Twice a week they met at the corner, mindful of oncoming buses. He saw her in the gray sweater with the silver buttons, the blue sweater with the fake ivory buttons, the green sweater with no buttons. They passed a cigarette back and forth, and when he felt the damp of her lips on the filter, the world became big and beautiful. His office could only accommodate one chair, so she would read her books there while he worked in the library. One afternoon he returned a half hour earlier than usual and found her hunched over a huge stack of typewritten paper. From the flipped-over pages, he could see that she was at least two-thirds through his manuscript. A breeze would have broken him. “This is wonderful,” she said, standing, as if baffled that he was capable of anything wonderful. His tilted gaze found her ankles. They were lovely ankles. She praised his book and he embraced her from gratitude rather than lust, but she didn’t let go. Neither did he. She kissed his cheek, his earlobe. For months they’d run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. The circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed. She sat on the desk, between the columns of read and unread manuscript, and pulled him toward her by his index fingers.
It was over in ninety seconds. He walked her to the marshrutka stop. When she boarded the shared taxi-bus, he followed. He sat beside her and angled his leg against hers, and they rode silently, two strangers with a secret held like a sheet of paper between their knees. She met him at the back of his house and at the door she stood red-cheeked and shivering, and he took her hands. She was his home. The only land that bound him. He led her to the notecard-papered room and didn’t have to explain a thing. She saw the yarn and knew. She unwound the ruby scarf from her neck and added it to his collection. This time they undressed before making love. The birthmark he remembered so vividly was still there, a purple ink-spill across her kidney, the only part of her that hadn’t aged. The affair lasted another eleven months, until she became pregnant. For several years she had tried with her husband, who had resorted to root-based aphrodisiacs brewed by an elderly widow — after the story spread, the widowed herbalist received enough business to become the wealthiest woman in the village, and soon received a number of marriage proposals herself — and whether the father was he or the root-remedied botanist, Khassan never knew. Akhmed was born on July 1, 1965; that was all that mattered. Mirza died when she was thirty-nine. Akhmed was seven. The cancer in her stomach was just eight months old. After she passed, Khassan and the botanist became friends. Both shared the same object of love and loss, and though they never discussed it, Khassan suspected the botanist knew. The botanist allowed him to be an uncle to Akhmed, a figure whom Akhmed could love without having to rely on, and in this way, regardless of true paternity, he was a better father to Akhmed than he ever was to Ramzan.
“Even you know that, Ula. You just have to look at how each turned out.”
When Khassan returned home, Ramzan was sitting at the table, though sitting generously described his posture, which slumped so low the chair back loomed over his head. The sharp reek of liquor coated the air. Perhaps it had dissolved his son’s spine.
Teetering against the table, Ramzan kept his voice steady; he still hadn’t seen his father at the door. “There’s nothing to eat and I can’t shit. I don’t understand it, do you? How can I be constipated when you’ve given all the meat to those filthy dogs? The sleeping pills. Maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe December has frozen my bowels.” He spoke in the vacant monotone of a man who knew no one was listening, and it was awful for Khassan to hear his son’s voice, whittled by loneliness, addressing an empty chair. A few years earlier, Khassan hadn’t been able to get him to answer a yes-or-no question; now no question Ramzan posed and answered was so simple.
If not for Ula, Khassan would have shut the door and returned to his dogs. He would have followed them through the alleyways, through the refuse-strewn gutters, to the thin strips of twig shadow that made mazes on the forest floor, until their upturned snouts pointed to him, eager, hungry. If not for Ula, he would have ignored his son’s voice in the morning and at midday and in the evening, when he said good-bye to his pack and returned home to prepare his insulin shot. The day would have silently joined the hundreds of others, if not for Ula. But he had spoken to Ula, and the relief of unburdening still lifted him, and today, he decided, would be the day he spoke to the one person who was waiting to hear from him.
“You can’t shit?” he asked softly. He had forgotten the tone of chastisement. “It could be the sleeping pills you take to fall asleep among ghosts. It could be Alman, or Musa, or Omar, or Aslan, or Apti, or Mansur, or Aslan the Hirsute, or Ruslan, or Amir, or Amir Number Two, or Isa, or Khalid, or even Dokka. Probably Dokka.” He layered his voice with all the animosity it could sustain. He had never spoken this way. For one year, eleven months, and four days the pleas, admonitions and prayers he had wanted to utter never left his lungs. The weight of all he hadn’t said hung like a dead organ in his chest. He could barely breathe. He, too, knew what it was to have waste you cannot dislodge.
Ramzan’s face lit with surprise. “I’ve been waiting to hear you say that,” he said. A beaming grin stripped the shadows from his features. Khassan’s silence had been so long and lonesome that to Ramzan this voice of denouncement was both victory and absolution. The sound of his father’s voice was all that mattered; its message was irrelevant. “But you can’t speak to me like that,” he added, clasping tightly to the thread and hoping argument would unspool more of his father’s voice.
“You’re telling me how to speak?” Khassan’s temples throbbed. “A son tells his father? A boy? A …” He stopped before belittling Ramzan’s manhood.
“You think you live ten centimeters off the ground, but who gets you the food you throw away to mutts?” Ramzan spoke with slow, savage joy, pinning each word to his father. “In fifty kilometers I couldn’t find enough aspirin to dull a hangover, but every other week I bring you insulin. You should be grateful. I allow you both to survive and to resent me for it.”
Khassan’s breaths couldn’t come fast enough. A dull, vise-like clarity crushed whatever fatherly affection survived the silence. For all the lies Ramzan lived by, he was still capable of speaking the truth, and it was for the truth, rather than the lies, that Khassan hated him. He had once held his hand over Ramzan’s bassinet and the boy’s fingers had wound around his like little vines. He had once lifted the boy and seen miracles in his deep, unblinking eyes. “You are nothing to me,” he finally said.
But Ramzan, still grinning, still unaccountably joyous, said, “Just like your book? Are you going to carry me to the woods and burn me?”
“I treasured that book more than anyone.”
“I know, more than my mother.”
“She knew exactly who I was when she accepted my proposal.”
“She thought you were Albert Einstein, that the honor of your genius would compensate for your neglect. You treat your dogs better.”
“That’s not true,” Khassan said, uncertain how the conversation had turned against him.
“A genius, she thought. As if Albert Einstein would forget his wife’s birthday.”
What had possessed him to speak? Two more silent years would hurt less than one more minute of this. He had expected Ramzan’s vehemence, his blather, but hadn’t expected his concision. Hadn’t expected that the son who had destroyed his reputation, his name, his faith in human goodness, would find new ways to ruin him. More than his paternal failures, it was the grinning joy his son took in describing them that Khassan would remember. Eyes skewed with jubilation. Khassan recognized them as his own. It was the conversation he’d feared since Ramzan’s birth. Since the woman who wasn’t Mirza had said, in an exhausted ache, a word that should have wrapped them together: “Ours.” Since he had held him, no more than a bald head and blankets, and wished the child in his arms were Akhmed. You poor thing. You never had a chance.