The stairwell door slammed shut. They walked to each other until their silhouettes converged. In the darkness she found his eyebrows with her thumbs. They went to the third maternity bed, and she sat on the edge, and he stood between her legs. Her thighs clasped his hip bones. From the far side of the room the lantern dimly bathed them.
“I think there is a bee on my behind,” she said.
“You’re still hallucinating,” he said.
“You should slap it away, just in case,” she said.
She reached under his shirt, spread her hand across his abdomen, and tried not to think of which organ lay beneath which finger. “This is your stomach,” she said, mimicking his tenor. “Not your brother’s stomach, not Stalin’s stomach, but your stomach.”
“You make me sound like a serious man.”
“You certainly aren’t that.”
They undressed by degree, a button here, shirtsleeve there, making a show of their shortcomings, their bodies androgynous with deprivation. It was remarkable to trust someone enough to be silly like this. She lay back. It was dark. Her lips found his.
“Good night to you and your ugly nose,” Deshi told Akhmed as he was leaving. A buoyant confidence swelled in him and as he stepped into the navy twilight and trekked toward the village he finally felt part of the top tenth percentile. Never had he been so honored by being addressed in the second person.
But the radio antenna listing from the hood of Ramzan’s truck, parked before his house, punctured the sweet feeling inside him. Akhmed smiled sadly and trudged forward, balling his fists in his coat sleeves. The coat was fifty-eight years old, canvas military grade, about the only thing the Red Army had ever done right. It kept him as warm as it had kept his father and his father’s father and the idea of three generations sheltered by the same stiff, unyielding fabric gave him greater comfort than the coat itself ever could.
Again Ramzan questioned him, and again he claimed ignorance.
“You disappoint me, my friend,” Ramzan said. Ramzan’s coat was six months old. It would never warm another set of shoulders. “You’re a doctor. Think logically. Think about your wife. Think about yourself. Think about your silence. It’s reckless.”
“I owe Dokka my silence more than I owe you anything,” Akhmed said.
“Owe? We’re beyond obligation,” Ramzan said. “We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are. I know you think you are being noble, that this is some terrific act of sacrifice. You probably believe that because you fucked Dokka’s wife two years ago, you owe it to him to save his child. But let me be clear, Akhmed. You don’t. She is not yours.” Ramzan’s voice cracked, and he steadied himself with two deep breaths. It wasn’t an act. “I know you think I’m a traitor and a coward, Akhmed. And you’re right. But that doesn’t make me wrong. I’m telling you this because we were friends. You don’t owe this to Dokka.”
Akhmed hadn’t lusted for Esiila before the wars, hadn’t thought of her as more than the wife of his closest friend. She could have been anyone. He had just wanted to hear his name breathed in his ear, a body warm and damp beneath him, whole and alive and a world away from pain. Was it such a sin? No, of course not. But Dokka. There was Dokka. Now he stood up for them, as if he were a hero rather than a hypocrite, as if he hadn’t betrayed, dishonored, and broken the family whose last living member he now offered his life to save. Ramzan stood across from him, but he knew that in their hearts, they stood on the same side.
Pale moonlight fell across his snowy boot tracks, and Akhmed suddenly saw the fragility of the plan he’d designed over the past day. The girl would be safe, he had assumed, if he severed the link between the village and the city, and the link was him. But this meant trusting that Sonja would care for the girl. It meant trusting an erratic, overextended surgeon, who had put a gun to his back a day earlier, with the girl’s life. It meant pushing through his endless doubts and trusting, however misguidedly, the decency he believed was buried inside Sonja.
“Why do they want the girl, Ramzan? You still haven’t tried to explain.”
“Revenge,” Ramzan said flatly. “Dokka fucked up.”
“But what did he do?”
“Akhmed. So many questions. If you had learned to keep your mouth shut, your eyes on your feet, you would have had a happier life.”
“They already have Dokka, Ramzan. Why do they need the girl?”
Ramzan shook his head. “Because the life of a Russian colonel doesn’t equal the life of a Chechen arborist.”
“You can’t mean that—”
“A few days after we returned from the Landfill, Dokka asked me for a pistol. He wanted to be able to protect his family, so I gave him one of the Makarovs I’d kept from our final fucked-up gun run. That same Makarov was later used to assassinate a colonel.”
“But Dokka couldn’t have been an insurgent. He couldn’t hold a gun in his hand, much less fire it!”
“That doesn’t matter when the serial number on the pistol used to kill a colonel sequentially matches the serial numbers of the guns those lost soldiers took off us before they left us at the Landfill. The Feds made the connection. I couldn’t give Dokka up, because they already had him.”
“But why do they want the girl?”
Ramzan gave him a sad smile. “You know the saying, As the son inherits from the father, so the father inherits from the son? The Feds have made it official policy. There is a campaign to disappear not only suspected insurgents but their relatives as well. The idea being that you are less likely to go into the woods with the rebels if you know that your house will burn and your family will disappear. Rebel recruitment has plummeted in recent months. It’s part of the new hearts-and-minds strategy. It’s how they will win the war on terror. They will kill Havaa and call it peace.”
Akhmed’s head hummed with the shock of how not shocked he was. What Ramzan said made sense to him. He understood why the Feds would want to kill a child. Accompanying that understanding was a second, equally shameful recognition: this incomprehensible war would take from him even the humanity to find it incomprehensible.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I’m trying to save you.”
When Ramzan returned from the Landfill the first time, with that wound between his legs, Akhmed had saved him. They never said it, Ramzan never thanked him for it, but they both knew that the week he spent treating the infection was just that. If a stranger were to put his ear in the space between them, he would hear the dull roar of that knowledge.
“Isn’t it too late for that?” Akhmed asked.
“No, not yet.”
“Yes, it is.”
“If you give up like this you really will be the stupidest doctor in Chechnya.”
Akhmed allowed himself a smile. This was the Ramzan he remembered. “That honor has been mine for some time.”
“You probably think you are a hero or a martyr, don’t you?” Ramzan asked. “You probably think you are a saint for refusing the Feds. I know, Akhmed, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that by refusing me you’re refusing them. But let me tell you, my friend, I am nothing. I am no one. I am so much easier to refuse than those to come. You’re thinking that you will be as silent to them as you are to me. But you won’t, Akhmed. You just won’t. You might believe that you will be brave, that you will hew to your convictions, but you have never been to the Landfill. They won’t ask you where the girl is. They will make you bring her to them, and you will watch yourself do it. Look at me, Akhmed. Once I was like you, and soon you will be like me. They are in the business of changing lives, Akhmed, and they are the very best.”