CHAPTER 21
AT DAYBREAK KHASSAN left for the service road half hoping to intercept Akhmed, but all he found was a fresh set of footprints. Not knowing what else to do, he walked back and forth, urging the dogs to do likewise, and together they turned five kilometers of snow into a riddle no one could solve. Khassan had taken off his gloves, periodically oiling his fingers with butter, and for five kilometers lapping tongues warmed his knuckles. The bald one, Kashtanka, shivered like a prenatal rat, and several times Khassan paused to reattach the blanket tied by twine around the dog’s pale torso. In summer he bathed the dogs. If one fell sick he cared for it. At the village edge, he knelt and they gathered to him, leaping, licking his cheeks, leaning their paws on his back and panting in his ears, diseased, unwashed, his, his, his. When he stood, all six followed with Sharik at the rear. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock. The day stretched out and his path in it lay as meandering and meaningless as the one he had left. Before the bend in the road he saw Akhmed’s house and across from it the gap that had been Dokka’s. If he had seen Akhmed that morning, he would have had to ask permission to visit Ula; if he had asked permission, he might have been denied. It was a better excuse than the frigid air to stay curled under the covers those extra minutes.
The dogs lounged in the snowy lawn to wait for him. He crept through the shadows of the living room, careful not to disturb the curtains, and into the bedroom where Ula slept fitfully. He hesitated to wake her, as if he were no more than her troubled dream and would dissolve if he touched her. Her hair clumped in greasy cords and she smelled of talcum powder. In the kitchen he filled a stew pot with clean water and set it beside the bed. He drew the covers to Ula’s chin, so when she woke she wouldn’t worry about her decency. Then, reluctantly, he rubbed her arm.
“Why are you here?” she asked without even the suggestion of surprise in her face.
“Do you remember me?” he asked, more urgently than he had intended.
She narrowed her eyes.
“I must have lived a thousand lives before this. I was a bird. I was a bug. I lived in the leaves. I don’t know which life is the hallucination.”
“You’re Ula,” he said. “You’re married to Akhmed.”
“Why are you here?” Again she asked the question; again he didn’t answer.
Because his son was the reason she spent the day alone. Because keeping her comfortable, keeping her company, caring for her was the least he could do. Because he was lonely. Because he had forgotten a woman’s companionship. Because the thought of talking himself senile to a pack of feral dogs didn’t appeal to him this early in the day. He looked to the stew pot of water beside the bed. Because she forgot. Because she forgot everything he said. “I’m here to wash your hair.”
She nodded and he peeled back the blanket, her skin whiter than a Russian’s. Sometimes Akhmed carried her outside to the rocking chair and she would sit without rocking, swathed in blankets even in the sticky summer months. Khassan turned her so her hair hung off the side of the bed and into the water. The soap gave a fine lather, and he ran his fingers through the water, and broke the bubbles against her scalp, and washed away the grease and dead skin. After it was washed and rinsed, he wrapped her hair in a towel and propped her upright against the headboard.
“You look like a sheikh with that turban around your head,” he said.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I’m here to finish telling you a story.”
She smiled, pleased with his answer. “You might have to repeat things. You may not know but my memory isn’t what it once was.”
He began where he had stopped, on the steppe, where the next morning he and Mirza boarded the train from Kazakhstan to Chechnya. Eldár was a ghost town when the survivors among its former residents returned. Soviet soldiers tasked with building a new thoroughfare had uprooted all the tombstones from the village cemetery. Khassan entered the village on a street scrawled with epitaphs. Dust added an extra half centimeter of height to the tabletop, the shelves, and floor. The air was too thick to breathe, and so on his first night home, he slept outside. The next morning, under an awning of bulbous gray clouds, he buried the brown suitcase in the back garden.
He was thirty-one years old and enrolled in the history doctoral program at Volchansk State University. On the day of Mirza’s wedding, he barricaded himself in the university library. He had considered kidnapping her, as Chechen grooms had done since time immemorial when failing to receive the approval of a bride’s parents. But he didn’t want to earn a reputation as a bride kidnapper, particularly not among his professors, and besides, it was too late. That afternoon she would marry the botanist she’d been betrothed to since her ninth birthday, and if botany wasn’t bad enough, the man also had a clubfoot and a collection of pressed flowers. All through the day Khassan read thick philosophical tomes, but not one explained the injustice of a world in which he would lose Mirza to a clubfooted botanist with a passion for pressed flowers. The botanist was a decent man, but Khassan was in love, and thus capable of infinite hate.
About the time he began writing the book that would occupy his life, Khassan embarked on a smaller, secondary project of historical reclamation. On notecards he recorded the recollections friends, neighbors, and distant relations had of his family, and pinned them to the walls of what had been his sister’s room. All were small and ordinary — his sister’s hiccupping laugh, his father’s wish for the smallest denominations of change so his pockets would jingle like a rich man’s — but when he read them, alone in the house they once had shared, these unremarkable memories returned with an unforeseen force. When one wall was covered from floor to ceiling, he began populating the room with artifacts of Mirza, as though she too had receded into the past that had claimed his family. He followed her. When, at the bazaar, she purchased a ball of ruby-red yarn, he purchased the tangerine ball adjacent; when she wore a gray cardigan with silver buttons, he found that same gray cardigan, with brass buttons. While the clubfooted botanist collected flowers, Khassan collected his wife. The notecard-papered room soon filled with the headscarves she’d never worn, the cigarettes she’d never smoked, and in the evenings he would flop into the teal-striped armchair, so similar to the navy-striped armchair in her living room, and would read while sipping from a teacup a centimeter narrower than hers, and for a few moments, if lucky, he would forget and she would be standing just out of sight, refilling the samovar, or perhaps knitting a pair of tangerine mittens, and his happiness became the one real artifact in the room.
So it went. Seven years passed before he spoke again to the real Mirza, on an autumn afternoon as uninspiring as every afternoon that autumn, when the blast of a Volchansk bus horn broke the silence. He had just left the library in a frantic search for matches when he heard the punched blare. He turned, and had the Prophet himself stood there, he would have been no more surprised. She wore the gray sweater; the silver buttons really did look better than brass. The flailing ends of a ruby-red scarf tossed at her shoulders. The bus had braked less than a meter from where she stood; he could have bowed down and blackened his lips on that hallowed pavement. Their eyes met. She blushed; not with surprise or astonishment, but with the downcast embarrassment of one who has been caught.
He invited her to the university cafeteria. They picked awkwardly at a pastry plate, and she tried to convince him that she had come to the city for a dental appointment, and he gave assurances that he believed her. But her sheepishness dissolved as quickly as the spoonful of sugar in her second cup of tea. Her short, filed fingernails darted across the partition of silverware. They spoke for two hours, and when the cafeteria lady’s disapproving glances lingered too long, Mirza asked for a tour of the library. She hurried from one stack to the next, wide-eyed and awed, and only later, when he’d checked out a dozen books for her, did he learn that this was her first time in a library. He carried them to his office, which did not, he could safely say, have the same impact. It was, quite literally, the broom closet. The brooms were gone — he’d thrown them out when he’d been assigned the office — but the closet was barely wide enough to accommodate the smallest university desk, which was wedged in so tightly tissue paper couldn’t have slipped between it and the wall. Her days were empty, she confessed; would it be possible to come to the university a few days a week and read in his office? This Mirza was entirely different than the younger one who had smashed Stalin’s plaster nose with the heel of her boot. Perhaps he had changed, too; but he loved her no less.