When she woke the following Sunday, a single question pulsated in the cold morning air. What if there was no chess match today? The biweekly matches were the last heartbeats of the society in which she so badly wanted citizenship. She lay in bed until the sun had climbed into the first pane. When her mother, Esiila, asked her to help in the kitchen, she refused to answer, and poured a stream of indecipherable half words onto her pillow. The girl always surprised her mother. During the zachistka she had hid in the woods as quiet as the stones at her feet and twice as tough, calmer and more sensible than Dokka, who had gone on and on, lecturing them, knowing they were trapped. And now, the girl who hadn’t cried once since the rebels arrived in town was bawling over morning chores. Believing the girl’s endurance had at last reached its limits, Esiila quietly closed the door.
Havaa only left the bedroom when she heard the soft tapping of her father setting chessmen on the board. Later that afternoon, when her father lost Boris Yeltsin, again to Akhmed and Ramzan’s rook, Havaa didn’t care.
Quiet and cautious, the months moved like men slipping into mosque after salat. Villagers slid into the refugee lines without telling anyone and the taste of concrete dust hung in the air for a full season. Once a month, Ramzan’s red pickup pulled up and her father sank into the cracked leather passenger seat, and she would watch through the window as the taillights shrank. When he returned a week later, his whole body would smell like an armpit and he would pause at the threshold, eyes narrowed, rebuilding his family in his mind before pushing the door open and telling them how much he had missed them. Though Havaa never discovered where her father and Ramzan went, or what they did, she knew from her mother’s voice that they were probably doing something more dangerous than flipping blini on the skillet with their bare fingers.
The kitchen window was left open even in winter to ventilate the oven air and, in the mornings, her father’s indigestion. She paused at it on the day before her father was to leave. Her parents’ voices ran together like ribbons of smoke. Her father said it would ensure their survival, and her mother called him an idiot for thinking anything involving guns or Ramzan was safe, and Havaa dashed back to the woods, where songbirds spoke to one another in more pleasant tones. Ramzan’s truck arrived before dawn. At the door, Havaa placed a pebble in her father’s palm. “If you roll it in a hundred circles you get a wish,” she said. He slipped it into his shirt pocket, and leaned forward, and his lips were two slats of sunlight on her forehead. The warmth glowed pleasantly, and after he turned to her mother, she pressed her fingers to her skin to hold it there.
Ula had taken ill in spring 2002, one year after the zachistka, and so when for the first three nights of her father’s final trip Akhmed filled Dokka’s seat at the table, it seemed only natural that he should come alone, as he had on other occasions when her father was in the mountains. It was January 2003. Havaa hadn’t seen Ula in eight and a half months. On the first evening, as Havaa set plates on the table, Akhmed followed behind her and picked them back up, muttering, “These won’t do.” He left for his house and returned a few minutes later with a shorter, narrower stack of dishware. Between the knives and forks Akhmed’s saucers looked like shrunken heads attached to enormous metal ears. Her mother frowned at the reconfigured table setting; men, she knew, would take everything from a woman, even her plates.
“To trick our stomachs,” Akhmed told Havaa, loud enough for her mother to hear in the kitchen. “Tonight we dine like aristocrats on an elegant meal of modest portions. But I find nothing sadder than a small amount of food lost on a large amount of plate. But this,” he said, holding a saucer in his palm, “is just the right size. If we trick our brains into thinking our dinner fills an entire plate, we might trick them into thinking our stomachs are full.” On the kitchen window Havaa thought she caught a smile in her mother’s reflection.
The tension that had seemed staked to the floorboards the previous night fluttered out the open kitchen window as her mother and Akhmed conversed. They reminisced about Dokka’s arrival in the village. He had presumed the village had its own newspaper, a presumption some took as evidence of insanity. He had brought more boxes of books with him than there was floor space in his rented room, and rather than discard the precious tomes, he had turned them into furniture. He slept on a mattress raised on book boxes, and sat at a desk made of an old door laid across pillars of science manuals. It didn’t help his standing among those already questioning his sanity.
