While the men ate she and her mother remained in the kitchen. The custom seemed so unfair, and she didn’t understand why her mother, usually as stubborn as a sleepy ox, submitted to it. Her father allowed her to join them when they finished, provided she didn’t bite her nails, and the ottoman provided the perfect perch from which to watch the chess game. It was a beautiful set of lacquered beech bordered with mother-of-pearl. The board had to have been carved from magical wood, since for all the time she spent in the forest she’d never come across so shiny a tree. The little figures, demarcated by color and bound by rules, made warfare a clean and orderly enterprise. The bulbous heads of pawns and imams, rubbed bald by the touch of too many fingers, were her favorite; months later she would wonder why the rebels and Feds, most in their teens and twenties, still had so much hair. Her father was so skilled that Ramzan and Akhmed played in a team against him. The two consulted and conspired before making their next move, and her father would read a book while they decided, so confident in his mastery he didn’t care if Ramzan cheated. Once he told her that a true chess player thinks with his fingers, and she would remember this, thirteen months later, when he lost his. When his turn came he probed the air indecisively; then, as if each digit independently reached the same conclusion, they came together on the wooden scalp of the imam who slayed Boris Yeltsin, like any good jihadist.
Her father only lost to them twice. The first was in 2001, the Sunday after a company of wounded rebels spent one night of an eighteen-month retreat in Eldár. They came from the hospital in Volchansk, a fact that Akhmed might have exploited when he later took in the girl, had he remembered. When they hobbled into the village square, arms in slings, eyes purpled by exhaustion, the assembled villagers thought the rebels had fled the hospital too soon. One was in a wheelchair. How had the Feds failed to catch them? Their green headbands proclaimed Allahu Akhbar in a golden Arabic script. The villagers, Havaa among them, approached the rebels with cautious curiosity. Many, Havaa among them, had never seen a rebel in the flesh. They were a land over the horizon; sons and brothers would go to the rebels and never be seen again. Several mothers spoke to them directly, asking after their sons, but most, Havaa among them, watched silently. A shudder passed through the entire assembly when the short field commander planted the green flag of national independence in the square. With this act the rebels — so weak a few children with gardening tools could have overpowered them — had officially seized the village, and thus damned it to a Russian liberation.
They demanded medical attention and were taken to Akhmed’s clinic by a dozen villagers who introduced the rebels and disappeared, grateful for the clinic for the first time. Only after checking the linen closet for a potential Federal ambush were they willing to disarm. On the other side of the village, Havaa saw none of it. She sat with her mother, in the safety of the kitchen. Had she seen the short, squat field commander, she might have thought he looked like a half-emptied grain sack in fatigues. He addressed Akhmed courteously, reiterating the importance of communal sacrifice in the campaign to defeat the godless Russian scourge. Akhmed held his hands together but one couldn’t stop the other’s tremble. He warned the field commander that he wasn’t a very good doctor, that a pedophile’s ghost was said to haunt the clinic, and that he would much rather draw his portrait. In a deep, even voice as he unbuttoned his shirt, the field commander informed Akhmed that if he didn’t become the best doctor in Chechnya within the next five minutes, he’d soon haunt the clinic as well. A surgical thread Akhmed had never encountered held the field commander’s chest together.
“What is this?” Akhmed asked.
“Dental floss,” the field commander said. Given the lichenous growth on the field commander’s incisors, Akhmed assumed the floss hadn’t seen much prior action.
“Dental floss stitches. I’ve never seen such fine work. Who put them in?”
“A doctor at the Volchansk hospital. She was both a woman and an ethnic Russian. Can you believe it?”
The self-doubt that had unfolded from the envelope with every hospital rejection letter again stole Akhmed’s breath. “No,” he said, dispirited. In three and a quarter years, when Sonja was to offer him a job, Akhmed would finally find that breath.
On the other side of the village Havaa was studying the pale blue flowers on her mother’s skirt, annoyed she couldn’t find them in the Caucasian flora guide. Why invent flowers when so many real ones would be honored to find their faces on a skirt? Her mother had spent the afternoon in the back garden and now chopped carrots, beets, and thyme lay on the counter. Havaa, standing on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor. Later that afternoon the door would quietly close and her father would enter. He would speak with that deliberate, deceptive tone he used when reading her a story whose ending he already knew. She would ask if the army men would be staying with them and he would say, no, they’re not refugees, and leave it at that. She wouldn’t know that her father and Ramzan had spent nearly an hour conversing with the field commander. She wouldn’t know that the field commander, impressed by Ramzan’s experience as a trader in the mountains, had put him in touch with a sheikh who was looking for a capable man, a man like Ramzan, to deliver arms to the rebel encampments. All she would know was that the following Sunday, a day before the Feds arrived, her father lost Boris Yeltsin to a rook.
Three mornings after the rebels tottered from the village, Havaa woke to her parents’ hushed panic. Her father hoisted her in his arms before she could change out of her nightclothes. The impact of each footstep jolted through her, and as he ran into the forest, she watched the village shrink over his shoulder.
“What is it?” she asked.
“We are being liberated,” her mother panted from beside her.
A rotten log shielded them from all but the zachistka’s sound. When a ten-second spray of gunfire flooded the sky, Havaa couldn’t have imagined it was directed at eight villagers deemed too dangerous to be transported to the Landfill. Lying on the mossy topsoil for hours, she thought of her father’s defeat the previous afternoon. She knew that Russian soldiers could destroy a village, but she hadn’t known her father could lose a chess match. He lay next to her, twitching at the slightest shift in the wind, his fingers white around the handle of the kitchen knife. The rising smoke was so thick dusk came at three o’clock. Her father peered over the log with a pair of binoculars. He passed her the binoculars, the two-night payment of an ornithologist, who was now homesick, studying birds in Ecuador. As she spied Feds through the gaps between tree trunks, her father explained the difference between kontraktniki and ordinary draft soldiers.
“The draft soldiers in blue uniforms are scared teenagers. They are what we might call the victims of absurdism,” he said, not one to miss an opportunity to lecture a captive audience. “They would surrender if you waved a soup spoon at them. Most can’t find Chechnya on a map and don’t care if Putin, Maskhadov, or Father Christmas presides over the republic; most arrived by train in passenger carriages but most will return as Cargo 200, sealed within zinc-lined coffins in the freights. But the kontraktniki, the ones you see wearing sleeveless black T-shirts to show off their tattoos, they are nihilists, immoralists, or misanthropists, take your pick. They were released from prison provided they serve a certain number of years in Chechnya. They want to be here because this is the only place they can express their true nature, and, if I weren’t hiding behind a log, I suppose I might even admire them because they are committed to the dialectics of their philosophy, no matter how horrid.”