Azade held open the door of the latrine with her foot and studied the children outside. That's what carried her all these years, the thought of children. But even in that she was cursed with bad luck. Six times, maybe seven, she conceived. But always, always something went wrong. Azade grabbed a bucket and sprinkled salt along the path between the stairwell and the latrine. She counted the children pawing at the heap. The oldest, Big Anna, stood knock-kneed and pawed through the clutter at the base of the heap.
'Up your mother!' Anna hooted at the twin with the transparent veins that swam under his skin. Bad Boris, Azade had called him, and the name had stuck. 'Your mother twice over!' Bad Boris yelled back at the girl.
Good Boris, not to be outdone, hawked a jet of mucus at the base of the glistening heap. 'Your mother like this and that!'
Gleb, the red-haired boy, ran his sleeve under his nose. Eight years old, Azade put him at. 'Your mother up and down and all around.'
'Your mother and seven crosses on her death bed!' cried the littlest child, the girl with the brown skin. She used to have India-black hair, but now it was orange with malnutrition. Five, Azade guessed her age. Maybe six. It was hard to tell just how old, what with all the glue they'd been sniffing. Stunted the growth. Every day she said this to the twin boys with the transparent skin. Seven she was guessing for those two, because they'd each lost their front teeth, and she was pretty sure they fell out the natural way, though there was no denying that Vitek treated them rough and what with all those fumes they inhaled, and their funny lurching walk, they tended to hurt themselves. Five of them. And they might have been hers. It was easy to think this way. Easy to count them and think of all the children she'd lost, every one of them with skins thin and bones soft. She'd lost them and it was her own fault, her own carelessness that caused it—she understood this now. When her mother told her to hang an unbroken, unknotted skein from the door of the latrine, Azade had laughed. She and Mircha had only been married two years and she didn't know then the importance of unbroken thread, didn't really believe that unbroken thread was life.
Only after she lost her children did she remember her mother's advice. They hadn't grown right and when they came, always months too soon, they slid out into the sheets and once into the toilet bowl, fishlike, and so strange, she could hardly see how they could be human. Fish, they were creatures meant for water, but not for this land. Mircha took them in his hands—yes, in those days he had both his arms still—and wrapped them in milling cloth and buried them the mountain way, red string tied around the bundle, pocketing them in barren ground without a marker, without a reminder, so as not to curse the cotton crop or send their spirits into the trees.
'Not like that, stupid! Like this.' Vitek's voice bounced from wall to wall in the dvor, snapping Azade from her reverie. Vitek shook the boy with the rust-coloured hair and the boy's glasses sailed across the cracked pavement. 'When you rush a tourist, you littler ones should get in front and you,' Vitek pointed to the rust-haired boy and the older girl, 'should stand behind the mark and get your hands in every pocket.'
Azade shuffled toward the children, taking note of their blank stares. 'You're ruining them,' she said, dumping a handful of salt on Vitek's left shoe.
Vitek laughed. 'Oh, Ma—it's all fun and games.'
'These kids need an education, or they'll be good for nothing.' Azade squinted at the kids, who stared back at her with empty eyes.
'I'm giving them an education,' Vitek said.
'No. The kind with books and things.'
Vitek passed his tongue over his gold tooth as he glanced at the Material Dialectics textbook Azade kept stowed near the latrine in the event of big bizness.
'Books are only good for wiping your ass with. Besides, what I'm teaching them is better than anything you can find in a book. Not a single one of those books will tell you how to get by in this life.'
'In every equation there is nothing as constant as human cruelty,' Big Anna said.
'See,' Vitek smiled. 'They know everything kids their age should if they want to survive.'
Azade shook her head, mumbled some choice words in Kumyk. He could catch crayfish in winter, her Vitek. He could figure the angles in a circle. But for all this cleverness there was something fundamentally wrong with him. For starters, every time he opened his mouth, he broke her heart just a little more. Not his fault, though. Could he help it that nobody, not even his own mother, had wanted him? It's the only way she could explain how he turned up in their courtyard one morning with lice in his hair and scabies on his skin. At seven years old he was already a confirmed alcoholic, and Azade knew that the street had been his mother and it was his good luck to wander under the archway into their dvor to use her Little Necessary the day he did. And she thanked God for him. It was like the ground had finally returned to her what it had taken. A real child, alive and trailing her like a shadow, and she could not have ignored him even if she had wanted to.
'We can't feed that little runt,' Mircha had said. 'Take him to the orphanage, let the state raise him.' It was the one time she defied Mircha. Mircha had just been sent home from the front, missing an arm. And with only one arm to hit her with, she figured she could care for them both, could stand between them and that, in time, because she loved them both, they would for her sake learn how to love each other.
She should have remembered what mountain women had known for centuries and what her mother tried to teach her: Love made wise people stupid and kind people cruel. And love made the courageous cowardly. This was the only way Azade could explain what happened next. Because the more she cared for Vitek and for Mircha and his weeping stump, the more Mircha drank. And the more Mircha drank the angrier he became. And all that love she thought she had—an ocean of it, the best and purest kind of love—wasn't enough. And beneath her good intentions she was a coward—quiet when she should have made noise. Oh, her mother would have died a second death if she could have seen how her Azade, who had strong arms and the long hair, the source of a highland woman's strength, allowed Mircha with his one arm and fraying hair to push her around. Her mother would have died all over again if she could witness how much of her motherly wisdom Azade had managed to forget. But who really suffered? Why, the boy did, of course. Always it's this way with drinkers and their children. The rage boils out of the body at every chance. And for years Azade had thought that if she kept quiet, silently turning her tears to feathers, Mircha's anger would burn itself out like a match dropped into a deep bucket. But wrath fueled by alcohol never burns out so quickly.
Azade tried for years to figure the alchemy. Maybe it was because of his missing arm. Maybe because he hated his work at the factory. Maybe because there was not enough beer or vodka to make the world beautiful enough. It was so hard to say with Mircha where all the rage came from. All she could attest to was how little it took to incite his fury: a shift in the light, the noise of a bulldozer nuzzling a pile of rubble, the flies buzzing at the window, Vitek mumbling over the chessboard. Azade remembered most of the beatings, but it was with shame she recalled her own cowardice, her complicity. Once she busied herself at the stove simply to steer clear of Mircha, leaving Vitek, lost in thought over a game of chess, to fend for himself. Mircha had pounded his fist on the cardboard box that held the playing board. Up went the chessmen and up went Mircha's fist, catching Vitek on the ear, causing him to fall over and without so much as a whimper curl into the foetal position in preparation for what was coming next. Azade had dragged the kettle over the ring so as to disguise the noise of Mircha punching Vitek with an enthusiasm that went beyond the requirements of punishment meted for purely instructive purposes.