixteen hours earlier they had lain on the narrow maternity ward bed and held each other so neither would roll off. When he stood and hitched up his trousers, she had noted a small tear near the knee, which he had blamed on a stray line of razor wire, even though she didn’t ask. She ironed out the wrinkled slip of paper with her thumb. It was the penultimate message she would receive from him. In a shoebox in the canteen cupboard, atop six dozen others, his ID card was to be the final message, though she wouldn’t find that for another five days.
With the note now folded in her jacket
pocket, she drove to Eldár. Bereft of leaves, the trees looked skeletal. This was the road Akhmed marched down to and from the hospital. The one he marches down, she corrected, careful to keep him alive while she still could. Clouds veined the sky. Grain stalks swayed with what little breeze there was. The forest had overtaken much of the farmland, but as the road curved through a field, she came upon the frozen carcass of what had been a wolf.
Eldár was no more than a saucer beside Volchansk, the type of village one would only stumble upon when lost. Save for the street portraits, its name was all that distinguished it from a thousand other ruined villages. She tracked the addresses, no small feat when so few doorways stood, and parked in front of number 38. Across from Akhmed’s house, frozen ash stretched beyond the charred foundations of a house, across the field, and into the woods. It had been Havaa’s home, and the realization pulled a wire of grief straight through her stomach. Havaa and Akhmed had only become real when they were plucked from nowhere and deposited in her life. She knew what had happened to Havaa’s father and her home, but here the girl materialized in her mind as she hadn’t before. She turned her back on the ruin.
The door to number 38 hung from its top hinge. As she entered her stomach clenched, as it did each time she stepped into the operating theater knowing she couldn’t save the life before her.
For her first nine years, she had traveled to her maternal grandmother’s flat in Grozny for Christmas and New Year’s. Her grandmother had moved from Moscow to Grozny in the late forties, among the ethnic Russians sent to repopulate the republic after the deportation, and had taken with her the goose-down mattress she had inherited from her parents. The grandmother’s parents, Sonja’s great-grandparents, had hidden the goose-down mattress in a haystack for three years following the Revolution, when the price of owning such an extravagance had been nine grams of lead. The grandmother’s parents had lost to the state nearly everything of lesser value than their lives: the farmland, the farmhouse, nearly all their clothing and furniture, even the donkey they had named Vladimir Ilyich. Through it all the goose-down mattress lay beneath the haystack that neither the commissars nor the Cheka agents had thought to disturb. When they moved to Moscow, they prized their rescued mattress as a happy memory of what life had been like before a band of angry men overly fond of facial hair had deigned to liberate them. Even in the Great Purge, when they hid the goose-down mattress beneath their bed and slept instead on a thin mat of straw, they pulled it out on birthdays and anniversaries to remember the way life once had been. Sonja’s grandmother was conceived on that mattress, birthed on that mattress, and sixty-four years later she died on that mattress. For its long life, a life that outlasted the Soviet Union, the mattress retained the damp reek of haystack. It marked Sonja’s first nine Decembers, and now, in her thirty-fifth, she pushed open the rickety door of Akhmed’s house and found the scent of her grandmother’s mattress inside.
The living room had been violently shaken. A fallen bookcase leaned against the divan. On the floor were twelve kopek-sized circles connected by slender shafts of light to twelve bullet holes in the ceiling. She called his name, but the house wouldn’t respond with even an echo. A trail of glass led to the kitchen where the kettle and two cans of evaporated milk were the only intact containers. In the bedroom, a body rested beneath the sheets. A hypodermic needle lay on the floor beside the bed. Akhmed’s wife, Sonja realized. She slowly peeled back the sheet. Out of habit, she felt for a pulse. The woman’s hair smelled of pears. Her hands were smooth, uncalloused, beautiful. Pressing her fingertips to the woman’s forehead, she found herself for the first time in many years standing before a corpse without guilt, a mourner rather than a failed surgeon.
She didn’t know the woman’s favorite color, or her favorite food, or whether she had, as a child, preferred her father’s company to that of her mother; she didn’t know the sound of the woman’s voice, whether it was as small as her body suggested, or much larger, growing as her flesh shrank. She didn’t even know the woman’s name. But she knew this woman had a husband, and he had been a decent man, yes, had been. Akhmed died the moment she saw his wife in bed. He wouldn’t return. Whoever came upon this house next would find fallout, chaos, and would not see the way Akhmed had lived; a stranger, a refugee, would discover this place and never the man and woman it had belonged to.