Dokka had grown up and been educated in Grozny, and Akhmed, just graduated in the bottom tenth of his class with no job prospects and the noose of the village’s expectations tightening around his neck, did his best to transform Dokka into a local celebrity, partly because he had never befriended a man from Grozny, but mainly so Dokka could replace him on the tongues of gossiping widows. An arborist by training, Dokka was assigned to a three-year position researching the potential environmental benefits of clear-cutting, the professional equivalent of Siberian exile. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the timber industry disappeared—along with Dokka’s funding—he remained to take advantage of this rare opportunity to research new-growth forest. By then he had moved into a home large enough to accommodate both books and furniture, and the villagers, most anyway, didn’t run to the other side of the road when passing him. Though Esiila’s father belonged to the camp still questioning Dokka’s mental health, Khassan fully endorsed the young arborist, and Dokka was willing to marry Esiila for such a small dowry, the father would have been judged insane himself for refusing.
Havaa watched the conversation as she would a chess match, each side testing the other, searching for weaknesses to exploit. Now and then her mother glanced at her and the reflection of candlelight revealed an unfamiliar intensity in her eyes.
“Has Ula shown any signs of improvement?” her mother asked.
“No. She hasn’t left the bed for over eight months now.”
“Are you any closer to a diagnosis?”
Again, Akhmed shook his head. “Her vitals are fine. Whatever she has exceeds my ability to detect, let alone treat. I make sure she rolls over every couple hours to prevent bedsores. What else can I do?”
“You don’t think there is anything wrong with her, do you?” The question was a queen driven eight squares forward.
“I think the human mind isn’t built to sustain trauma after trauma.”
“Perhaps she needs to learn to care for herself. Perhaps your care is her paralysis.”
Havaa focused on her fingernails. She wanted to speak but didn’t, wanted to flee but couldn’t.
“I’ve considered leaving her for a few days, seeing if her body might jump-start her mind. It seems too cruel.”
“Both of our spouses have disappeared into themselves. Cruelty may be the line to draw them back.”
The conversation then veered back down the unmined road to the past, but when they each reached for the water pitcher, her mother’s fingers brushed his, and they all blushed.
Akhmed stayed with them the following day and night, and the one after that, spending most of the daylight hours planted in front of the living room window, staring across the street to his house. At night, when he thought Havaa was asleep, she heard him sneak into her parents’ room. It wasn’t until just after the fajr on the third morning that he finally left. He didn’t return. Esiila stood at the window, where he had, and she could see him across the street watching from his living room window, and they stood there with a bridge running between their eyes. Something awful had happened, but Havaa couldn’t put a name to it. She and her mother didn’t speak for the rest of that day or the next, as if Akhmed had been the substance through which they communicated, and without him they were alone with what they knew. The longer they went without speaking it, the heavier that first word became. On the day her father was to return, her mother hummed while she swept, scouring the silence with the dust from the rooms. Daylight dissolved into marbled twilight and Havaa fell asleep waiti
ng for her father to appear.
They steeped in that silence for eight more days and nights before the uneven crush of gravel broke it. The door edged open and her father’s full weight collapsed against her mother’s chest. She would remember the yellow-gray of her father’s cheeks, how she’d seen that color frozen in deer urine but never on a human face. “Help me,” he whispered. Only then, when he tottered forward, did she see the dark red rags rubber-banded to his wrists. Akhmed must have seen from his house because he ran in with his doctor’s satchel before she could scream.
Akhmed would later explain that the bolt cutter had severed each finger so cleanly no skin remained to stitch over the bone. He would later explain that though ten strips of duct tape closed the wounds for the journey from the Landfill, infection was a greater threat than blood loss, and so he had no choice but to cauterize, no choice but to put out each finger like a cigar stub on the side of a heated butcher’s blade. But when he ran in he couldn’t explain what he was doing any more than could a man asked to put out a forest fire with only the water he could carry in his mouth. He asked her mother to start the stove and asked Havaa to go to her room. She hesitated. In the zachistka, she’d helped him when his fingers were too large and fumbling. Why wouldn’t he let her do the same for her father? The thunderclap of her name, this time shouted by her mother, and she ran.
