“It’s not writing itself?”
“History writes itself. It doesn’t need my assistance.”
“But it’s your life’s work.”
“Your life’s work could be scrubbing piss from a toilet bowl. Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”
For four decades Khassan had drafted and redrafted his six-volume, thirty-three-hundred-page historical survey of the Chechen lands. Akhmed was a child when he had first seen the pages. After cancer had put his mother in the ground, he and his father had received weekly invitations to dine with Khassan in the three-room house built by Khassan’s father in a time when men were expected to grow their own corn, raise their own sheep, and build their own homes. A partial draft, kept in eight boxes beneath Khassan’s desk, was written in the careful cursive of a condolence letter. Akhmed found it one afternoon while his father and Khassan sat outside, gossiping like married ladies beneath a June sun. Each afternoon, while Khassan taught at the city university, Akhmed snuck into the living room and stole a single page. He read it at night, after completing his homework, and exchanged it the next afternoon for the following page. Khassan had begun his history in the time before humanity, when the flora and fauna of Chechnya had existed in classless egalitarianism. In a twenty-page account of Caucasian geology, Khassan proved that rock and soil adhered to the same patterns of dialectical materialism proffered by Marx. A seven-page explanation of natural selection compared kulaks to a species that failed to adapt to environmental changes. Akhmed read seventy-three pages in total, only reaching the Neolithic period before Khassan realized pages had gone missing: the three Akhmed had lost, the two he had turned into paper airplanes, and the one, a description of Eldár Forest before man invented chainsaws, that had been too beautiful for him to return. Believing the culprit to be a secret police informant, Khassan had burned the pages in his wood stove.
“But you need to finish it,” Akhmed urged, unsure if Khassan was serious. The Khassan obsessed with a history book that, even if published, no one would read was the only Khassan he knew. Khassan could renounce his legs and sound no more ridiculous.
“You’re right,” Khassan said. His parted lips revealed a row of teeth the color of cooking oil. That city dentist had been so in love with the teeth of his young women patients, he couldn’t look inside the mouth of an old man for more than a few moments without feeling a wash of revulsion and betrayal; he had never told Khassan to floss. “And I’m sorry, Akhmed. For Dokka.”
“Was he taken to the Landfill?”
Khassan’s shoulders sloped in a shrug. They both knew the answer but that didn’t make it any easier to admit. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“Can you ask Ramzan …” Ask him what? Ramzan had no answers; the blindness he walked through was a shade darker than theirs. “Can you ask him to let the girl be? She’s gone.”
“Ramzan hasn’t heard my voice in the one year, eleven months and three days since he began informing. I’ve counted every day of silence. It’s stupid, I know, but silence is the only authority I have left.”
Each looked past the other, into the woods stretching on either side of the road, uncomfortable and ashamed. “I’m a pariah. The father of an informer,” Khassan continued. “You and my son are the only people in the village willing to speak to me, and I can’t speak to him. In one year, eleven months and three days the only conversations I’ve had have been with you. You still speak to me. Why?”
Akhmed focused on the trees. He didn’t know. He didn’t know that when Khassan returned home that morning he would write down what he remembered of their conversation in a shorthand his son couldn’t decipher, or that later Khassan would read it quietly, without speaking a single word aloud, and even on the page their exchange would lift that blanketing silence like tent poles. What he did know was that Khassan was his friend, a decent man, and that was as rare as snowfall in May.
“You ran away from me just now,” Khassan said, before Akhmed could answer. “I understand. My son is weak and cruel. That’s fine. You know, I’ve been thinking of the Festival of the Sacrifice recently. In the resettlement camps we celebrated in secret, slaughtering a wild dog in place of a lamb. I wonder if Ibrahim’s palms were damp as he walked his son to the summit. Did he tell him they were going on a hike? Did he take water? I think he must have glared at the knife until his reflection was part of the blade. I think relief must have replaced his horror when he unsheathed his knife and recognized his face. He must have known that what he was to do was of such significance it had already become who he was, and so he offered both his son and himself to the kinzhal’s edge.”
Hunched over, Khassan pressed his bare hands into the snow. He sank them to his forearms and left them there in what a stranger might take to be a demonstration of endurance, but what was, Akhmed knew, a private ritual of contrition. His face was broken in a way Akhmed couldn’t look at, let alone understand, let alone mend. “Walk on both sides of the service road so my footprints can’t be followed,” Akhmed said. “I’ll be gone all day. Make sure no one knows where I’m going. Do that.”
Khassan’s head bobbed. He scooped two palmfuls of snow and pressed them to his eyes. Melting rivulets circled his wrists. “Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son isn’t hard to believe. His son was an innocent. It’s so much harder when you know what your son would do to you if he survived. When you know just what would happen if an angel was to grab the knife from your hand.”
Distal phalange, proximal phalange, metatarsus, medial cuneiform, navicular, talus, calcaneus. Akhmed recited the bones composing the big toe and followed the Latin north to the ankle as he walked to the hospital. Before leaving that morning he had torn a half dozen diagrams from his old anatomy textbook and he studied them as he hiked, glancing up every few seconds to check for land mines. He’d be ready for any more of Sonja’s quizzes. The sun had fully risen when he entered the hospital and the guard, whose left arm ended at the elbow, stopped him.
“Here?” he asked, exasperated. “I’ve walked nearly to Turkey avoiding checkpoints.”
The cuff of the guard’s left jacket sleeve was sewn to his shoulder. The slender beard descending from his chin looked like the tail of a squirrel hibernating in his mouth. “You need to pull the glass shards from your boots,” the guard instructed.
“Don’t worry,” Akhmed said. “I’m the doctor.”
“No, Sonja is the doctor,” the one-armed guard corrected. “You are the idiot with glass shards in his boot soles. Now have a seat on that bench and take those pliers and pull out the glass if you want to enter the hospital.”
No one could walk through the city without lodging a full pane of glass shards in his shoe soles, and the guard, who had for eighteen arduous months fought with the rebels and had witnessed and participated in all manner of horrors, was afraid of Sonja and what she would do if she found glass shards tracked into the hospital. He watched Akhmed pry out fourteen shards and deposit them in an ashtray.
Akhmed sighed, crestfallen. His first day as a hospital doctor wasn’t beginning well. “Tell me,” he asked, nodding to the guard’s missing arm. “Do they pay you half rate?”
The guard, thirty-one years old, had never received a paycheck, and wouldn’t have known what to do with one if he had; in three years, when the hospital issued paychecks again, beginning with a whopping nine years of back pay, the guard would frame his in glass and hang it on his wall without ever depositing it. For the rest of his life, he wouldn’t trust the numbers people put on paper. “They should pay me more than they pay you,” the guard said, smiling. “Even I know better than to give an unresponsive patient a questionnaire.”