a dental appointment, and he gave assurances that he believed her. But her sheepishness dissolved as quickly as the spoonful of sugar in her second cup of tea. Her short, filed fingernails darted across the partition of silverware. They spoke for two hours, and when the cafeteria lady’s disapproving glances lingered too long, Mirza asked for a tour of the library. She hurried from one stack to the next, wide-eyed and awed, and only later, when he’d checked out a dozen books for her, did he learn that this was her first time in a library. He carried them to his office, which did not, he could safely say, have the same impact. It was, quite literally, the broom closet. The brooms were gone—he’d thrown them out when he’d been assigned the office—but the closet was barely wide enough to accommodate the smallest university desk, which was wedged in so tightly tissue paper couldn’t have slipped between it and the wall. Her days were empty, she confessed; would it be possible to come to the university a few days a week and read in his office? This Mirza was entirely different than the younger one who had smashed Stalin’s plaster nose with the heel of her boot. Perhaps he had changed, too; but he loved her no less.
Twice a week they met at the corner, mindful of oncoming buses. He saw her in the gray sweater with the silver buttons, the blue sweater with the fake ivory buttons, the green sweater with no buttons. They passed a cigarette back and forth, and when he felt the damp of her lips on the filter, the world became big and beautiful. His office could only accommodate one chair, so she would read her books there while he worked in the library. One afternoon he returned a half hour earlier than usual and found her hunched over a huge stack of typewritten paper. From the flipped-over pages, he could see that she was at least two-thirds through his manuscript. A breeze would have broken him. “This is wonderful,” she said, standing, as if baffled that he was capable of anything wonderful. His tilted gaze found her ankles. They were lovely ankles. She praised his book and he embraced her from gratitude rather than lust, but she didn’t let go. Neither did he. She kissed his cheek, his earlobe. For months they’d run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. The circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed. She sat on the desk, between the columns of read and unread manuscript, and pulled him toward her by his index fingers.
It was over in ninety seconds. He walked her to the marshrutka stop. When she boarded the shared taxi-bus, he followed. He sat beside her and angled his leg against hers, and they rode silently, two strangers with a secret held like a sheet of paper between their knees. She met him at the back of his house and at the door she stood red-cheeked and shivering, and he took her hands. She was his home. The only land that bound him. He led her to the notecard-papered room and didn’t have to explain a thing. She saw the yarn and knew. She unwound the ruby scarf from her neck and added it to his collection. This time they undressed before making love. The birthmark he remembered so vividly was still there, a purple ink-spill across her kidney, the only part of her that hadn’t aged. The affair lasted another eleven months, until she became pregnant. For several years she had tried with her husband, who had resorted to root-based aphrodisiacs brewed by an elderly widow—after the story spread, the widowed herbalist received enough business to become the wealthiest woman in the village, and soon received a number of marriage proposals herself—and whether the father was he or the root-remedied botanist, Khassan never knew. Akhmed was born on July 1, 1965; that was all that mattered. Mirza died when she was thirty-nine. Akhmed was seven. The cancer in her stomach was just eight months old. After she passed, Khassan and the botanist became friends. Both shared the same object of love and loss, and though they never discussed it, Khassan suspected the botanist knew. The botanist allowed him to be an uncle to Akhmed, a figure whom Akhmed could love without having to rely on, and in this way, regardless of true paternity, he was a