When he reached his cabin, a small shack within a perimeter of pale stone, he wanted to wash his hands. He didn’t. Instead he folded the shirts he’d won in cards from Red Army guards, the long underwear he’d stripped from a corpse, the marmot coat a Kazakh widow had traded for the promise that her departed husband’s name would remain on his tongue for nine years of nightly prayers. The brown suitcase stood at the door. He had inherited no other, nothing in which to pack the clothes so neatly folded on the floor. For eleven years he had dreamed of leaving behind his folded clothes for whatever Soviet ethnicity next fell from official favor, leaving behind all but his parents’ remains, and the following morning, when a locomotive whistle seared through his sleep, he awoke to that dream.

The cattle cars were filled by the time he reached the tracks. The refugees watched uncertainly as trains glided into the pale grasses of the steppe, becoming the only measure of scale. Balancing on a tie, beneath an exhaust cloud that rose like a locust swarm returning to God’s mouth, he found Mirza. “You’re still here,” she said. “I am,” he said. She lifted his brown suitcase. “It’s light,” she said. “It’s my parents,” he said. It was their third conversation.

The refugees camped along the tracks, afraid of missing the next transport, but Khassan, trusting the sky to convey the clatter of approaching trains, walked into the empty village beside Mirza. Trails of clothing, furniture, and dishware flowed from the open doors of cabins and huts. The commissar and his entourage were the first to flee, and the Party headquarters, the most architecturally sound building for many kilometers, was abandoned. They passed through meeting rooms papered with bulletins announcing the repatriation, and into the commissar’s office. Three upholstered chairs encircled a coffee table where a golden fountain pen stood at attention in its reservoir. Behind them, hanging over the doorframe, the plaster bust of Stalin observed them coolly. Khassan lifted it from its perch — two taps to Stalin’s forehead echoed in the hollow cranium — and wrapped it in a burgundy drape. Mirza’s face was unrecognizable in its approval.

Khassan carried the bust to the steppe and when he set it down the tall grasses radiated around the dead dictator’s face. Mirza dropped her heel through Stalin’s temple — and what could he do, when she looked at him like that, but become her accomplice? He crushed the big brown mustache, and she joined in, stamping out the left eye; their feet engaged in this fourth conversation until their boots were white with plaster dust, and they had finally committed the treason for which they had been sentenced twelve years earlier. They shrieked and whooped until their voices were hoarse and their lungs ached and the wind was carrying off the dust and it was all celebration. Finally, he spread the burgundy drape across the grass. She reached for his cheek and he reached for her shoulder. On her stomach, to the left of her navel, an oval birthmark spread like a tipped inkwell. He placed his mouth on it.

Ula had closed her eyes, but in the quiet he felt the relief of confession like a current carrying him after he stopped kicking. It felt wonderful to be heard and forgotten. He wanted more. He wanted to erase the past he had spent his life recording. Later, in his study, he gathered his notes, rough drafts, red-line edits, everything, and set them in a bedsheet and carried them into the woods. It would take many trips, many tied bedsheets, but he would erase every word he had ever written. The dogs accompanied him, and behind them followed the memory of Mirza’s accusation, now stronger, fortified by the testimony of four decades spent as a Soviet apologist. And after the fire had read his pages, and the dogs basked in the warmth, and the ashes grayed the snow, what would he write? Not a history of a nation that had destroyed history and nationhood. Something smaller. A letter to Havaa. His recollections of Dokka. He would begin with his favorite memory of Dokka, then go back to the first time he had met him, and end with Havaa’s birth. It would be the first true thing he had ever written.

CHAPTER 6

AT THAT MOMENT, Havaa hated the hospital. She hated the chemicals that sharpened the air and burned her throat just like the bleach her mother used to launder sheets, when there had been bleach, and sheets, and her mother. She hated the patients, who were bruised, who were broken, who took so, so, so long to die. She hated Deshi. The nurse was old, the nurse was boring, and if she were the face of life, no wonder so many patients chose death. She frowned at the stupid yellow linoleum; what was Akhmed doing? She hated him, too. He’d thrown a lab coat over her and left her to sit by herself in the waiting room while the man hauled in on the tarpaulin filled the air with screaming and the floor with bleeding. Through the thin fabric of the lab coat, she’d watched the frantic shadows thrash about on the floor, straining to stopper everything that was pouring from that sad man. When they finished, they disappeared down the corridor, and left her there like a coat stand.

And now Akhmed had gone home, had left her again. Would he return tomorrow? Yes, he had to. She couldn’t entertain other possibilities. Yes, Akhmed would return tomorrow; he would return tomorrow and he would go to Grozny, a place they always talked about going to together, and he would go with Sonja instead, whom he clearly liked more than her, because she was older and had breasts, and they would probably be doing something only the two of them would find fun, like inventing a way to scratch a phantom limb, and tomorrow, when he returned, she would hate him, and until then she would miss him.

A phantom limb. She still hadn’t taught the one-armed guard to juggle, as she had promised Akhmed, and she hated that she wanted to impress Akhmed even when he wasn’t with her. She found the guard at the hospital entrance, asleep on the bench. He wore the faded olive uniform of the rebels. She pressed her index finger into his stomach as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far, because he didn’t have much stomach to him. He woke with a grunt. “What do you want?”

“To juggle.”

He closed his eyes. “You don’t need my permission. Go forth.

Juggle.”

“No, I’m here to teach you to juggle.”

“You must be kidding.” He hadn’t opened his eyes again.

“You aren’t a one-armed freak that everyone feels sorry for,” Havaa said, as comfortingly as she could. When Akhmed had taught her to juggle six months earlier, he had used small rectangles of gauze that flapped and turned in the breeze like a shoal of starving white fish. They had stood in the middle of the street, the gusting headwind the nearest thing to traffic, the gauze strips slithering in it, and Akhmed hooting as she chased them. It had taken her all afternoon to learn to juggle one. The next day they had moved indoors. Juggling is more in your mind than your hands, Akhmed had told her; in the still air she had learned in minutes. “Juggling is more in your mind than your hand,” she told the one-armed guard.

“I died in my sleep, didn’t I? This is Hell, isn’t it?”

“You begin by throwing a handkerchief up in the air,” she said, and demonstrated in an exaggerated flourish.

The one-armed guard began praying. “Deliver me, Allah, from this cesspool of wickedness.”

“You want to make sure you cross the handkerchief, like you’re pinning it to the shoulder of an invisible partner. Like a phantom partner; that should be familiar to you!”

“Jesus Christ, hear my plea,” the one-armed guard chanted, in case the infidel god was more receptive.