“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 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.”