This was his greatest fear. Could he stay silent? Could he withstand what awaited him? He told himself that his love for the girl would fortify him against any torture, but this, like so much of what he told himself, was a lie. After all, he was squeamish at the sight of blood; what would he say when lying in a puddle of his own? But he saw no other way. He would pray for the strength to stay silent, for a quick heart attack, and leave the rest to God.
“You remember in ninety-five, my first trip to the Landfill?” asked Ramzan. “It was my twenty-third birthday and I had the bad luck of bicycling to the city on the day of a rebel ambush. That’s the only reason they took me. I was a young Chechen man on the day rebels decide to attack the Feds outside of Gudermes, so they took me to the Landfill and you know what they did. You stitched me back together. For so long I worried you or my father would ask why it happened, and I was always afraid of it, afraid of the asking and how I would answer. But neither of you ever did. You’re both too polite. But don’t you want to know what happened? You’re always asking why, Akhmed, so let me tell you. It happened because they asked me to inform on my friends and neighbors, Akhmed. When they threatened to beat me, I said nothing. When they threatened to electrocute me, I said nothing. When they threatened to castrate me, I said nothing. I said nothing, Akhmed. Whatever you think of me, you remember that once I said nothing when a wiser man would have sung. And the interrogators, they couldn’t believe it. They called in others to examine me. I was there on the floor, and above their faces were dark ovals silhouetted by the ceiling lights. They had beaten me hard and I couldn’t hear right, but I kept saying no, with every breath I had. The only reason they let me go, the only reason they didn’t shoot me right there was out of perverse respect, some sort of professional courtesy. But I wish they had shot me, Akhmed, because the good part of me died there, and all this, everything since, has been an afterlife I’m trying to escape.”
Akhmed had never been in a fight before, but right then he had to concentrate on controlling his hands. On their own they would have strangled Ramzan to keep him from saying one more word. Whether this was confession or ruse, Akhmed couldn’t say, but the anguish was there for him to see in Ramzan’s face. “Why did you start saying yes?”
Ramzan looked like a small, trembling package tied off beneath his folded arms. “A second war. A second trip to that place. I knew what was coming. I knew it never stops. They put a shame inside you that goes on like a bridge with no end, the humiliation, the fucking humiliation of knowing that you are not a human being but a bundle of screaming nerve endings, that the torture goes on even when the physical hurt quiets. People treated me differently when I came back the first time. They gossiped, told rumors about me because I still lived with my father, couldn’t marry, and then I was a fucking joke to those for whom I’d sacrificed a wife, children, family, a life. When the Feds took Dokka and me to the Landfill, when I said yes, when I told them what they wanted, when I agreed to inform on anyone, I wished I had done it in ninety-five, in the first war, that is my biggest regret. If I had said yes from the beginning, I would still be a man. I’m not asking for your friendship or forgiveness, Akhmed, just tell me you understand. Please give that much to me.”
Ramzan stepped forward to embrace Akhmed, and in the moment before he came to his senses, before he planted his hands on Ramzan’s chest and gave him a sharp shove to the ground, Akhmed wanted to take Ramzan in his arms, as a patient, as an old friend, and fix all that had gone wrong in him.
“I don’t,” he said as he pushed Ramzan. Ramzan tumbled and the next moment Akhmed knelt over him, fist raised, ready to beat Ramzan as the interrogators had beaten him, for what he had done to Dokka, to Havaa, to the entire village, to himself. Ramzan covered his face with his hands and tried to crawl away on his elbows. “Don’t hurt me, don’t do it, don’t hurt me, mercy, have mercy,” he pleaded, eyes closed, collapsing into a fetal position, weeping into the brown snow. Akhmed stood, disgusted with himself, with the man at his feet, with the war that had reduced them to this. “I don’t understand,” he said, but Ramzan could hear nothing above his own calls for mercy.
After checking on Ula, he drew closed the blackout curtains and lit the living room oil lamp. Khassan’s letter lay on the divan, where he had left it the previous evening. How could he have forgotten it? He really was an idiot. Through the closed door he could still hear Ramzan’s faint crying. The previous night Khassan had asked his advice, and he thought he had understood what was the right and honorable answer, but no longer. Crammed in his jacket pocket were the two letters of safe passage he had taken from the glove box of Sonja’s truck that afternoon on the pretext of searching for a nonexistent scarf. The glove box held dozens of letters of safe passage and he hoped she wouldn’t miss or need these two. He slipped them into the larger manila envelope that had held Khassan’s letter, added a one-word note to Khassan, then sealed and addressed it: For K, 56 Eldár Forest Service Road.
Back in the bedroom, he undressed Ula. He carried her to the bathroom and the water rose, so slightly, when he set her in the tub. She had never learned to swim. As a girl she would scoop carrots from her mother’s stew and feed them to the rabbit that lived in the back garden; her mother trapped the rabbit one autumn afternoon and made stew from it, and for all their time together, Ula refused to explain to Akhmed her aversion to carrots. He washed her neck and shoulders. He lifted her elbow and scrubbed the divot of soft underarm hair. Her mother had spoken of lust as if it were a loaded firearm, and when, one summer, the big-eared boy who lived across the village transformed into something right-sized and beautiful, she concealed her affection, holstered it to her chest, because she knew the shame of it could kill her mother. He washed her elbows and wrists. With a toothbrush he scoured the rims of her fingernails. He washed her nape and her back and slalomed his fingers down her spine. Her older brother was born touched, kept in a room with the curtains always drawn shut, this wailing, incomprehensible heart beating against the walls of the family house. For nearly as long as she had feared him, she had been ashamed of her fear, and wanted to reach through his madness to the part of him that could, at times, be so gentle, and embrace it. He washed her chest, the skin that had been breasts. He washed her hips, her stomach, swirling soap into her navel. She had been so afraid of Akhmed when she met him for the first time, on a June morning, on her porch, the branches clutched by blackbirds. In the eight years since their betrothal he had become a local celebrity. He could have any girl. He could have anyone. Her mother invited him in without fear of embarrassment because a cousin had taken her older brother for the day. He washed her pubis, vagina, and anus. He washed her thighs. He washed her knees. He washed her calves. For as far back as anyone could remember, she had wanted to be a mother. He washed the tops of her feet, her soles, all ten toes and the gaps between. She would have had eight girls, treated them like the very reason her lungs drew breath, whether they were normal or touched, whether they ate carrots or not, she would have loved them, and given herself to them; she would have given each a pet rabbit; a mother, she would have been a mother if her body and Akhmed’s had only worked the way they were supposed to work. When he finished, they were both clean.
He wrapped a towel around her shoulders and with long, vigorous caresses, rubbed her dry. He couldn’t stop worrying that she might catch a cold. Four hours earlier, he had come inside Sonja, and now he was brushing his wife’s hair. Nagging doubt was the nearest he came to guilt. He looked into the eyes of the wife that had become his ward. A smile was buried in his beard. He had never loved her more.