Oh, he liked to hit the boy, kept on hitting him even after he promised Azade he'd stopped. Azade knew it, though Mircha and even Vitek pretended otherwise, violence having forged a secret alliance between them.
But she did manage her quiet revenges. With sour cream a day or two past being bad, with reduced meat from the street market, shiny at the edges where it had started to turn. With an inner guilty joy, Azade would smile with her split lips and Vitek's swollen eyes would shine as they watched Mircha hop from the divan and race for the commode, which in those days still worked. She can remember Mircha gripping the rim of the toilet—'Waaaaah! Hummmmm!'—and emptying the contents of his stomach with such a high degree of unswerving perseverance that sometimes Azade almost felt sorry for Mircha.
'Sweetheart,' Mircha would call from the toilet. 'Some water or a snort of vodka. I beg you!' And by the next morning Mircha, broken in body, would turn gentle, so large in his promises, so expansive in his remorse, that Azade could extract almost anything—a bottle of Russian Forest perfume, the alcoholic content of which she knew made a handy supplement should the vodka fail; a trip to the dentist to replace a broken tooth; even the assurance that the beatings would stop.
Azade turned her gaze to the kids. They were almost playing, mock-punching one another, leaping from the heap. The red-haired boy, Gleb, skirled around Vitek, then reached for Vitek's vodka. Vitek pushed the boy to the ground and pinned him with his knee, then brought back his fist. 'Don't!' Azade shouted.
Vitek stood, straightened his leather jacket, smiled, and ran his tongue over his chipped front tooth. With his thumb and forefinger he made a gun, pointed it at her, cocked his thumb and fired.
Azade slumped against the latrine. She had ruined him. She saw that now. She'd indulged him in the strange way mothers, against their better instincts, sometimes do. With a lopsided attentiveness, she had tried to make up for her failures and shortcomings. After Mircha beat the boy, Azade brooded and hovered with aspirins and ice, was careful to keep Vitek out of Mircha's sight for a few days. But she'd not stopped Mircha and told herself it was out of love for her husband, when really it was cowardice. Worse: to make up for Mircha's harsh treatment, she'd spared her son necessary corrections. He'd always been a cheat, a bully, and even a liar. But she'd not punished him. And now he was a grown man, still behaving shamefully. And this was her fault. This was how love, or rather the lie of love, had made her, a well-intentioned mother, raise a perfect monster. A perfectly lovable, fearsome monster.
Koza, her goat, hiked his snout in the air and bleated mournfully. Azade pointed her nose in the same direction. With her true and precise olfactory powers, Azade detected a sharp-edged malevolent odour unlike those that ordinarily swelled out of the latrine. That she could smell anything at all in this cold, which had a way of crimping smell to tight radii, was a testament to the largesse of the odour.
In Mircha's boots, Azade walked the perimeter of the stink. She scattered lime in a rough concentric circle. She counted the neat little piles of human excrement the kids had left. Their droppings were too tidy, too frozen to be responsible for this newer, more aggressive stench. Azade sniffed at the heap, but frost had trapped all the smells of rotting peelings deep inside its throbbing heart. Azade shuffled to the back side of the heap and that's when she saw it: a dark gash in the ground. How it got there and how she could not have noticed it before Azade could not fathom. Azade dropped to her knees, lowered her nose to the trembling gash and took a deep and substantial whiff. Nothing. Just the smell of wet mud, which, if anything, held a round organic scent of soft ooze. Azade straightened and headed for the bank of snow that contained her husband. Yes. Absolutely this was the source of the stink and it was phenomenal. Azade sprayed her lemon-scented fumigant around the bank of snow. But it was as if the odour doubled in strength as if it were swelling with outrage, as if it were indignant that someone as low as she might try to combat it. Azade narrowed her eyes. With her broom she swept at the top layers of snow. It was then that she saw Mircha's boots were unlaced and on backward—not at all the way they had left him. Azade tightened her grip on her broom and headed for the stairs, with each step a chill climbing the rungs of her spine.
The dead never leave us. She knew that. It was a physical law. No, she never went to university, but she didn't need a PhD to understand the law of conservation of mass. A body never completely disappears; it only changes shape or constitution, reasserting itself elsewhere, boiling over, leaking at the edges. And the dead who remain keep themselves frightfully busy. Her own father, for instance, walked backwards with his shoes unlaced, treading up and down these very stairs. He had to do this to reverse the indignities his body and soul had suffered while he had been living those last years in the apartment building and tending the Little Necessary, Azade's mother explained. Azade knew it to be true, for she heard her father's heavy tread on the stairs as he corrected the wrongs committed against him and adjusted the wrongs he himself may have committed. He had to walk backwards through every sorrow, every regret, every wound, in order to leave them properly. It took him seven years to do it, but finally, one afternoon in May when the trees along the wide prospects exhaled a blizzard of cotton, her mother flung open the windows so that, at last, her father, his nose finally straight again and pointing true as a needle on a compass, could fly away.
But with Mircha, one sniff told Azade that things were different. Whatever the rules of the afterlife she and her mother had worked out, they did not seem to apply to him. For there his body was, defrosting down there in the shadows of the courtyard, and yet the smell here in the corridor outside their door—colossal! Azade paused outside the door and checked the knots on her rope, for quick verification. Yes, the knots were all there. Her resolve galvanized, Azade leaned into the door.
'Milii! Sweetheart!' At once Mircha's voice assaulted her. Azade peered into the darkness of the room. There he was, in the corner of the room, sitting in that ridiculous claw-footed bath, wearing a wool sock on his hand and smoking a Turkish cigarette. She had never seen her husband looking so jolly, so alive. So silly.
Azade held her broom aloft as if it were a weapon, or perhaps a talisman, and approached Mircha with caution. The dead, after all, were so unpredictable. But after a moment, her suspicion gave way to curiosity. 'Why did you do it?'
'What?' Mircha's smile loped from one side of his face to the other and she could see that he was drunk.
Azade rolled her eyes to the ceiling. 'Jump.'
Mircha sucked on his cigarette and exhaled a mouthful of rings. 'I was tired of this life and afraid to grow old while living it. I wanted to go with dignity. Not like some of those men shitting themselves to death in their own bed.'
'So then why did you come back?'
Mircha brightened. 'I feel a tremendous urge to express myself in ways I never had before.'
Azade squeezed the neck of her broom. 'Express yourself how?'
Mircha ground his cigarette on his stump then cleared his throat. 'Imagine if you will that I am like a famous prophet risen from the dead. I've come back to rewrite myself, to revise myself. To retell my story with vast scope and with miracle.'