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She would remember the cool metal warming in her hands, how she gripped it like a banister. Later she would learn that Akhmed had shouted instructions as he drove; her father performed them as well as his hands allowed. She would never understand why Akhmed hadn’t thought to bring her when he needed a second set of fingers. In the panicked departure no one remembered her mother’s ID card. The sergeant at the checkpoint nodded often, sympathetically, and then explained there was simply no way he could allow her through without proper identification. There are few rules in war, he went on, but those that do exist must be upheld, because if so simple a rule as this is broken, then couldn’t the more complex, convoluted, one might even say absurd rules of the Geneva Convention break with even greater ease? Her father raised his hands in response, but the sergeant, a man who had grown up in a mining town above the Arctic circle, and found the Chechen climate so fine he had renewed his contract three times, had seen worse. Her mother died and the argument went on for several more minutes before anyone noticed.
The gun was buried in the back of the drawer before her father returned. The look on his face told her what had happened and that hurt burrowed deeper than anything she’d ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was. Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed. But even on those days when she ran to Akim in the woods, her pain wasn’t complicated by guilt. She hadn’t caused or contributed to her mother’s death. She couldn’t have saved her.
That was the difference in how she mourned each parent. One and a half years since her mother had died and she grieved for her cleanly because she wasn’t at fault. But when the security forces had come for her father three nights earlier, she could have taken that pistol and aimed it at the first face appearing in the kicked-in door. She could have fired all twelve rounds, let the magazine drop, ducked and reloaded, just as Ramzan had taught her.
But she didn’t. Instead she’d followed her father’s hoarse command and run through the backdoor and into the safety of the woods with her prepacked just-in-case suitcase. The shadows of the Feds moved across the windowpanes. The bookcase tipped and the book covers opened like wings over an underbelly of white feathers, dirty with ink. In the living room the men gathered with their faces to the floor. From behind the moldering log, she couldn’t make out what the men were laughing at, and because she couldn’t see she could still believe it wasn’t her father. She sucked snow, breathed through her mouth, her breath invisible in the cold. Their shoulders strained with an unseen weight. They vanished, reappearing in the next window, and she crept to the edge of the clearing until she could see the parked truck. The duct tape stretching over her father’s mouth wrinkled. When she saw that they had even taped his hands together, she would have fired three shots right then, if she had had the pistol. But there was no gun. The silver Makarov was not in the dresser drawer. It hadn’t been there for some time.
CHAPTER 18
THE SILVER MAKAROV pistol was all Ramzan thought about for the two weeks preceding Dokka’s disappearance, in which he failed to produce a single bowel movement. Each morning, venturing into the cold in nothing but a robe and lambskin boots, he turned the corner of the house, passed icicles filling the gutter’s missing segments, passed the frostbitten fingers of fallen birch limbs, and waded down the sharp incline to the scattered pinecones that had amassed into an ankle-deep mound at the outhouse door. Inside, he sat with his elbows burrowed into his knees, a full-bodied clench that left him red-faced and winded. Snow flurries fell through the roof’s missing half, landing on the back of his neck, and melted into sweat. His scrotum was an empty coin purse flattened between his legs. He was unable to father even a soft dollop of excrement. As the stagnant days stacked one atop the next, he altered his diet, already limited to what his father hadn’t thrown to the dogs. He stopped eating his favorite meal of cured beef spiced with paprika, chilies, and coriander, the one sumptuous di
It was the Cossack colonel, Ramzan came to believe, who had tied the knot in his intestines. His deep timbre could constipate the Volga. The smoke of three daily packs blew through his sentences. He spoke with a velvety menace as he asked Ramzan if the sun was shining over the village, and the collision of the colonel’s tone and the childlike question gave Ramzan the impression that to the man on the other end of the line death was an unremarkable hazard of his trade. The sun was shining, beaming even, yet Ramzan felt compelled to lie, to say the cloud cover sat as thick as spoiled milk, as though enough small lies would absolve him of the larger truths divulged. But he didn’t lie. He said yes. The sun shone. The colonel grunted in approval, then read from the military meteorological report for the village. Static breathed through the transmission. Ramzan lifted the ante