Unaccustomed to such portions, Ramzan and Dokka finished last. As soon as they set down their bowls, the women filed in through the backdoor. The women waited for the men to leave before taking their places on the lambskin blankets. Ramzan, the last out, heard whispers and suppressed laughter as the door closed behind him and very much wished he could have remained behind. The men followed a deer trail past the ice-glazed remnants of a stone tower. In earlier centuries, it had been a fortress, watchtower, signal light, and anchor to the long-since-scattered teip. Past the tower they reached a clearing. A series of elevated planks formed a flat, dry, tire-shaped platform in the center of the clearing. Its axle was a ring of stone containing the ashes of a bonfire. The men carried logs from a lean-to deeply entrenched in the hillside. Within minutes the fire reached above Ramzan’s head, so bright he could count the rings of the logs yet unconsumed. It had been years since he had last participated in a zikr.
Ramzan and Dokka removed their boots and joined the others in a circle around the fire. The elder began the zikr with prayer. A steady call, the voice of a man, he thought, in a country bereft of men. La ilaha illallah, la ilaha illallah. The elder repeated the cry, and its slow rhythm sliced the words into syllables that stood alone as if locutions of a higher language. Voices on either side joined in harmonies that buoyed the elder’s call. Then clapping, not to keep the rhythm, but to propel it. The silver of the moon and the orange of the flames entwined on the elder’s tilted face. There is no god but Allah. The men swayed from side to side as the pace increased. Swaying grew to stomping, and sawdust rose from the shaking platform, and the men shed their outer garments. Against the burn of bonfire, the men combusted. The flailing arms of overcoats, the falling hands of woolen gloves, but the cries were not the cries of a land mine or shelling, and the pain of the elder’s call was the merciful ache of longing. There is no god. But Allah. No god. But Allah.
Ramzan clapped and he stomped and he shouted as sweat slicked his face. Without warning, a man three down from Ramzan let out a long wail, and though Ramzan couldn’t tie one word from the string of utterances twisting from the man’s throat, he understood precisely what the man meant. The man’s eyes were closed, and the uncommon serenity of his features suggested he had seen all that could be seen. The elder’s voice dropped an octave and in unison the men’s stamping became a dance. They marched joyously, counterclockwise, sliding the left foot across the platform and dropping hard on the heel of the right. In unison they spun. Three hundred and sixty degrees flattened to an indivisible plane. The pressure had built in his chest and he tried to contain it with reminders that he was no longer Sufi, that these weren’t his people, that human sorrow was the prophecy of an empty heaven, but it built, and built, like the memory of a long extinguished orgasm, and the pressure closed the space between his cells, and he was released. No melody ran through his wail. His voice was hoarse and broken and he raised it. The other men took no note above the tremble of palms and planks, but Ramzan’s next breath brought peace.
The following morning Ramzan woke with a sore throat. After breakfasting on nuts, dried fruit, and goat’s milk, the elder led Ramzan and Dokka to their truck. In exchange for the hospitality, he gave the elder ten kilos of rice and a liter of butane. The elder refused any offer of munitions besides buckshot, and despite his protestations, Ramzan pressed the issue. He couldn’t recall when he had last felt so moved to ensure the safety of a stranger. But the stiffness of the elder’s frown made it known that he would never be persuaded of a hand grenade’s safety. Driving away, Ramzan struggled to focus on the road. The lives lived behind him were so small and anonymous they had escaped the notice of state socialism, of the first and second war. The previous night, for the first time in a long time, he had felt whole, and his eyes returned to the rearview, where his dignity was held within a few square centimeters of glass.
They drove another five hours, through mountain passes so narrow the side mirrors would have snapped off, had they not already, and back down to valleys; five hours of listening to Dokka praise his wife’s resourcefulness and her gardening and her talent for creating sumptuous dishes with only a third of the requisite ingredients, five hours of compliments so lavish and exaggerated that Dokka could only mean them as insults, for why else sing the praises of marriage to a man who could never marry, why else recite the wonders of companionship if not to wound Ramzan, who, for those five long hours, felt so deficient he would have given his right hand in dowry for a wife who could neither cook, nor sew, nor raise children, a wife who committed adultery and passed gas in public, a wife who treated him like an animal — yes, he would take it and be fine with it because a disgraced man is still a man, and Ramzan wasn’t a man, not really, yet the whole world expected him to be one; and the neighbors, dear god, why haven’t you married, a handsome man like you still living with your father—and when his quiet demurrals spawned rumor—he doesn’t like women, that’s why he’s thirty-one years old and unmarried, he couldn’t decide if truth or rumor dishonored him more, but ultimately, he decided it better to allow the hearsay of homosexuality to flourish so long as his silence could cast doubt upon the whole matter, and yes, his silence engendered doubt, though mainly in himself, converting shame into rage and propelling it through his veins, his kidneys, his forearms, his little toes, and then returning to that second heart on which the names of those who slandered him were etched, and much later, he would recite those names over a satellite phone and those who had created those stories would fall victim to his own stories, homosexuality replaced with rebel sympathies, Wahhabism, jihad; but those stories were still unspoken, still unimaginable, and the purgatory of Dokka’s wife, within which he was the unfortunate audience, remained interminable even after five hours of driving when he crested a hill and slammed on the brakes because right there, not two hundred meters away, was a platoon of Russian troops, and he viewed them as both conquerors and liberators, who might kill him but would free him at least from the perdition of Dokka’s voice, and trembling with terror and gratitude he spoke the words that had been on his tongue for five hours. “Stop talking, Dokka.”
A welcome quiet suffused the cabin, and Ramzan basked in it before fear retook him. There were two armored personnel carriers, two UAZ jeeps, and a tank crowned with a machine-gun turret.
“Turn around!” Dokka shouted and shook Ramzan’s arm by the sleeve of his jacket. “What are you doing? Let’s go!”
But he kept the ball of his foot pressed to the brake pedal. “They have already seen us.”
It was true. The machine-gun turret had swiveled to face them and snow shot up behind the jeeps as they accelerated toward the crest.
“If we run, we’re fucked. If we wait and are reasonable, we might survive. We’re just sitting here. It’s not yet a crime to be alive. You might even get a chance to finish telling me about your wife.”
The jeeps stopped twenty meters ahead and idled, while behind them, the tank gradually ground up the incline. The soldiers who emerged were not the tattooed kontraktniki, like those Ramzan remembered from the zachistka; no, compared to those hulking Russian bears these were half-starved jackals. We may live to see the sunset, he thought.