He pushed open the door and crossed the thick mustiness to the bedroom. A pair of slender legs, no more than sheet creases, shifted beneath the covers. For three minutes he watched her from the threshold, a second slice of his day spent watching a second addled mind at rest; then she rolled over. He looked into her eyes and they took their time looking back.

“You’ve gotten old, Akhmed,” she said, and he couldn’t suppress his smile. Like a child, this one.

“I’m not Akhmed,” he said. Akhmed had been eight days old when they first met in the living room of Akhmed’s parents in 1965. He had held the infant in his arms and a relief profound as any he would ever feel had seeped right through him. Akhmed’s eight-day-old eyes had held the reflection of ten thousand possible lives. Khassan wasn’t an emotive or superstitious man, and nothing like it had ever happened again, but he had found, layered in the infant’s half-lidded eyes, innumerable, wanting faces, none of which he had recognized.

“I’m sorry,” Ula murmured. “My head isn’t right.”

He sat on the bed beside the bone of her hip. “Don’t apologize. I spent the morning talking to dogs.”

“If you’re not Akhmed, then why are you here?”

“I wanted to see if you needed anything. If you wanted someone to talk to. Akhmed won’t be back for a while.”

“He won’t be back?” she seemed to ask, but he wasn’t sure. She had but two notes in her, and on the wire stretching between them her questions and answers warbled the same.

“Not for a little while,” he said. Three full water glasses and a bowl of hardened rice sat on the nightstand.

Sensing his uncertainty, she again asked, “Why are you here?”

“I miss speaking to people,” he said. When he admitted it aloud he wanted to laugh. It was that simple. He was that lonely. He had come to an invalid woman to offer the help he needed. “I miss being able to speak. For nearly two years Akhmed has been the only person I’ve had a conversation with.”

“You said you spent the morning talking to dogs.”

He smiled and nodded. “I didn’t think you’d remember that. He must be the only person you’ve talked with in that time, too.”

“Who?”

“Do you know my name?” he asked. She strained but came back with nothing. “That’s okay,” he said. “That’s just fine.”

“Tell me a story,” she said.

“A story?”

“There were the stories of paintings. All true.”

He frowned. He didn’t know the stories of any paintings. “I only know one story,” he said. “I can say it happened, but I can’t say if it’s true. Did you ever meet Akhmed’s mother?” He took her empty stare for a no. “I’m glad you remember that because you couldn’t have met her. Cancer took her when Akhmed was seven. Her name was Mirza.”

She nodded because she was expected to.

“If I tell you this story, do you promise you will forget it?”

“I can’t promise anything,” she said distantly. He held her wrist, felt its plodding pulse. A mind too feeble to tell the time of day can still get the right blood to the right places, he thought. He’d never told anyone about her. “I will tell you about Mirza.”

He heard about the mass deportation nearly two years after it occurred, he told Ula, only after he himself had been deported to Kazakhstan. On February 23, 1944, Red Army Day, a day when Khassan had been shooting Nazis in eastern Poland, the Soviet NKVD rounded up Chechens in their town squares and forced them into Lend-Lease Studebaker trucks. Those who resisted or whom the NKVD deemed unfit for transport were shot. Packed into a coal wagon, Khassan’s parents and sister slept on maize sacks and ate dry maize meal as the trains slowly steamed eastward. Local soldiers cut their hair and dusted them with delousing powder when they arrived on the Kazakh steppe. Khassan never knew what happened to his sister, only that she had been seen climbing into the coal wagon in Grozny but hadn’t been seen climbing out. His parents slept in a kolkhozniki dormitory cellar, on a bed of dry mattress straw, and when hungry they made a flour of the mattress straw and fried thin powdery slabs that left them feverish but full. When they ran out of straw, they slept on the stone floor and made soup from grains picked from horse manure. By the time Khassan reached Kazakhstan in autumn 1945, conditions had improved but his parents had already perished, and he pieced together the story of their last year from the memories of their neighbors and friends, and from Mirza.

Mirza had been a child when Khassan left for war, and in 1947, when he came upon her straining water through cheesecloth, he didn’t recognize her as the girl who, at the age of eight, had been brought up on criminal charges for drawing a charcoal mustache on her lip and goose-stepping around the barnyard, ordering livestock to become more active builders of communism. “Let me have some,” he said, thirsty after his long way. “Go fuck yourself,” she said simply. It was their first conversation. She would become the love of his life, but he couldn’t have known that as he turned and stepped into dung so deep it reached the knot in his laces. He couldn’t have known it as he pried the pail from Mirza’s fingers and washed his boot in her clean water.

A year later the schoolmaster died and Khassan replaced him. He was without qualification or experience, but after the war, the squabbles of children approximated peace, and he was happy. Among his pupils was Mirza’s youngest sister, a quick-witted girl, with fingernails bitten so short she couldn’t lift a kopek coin from a counter, who once set a tack on the chair of the commissar’s chubby son to see if he would explode. Though he saved the commissar’s son from the tack — and thus Mirza’s sister from a bullet — he recognized that thread of recklessness running through her family just asking to be snipped short.

For May Day 1950, Khassan organized a children’s parade. Adults lined the stone-marked road to cheer their children and avoid the penalty of ten years’ hard labor for nonattendance. Twenty-three of the ninety-six children marching that day wouldn’t live to see their native Chechnya. The commissar’s son would be among them because the cholera ward, without respect for political class, was the nearest to an egalitarian society that most of them would ever come. Mirza’s youngest sister was one of the four who held on a raised pallet the plaster bust of Stalin. Mirza glared from across the street, her hands at her sides, the only pair there not brought together in applause. Her contempt passed through him as light through vapor. The following afternoon she confronted him in the schoolhouse with a look that would have severed weaker necks. “You are a coward,” she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy. It was their second conversation.

In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, the Chechen ethnicity was rehabilitated by the pen stroke of a distant bureaucrat. On the evening of the day the first trains arrived to transport them home, Khassan followed the pale stone road to the pale stone cemetery, carrying with him a spade and the brown suitcase his parents had last packed twelve years earlier. The earth was hard and dry, and it took several hours to reach them. His mother’s index finger pointed at him through the dirt. The burial shroud had replaced their skin. They were lighter than he had expected, their muscles hard in desiccation. He folded their arms, pulled on their legs until the tendons snapped; he was as reverent as possible. He packed them tenderly within the discolored suitcase lining. Their bones lay bowed and prostrate. He performed no ablutions, and the brown of earth and decay had rusted his hands, but God would forgive him these lesser blasphemies. They had given him as good a life as they could. He wished he could have given them a better death. He decided, then, that he would write a history of his parents, of his people, of this sliver of humanity the world seemed determined to forget. Standing in the mounded dirt the spade was a slender tombstone. He wasn’t alone. Hundreds of others had come to raise and return their dead, and the dust reddened the night.