A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (46 page)

“They never tell you about that part, about how long you might live with it,” Khassan continued. He held Ramzan’s limp fingers. Thirty-two and three-quarter years had passed since he had first felt those fingers and they had astonished him, delicate as sparrow feet and holding on to his thumb as if he were the sturdiest branch in the forest. “They never tell you about that part.”

For two long years he had hated himself for imagining this moment. Disappearance by disappearance he had tallied the lives his son had extinguished—and if Ramzan hadn’t snuffed them, he’d held them to the wind—Alman, Musa, Omar, Aslan, Apti, Mansur, Aslan the Hirsute, Ruslan, Amir, Amir Number Two, Isa, Khalid, and Dokka, postponing this inevitability until the next day, the next disappearance, until he watched Akhmed’s beaten shadow eclipse the flood of headlights, and knew the next day would be the last. Twenty-one years and five months earlier, Ramzan had bounded from this bed and out that door to the kitchen, shirtless and wide-eyed with awe; he had pointed to a single hair sprouting from his underarm, as thrilled as if he’d found a diamond there. “You were right about the trumpet blast,” Khassan said. The regret was already there, a blank wall he’d spend the rest of his life staring at. “These are the end times. There can be nothing after this.” Now that it had arrived, all his talk of mountaintop sacrifices seemed the absurd, grandiose fantasies of a confused old man. There was no voice in the sky.

Ramzan’s chest rose and fell, oblivious to the decision already made by the hand holding his. Khassan had held that chest when it was no wider than a chicken’s, had held it to his own and felt something so tender and precious pass between them that he would have done anything for this boy. But this? Had the bottle of sleeping pills not sat open on the nightstand, he would have acted sooner. But from the many times he had perched on the mattress, he knew the pills would keep Ramzan comatose until evening. He could wait. Now that he had, in his heart, stepped over the
edge, it didn’t matter how long he fell before hitting the ground. “I want to tell you something,” he said. “But I don’t know what. I don’t know.” Pride wouldn’t allow apology, not even now. “You are my son. You are mine,” he whispered, as a spell, as a gift, a last lullaby, a branding. Ramzan’s head turned, so slightly, into the pillow, and it nearly broke Khassan to see this shimmer of life. Sleep, just a while longer, that’s it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering? Khassan lay on the bed and breathed with his son. He followed Ramzan’s lead. Together they drew from and gave to the communal air, his open hand on Ramzan’s chest, rising and falling in this silence they made.

Three knocks broke it. Khassan sat up and carried the cavern in his chest to the front door. No one in the village, not even Akhmed, had visited the house since Ramzan’s collusion became known. Were his former friends standing on the other side with honey and raisins to welcome him back into society? You are too soon, he wanted to cry. I haven’t done it yet. I’m still climbing to the summit. He blotted his forehead with a purple handkerchief before opening the door.

On the other side stood a woman foregrounded against the teal sky. She wore a padded gray coat over scrubs. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Akhmed’s … I’m his friend. Are you K?” She passed him the manila envelope he had given Akhmed two days earlier. His pulse quivered as he accepted it; if it still contained his letter to Havaa he would give up. But his address was written on the manila envelope by Akhmed’s hand. The contained correspondence was thinner than his. “In his house,” she said in explanation. “I found it there. He was taken last night.”

That shadow floundering through light to the dark bank on the other side. The dementia that was to consume his memory in nine years would leave him that. When all else had faded, those headlights would still shine; they would be the light at the end. He could hardly speak, think, act, breathe. What was happening? What was this? He discovered Ula’s name between his lips. The woman dropped her eyes and shook her head, respectful but firm, perhaps accustomed to delivering bad news.
As soon as she turned to the road, he tore open the manila envelope. It held two letters. One was written by an FSB colonel, the other by a rebel field commander. Each letter gave orders for the unhindered passage of its unnamed bearer. A third message lay at the bottom of the manila envelope, written on a scrap of paper so slight he nearly missed it.
Mercy
, the note read.
Mercy
.

The dogs, dozing beside the house, stretched their legs on the ground and lumbered after him, Sharik last, as he hurried to Akhmed’s house. He held the manila envelope against his chest, blocking it from the wind.

The front door was propped against the doorframe. He passed over a clean living room floor, an inexplicably alphabetized bookcase, and the dogs followed, Sharik last, because the front door wouldn’t close, and what did it matter, they were cleaner than the last beasts to enter.

Ula lay fully clothed on the unmade bed. After the past hour watching the rise and fall of his son’s chest, he knew immediately that she was gone. White tennis shoes jutted from the end of her baggy brown skirt, as if in death she would be reborn in good health, given a newly wired nervous system, allowed in her private paradise an afterlife of marathons. He closed the bedroom door, afraid the dogs might nibble at the body. Claw patter trembled through the thin walls. If he had to come back, he would be a dog.

For a moment he stood by the door, surprised by the scent of soap. Then one foot forward. Then the other. He folded her hands together and placed them on her stomach. The room was clean, as was the body, and though he could explain neither, he wasn’t surprised. A burgundy headscarf framed her face. Cupping her skull like a fragile bowl into which he had poured his most valuable possessions, placing his thumbs on her lids, he opened her to the dead afternoon light. She stared straight through him, to the unfolding infinities that bookended her thirty-five years, through him to the place where they would soon meet, when the trumpeter’s breath failed, when he would descend the notes of the final melody to the silence where Mirza waited.

