“What did he have to say about my mother?”
She closed her eyes for so long he assumed she’d fallen asleep. “I saw a birthmark,” she finally whispered. “An oval on her stomach.”
Soon she slept. He finished the bowl of rice, disappointed by how little she had eaten, and rinsed it in the pail that had become the kitchen sink. After he stitched shut his pockets — to prevent checkpoint soldiers from planting contraband on him the next day — he brushed his teeth with baking soda and climbed into bed. He wiggled his toes. They felt wonderful there, at the ends of his feet. A question surfaced as he swam to meet Ula in sleep. By morning it would be forgotten, drawn back into dreams, but for a moment it sat there left by the tide. The oval-shaped birthmark on his mother’s stomach. He had never told Ula, yet she knew.
CHAPTER 9
This is about your father. I remember he wrote tracts of pure classification, every idea an — ism, every person an — ist, and when I once criticized him for this reductive habit, he said, “We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.” I remember he wanted to teach you to read and write but didn’t know whether to teach you the Cyrillic alphabet (which would be used if the Russians won) or the Latin alphabet (which would be used if the rebels won), and so he taught you the Arabic alphabet instead, and said he would have taught you to read and speak in Japanese if he knew it. I can’t write Arabic. I hope you can read this. I hope there are still people speaking Chechen when you read this. These are stray memories, plucked from the air. But if I closed my eyes and forced myself to find your father, to truly find him, I would find him at his chessboard. In his forty years he lost only three matches. One was to you on your sixth birthday.
I would find him peeling a plum. You haven’t forgotten, have you, how he peeled the skin with a paring knife? A dozen revolutions and the skin came off in a thin, unbroken coil, a meter-long helix. He transformed the skin of that squat little fruit, smaller than your fist, into a measureable length. Then he held the blade to the naked flesh and rotated the plum vertically. One half fell from the other, the cut so clean not even a filament clung to the seed. Pale pink beads dripped to the plate. If Sharik was with me, the dog would contemplate his hands eagerly. But when your father finally let them fall within reach of Sharik’s tongue, he tasted the disappointment of dry skin. Your father wasn’t a graceful man, but he could cut a plum like a jeweler.
He pretended to prefer the skin, and always gave you the flesh. You devoured the slices because you had to wash your hands before touching the chess pieces. It was a beautiful set, hand-carved, purchased by your great-grandfather, before the Revolution, when a postal clerk could afford such intimate craftsmanship. He taught you to play chess, and on your sixth birthday, he let you win. Your father did many things in his forty years. Yet if pressed to recall his finest moment, I would choose to see him in the living room, with you, by the chess set, peeling a plum.
THE THIRD DAY
CHAPTER 10
THEY APPEARED FOUR years before her father was taken, one or two at first, eyes glazed as if they’d never before seen a house, then more. They came stooped and waxen, downcast and wary, from Grozny, Shali, Urus-Martan, one long exhalation toward the mountains. Some carried the most necessary provisions: boots, woolen socks, more woolen socks, bribe money. Those who had lost everything, even their reason, carried the most ridiculous things: a man who lost his parents and children in the same Uragan rocket blast carried the key to the flat they perished in; a thrice-widowed woman carried the framed portrait of a face no one had seen alive for over a hundred years, and no images of her husbands; a retired bureaucrat carried a twelve-hundred-page regulatory binder, convinced that these rules were forever inviolable. Others carried nothing at all. They kept coming and their clothes kept getting bigger on them. Havaa had just learned the Arabic alphabet, and she found the letter shapes in their figures. An eye raised to the mountains was 
forehead sweat formed a stammer of 
each jawline was as sharp as 
the smoke dotting an old man’s bark-loaded pipe was the point above 
and strung together they were an unpunctuated sentence the road wrote.
Her father seated the first one or two at the kitchen table and put enough food in front of them that they nearly refused to leave. Word spread through the refugee lines, and soon the number exceeded her parents’ modest means. One day she came home from the forest to find her bedroom furniture scattered across the yard, her father and Akhmed modeling new beds on hers, the air pungent with sawdust, the sun glimmering off their bare backs. Two days later her bedroom was converted into a three-bunk hostel. The refugees — that’s what they were, she could say the name in Chechen and write it in Arabic — paid for the night’s sleep, two meals, and laundry line however they could. The shame that tightened Dokka’s ventricles each time he asked for payment soon weakened to a slight, ignorable twitch. The first and thousandth refugees came from different peoples: the former deserving of his compassion and hospitality, the latter of nothing. Let them sleep outside for as long as their grandmother’s jewelry will warm them. Let them eat their rubles. But since so few had jewelry or rubles, and since Dokka was incapable of turning away those truly in need, his parameters for payment expanded to include nearly anything. The tokens and trinkets went to Havaa, who collected them as souvenirs, and so rather than toys or homework she played with and learned from the plastic figurine of a ballerina in pirouette, the field guide to Caucasian flora, and whatever else her father and guest agreed was worth a rickety bunk bed on a winter’s night. Now she slept on a mattress on the floor of her parents’ room. Many nights she woke to find herself in their bed, her body heat held between theirs, distinguishing each in the darkness by the size of their fingers.
Others came on the weekends, strangers better dressed and rested, to see Akhmed. If they had heard rumors of the pedophile’s ghost, they left their children outside when they entered the abandoned house, arms heavy with donations of linen bandages, fishing-line sutures, dry plaster, and slings of old magazines and bandannas. In the waiting room they sat straight-backed and motionless, afraid of breathing too hard, of squeaking the sensitive folding chairs and thus breaking the solemnity the proceedings demanded. Akhmed called them, one family at a time, as if they were his patients. And he wished they were, because they treated him with greater respect than his real patients, and he could do more for them. The family, as it entered Akhmed’s office, likely knew he was the worst doctor in Chechnya. Sitting at the folding chairs before his desk, likely they knew he had followed the wrong calling. Likely they knew the worst doctor in Chechnya was its most talented portraitist.
The father might break the silence with a wet cough, and, praying that Akhmed not ask to examine his chest, describe the shape of his son’s nose. Flat and wide, he might say, as if knocked in the face with a frying pan as a child. No, no, no, the mother might deny before Akhmed’s pencil reached the paper. It is a normal nose, a shapely nose, a beautiful nose, and he was never hit with a frying pan, or a soup pot, or even a kettle; a ladle, yes, of course, that is to be expected because a mother’s kitchen is her sanctum and she must maintain order. Then in might jump a cousin, a sister, an aggrieved daughter who too clearly remembered the slap of a ladle on her outstretched palm. The conversation might never recover if Akhmed didn’t raise his finger to quiet them; he had heard these arguments before, had seen grief warp the fabric of memory such that a mother refused to recognize her son when described by the father, and the father, usually compliant to his wife’s requests, truly believed his son’s nose was so crushed he could only breathe through his mouth. He asked them to close their eyes, and hoped their mouths would follow suit. He asked them to concentrate.