He surveyed the yard while waiting for the dogs to emerge from the woods. The slate grave markers and stone perimeter of the herb garden were no more than dips and rises in the snow. The garden had been his wife’s suggestion, one of the few he acted on in their twenty-three years of marriage. Sharik, a pup then, had followed his nose around the yard as though pushing an invisible ball, and Khassan had planted seeds in rows marked with bent wire hangers. The dishes his wife had cooked for years soon tasted new, as though prepared by another woman, and Khassan had imagined that other woman when he made love to his wife five times that spring. Now she lay buried at the far end of the garden, beside the brown suitcase containing the bones of his parents, commemorated by a slight depression in the snow and a frozen dog turd.
Feral and matted, whittled by deprivation, the dogs loped toward the back steps. They had belonged to the neighbors his son had disappeared, and even in this state he knew them by name. They trotted through the hole he’d clipped in the fence and gathered before him in a tight semicircle, jostling and snapping at the thin slivers of apple falling from the kinzhal blade. He held out his hands and they licked the juice from his fingers. Like them, he was unwelcome at the homes of his neighbors and avoided on the street. Like them, he was a pariah. He nuzzled the snout of a brown mutt, reaching from the dog’s muzzle to her ears, and before he knew what was happening, he was holding her as he hadn’t held a human in years. The mutt — which had been a husband’s tenth-anniversary gift to his wife, who had been expecting something smaller, inanimate, and in a box — licked the grease from his hair.
“You think I’m wonderful, don’t you? You think I’m the kindest, bravest, most generous man ever given a pair of feet to step into the world,” he said, and the dog kept licking his hair in reply. “That’s because you’re a stupid dog.”
He went to the kitchen, returned with the meat of two chickens and a lamb shank, and laid it in the snow, his hair sticky with saliva, the king and benefactor of their open maws. He would never forget his son’s face the morning after Ramzan’s fifth trip to the military supplier, when Ramzan opened the refrigerator and found nothing but condiment jars basking in the thirty-watt glow. Ramzan had stormed to the backyard, where the dogs lay on the ground, swollen stomachs pointed skyward, unable to roll, let alone stand, let alone run, and Khassan lay right there among them, his own navel aimed at the clouds, turning the dead grass into confetti, such a lovely and peculiar carelessness known only to elderly men who have napped with feral dogs. Ramzan screamed at him, picking up a thigh bone gnawed clean, pulling the gristle from the slack jaws of a blind wolfhound, and a distant happiness returned to Khassan like a word he could define but not remember. From that day, a year and a half earlier, his disapproval had expanded from silence to sabotage. If Ramzan used food to justify the disappearances, Khassan made sure it all went to the dogs. Canine affection and his son’s exasperation became his only sources of pleasure. In response, Ramzan began stashing food around the house, but he soon realized that even processed meat spoiled. Then he bought a fancy refrigerator lock invented for fat Westerners without self-control; each morning he set aside enough for Khassan to eat that day, and locked up. But Khassan would give his three meals to the dogs and go hungry himself, and when he lost enough weight, Ramzan abandoned the tactic. Next Ramzan only brought foods to which dogs are allergic: chocolate, raisins, and walnuts. But Ramzan’s teeth began aching, his shit began looking like fancy Swiss candy bars, and with one glance to the insulin bottle Khassan reminded him that a diabetic couldn’t live on sweets. They were wonderful days; how he enjoyed terrorizing his son. In the end his boy surrendered. Couldn’t outwit his father. For the past year they had communicated by the glares of a resentful truce. Khassan fed the dogs as his only family, and always left enough for Ramzan, though no more than the average villager could hope to survive on in these difficult days.
Khassan stood and smiled at the six dogs, muzzles to the ground, tails wagging languidly. One was bald, another blind. From time to time a dog would race toward the fence, chasing invisible rodents; in the vaporous insanity that had fallen across the land, even dogs hallucinated. A white shepherd dog stood at the back. He tossed him the finest cut.
“Sharik,” he said, but the dog didn’t recognize his name. Three years earlier, before his son’s treachery allowed them food to spare, he had let the dog go. His claws had danced frantically on the floorboards, and Khassan had had to kick twice before he scampered out the open door. For three days the dog had paced the fence, head hung, waiting for Khassan to call him back. Khassan hadn’t left the house until Sharik finally had disappeared into the forest. When Ramzan had arrived with the first cardboard boxes of food, he had tried to entice the dog home, but whatever trust had existed between them was dead. Only by caring for the pack could Khassan care for his dog. That was the gift Sharik had given, and Khassan thanked him every morning with the finest cuts.
The dogs followed him around the side of the house, through weeds winter couldn’t kill, to the tire tracks furrowed in the road. They clambered behind him, trusting him as people did not, and when he unclenched his fists and wiggled his fingers, he felt cold wet noses and the warmth of their tongues.
“Did I ever tell you the story of the cobbler and his son?” he asked the brown mutt. “Yes, you’ve already heard it. Sharik tells it best.”
He walked to the gap in the block where Dokka’s house had stood. The dogs wouldn’t follow him onto the frozen charcoal. He found the corner where Dokka’s bookcase had stood, and there he bent down and scooped a handful of ash into his coat pocket. The dark dust dissolved into his palm. “A bunch of big tough wild dogs,” he said to the pack, which waited for him on the banks of the frozen debris. “But too afraid to follow me …” To follow him where? Where was he?
Across the street the curtained windows were two black eyes on the face of Akhmed’s house. If Akhmed had left at dawn, and said he would be gone all day, who was looking in on Ula? The most painful revelations were the quietest, those moments when the map opened on the meandering path that had led him here. An ailing woman would spend the day alone; he hadn’t envisioned that.
“I could call on her, see if she is all right, if she needs anything,” he said, glancing to the dogs for approval. They were all ripples on the same pond. “If I’m looking after a bunch of dogs, the least I can do is look after her. Don’t take that tone with me. I am not breaking in. I have the key right here.” He displayed the spare key Akhmed had given him with a grin, nine years earlier, on the day the bank that owned four-fifths of Akhmed’s house was bombed into oblivion. The dogs cocked their heads, unconvinced. “No, I haven’t been called for, but that’s beside the point. Are you sure you want to discuss etiquette? I have a lot to say about ass-sniffing as a way to say hello.”
Two paces toward the house a burgeoning worry spread through him. What if the dogs thought he was leaving them for human company? Well, he was, but he had to break it to them gently. They were sensitive souls, even if they occasionally dug up and ate newly buried bodies. He dropped to one knee and opened his arms. All but Sharik licked the aftertaste of oats from his breath, and he told them how much he loved them, how much he needed them, how he would never leave them. Then the bald dog sniffed his ass.
His highly critical canine audience observed as he knocked at the front door. “See?” he said to them. “I have no choice but to use the key.”