CHAPTER 21
AT DAYBREAK KHASSAN left for the service road half hoping to intercept Akhmed, but all he found was a fresh set of footprints. Not knowing what else to do, he walked back and forth, urging the dogs to do likewise, and together they turned five kilometers of snow into a riddle no one could solve. Khassan had taken off his gloves, periodically oiling his fingers with butter, and for five kilometers lapping tongues warmed his knuckles. The bald one, Kashtanka, shivered like a prenatal rat, and several times Khassan paused to reattach the blanket tied by twine around the dog’s pale torso. In summer he bathed the dogs. If one fell sick he cared for it. At the village edge, he knelt and they gathered to him, leaping, licking his cheeks, leaning their paws on his back and panting in his ears, diseased, unwashed, his, his, his. When he stood, all six followed with Sharik at the rear. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock. The day stretched out and his path in it lay as meandering and meaningless as the one he had left. Before the bend in the road he saw Akhmed’s house and across from it the gap that had been Dokka’s. If he had seen Akhmed that morning, he would have had to ask permission to visit Ula; if he had asked permission, he might have been denied. It was a better excuse than the frigid air to stay curled under the covers those extra minutes.
The dogs lounged in the snowy lawn to wait for him. He crept through the shadows of the living room, careful not to disturb the curtains, and into the bedroom where Ula slept fitfully. He hesitated to wake her, as if he were no more than her troubled dream and would dissolve if he touched her. Her hair clumped in greasy cords and she smelled of talcum powder. In the kitchen he filled a stew pot with clean water and set it beside the bed. He drew the covers to Ula’s chin, so when she woke she wouldn’t worry about her decency. Then, reluctantly, he rubbed her arm.
“Why are you here?” she asked without even the suggestion of surprise in her face.
“Do you remember me?” he asked, more urgently than he had intended.
She narrowed her eyes.
“I must have lived a thousand lives before this. I was a bird. I was a bug. I lived in the leaves. I don’t know which life is the hallucination.”
“You’re Ula,” he said. “You’re married to Akhmed.”
“Why are you here?” Again she asked the question; again he didn’t answer.
Because his son was the reason she spent the day alone. Because keeping her comfortable, keeping her company, caring for her was the least he could do. Because he was lonely. Because he had forgotten a woman’s companionship. Because the thought of talking himself senile to a pack of feral dogs didn’t appeal to him this early in the day. He looked to the stew pot of water beside the bed. Because she forgot. Because she forgot everything he said. “I’m here to wash your hair.”
She nodded and he peeled back the blanket, her skin whiter than a Russian’s. Sometimes Akhmed carried her outside to the rocking chair and she would sit without rocking, swathed in blankets even in the sticky summer months. Khassan turned her so her hair hung off the side of the bed and into the water. The soap gave a fine lather, and he ran his fingers through the water, and broke the bubbles against her scalp, and washed away the grease and dead skin. After it was washed and rinsed, he wrapped her hair in a towel and propped her upright against the headboard.
“You look like a sheikh with that turban around your head,” he said.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I’m here to finish telling you a story.”
She smiled, pleased with his answer. “You might have to repeat things. You may not know but my memory isn’t what it once was.”
He began where he had stopped, on the steppe, where the next morning he and Mirza boarded the train from Kazakhstan to Chechnya. Eldár was a ghost town when the survivors among its former residents returned. Soviet soldiers tasked with building a new thoroughfare had uprooted all the tombstones from the village cemetery. Khassan entered the village on a street scrawled with epitaphs. Dust added an extra half centimeter of height to the tabletop, the shelves, and floor. The air was too thick to breathe, and so on his first night home, he slept outside. The next morning, under an awning of bulbous gray clouds, he buried the brown suitcase in the back garden.
He was thirty-one years old and enrolled in the history doctoral program at Volchansk State University. On the day of Mirza’s wedding, he barricaded himself in the university library. He had considered kidnapping her, as Chechen grooms had done since time immemorial when failing to receive the approval of a bride’s parents. But he didn’t want to earn a reputation as a bride kidnapper, particularly not among his professors, and besides, it was too late. That afternoon she would marry the botanist she’d been betrothed to since her ninth birthday, and if botany wasn’t bad enough, the man also had a clubfoot and a collection of pressed flowers. All through the day Khassan read thick philosophical tomes, but not one explained the injustice of a world in which he would lose Mirza to a clubfooted botanist with a passion for pressed flowers. The botanist was a decent man, but Khassan was in love, and thus capable of infinite hate.