She found a broom and dustpan in the kitchen closet and swept up the broken dishes and jars and teacups. She righted the living room bookcases and, unsure of how Akhmed had ordered the books, she arranged them alphabetically. She wiped up the plaster shaken loose by gunfire and nailed a wooden board over the bullet holes. She scrubbed the black grime from the basin with steel wool. For more than two hours she tidied the house. The rooms contained so little they were quickly restored, and by early afternoon she had no choice but to face the bedroom. Dust blanketed the bureau, carpeted the floor, filled the frame of their wedding photograph. She pulled a fistful of white athletic socks from the drawer. “Do you mind if I borrow these?” she asked, and took the silence as permission. She cleaned the bureau, floor, windowsill and panes. The edge of the bed, rim of the lamp, and the books stacked beside the nightstand. Hadji Murád was among them and she set it aside knowing this once she’d break her long-standing policy against sad endings. In one of the bureau drawers she found several dozen charcoal-drawn portraits of the woman now lying dead in the bed. In the drawings her cheeks were fuller, her eyes open and clear. In every one she smiled.
When she finished dusting, she turned her attention to the bed. “Several hours after death the sphincter and bladder muscles relax,” she said softly. “It isn’t right to spend an eternity in soiled underwear. I’ll clean you, okay?” She pulled back the covers and stripped off the nightdress. Wearing the socks like gloves she washed the woman’s thighs and buttocks, and then dressed her in a tan skirt, a garden-hose-green sweater, and a burgundy headscarf. She looked like a bouquet of roses. Akhmed had told her that his wife hadn’t walked in more than two years, so after pulling on the last pair of clean socks, she wedged the woman’s feet into a pair of sneakers. “Now you can walk wherever you want.”
After cleaning and dressing the woman, she returned to the manila envelope and collection of pages she’d found hidden beneath her body. The manila envelope was addressed: For K, 56 Eldár Forest Service Road. This K, whoever he was, lived only a handful of houses away. She set it aside and picked up the fastened pages. They appeared to form a letter or journal entry. The first sentence read: This is about your father. She flipped to the last page to read the last sentence, as was her custom, then moved up to the last paragraph, and then the last page:
There is little ink left in the pen, even less energy in my hand, and the time has come. This story ends where you begin. You were born in a hospital. I drove your mother and father in the truck I purchased my son for his sixteenth birthday. Your mother’s face was as red as the paint. Your father kept telling me to drive faster. The maternity ward was on the fourth floor of the hospital. Your father and I helped your mother climb the stairs. When her feet failed, we carried her. She was worried her hips would crush you. Even before you were born, she worried for you. It was amazing to see her love you before you even met. Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn’t create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written. For their entire lives, even before they met, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree. You were their rain and sun, their morning and night.
In the maternity ward the nurse put your mother in a bed and I held her left hand and your father held her right. Custom says that a man shouldn’t be present at a birth, but we didn’t listen, we were there. On the boarded windows were drawings of a city that no longer existed. You were born within the memory of a kinder past. Your mother’s screams opened her jaw so wide you could have come from her mouth. Never have I seen your father so afraid. Then, you arrived. We we
re all there, waiting for you. The nurse held you in her hands. You didn’t breathe. We held our breaths waiting for you to find yours. And when your mouth opened, and your lungs burst, we knew they would never be empty. And your father, I have never seen a man more joyful.
The nurse who delivered you was named Natasha. All these years later I remember her name because she had remembered mine. She had read my book, Origins of Chechen Civilization, one of the four score who ever had. Hers were the first hands to hold you. When you were suffocating, she taught you to breathe.
Your mother’s were the second hands. She looked at you as if she had been born to you. She passed you to your father. The corners of his eyes crinkled. His heart had been the acorn. Now it was the oak tree.
Those are the first three pairs of hands that held you. How I hope you will live long enough that I will never know the final three.
“What is her name?” the nurse asked, as your father held you to his chest.
“Havaa.” He spoke your name like the rhythm of a pulse.
When they took him, he held your name right there in his chest, and you were with him, even if you didn’t know it. When he reached the end, he did not die. He called your name and began to live in you.
She set down the letter. If her pounding heart spoke a name, it was one she didn’t recognize. Her sister had delivered hundreds of newborns in the seven years she had worked in the maternity ward, hundreds of Havaas, and they were her patients, not her children, neither more nor less loved than the other lives begun and ended, saved and lost, revived and mourned within the gray granite walls of Hospital No. 6. But Sonja couldn’t name those countless others, had not shared with them a mattress or a room or an energy bar, would not recognize their faces on the street or in the bazaar or at the cemetery, did not wish for them what she wished for Havaa, a need, newly made, to save this one life her sister had brought into the world.