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