When the Nines Roll Over (8 page)

“And I've kissed eleven.”

Surkhov plunged his knife into the table and shouted, “That's a lie!” Then he giggled and drank more vodka.

“Eleven,” repeated Leksi.

“Are you counting your mother?” Surkhov asked.

“I'm a very good kisser,” said Leksi. “They all said so.”

Nikolai and Surkhov looked at each other and laughed. “Excellent,” said Nikolai. “We're lucky to have such an expert with us. Could you demonstrate?” He reached over and grabbed the doll by its hair and tossed it to Leksi, who caught it and looked into its blue-glass eyes.

“I don't like blondes,” said Leksi. The other men laughed and Leksi was very pleased with the joke. He laughed himself and took another drink.

“Please,” said Nikolai. “Teach us.”

Leksi supported the doll by the back of its head and leaned forward to kiss its painted porcelain lips. He kept his eyes closed. He thought about the last real girl he had kissed, the eleventh, the night before entering the army.

When Leksi opened his eyes Nikolai was standing, hands on his hips, frowning. “No,” he said. “Where is the passion?” He grabbed the doll by the shoulders and pulled it from Leksi's hands. He stared angrily at the doll's face. “Who do you love, doll? Is it Aleksandr? No? Is it me? I don't believe you. How can I trust you?” He cupped the doll's face in his palms and kissed it mightily.

Leksi was impressed. It was a much better kiss, there was no question. He wanted another chance but Nikolai tossed the doll aside. It landed on its back on the oaken sideboard. Surkhov clapped and whistled, as if Nikolai had just scored the winning goal for their club team.

“That is a kiss,” said Nikolai, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “You must always kiss as if kissing will be outlawed at dawn.” He seized the vodka bottle from the table and saw that it was empty. “Surkhov! You drunk bastard, you finished it!”

Surkhov nodded. “Good vodka.”

Nikolai stared sadly through the bottle. “There was more in the freezer?”

“No.”

“There's all that wine in the cellar,” said Leksi, looking at the doll's little black shoes dangling over the sideboard's edge.

“Yes!” said Nikolai. “The cellar.”

Leksi followed Nikolai down the narrow staircase, both of them still barefoot. The cellar was windowless so Nikolai turned on the lights. The corners of the room were cob-webbed. A billiards table covered with a plastic sheet stood against one wall. A chalkboard above it still tallied the score from an old game. In the middle of the floor a yellow toy dump truck sat on its side. Leksi picked it up and rolled its wheels; it would make a good gift for his little nephew.

One entire wall was a wine rack, a giant honeycomb of clay-colored octagonal cubbies. Foil-wrapped bottle tops peeked out of each. Nikolai pulled one bottle out and inspected the label.

“French.” He handed it to Leksi. “The French are the whores of Europe, but they make nice wine.” He pulled out two more bottles and they turned to go. They were halfway up the stairs when Nikolai placed his two wine bottles on the step above him, drew his pistol from his waist holster, and chambered a bullet. Leksi did not have a pistol. His rifle was still in the library. He held a bottle in one hand and the toy truck in the other. He looked at Nikolai, not sure what was happening.

“Leksi,” whispered Nikolai. “How do they play pool with the table jammed against the wall?”

Leksi shook his head. He had no idea what the older man was talking about.

“Get Surkhov. Get your rifles and come down here.”

By the time Leksi had retrieved Surkhov from the dining room, their rifles from the library, and returned to the cellar staircase, Nikolai was gone. Then they heard him calling for them. “Come on, come on, it's over.”

They found him standing above an opened trapdoor, his pistol reholstered. He had shoved the billiards table aside to get to the trapdoor, a feat of strength that Leksi did not even register until a few minutes later. The three soldiers stared down into the tiny subcellar. An old woman sat on a bare mattress. She did not look up at them. Her thinning gray hair was tied back in a bun and her spotted hands trembled on her knees. She wore a long black dress. A black cameo on a slender silver chain hung from her neck. Aside from the mattress, a small table holding a hot plate was the only furniture. A pyramid of canned food sat against one wall, next to several plastic jugs of water. A short aluminum stepladder leaned against another wall.

“Is this your house, Grandmother?” asked Surkhov. The woman did not respond.

“She's not talking,” said Nikolai. He crouched down, grabbed the edge of the door frame, and lowered himself into the bunker. The woman did not look at him. Nikolai patted her for weapons, gently but thoroughly. He kicked over the pyramid of cans, checked under the hot plate, knocked on the walls to make sure they were not hollow.

“All right,” he said. “Let's get her out of here. Come on, Grandmother, up.” The woman did not move. He grabbed her by the elbows and hoisted her into the air. Surkhov and Leksi reached down; each grabbed an arm and pulled her up. Nikolai climbed out of the bunker; all three men stood around the old woman and stared at her.

She looked back at them now, her amber eyes wide and furious. Leksi recognized her. She had been the young woman in the photograph.

“This is
my
house,” she said in Russian, looking at each man in turn. She had a thick Chechen accent but she articulated each word clearly. “
My
house,” she repeated.

“Yes, Grandmother,” said Nikolai. “We are your guests. Please, come upstairs with us.”

She seemed bewildered by his polite tone, and let them lead her to the staircase. When Nikolai retrieved his wine bottles she pointed at them. “That is not your wine,” she said. “Put it back.”

He nodded and handed the bottles to Leksi. “Put them back where we got them.”

When Leksi came upstairs he heard them talking in the library. He went there and found the old woman sitting on the sofa, rubbing her black cameo between her fingers. It was hard to believe that she had once been beautiful. The loose skin of her face and throat was furrowed and mottled. At her feet was the piled silver, glittering in the sunlight that poured through the windows.

