A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (37 page)

But Ramzan, still grinning, still unaccountably joyous, said, “Just like your book? Are you going to carry me to the woods and burn me?”

“I treasured that book more than anyone.”

“I know, more than my mother.”

“She knew exactly who I was when she accepted my proposal.”

“She thought you were Albert Einstein, that the honor of your genius would compensate for your neglect. You treat your dogs better.”

“That’s not true,” Khassan said, uncertain how the conversation had turned against him.

“A genius, she thought. As if Albert Einstein would forget his wife’s birthday.”

What had possessed him to speak? Two more silent years would hurt less than one more minute of this. He had expected Ramzan’s vehemence, his blather, but hadn’t expected his concision. Hadn’t expected that the son who had destroyed his reputation, his name, his faith in human goodness, would find new ways to ruin him. More than his paternal failures, it was the grinning joy his son took in describing them that Khassan would remember. Eyes skewed with jubilation. Khassan recognized them as his own. It was the conversation he’d feared since Ramzan’s birth. Since the woman who wasn’t Mirza had said, in an exhausted ache, a word that should have wrapped them together: “Ours.”
Since he had held him, no more than a bald head and blankets, and wished the child in his arms were Akhmed. You poor thing. You never had a chance.

“I haven’t been a good father, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know,” and he kept repeating it, the needle stuck on this one proclamation he stated and restated so Ramzan wouldn’t. “But I never hurt you,” he said finally. “I never laid a finger on either of you.”

“You were a mouth that only opened to eat. Just like now. And what’s worse is you squandered what you had. You were physically capable of having a wife and son, but you didn’t want us.”

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” he said. Even in apology he couldn’t name it. March 2, 1995, eight days after Ramzan’s twenty-third birthday, he’d never forget the day. The transport truck didn’t slow down when Ramzan was pushed from the back. The adult diapers they’d dressed him in were maroon. Finding his boy, right there, in the road, my god, his horror had left him speechless. Akhmed had treated Ramzan’s wound and was the only other villager to know of it. For weeks Khassan had tended to his son, taking him meals in bed, reading him pulp fiction, coaxing the spark of life from his dull, brutalized eyes. Ramzan had never recovered, not fully, not physically, not existentially. The Landfill had snapped him as cleanly as a branch and all the tea and small talk in Chechnya wouldn’t put his halves back together. He never spoke of what had happened there. His pride for what he had done and his disgrace for the consequence were so entwined that he couldn’t even tell his father that he had been castrated for refusing to inform on his neighbors. “I mourn the life you weren’t able to experience,” Khassan said. “For the father you might have become, for all our sakes.”

“And I mourn the father you might have been,” Ramzan said. The taunt peeled from his voice and behind it lay unvarnished, unfathomable need. Khassan’s face felt so heavy. He had expected false accusations,
dissemblance; he hadn’t expected honesty. The floorboards ached as he turned to the door. In his head he heard the jingle from the television show that had followed the nightly news in the seventies, a stupidly cheerful song, sung by collective laborers, whose melody had once worked on his ears like a reverse alarm clock, a ringing that had let him know it was time to sleep, to rest, to dream; and though he hadn’t thought of the song in years, it came to him now, every note, and he hummed it beneath his breath as he held the doorframe, and wanted to die.

“You think I’m selfish, but I’m not,” Ramzan said, behind him, with unbearable sincerity. “I meant what I said about the insulin. This will all be over, eventually. We just need to survive it. You can’t survive without insulin. We both need food, right?”

“I’m seventy-nine years old. Seventy-nine. The rest of my life is not worth the rest of Havaa’s or Dokka’s or Akhmed’s.”

“I’m not holding a gun to anyone’s head.”

“Ramzan.” Khassan sighed. A wave of exhaustion seeped through him. “You’re putting the bullets in the chamber.”

“I’m just like you! You said you never laid a finger on my mother or me. I’ve never laid a finger on anyone either!”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Just a name over the phone?”

