Mirza had been a child when Khassan left for war, and in 1947, when he came upon her straining water through cheesecloth, he didn’t recognize her as the girl who, at the age of eight, had been brought up on criminal charges for drawing a charcoal mustache on her lip and goose-stepping around the barnyard, ordering livestock to become more active builders of communism. “Let me have some,” he said, thirsty after his long way. “Go fuck yourself,” she said simply. It was their first conversation. She would become the love of his life, but he couldn’t have known that as he turned and stepped into dung so deep it reached the knot in his laces. He couldn’t have known it as he pried the pail from Mirza’s fingers and washed his boot in her clean water.
A year later the schoolmaster died and Khassan replaced him. He was without qualification or experience, but after the war, the squabbles of children approximated peace, and he was happy. Among his pupils was Mirza’s youngest sister, a quick-witted girl, with fingernails bitten so short she couldn’t lift a kopek coin from a counter, who once set a tack on the chair of the commissar’s chubby son to see if he would explode. Though he saved the commissar’s son from the tack — and thus Mirza’s sister from a bullet — he recognized that thread of recklessness running through her family just asking to be snipped short.
For May Day 1950, Khassan organized a children’s parade. Adults lined the stone-marked road to cheer their children and avoid the penalty of ten years’ hard labor for nonattendance. Twenty-three of the ninety-six children marching that day wouldn’t live to see their native Chechnya. The commissar’s son would be among them because the cholera ward, without respect for political class, was the nearest to an egalitarian society that most of them would ever come. Mirza’s youngest sister was one of the four who held on a raised pallet the plaster bust of Stalin. Mirza glared from across the street, her hands at her sides, the only pair there not brought together in applause. Her contempt passed through him as light through vapor. The following afternoon she confronted him in the schoolhouse with a look that would have severed weaker necks. “You are a coward,” she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy. It was their second conversation.
In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, the Chechen ethnicity was rehabilitated by the pen stroke of a distant bureaucrat. On the evening of the day the first trains arrived to transport them home, Khassan followed the pale stone road to the pale stone cemetery, carrying with him a spade and the brown suitcase his parents had last packed twelve years earlier. The earth was hard and dry, and it took several hours to reach them. His mother’s index finger pointed at him through the dirt. The burial shroud had replaced their skin. They were lighter than he had expected, their muscles hard in desiccation. He folded their arms, pulled on their legs until the tendons snapped; he was as reverent as possible. He packed them tenderly within the discolored suitcase lining. Their bones lay bowed and prostrate. He performed no ablutions, and the brown of earth and decay had rusted his hands, but God would forgive him these lesser blasphemies. They had given him as good a life as they could. He wished he could have given them a better death. He decided, then, that he would write a history of his parents, of his people, of this sliver of humanity the world seemed determined to forget. Standing in the mounded dirt the spade was a slender tombstone. He wasn’t alone. Hundreds of others had come to raise and return their dead, and the dust reddened the night.
When he reached his cabin, a small shack within a perimeter of pale stone, he wanted to wash his hands. He didn’t. Instead he folded the shirts he’d won in cards from Red Army guards, the long underwear he’d stripped from a corpse, the marmot coat a Kazakh widow had traded for the promise that her departed husband’s name would remain on his tongue for nine years of nightly prayers. The brown suitcase stood at the door. He had inherited no other, nothing in which to pack the clothes so neatly folded on the floor. For eleven years he had dreamed of leaving behind his folded clothes for whatever Soviet ethnicity next fell from official favor, leaving behind all but his parents’ remains, and the following morning, when a locomotive whistle seared through his sleep, he awoke to that dream.
The cattle cars were filled by the time he reached the tracks. The refugees watched uncertainly as trains glided into the pale grasses of the steppe, becoming the only measure of scale. Balancing on a tie, beneath an exhaust cloud that rose like a locust swarm returning to God’s mouth, he found Mirza. “You’re still here,” she said. “I am,” he said. She lifted his brown suitcase. “It’s light,” she said. “It’s my parents,” he said. It was their third conversation.
The refugees camped along the tracks, afraid of missing the next transport, but Khassan, trusting the sky to convey the clatter of approaching trains, walked into the empty village beside Mirza. Trails of clothing, furniture, and dishware flowed from the open doors of cabins and huts. The commissar and his entourage were the first to flee, and the Party headquarters, the most architecturally sound building for many kilometers, was abandoned. They passed through meeting rooms papered with bulletins announcing the repatriation, and into the commissar’s office. Three upholstered chairs encircled a coffee table where a golden fountain pen stood at attention in its reservoir. Behind them, hanging over the doorframe, the plaster bust of Stalin observed them coolly. Khassan lifted it from its perch — two taps to Stalin’s forehead echoed in the hollow cranium — and wrapped it in a burgundy drape. Mirza’s face was unrecognizable in its approval.
Khassan carried the bust to the steppe and when he set it down the tall grasses radiated around the dead dictator’s face. Mirza dropped her heel through Stalin’s temple — and what could he do, when she looked at him like that, but become her accomplice? He crushed the big brown mustache, and she joined in, stamping out the left eye; their feet engaged in this fourth conversation until their boots were white with plaster dust, and they had finally committed the treason for which they had been sentenced twelve years earlier. They shrieked and whooped until their voices were hoarse and their lungs ached and the wind was carrying off the dust and it was all celebration. Finally, he spread the burgundy drape across the grass. She reached for his cheek and he reached for her shoulder. On her stomach, to the left of her navel, an oval birthmark spread like a tipped inkwell. He placed his mouth on it.
Ula had closed her eyes, but in the quiet he felt the relief of confession like a current carrying him after he stopped kicking. It felt wonderful to be heard and forgotten. He wanted more. He wanted to erase the past he had spent his life recording. Later, in his study, he gathered his notes, rough drafts, red-line edits, everything, and set them in a bedsheet and carried them into the woods. It would take many trips, many tied bedsheets, but he would erase every word he had ever written. The dogs accompanied him, and behind them followed the memory of Mirza’s accusation, now stronger, fortified by the testimony of four decades spent as a Soviet apologist. And after the fire had read his pages, and the dogs basked in the warmth, and the ashes grayed the snow, what would he write? Not a history of a nation that had destroyed history and nationhood. Something smaller. A letter to Havaa. His recollections of Dokka. He would begin with his favorite memory of Dokka, then go back to the first time he had met him, and end with Havaa’s birth. It would be the first true thing he had ever written.