“I think the human mind isn’t built to sustain trauma after trauma.”

“Perhaps she needs to learn to care for herself. Perhaps your care is her paralysis.”

Havaa focused on her fingernails. She wanted to speak but didn’t, wanted to flee but couldn’t.

“I’ve considered leaving her for a few days, seeing if her body might jump-start her mind. It seems too cruel.”

“Both of our spouses have disappeared into themselves. Cruelty may be the line to draw them back.”

The conversation then veered back down the unmined road to the past, but when they each reached for the water pitcher, her mother’s fingers brushed his, and they all blushed.

Akhmed stayed with them the following day and night, and the one after that, spending most of the daylight hours planted in front of the living room window, staring across the street to his house. At night, when he thought Havaa was asleep, she heard him sneak into her parents’ room. It wasn’t until just after the fajr on the third morning that he finally left. He didn’t return. Esiila stood at the window, where he had, and she could see him across the street watching from his living room window, and they stood there with a bridge running between their eyes. Something awful had happened, but Havaa couldn’t put a name to it. She and her mother didn’t speak for the rest of that day or the next, as if Akhmed had been the substance through which they communicated, and without him they were alone with what they knew. The longer they went without speaking it, the heavier that first word became. On the day her father was to return, her mother hummed while she swept, scouring the silence with the dust from the rooms. Daylight dissolved into marbled twilight and Havaa fell asleep waiting for her father to appear.

They steeped in that silence for eight more days and nights before the uneven crush of gravel broke it. The door edged open and her father’s full weight collapsed against her mother’s chest. She would remember the yellow-gray of her father’s cheeks, how she’d seen that color frozen in deer urine but never on a human face. “Help me,” he whispered. Only then, when he tottered forward, did she see the dark red rags rubber-banded to his wrists. Akhmed must have seen from his house because he ran in with his doctor’s satchel before she could scream.

Akhmed would later explain that the bolt cutter had severed each finger so cleanly no skin remained to stitch over the bone. He would later explain that though ten strips of duct tape closed the wounds for the journey from the Landfill, infection was a greater threat than blood loss, and so he had no choice but to cauterize, no choice but to put out each finger like a cigar stub on the side of a heated butcher’s blade. But when he ran in he couldn’t explain what he was doing any more than could a man asked to put out a forest fire with only the water he could carry in his mouth. He asked her mother to start the stove and asked Havaa to go to her room. She hesitated. In the zachistka, she’d helped him when his fingers were too large and fumbling. Why wouldn’t he let her do the same for her father? The thunderclap of her name, this time shouted by her mother, and she ran.

The clatter of kitchen utensils passed through her closed bedroom door. Akhmed shouted for the butcher’s blade, and for more petrol, and with an intake of air the bar beneath the door brightened.

For three days her father slouched on the divan. Each night her mother unwound the gauze to polish the dark stumps with ointment. After a minute or two she cut a new strip of gauze, taped it around the shiny nub, and sighed, knowing she had nine more.

Late afternoon on the fourth day he stood. He paused at the coat stand, studying the buttons, and decided it was too warm for a coat. Havaa opened the door for him and he set his hand on the back of her neck and the heat of five missing fingers held her shoulder. They walked like that to Khassan’s house. Ramzan opened the door. They both looked to Ramzan’s fingers. Not even a nail was missing, and Ramzan blushed, and shoved his hands in his pockets.

“How …” Ramzan began to ask, but didn’t finish. “You look better.”

“I need a gun,” her father said.

“What? No, Dokka.”

“I need to know that my family can protect itself.”

“Dokka, they let us go from the Landfill. Do you know what they’ll do to you if they have even the idea that you are involved with guns again?”

“What, Ramzan?” her father asked, raising his hands. “What will they do to me?”

Ramzan looked down. “Fine,” he said, after a moment. “Come in.”

They walked past Khassan’s desk to Ramzan’s room. Ramzan popped the rigged floorboard and retrieved a Russian-made Makarov pistol from a cache beneath the floor. “Why did you bring the girl?” he asked.

“To pull the trigger,” her father said, looking down at her. “She’s six years old. It’s about time she learned how to handle guns.”

Ramzan took her outside, showed her how to load and unload the bullets, to set and release the safety. He told her to aim at the feral dogs clustered at the tree line, but she chose a tree trunk instead.

“It’s a semiautomatic,” Ramzan explained, “so you don’t need to cock the hammer. Don’t hold it out, that’s for American movie stars. You want to keep it just in front of you, your elbow against your chest, like you’re carrying a water pitcher. This won’t have the kickback of a high-caliber gun, but it isn’t designed for children, so you’ll feel it. Where do you think you should aim? The head? Never on the first shot. Too small a target. Aim for the chest, right in the center, that’s the kill shot.”

When she returned to the front of the house, her father sat back on the stoop, eyes closed, basking in the sun with a faint smile on his lips. She put the gun in his jacket pocket. He still hadn’t said what had happened to his fingers. As they walked home, she was worried he might, but his feet ground into the glinting gravel, and hers did too, and they conversed only in footsteps.

Two women and a man waited for them at the front door. The man’s hair looked painted and polished on his head; in another life he’d had a good job, a good flat, and a good wife, but now his lustrous head of hair was the only good thing he had left. “We heard you have beds,” one of the women said.

Her father looked at his shoe as if just stepping in dog shit. With a sickle-moon smile he shook his head, but they all knew it wasn’t in response to the question. Havaa would never know her father had spent the past three days paralyzed by the realization that his fingers would never again save Boris Yeltsin, or rake April soil, or flip the pages of a book, or wrap around his penis in the outhouse, where for the space of an inhalation he felt content.

“Yes,” he said. The three refugees beamed with a gratitude that would fill him even longer than a final trip to the outhouse. “We have several beds.”

CHAPTER 11

SONJA DIDN’T SEE him when she crossed the parking lot, didn’t know him when she unlocked the doors, didn’t hear him when he greeted her good morning, when he climbed into the truck after her, when she released the brake, gunned the engine, and followed the gray road to Grozny. Twelve hours earlier he had nearly fainted at the sight of her palm calluses. But why think about this when the snow melted into muddy veins, when the blue of a peaceful sky radiated from all the metal of the jeep, when Havaa was safe and he was alive and Grozny waited like a great lake at the end of this river of asphalt.

To conserve petrol, Sonja accelerated for several seconds, then freewheeled out of gear. Too much oil in the ground, never enough in the tank, he thought; it could be the national motto. They progressed haltingly, the truck leaping forward and then rolling to a near standstill. He felt carsick, but knew better than to ask her to drive more evenly. Fifteen silent minutes passed before he flipped on the radio and gave the dial a quarter turn. A crush of warm static filled the cabin.