He could have wrapped her in a white elasticated bedsheet, the nearest to a burial
kafan
in the depleted closet. The body was usually washed in scented water, but a martyr was buried unwashed, in the clothes she died in. He could have enshrouded her. She weighed so little. Even a man of his age could have carried her outside. In the backyard he might have set her on a cushion of snow. The ground was frozen. He could have plunged the spade head but the ground would hold. He knew no burial prayers, but he could have stood quietly and let canine panting mark the minute. He had spent his entire life burying, and unearthing, and reburying the dead, and he could have done it once more. The spade would have scraped through the frost. A shovelful of snow scattering on her torso. Three thousand years before a Russian empire existed, native tribes buried their dead in kurgans that grew so large they became part of the land, surviving the construction and collapse of subsequent civilizations. He would have thought of this as he entombed her. He would have shoveled until he couldn’t lift the spade, until the tomb reached his chest, until it compacted into a monument that would last until the spring thaw. But he didn’t have the energy to do more than close her eyelids, fluff the pillow beneath her head, and point her toward Mecca.

At home he picked three sets of clothes. Extra layers, heavy on wool; no longer could he rely on the comforts his son provided. He searched his closet for something to pack his clothes in but only found a laundry bag. He’d never thought to replace the brown suitcase after he buried it, never thought he would leave Chechnya again. At the center of his small bundle of clothes was the ruby-red scarf Mirza had unwound from her neck and placed in his hands, one afternoon, long ago. In the kitchen he packed alcohol swabs and syringes and insulin vials and all the food he could find in withered plastic shopping bags. On the kitchen table Ramzan’s keys radiated from their ring and he placed them in his pocket. He didn’t know where he would go. He had journeyed through Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He had, once, taken a victorious shit on a Reichstag commode. And from there to the Kazakh steppe,
where, to the horizon, nothing sounded louder than the wind. He had traveled a quarter of the way around the globe without taking one step voluntarily. This was his home. For every barrack floor, muddy trench, outpost tarpaulin, bunker cot, and fallow field he had ever slept on, the memory of home was his only rest. Returning in 1956 he had vowed to never leave. Better to die here, he imagined, than endure another exile.

He crossed the hall to Ramzan’s room. Neither his
kinzhal
nor his boy had moved. If he could reach back he would hold his son, love his son, and untangle the knot his soul had become. He would find the ends. “Why are you my father?” the boy had asked one August afternoon, twenty seconds after asking, “Why is the sky blue?” and forty seconds before he asked, “Why do people get old?” They were sitting outside. Khassan had been teaching his son to eat shelled sunflower seeds and he held his breath long enough for the question to pass. “Why are you my father?” the boy asked again. It was two years before he stopped asking for a bike, five and a quarter before he stopped asking his father for anything. Khassan had never found an answer. If he could go back he would make one.

He closed Ramzan’s door behind him. The time for answering had ended and the peace of the afternoon articulated all he wanted for his son. The shopping bags, laundry bag, and two letters of safe passage waited at the front door, and as he reached for them, a question hit him like the face of a wall. Who was that woman and why had she come to deliver Akhmed’s answer? Had she known she would deliver him from his son? It didn’t matter. He would forever remember her as an angel dressed in an overcoat and scrubs, sent to stay his hand.

He locked the door behind him and crossed the packed snow to the red pickup. The dogs followed him, sniffing at the plastic bag of insulin, syringes, and chicken thighs. He set the bags in the passenger seat and turned to the dogs, six in all, lean-boned and matted and blind and bald.

“I’m leaving,” he said. His voice cracked with sorrow as the dogs tilted their snouts to him. Killing his son had seemed less reprehensible
than abandoning these dogs. “I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what will happen.”

Tears fell down his cheeks. Two of the dogs ran after a hallucinated mouse, while the rest stared up at their broken benefactor with the same incomprehension that had made a home between his ears. “I can’t promise anything, but I will try to take care of you. If you want to come, I will take you.”

He climbed into the truck, set the two letters of safe passage in the glove box, and started the engine. He eased the brake and let the truck roll at a walking pace, waiting to see what would happen. In the rearview the dogs licked each other, tumbled on the ground, and went on in a world without him. Gravel shot back when he pushed the accelerator and the ears of the bald dog perked, and when she turned the other dogs noticed, and their snouts swiveled toward the truck as they galloped as one animal, a twenty-four-legged, twelve-eared beast, racing to reclaim their seventh head. He unlatched the back and one by one they jumped into the bed of the pickup truck, Sharik last.

Passing beneath the portraits of the disappeared he saw them as if for the first time. No one else would remember the artist’s face, but he would. When he reached the end of the block, he kept driving. When he reached the end of the village, he kept driving. Wind tossed the dogs’ tongues and they shook their heads wonderfully. The serrated ridge of mountains cut into the horizon and he drove toward it. The passing refugees had speculated wildly, believing any rumor large enough to hope on. He didn’t know what lay on the other side. He didn’t know that the disease that would in nine years erase every memory but the headlights was already brewing among his neurons. He didn’t know that his son would live alone in the village for three grief-stricken years, wondering and waiting for his return before moving to a mountain hamlet, where he would keep wondering what had happened to his father, without ever finding out, for another fifty-seven years. Khassan didn’t know and he drove. He was seventy-nine years old. He was beginning a new life.

CHAPTER
28

“I
F YOU COULD
go back, would you leave London?” Natasha had asked the question on a cool Tuesday morning in March 1998. They were on good terms that month, sharing the last drags of a cigarette in the hospital parking lot as loose debris rustled under what seemed too pleasant a shade of sky. “If you could go back, would you leave London?” Of the thousands of times she had considered and still would consider the question, that had been the only time it had been posed as if an answer lived on the other side of it. “If you could go back …” There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.