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.