Surkhov had pulled a leather-bound book from a shelf and was skimming through it, licking his fingertips each time he turned a page. Nikolai sat on the floor across from the woman, his back against the marble side of the fireplace. He held an iron poker in his hands. The silver-framed photograph still rested on the mantel. Leksi waited in the doorway, wondering if the old woman saw her picture. He wished he had never moved it. There was something terribly shameful about forcing the beautiful young woman to witness her future. The vodka, which Leksi had drunk with such pleasure a few minutes ago, now burned in his stomach.

“Don't do that,” said the old woman. The soldiers looked at her. “This,” she said angrily, licking her fingertips in imitation of Surkhov. “You will ruin the paper.”

Surkhov nodded, smiled at her, and returned the book to its shelf. Nikolai stood, still holding the poker, and gestured to Leksi. He ushered him out to the hallway and closed the library doors behind them. They went into the dining room. The dirty plates, littered with broken chicken bones, still sat in the middle of the table. Nikolai and Leksi looked out the high window at the snow-covered valley.

Nikolai sighed. “It is not a pleasant thing, but she is old. Her life from now on would be very bad. Give her back to her Allah.”

Leksi turned and stared at the older soldier. “Me?”

“Yes,” said Nikolai, spinning the poker in his hands. “It is very important that you do it. Have you shot anyone before?”

“No.”

“Good. She will be the first. I know, Aleksandr, you don't want to kill an old woman. None of us do. But think. Being a soldier is not about killing the people you want to kill. It would be nice, wouldn't it? If we only shot the people we hated. This woman, she is the enemy. She has bred enemies, and they will breed more. She buys them guns and food, and they slaughter our men. These people,” he said, pointing at the ceiling above them, “they are the richest people in the region. They have funded the terrorists for years. They sleep in their silk sheets while the mines they paid for blow our friends' legs off. They drink their French wine while their bombs explode in our taverns, our restaurants. She is not innocent.”

Leksi started to say something but Nikolai shook his head and lightly tapped Leksi's arm with the poker. “No, this is not something to discuss. This is not a conversation we are having. Take her outside and shoot her. Not on the property, I don't want the blackbirds coming here. Bad luck. Take her into the woods and shoot her and bury her.”

They were quiet for a minute, watching the distant lake, watching the wind-blown snow swirl above the pine trees. Finally Leksi asked, “How old were you? The first time?”

“The first time I shot someone? Nineteen.”

Leksi nodded and opened his mouth, but forgot what he had meant to say. Finally he asked, “Who were we fighting back then?”

Nikolai laughed. “How old do you think I am, Aleksandr?”

“Thirty-five?”

Nikolai smiled broadly, flashing his crooked teeth. “Twenty-four.” He pressed the poker's tip against the base of Leksi's skull. “Here's where the bullet goes.”

When they brought her into the house's mudroom and told her to put on her boots, she stared up at the soldiers, her hands trembling by her side. For a long while she stared at them, and Leksi wondered what they would have done to her if she had still been young and beautiful. And then he wondered what they would do if she simply refused to put her boots on. How could they threaten her? Would they shoot her there and carry her into the woods? He hoped that would happen, that she would fall down on the floor and refuse to rise, and Nikolai or Surkhov would be forced to shoot her. But she didn't, she simply stared at them and finally nodded, as though she were agreeing with something. She sat on the bench by the door and pulled on a pair of fur-lined boots. They seemed too big for her, as if she were a child trying on her mother's boots. She tucked the black cameo on its silver chain inside her dress and pulled on a fur coat made from the dark pelts of some animal Leksi could not name.

A heavy snow shovel hung on the wall, blade up, between two pegs. Surkhov took it down and handed it to the old woman. She grabbed it from him and headed out the door without a word. Leksi looked at his two comrades, hoping they would tell him it was all a prank, that nobody would be killed today. Nikolai would punch him on the arm and tell him he was a fool, and everyone would laugh; the old woman would pop back into the mudroom, laughing—she was in on it, it was a great practical joke. But Surkhov and Nikolai stood there, still barefoot, their faces expressionless, waiting for him to leave. Leksi walked out the door and closed it behind him.

The old woman dragged the shovel behind her as if it were a sled. The snow came up to her knees; she had to stop every minute for a rest. She would take several deep breaths and then continue walking, the shovel's blade bouncing over her footprints. She never looked back. Leksi followed three paces behind, rifle in hand. He followed her out the back gate and told her to turn right, and she did, and they circled to the front of the property and then down the hill.

Every time she stopped, Leksi would stare at the back of her head, at the gray bun held in place with hairpins, with growing fury. Why had she stayed behind in the house when everyone else had left? She hadn't been abandoned. Somebody had helped her down into the subcellar; somebody had dragged the billiards table over the trapdoor. It must have been pure greed, a refusal to give up the trinkets she had accumulated over the years, her crystal and her silver and her French wine and the rest. The others must have urged her to come with them. She was stubborn; she would not listen to reason; she was a fanatic.

“Why did you stay here?” he finally asked. He had not meant to speak with her; the question came out unbidden.

She turned slowly and stared up at him. “It is
my
house,” she said. “Why did
you
come?”

“All right,” he said, pointing the rifle at her. “Keep moving.” He did not expect her to obey him, but she did. They were walking down to where the three soldiers had hidden their packs, about a kilometer away; Leksi would carry them back up and save Surkhov and Nikolai a trip. It would be hard going, carrying three packs uphill, but he thought it would be much better than this walk downhill. Because Leksi did not doubt for a second that what he was doing now was a sin. This was evil. He was going to shoot an old woman in the back of the head, watch her pitch forward into the snow, and then bury her. There was nothing to call it but evil.