“That’s all!”

“Then another name, no? And another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and then Dokka?” He found his own bewilderment reflected in Ramzan’s eyes. His stupid, stupid child didn’t understand what he was doing or why any more than Khassan did.

“It was for us. So that we’ll survive together. You’re the only person I have. You’re my family.” It was the saddest, sweetest thing he’d ever
heard. In another world he would have embraced Ramzan, kissed his forehead, held him so that his son’s heart beat indistinguishably against his own.

He walked to the table, cupped Ramzan’s shoulder. His grip was strong and consoling. He imagined Ibrahim on the mountaintop and the verses returned unbidden:
My son, I dreamt that I was sacrificing you
.

“You speak of family; then let Akhmed and Havaa be.”

“I know you want him for your son. I’ve known that my whole life.”

“And so what if he is, Ramzan?” Khassan asked, clutching Ramzan’s shoulder. “What then?”

Ramzan’s face went flat, cold, depthless. “None of us is bound to anyone by so trivial a distinction. Do you think paternity even matters? No, Father, no. We are the children of wolves. That’s all, Father. He could be your son, your brother, your nephew, your neighbor, your friend, and I wouldn’t save him.”

“And yet you save me. What a waste.”

Khassan walked to the door, opened it to the wind. He looked back. Ramzan watched him, as frozen and impenetrable as a winter pond.
You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other’s miseries. It is that which makes us family
.

Outside, his dogs were waiting for him.

CHAPTER
22

T
HE VILLAGE CHIMNEYS
were sending up smoke among the birch trunks when Akhmed heard a low whistle from the trees. Khassan, surrounded by his guard of feral dogs, stepped into the road with an orange hand cupping the flashlight. The dogs, watchful, ears erect, studied him warily.

“I didn’t want Ramzan to see me waiting for you,” Khassan said. His fingers glowed.

“He was waiting for me last night, asking about Havaa.”

“I spoke with him today. For the first time in two years. My own son. I begged him.”

The statement knocked Akhmed a step back. Surprised, honored, grateful that the man would break the silence for Havaa’s sake, his sake,
he set his palm on those radiant fingers and the road was dark again. “It’s all right.”

“I’m sorry, Akhmed, I’m—” A sob halved the old man’s voice and Akhmed gripped his fingers. When his mother died, Khassan wept at the burial. When Akhmed’s father died, Khassan provided the shroud. Akhmed had always remembered this, how Khassan had shared his mourning as if he were family. Dog paws pattered in the undergrowth.

“So they will come for me.” For years he’d lived with the fear of murder, torture, or disappearance, as all men of his age did, and it was the senselessness that truly frightened him; that the monumental finality of death could come arbitrarily was more terrifying than the eternity to follow. But if his death severed the connection between city and village, it would be neither futile nor insignificant, and he would be more fortunate than many thousands of his countrymen.

“I don’t know,” Khassan said. His hands shook under Akhmed’s.

“And Ramzan doesn’t know where I’ve been these past three days?”

“I don’t think he wants to know. So long as the burden of disclosure is on you, some small corner of his conscience can stay clean.”

He imagined her right then, annoying Sonja, asking her to explain why feces are brown, why ears bend, so young and silly and smart. She was a child without parents, and he was a man without children. Ten years earlier he couldn’t have imagined claiming her, but the rules of that society had broken. There was no one left to say whom you could love.

“I won’t say a word,” Akhmed whispered.

“Im sorry.”

“Havaa is my only allegiance.” The moon outlined Khassan’s face. Tears rimmed his eyelids, and his lips pressed into a tight frown, but he didn’t appear contrite. If Akhmed hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was an expression of overwhelming pride.

“Do you remember in the first war, Dokka carried a book with him everywhere?” Akhmed asked. “Whenever the Feds passed, Dokka would open his book and start reading.”

Khassan gave a relieved grin. “The Feds thought the rebels were illiterate, so by reading a book he proved he wasn’t a rebel.”