The clatter of kitchen utensils passed through her closed bedroom door. Akhmed shouted for the butcher’s blade, and for more petrol, and with an intake of air the bar beneath the door brightened.
For three days her father slouched on the divan. Each night her mother unwound the gauze to polish the dark stumps with ointment. After a minute or two she cut a new strip of gauze, taped it around the shiny nub, and sighed, knowing she had nine more.
Late afternoon on the fourth day he stood. He paused at the coat stand, studying the buttons, and decided it was too warm for a coat. Havaa opened the door for him and he set his hand on the back of her neck and the heat of five missing fingers held her shoulder. They walked like that to Khassan’s house. Ramzan opened the door. They both looked to Ramzan’s fingers. Not even a nail was missing, and Ramzan blushed, and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“How …” Ramzan began to ask, but didn’t finish. “You look better.”
“I need a gun,” her father said.
“What? No, Dokka.”
“I need to know that my family can protect itself.”
“Dokka, they let us go from the Landfill. Do you know what they’ll do to you if they have even the idea that you are involved with guns again?”
“What, Ramzan?” her father asked, raising his hands. “What will they do to me?”
Ramzan looked down. “Fine,” he said, after a moment. “Come in.”
They walked past Khassan’s desk to Ramzan’s room. Ramzan popped the rigged floorboard and retrieved a Russian-made Makarov pistol from a cache beneath the floor. “Why did you bring the girl?” he asked.
“To pull the trigger,” her father said, looking down at her. “She’s six years old. It’s about time she learned how to handle guns.”
Ramzan took her outside, showed her how to load and unload the bullets, to set and release the safety. He told her to aim at the feral dogs clustered at the tree line, but she chose a tree trunk instead.
“It’s a semiautomatic,” Ramzan explained, “so you don’t need to cock the hammer. Don’t hold it out, that’s for American movie stars. You want to keep it just in front of you, your elbow against your chest, like you’re carrying a water pitcher. This won’t have the kickback of a high-caliber gun, but it isn’t designed for children, so you’ll feel it. Where do you think you should aim? The head? Never on the first shot. Too small a target. Aim for the chest, right in the center, that’s the kill shot.”
When she returned to the front of the house, her father sat back on the stoop, eyes closed, basking in the sun with a faint smile on his lips. She put the gun in his jacket pocket. He still hadn’t said what had happened to his fingers. As they walked home, she was worried he might, but his feet ground into the glinting gravel, and hers did too, and they conversed only in footsteps.
Two women and a man waited for them at the front door. The man’s hair looked painted and polished on his head; in another life he’d had a good job, a good flat, and a good wife, but now his lustrous head of hair was the only good thing he had left. “We heard you have beds,” one of the women said.
Her father looked at his shoe as if just stepping in dog shit. With a sickle-moon smile he shook his head, but they all knew it wasn’t in response to the question. Havaa would never know her father had spent the past three days paralyzed by the realization that his fingers would never again save Boris Yeltsin, or rake April soil, or flip the pages of a book, or wrap around his penis in the outhouse, where for the space of an inhalation he felt content.
“Yes,” he said. The three refugees beamed with a gratitude that would fill him even longer than a final trip to the outhouse. “We have several beds.”
CHAPTER
11
SONJA DIDN’T SEE him when she crossed the parking lot, didn’t know him when she unlocked the doors, didn’t hear him when he greeted her good morning, when he climbed into the truck after her, when she released the brake, gunned the engine, and followed the gray road to Grozny. Twelve hours earlier he had nearly fainted at the sight of her palm calluses. But why think about this when the snow melted into muddy veins, when the blue of a peaceful sky radiated from all the metal of the jeep, when Havaa was safe and he was alive and Grozny waited like a great lake at the end of this river of asphalt.
