A head, swollen and decapitated, hung from a tree behind her. A giant’s head, she thought, and then, two steps closer, she recognized it. Akim had survived the night but died the next morning. Akhmed said that those hours were a gift she’d given Akim, that time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years, though how he could have made peace while screaming, she didn’t know. She stood close enough that her breath, chilled by the winter air, reached his lacquered lips. Akim once had found her talking to a pinecone and had watched, fingers barring his mouth, until snickers erupted from his nostrils. She had hated him then and still did. But standing before the portrait she felt something wrap around that hatred as a flame wraps around a candle-wick, and soon there was nothing but a burnt taste in her mouth, his solemn face staring back at her, and the awful fact that it would never laugh again. Only then did she wonder how Akhmed had known to place the portrait where only she would find it. For a few more minutes, she stared at the portrait, and said good-bye.
When she woke the following Sunday, a single question pulsated in the cold morning air. What if there was no chess match today? The biweekly matches were the last heartbeats of the society in which she so badly wanted citizenship. She lay in bed until the sun had climbed into the first pane. When her mother, Esiila, asked her to help in the kitchen, she refused to answer, and poured a stream of indecipherable half words onto her pillow. The girl always surprised her mother. During the zachistka she had hid in the woods as quiet as the stones at her feet and twice as tough, calmer and more sensible than Dokka, who had gone on and on, lecturing them, knowing they were trapped. And now, the girl who hadn’t cried once since the rebels arrived in town was bawling over morning chores. Believing the girl’s endurance had at last reached its limits, Esiila quietly closed the door.
Havaa only left the bedroom when she heard the soft tapping of her father setting chessmen on the board. Later that afternoon, when her father lost Boris Yeltsin, again to Akhmed and Ramzan’s rook, Havaa didn’t care.
Quiet and cautious, the months moved like men slipping into mosque after salat. Villagers slid into the refugee lines without telling anyone and the taste of concrete dust hung in the air for a full season. Once a month, Ramzan’s red pickup pulled up and her father sank into the cracked leather passenger seat, and she would watch through the window as the taillights shrank. When he returned a week later, his whole body would smell like an armpit and he would pause at the threshold, eyes narrowed, rebuilding his family in his mind before pushing the door open and telling them how much he had missed them. Though Havaa never discovered where her father and Ramzan went, or what they did, she knew from her mother’s voice that they were probably doing something more dangerous than flipping blini on the skillet with their bare fingers.
The kitchen window was left open even in winter to ventilate the oven air and, in the mornings, her father’s indigestion. She paused at it on the day before her father was to leave. Her parents’ voices ran together like ribbons of smoke. Her father said it would ensure their survival, and her mother called him an idiot for thinking anything involving guns or Ramzan was safe, and Havaa dashed back to the woods, where songbirds spoke to one another in more pleasant tones. Ramzan’s truck arrived before dawn. At the door, Havaa placed a pebble in her father’s palm. “If you roll it in a hundred circles you get a wish,” she said. He slipped it into his shirt pocket, and leaned forward, and his lips were two slats of sunlight on her forehead. The warmth glowed pleasantly, and after he turned to her mother, she pressed her fingers to her skin to hold it there.
Ula had taken ill in spring 2002, one year after the zachistka, and so when for the first three nights of her father’s final trip Akhmed filled Dokka’s seat at the table, it seemed only natural that he should come alone, as he had on other occasions when her father was in the mountains. It was January 2003. Havaa hadn’t seen Ula in eight and a half months. On the first evening, as Havaa set plates on the table, Akhmed followed behind her and picked them back up, muttering, “These won’t do.” He left for his house and returned a few minutes later with a shorter, narrower stack of dishware. Between the knives and forks Akhmed’s saucers looked like shrunken heads attached to enormous metal ears. Her mother frowned at the reconfigured table setting; men, she knew, would take everything from a woman, even her plates.
“To trick our stomachs,” Akhmed told Havaa, loud enough for her mother to hear in the kitchen. “Tonight we dine like aristocrats on an elegant meal of modest portions. But I find nothing sadder than a small amount of food lost on a large amount of plate. But this,” he said, holding a saucer in his palm, “is just the right size. If we trick our brains into thinking our dinner fills an entire plate, we might trick them into thinking our stomachs are full.” On the kitchen window Havaa thought she caught a smile in her mother’s reflection.
The tension that had seemed staked to the floorboards the previous night fluttered out the open kitchen window as her mother and Akhmed conversed. They reminisced about Dokka’s arrival in the village. He had presumed the village had its own newspaper, a presumption some took as evidence of insanity. He had brought more boxes of books with him than there was floor space in his rented room, and rather than discard the precious tomes, he had turned them into furniture. He slept on a mattress raised on book boxes, and sat at a desk made of an old door laid across pillars of science manuals. It didn’t help his standing among those already questioning his sanity.
Dokka had grown up and been educated in Grozny, and Akhmed, just graduated in the bottom tenth of his class with no job prospects and the noose of the village’s expectations tightening around his neck, did his best to transform Dokka into a local celebrity, partly because he had never befriended a man from Grozny, but mainly so Dokka could replace him on the tongues of gossiping widows. An arborist by training, Dokka was assigned to a three-year position researching the potential environmental benefits of clear-cutting, the professional equivalent of Siberian exile. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the timber industry disappeared — along with Dokka’s funding — he remained to take advantage of this rare opportunity to research new-growth forest. By then he had moved into a home large enough to accommodate both books and furniture, and the villagers, most anyway, didn’t run to the other side of the road when passing him. Though Esiila’s father belonged to the camp still questioning Dokka’s mental health, Khassan fully endorsed the young arborist, and Dokka was willing to marry Esiila for such a small dowry, the father would have been judged insane himself for refusing.
Havaa watched the conversation as she would a chess match, each side testing the other, searching for weaknesses to exploit. Now and then her mother glanced at her and the reflection of candlelight revealed an unfamiliar intensity in her eyes.
“Has Ula shown any signs of improvement?” her mother asked.
“No. She hasn’t left the bed for over eight months now.”
“Are you any closer to a diagnosis?”
Again, Akhmed shook his head. “Her vitals are fine. Whatever she has exceeds my ability to detect, let alone treat. I make sure she rolls over every couple hours to prevent bedsores. What else can I do?”
“You don’t think there is anything wrong with her, do you?” The question was a queen driven eight squares forward.