“But it wasn’t even a book, was it?”

“No, a journal. All the pages were blank. But they couldn’t tell that.”

They laughed and the flashlight beam tore hoops in the shadows.

“And he wasn’t shot,” Khassan mused.

“No, not then.”

Khassan pulled a manila envelope from his overcoat and passed it to Akhmed. The exchange, Akhmed thought, was the nearest thing to a postal service in many years. “I was hoping you could give this to Havaa. It’s a letter, some memories of Dokka before he became a father. So she’ll have something to look to when she’s older.”

“I’m glad you’re optimistic,” Akhmed said.

“What do I do? I know what honor requires, but
that
? To my own son? With my own hands? Am I expected to do
that
? Tell me what to do, Akhmed. You know that your name is the next he’ll give the Feds. You tell me, what should a father do?” Khassan had leaned forward, his stale, quick breaths warming Akhmed’s cheek, his hands reaching for Akhmed’s shoulders. It was a peculiar sensation. They had never hugged before.

“I don’t know,” Akhmed said. There was no right answer and he was too tired, too cold, and too close to home to sift through all the wrong ones. “I’ve never been a father. I don’t know what you should do.”

“I’m not asking for your approval. I’m asking for your advice.”

Akhmed nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

Khassan stepped back and his face, paled in moonlight, shifted violently. He opened his mouth, but for a moment only his eyes spoke. Akhmed would have filled the fragile space between them with gratitude. He would have thanked Khassan for the advice, the stories, the meals, the cigarettes, the silences, everything, even the interminable history lessons, they had shared over the years. He would have said that Khassan had been like a father to him, in the ten years since his own
father had passed. He would have said it, but Khassan spoke first. “I feel fortunate to know who you are, Akhmed. I’ve wanted to say that for a long time.”

Their eyes met and broke away. Such naked acknowledgment of their relationship embarrassed them both, and nodding, turning toward the village, Akhmed said nothing.

He entered the musty blindness of the living room and crept toward the bedroom’s lantern light. “It’s me,” he said, in the doorway. “How are you?”

Beneath the blankets, Ula turned and smiled lazily. “Oh, just fine. Fine and fine. Your father came again. He told me a bedtime story.”

He prepared a dinner of lentils and canned apricots, pulled a chair beside the bed, and ate with her. His poor Ula. She really was losing her mind. Her health had improved in recent months, but this insistence that she spent her days with his ten-years-deceased father dispelled hope for recovery. Just as well. Her mind was one less thing she had left to lose. In a cigar box beneath the bed he hid a hypodermic needle and a vial of heroin he had swiped from the hospital.

After cleaning the dishes, he found his copy of
Hadji Murád
, steadying the wobbling dresser leg, and set it by the door. He secured the living room blackout curtains before opening Khassan’s envelope. Brass fasteners bound forty or fifty sheets. He parted the pages at random.
Your father loved your mother’s nose. It was a big, ungainly thing, and he said it was still growing, and was slowly taking over her cheeks and forehead, so her entire face would soon submerge beneath her nose
. He couldn’t start, not now, and slid the sheets back into the manila envelope.

In bed he cupped Ula’s bony hip. It wasn’t the hip he’d held on their wedding night as he fumbled and grunted, so self-conscious about his performance he wasn’t prepared for the embarrassment that accompanied the turn of her nose to the open window. But he loved it more, would miss it more. They used to argue about everything, quarrels that
left them both hoarse the next morning, and they forgave each other in silence, with a cup of tea, a hand on the shoulder, unencumbered by the voices that divided them. He missed her scorn more than anything. How she looked at him as if he weren’t there. How she knew what the whole village suspected: that he was an incompetent physician, a worse bookkeeper, a romantic, a man who was never happier than when sketching birds in the woods. How she knew that and still loved him. He ran his fingers through her hair. Days since he had last washed it, and still so clean. Praise Allah she is speaking with my father. If she is looking so far over the horizon, she won’t see what’s in front of her.