In the maternity ward the nurse put your mother in a bed and I held her left hand and your father held her right. Custom says that a man shouldn’t be present at a birth, but we didn’t listen, we were there. On the boarded windows were drawings of a city that no longer existed. You were born within the memory of a kinder past. Your mother’s screams opened her jaw so wide you could have come from her mouth. Never have I seen your father so afraid. Then, you arrived. We were all there, waiting for you. The nurse held you in her hands. You didn’t breathe. We held our breaths waiting for you to find yours. And when your mouth opened, and your lungs burst, we knew they would never be empty. And your father, I have never seen a man more joyful.

The nurse who delivered you was named Natasha. All these years later I remember her name because she had remembered mine. She had read my book, Origins of Chechen Civilization, one of the four score who ever had. Hers were the first hands to hold you. When you were suffocating, she taught you to breathe.

Your mother’s were the second hands. She looked at you as if she had been born to you. She passed you to your father. The corners of his eyes crinkled. His heart had been the acorn. Now it was the oak tree.

Those are the first three pairs of hands that held you. How I hope you will live long enough that I will never know the final three.

“What is her name?” the nurse asked, as your father held you to his chest.

“Havaa.” He spoke your name like the rhythm of a pulse.

When they took him, he held your name right there in his chest, and you were with him, even if you didn’t know it. When he reached the end, he did not die. He called your name and began to live in you.

She set down the letter. If her pounding heart spoke a name, it was one she didn’t recognize. Her sister had delivered hundreds of newborns in the seven years she had worked in the maternity ward, hundreds of Havaas, and they were her patients, not her children, neither more nor less loved than the other lives begun and ended, saved and lost, revived and mourned within the gray granite walls of Hospital No. 6. But Sonja couldn’t name those countless others, had not shared with them a mattress or a room or an energy bar, would not recognize their faces on the street or in the bazaar or at the cemetery, did not wish for them what she wished for Havaa, a need, newly made, to save this one life her sister had brought into the world.

Before leaving she surveyed the rooms a final time. Akhmed’s wife lay peacefully, her hands at her sides, her bright white tennis shoes ready to take her anywhere. Sonja propped the front door as best she could and wondered who would enter next. The vacant house would become a haven for refugees who had heard of a hostel in the 30-block of Eldár Forest Service Road. It would never again be as clean as it was the afternoon Sonja left, as one might expect, as some three thousand souls were yet to shelter there.

She drove to the address marked on the manila envelope. A red pickup truck parked in front of the house was better kept than any others on the block. Green antifreeze beads lazed in the sludge of the half-shoveled walk. She knocked on the door. A minute passed before an elderly man opened the door and gaped at her, his unhinged eyes filled with such bewilderment she wondered if he saw her as a ghost.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Akhmed’s …” What? Employer? Supervisor? Colleague? Lover? Five-day acquaintance? She held out the manila envelope. “I’m his friend. Are you K?”

“Khassan,” the old man mumbled. He reached for the envelope as if it weren’t there, as if his hand would pass through the paper, through her, into eternity. “Where did you …”

“In his house. I found it there. He was taken last night.”

“I know. And Ula?”

“Ula?”

“His wife,” the old man said.

“She’s there, but she’s gone too.”

The old man nodded, barely there. He squeezed the manila envelope and traced the address with his index finger.

“Are you okay?” she asked. He looked like he might fall over.

“Thank you for bringing me this,” he mumbled.

She was halfway to her truck when she heard the manila envelope tear behind her. Her truck was right there, next to the red pickup, and she just wanted to leave. That manila envelope contained a final message, but it wasn’t hers, and she didn’t want to know what it said. She slid the letter to Havaa in the glove box, between the letters of safe passage, without noticing that two were missing. Driving away, she fit her lips around the round, sonorous name. Ula. U-la. The name made her lips pucker, waiting to be kissed by the reply. Had she known the name earlier, she would have dressed the wife in a gown and shawl, rather than a skirt and a sweater, so she would, for all time, look as elegant as she sounded.

CHAPTER 27

BENEATH THE STARS, without the interference of cloud or wind or leaf cover, the low rumble of diesel engines murmured through the open window where Khassan waited and listened. When the nightstand clock read 12:15 A.M., the splayed headlights of three trucks parted the darkness. A minute later, in front of Akhmed’s house, the trucks were parked, engines idling, passengers disembarking, men from the security forces, whom Khassan, with his head craned out the open window, saw only as black silhouettes lit up by the headlights before returning to shadow. It was 12:16. Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion. At 12:17, the knocking began. Khassan couldn’t see the masked security forces first pound then kick at Akhmed’s door, and at this distance the thuds might be mistaken for a less violent act, an insomniac carpenter, a couple keeping themselves warm in bed, but a minute later came the unmistakable splintering of wood, twisting of door hinges. Khassan gripped the sill. He could see nothing but the pale flood of headlights. You are a coward, Mirza had said a half century earlier, and he heard her as if she stood just behind him. You are a coward. But what could he do? Run out? Reason with the masked men now entering Akhmed’s house? At best, they would arrest and take him wherever they were taking Akhmed. At worst, both would be shot for his intervention. And Havaa, what would happen to her? His face broke out in a cold sweat and his hands tightened their grip against the sill. He tried moving his feet toward the doorway, but they weren’t listening. Not once in his seventy-nine years had he felt more useless, more powerless, more afraid. You are a coward, Mirza said in his ear, but she didn’t know what they do to people in the Landfill. At 12:21 came a burst of twelve gunshots, enough to kill twelve Akhmeds, but no shadows crossed that wide wound of headlight. Unable to see, unable to move, he tuned his ear to the frequency of Akhmed’s broken bones, his bruised flesh, his gouged eyes, his ruptured organs, his snapped fingers, his busted cheeks, his smashed temple, his collapsed skull, his sobs, his surrender, his defeat, his gasps, his pleas, his promises, his prayers, his final breaths, his last memories, of his mother’s embrace or Ula’s thigh or a dog’s bark or a bullet rushing through a pink brainy cloud, whatever Akhmed might hold to as the whispers cease and the silent ascension begins. Akhmed’s pain would be the only sound loud enough to break through Mirza’s flat incantation, you are a coward a coward a coward, but Akhmed made no shout, no plea, no call for mercy that Khassan could hear. The only sound to escape the house was the clatter of dishes, the white plates with chipped edges, the small saucers Akhmed used to use to fool his stomach, the teal blue teacup, the one with the crimson rim from which Khassan had sipped the fancy Indian tea someone’s in-law had given one of them, and how could a teacup shatter when padded in so many layers of memory, how could this be happening again, how could Khassan stand at this same open window where four nights earlier he had listened to the same smashing dishware, had stared into the same unblinking headlights, had felt the same disgrace rip through him when Dokka was disappeared? At 12:27, shadows lumbered into the stream of headlights and among those shadows was a flailing form, so faint a contortion no one save Khassan would recognize it as Akhmed. A moment and the shadow vanished back into blessed darkness, and the truck doors snapped closed, and Mirza’s accusation clamped him to the windowsill, and the headlights pulled the trucks back to the underworld they had emerged from. As the last truck passed Khassan’s open window, Akhmed’s muffled cry finally reached him.