The pull of sheets transmitted the girl’s shape, her indentation in the mattress, that slight heat burning off her skin. Sonja didn’t want her here, couldn’t imagine what the girl had seen, or knew, or was blind to or ignorant of that had put her in the Feds’ crosshairs. Somewhere a colonel tossed in bed, wanting to find Havaa as much as Sonja wanted her gone, and she would happily trade the girl for Natasha, or her parents, or a plane ticket to London, or a decent night’s rest. The girl had lost her father and she had lost her sister and though their shared experience might lead to shared commiseration, she felt cheated. Moths had fluttered on the edge of her vision as she floated into the hallway that afternoon, hoping the man brought news. Her sister had taken the Samsonite when she vanished the previous December. There was no note or explanation, not even under the divan, where Sonja had crawled with a broomstick and the vain hope that the breeze had hidden Natasha’s good-bye. It was as if she’d opened the door to the fourth-floor storage closet and fallen off the earth. Poof and gone. But there were no arrest reports, no border-crossing records, no body, and the absence of evidence was enough to allow Sonja to go on hoping that the next patient funneled through the waiting room, through the swinging doors of the trauma ward would be Natasha. But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?
The night-light coated the girl in a green film. Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn’t say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between the creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving. For now, she slept.
CHAPTER 4
A SHADOW APPEARED against the white horizon, filling the sleeves of a familiar navy overcoat. Two mornings earlier, Akhmed would have waved and walked to greet his friend. He would have walked until the shade dissolved from Khassan’s face and then walked farther, to raise his voice, without fear or hesitation, had this been two mornings earlier. But these were afterthoughts as he ran into the forest and hid behind a gray trunk only half his width. He crouched at the base of the trunk and gulped the dawn air and hoped Khassan, a sharpshooter in the Great Patriotic War, hadn’t seen him flee. He cradled his jaw in his palms. Was this how he would live now? Fleeing into the forest at the slightest rustle?
Three taps sounded on the birch trunk. “Is anyone home?” the old man asked. Akhmed stood and turned ruefully. His footprints led right to the tree trunk. From the wrong ends of binoculars, Khassan could have tracked him here.
“It’s cold to be out so early,” Akhmed said. He couldn’t raise his gaze above Khassan’s shoulders as they walked back to the service road. The old man’s frame still filled his overcoat and he held a two-kilogram weight in each hand. At the age of seventy-nine — a full twenty years past the life expectancy of the average Russian man, as he often pointed out — Khassan maintained the exercise regimen he had begun in the army a half century earlier. Fifty squats, sit-ups and push-ups, plus a five-kilometer run that had slowed to a saunter over the decades.
“My balls have frozen in Poland and in Nazi Germany and in Kazakhstan. They have frozen in nine different time zones. But now?” He sighed and gazed sorrowfully at his crotch. “Now I’m too old to need them, so why should I care if they freeze?”
As a child and an adult, Akhmed had been captivated by stories of Khassan’s sixteen-year odyssey. To a man who had never even been to Grozny, Khassan’s travels rose to the realm of legend. In 1941, the Red Army gave him five bullets and an order to find a gun among the dead. With a rifle pried from frozen fingers in Stalingrad, he shot a path through Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. He pulled two bullets from his left thigh, lost three friends to hypothermia, killed twenty-seven Nazis by bullet, four by knife, three by hand, fought under five generals, liberated two concentration camps, heard the voices of innumerable angels in the ringing of an exploded mortar, and took a shit in one Reichstag commode, a moment that would forever commemorate the war’s victorious conclusion. After his years of service he returned to a Chechnya without Chechens. While he had fought and killed and shat for the U.S.S.R., the entire Chechen population had been deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia under Stalin’s accusations of ethnic collaboration with the fascist enemy. His commanding officer, a man whose life Khassan had twice saved, was to spend the next thirty-eight years working as a train porter in Liski, where the sight of train rails skewering the sun to the horizon served as a daily reminder of the disgraceful morning he shipped Khassan, the single greatest soldier he’d ever had the pleasure of spitting orders at, to Kazakhstan on a train packed with Russian physicians, German POWs, Polish Home Army soldiers, and Jews. Khassan’s parents hadn’t survived the resettlement, and in 1956, when — after the death of Stalin three years earlier — Khrushchev allowed Chechen repatriation, Khassan disinterred their remains and carried them home in their brown suitcase.
“From what you told me,” Akhmed said, “they weren’t cold from disuse.”
Khassan smiled. “Thank goodness the borders are closed. Who knows how many frauleins might otherwise track me down for dowries?”
Violet light veined the clouds. Akhmed searched for something to say, a sentence flung to pull them from the sinkhole of Dokka’s disappearance. “How’s the book?”
Khassan winced. Not the right sentence. “I’m giving up on that,” he said.
“It’s not writing itself?”
“History writes itself. It doesn’t need my assistance.”
“But it’s your life’s work.”
“Your life’s work could be scrubbing piss from a toilet bowl. Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”
For four decades Khassan had drafted and redrafted his six-volume, thirty-three-hundred-page historical survey of the Chechen lands. Akhmed was a child when he had first seen the pages. After cancer had put his mother in the ground, he and his father had received weekly invitations to dine with Khassan in the three-room house built by Khassan’s father in a time when men were expected to grow their own corn, raise their own sheep, and build their own homes. A partial draft, kept in eight boxes beneath Khassan’s desk, was written in the careful cursive of a condolence letter. Akhmed found it one afternoon while his father and Khassan sat outside, gossiping like married ladies beneath a June sun. Each afternoon, while Khassan taught at the city university, Akhmed snuck into the living room and stole a single page. He read it at night, after completing his homework, and exchanged it the next afternoon for the following page. Khassan had begun his history in the time before humanity, when the flora and fauna of Chechnya had existed in classless egalitarianism. In a twenty-page account of Caucasian geology, Khassan proved that rock and soil adhered to the same patterns of dialectical materialism proffered by Marx. A seven-page explanation of natural selection compared kulaks to a species that failed to adapt to environmental changes. Akhmed read seventy-three pages in total, only reaching the Neolithic period before Khassan realized pages had gone missing: the three Akhmed had lost, the two he had turned into paper airplanes, and the one, a description of Eldár Forest before man invented chainsaws, that had been too beautiful for him to return. Believing the culprit to be a secret police informant, Khassan had burned the pages in his wood stove.