helped your mother climb the stairs. When her feet failed, we carried her. She was worried her hips would crush you. Even before you were born, she worried for you. It was amazing to see her love you before you even met. Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn’t create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written. For their entire lives, even before they met, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree. You were their rain and sun, their morning and night.
In the maternity ward the nurse put your mother in a bed and I held her left hand and your father held her right. Custom says that a man shouldn’t be present at a birth, but we didn’t listen, we were there. On the boarded windows were drawings of a city that no longer existed. You were born within the memory of a kinder past. Your mother’s screams opened her jaw so wide you could have come from her mouth. Never have I seen your father so afraid. Then, you arrived. We were all there, waiting for you. The nurse held you in her hands. You didn’t breathe. We held our breaths waiting for you to find yours. And when your mouth opened, and your lungs burst, we knew they would never be empty. And your father, I have never seen a man more joyful.
The nurse who delivered you was named Natasha. All these years later I remember her name because she had remembered mine. She had read my book, Origins of Chechen Civilization, one of the four score who ever had. Hers were the first hands to hold you. When you were suffocating, she taught you to breathe.
Your mother’s were the second hands. She looked at you as if she had been born to you. She passed you to your father. The corners of his eyes crinkled. His heart had been the acorn. Now it was the oak tree.
Those are the first three pairs of hands that held you. How I hope you will live long enough that I will never know the final three.
“What is her name?” the nurse asked, as your father held you to his chest.
“Havaa.” He spoke your name like the rhythm of a pulse.
When they took him, he held your name right there in his chest, and you were with him, even if you didn’t know it. When he reached the end, he did not die. He called your name and began to live in you.
She set down the letter. If her pounding heart spoke a name, it was one she didn’t recognize. Her sister had delivered hundreds of newborns in the seven years she had worked in the maternity ward, hundreds of Havaas, and they were her patients, not her children, neither more nor less loved than the other lives begun and ended, saved and lost, revived and mourned within the gray granite walls of Hospital No. 6. But Sonja couldn’t name those countless others, had not shared with them a mattress or a room or an energy bar, would not recognize their faces on the street or in the bazaar or at the cemetery, did not wish for them what she wished for Havaa, a need, newly made, to save this one life her sister had brought into the world.
Before leaving she surveyed the rooms a final time. Akhmed’s wife lay peacefully, her hands at her sides, her bright white tennis shoes ready to take her anywhere. Sonja propped the front door as best she could and wondered who would enter next. The vacant house would become a haven for refugees who had heard of a hostel in the 30-block of Eldár Forest Service Road. It would never again be as clean as it was the afternoon Sonja left, as one might expect, as some three thousand souls were yet to shelter there.
She drove to the address marked on the manila envelope. A red pickup truck parked in front of the house was better kept than any others on the block. Green antifreeze beads lazed in the sludge of the half-shoveled walk. She knocked on the door. A minute passed before an elderly man opened the door and gaped at her, his unhinged eyes filled with such bewilderment she wondered if he saw her as a ghost.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Akhmed’s …” What? Employer? Supervisor? Colleague?