To conserve petrol, Sonja accelerated for several seconds, then freewheeled out of gear. Too much oil in the ground, never enough in the tank, he thought; it could be the national motto. They progressed haltingly, the truck leaping forward and then rolling to a near standstill. He felt carsick, but knew better than to ask her to drive more evenly. Fifteen silent minutes passed before he flipped on the radio and gave the dial a quarter turn. A crush of warm static filled the cabin.
“There’s no working radio tower in the country. It’s all static,” she said, without looking to him.
“I know. But 102.3 plays the best. Not too tinny. Full and robust. If a cello were to perform static, it would sound like this.”
She shook her head and turned the dial. “I prefer 93.9,” she said. She still hadn’t looked at him.
“It’s too thin and monotone. There’s no variation. It just sounds like static.”
“And that’s why I like it,” she said. “It sounds like static is supposed to sound.”
He reeled the dial to the far end. “106.7,” he said. “Just listen.” Snatches of foreign transmissions laced the white noise. Syllables surfaced like glowing bubbles from the harsh swirl. Voices in a storm. She turned the dial back to 93.9 and they listened to static-sounding static. Fog fell over the fields. A bus was parked in a meadow. Paint chips pointed down a gravel road to the rusted remains of a tractor factory. Dormant smokestacks. Nowhere was a fire less likely to be found than inside a factory furnace.
“Do you worry about land mines?” he asked.
“Not really. There’s a steel plate mounted beneath the driver’s seat.”
“Does it happen to cover the passenger’s seat, too?”
She had to smile, but before she shook her head and said he could amputate his own legs now, her gaze hardened around a figure a hundred meters down the road. An elderly woman with the posture of a parenthesis. A twine-strapped bundle of blue tarpaulin hung from her shoulders. A lavender dress hem fluttered at her ankles.
“Don’t you know this road isn’t safe on foot?” Sonja asked through the open window. “Do you need a ride?”
The woman shrugged the blue tarpaulin, and watching her Akhmed wanted to reach out, to wipe the damp grooves of her forehead and tell her that he too had suffered Sonja’s questions.
“Only a fool would sit in a
truck,” she said, pace unchanged.
“But we are doctors,” Akhmed said, emphasizing we.
She glanced at him and back to the road. “And you’re sitting in a truck.”
Thirty minutes of empty fields passed without remark before Akhmed and Sonja reached the first checkpoint. An OMON lieutenant approached, followed by two scrawny privates who mimed his movements down to the way he chewed his bottom lip between his sentences; and contemplating these slight, unconscious facsimiles, Akhmed wondered if fear so consumed the young men that they would fuck, fart, and die on their superior’s schedule. Sonja passed the lieutenant their documents: two ID cards, one expired medical license, and three letters penned by Federal colonels, which persuaded the lieutenant more compellingly than their legitimate documents. A hundred meters past the checkpoint she reached across his lap and slid the letters into the glove box. She still hadn’t looked at him. He grabbed her wrist before she could shut it and pulled out more than two dozen envelopes. The letters varied in formality, from official endorsements typewritten on Defense Ministry stationery to a few approving words scrawled on the back of a rebel field map. The signatories formed an index of the top brass on both sides of the war: General of the Federal Army Valentin Vladimirovich Korabelnikov, Special Battalion Vostok Commander Sulim Yamadayev, Commander of the Northern Caucasus Military District Alexander Ivanovich Baranov, the deceased mujahideen leader Ibn Al-Khattab, separatist field commanders Ruslan Gelayev and Shamil Basayev, even a deputy from Putin’s office, both rebels and Feds cohabiting peacefully by the thin partition of letter envelopes.
“Be careful with those,” she said, pulling her hand away.
“Why do you have these?” he asked, as the first of long-overdue misgivings unsettled him.
“For unhindered travel. They take care of bureaucratic formalities.”
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Page 15
