with chipped edges, the small saucers Akhmed used to use to fool his stomach, the teal blue teacup, the one with the crimson rim from which Khassan had sipped the fancy Indian tea someone’s in-law had given one of them, and how could a teacup shatter when padded in so many layers of memory, how could this be happening again, how could Khassan stand at this same open window where four nights earlier he had listened to the same smashing dishware, had stared into the same unblinking headlights, had felt the same disgrace rip through him when Dokka was disappeared? At 12:27, shadows lumbered into the stream of headlights and among those shadows was a flailing form, so faint a contortion no one save Khassan would recognize it as Akhmed. A moment and the shadow vanished back into blessed darkness, and the truck doors snapped closed, and Mirza’s accusation clamped him to the windowsill, and the headlights pulled the trucks back to the underworld they had emerged from. As the last truck passed Khassan’s open window, Akhmed’s muffled cry finally reached him.
The sun had risen by the time his mind slowed enough to slip away. He dozed, but didn’t rest. In his dreams he wandered through grass frozen into fields of stiff white ribbon. He had hated Kazakhstan so much. He’d never imagined he might look back on exile as his happiest years.
At ten he woke and for three hours stared at the ceiling as he marshaled the courage to stand. The house was silent. He slid through Ramzan’s half-opened door, as he had dozens of times before when he had something to tell his son. Ramzan lay on the bed, mouth agape. Khassan crept to the bureau, where he withdrew the kinzhal from the top drawer. He had received it from his father, and his father had received it from his father’s father, and so it went, a century and a half of fathers and sons. It was the oldest thing he had ever owned not counting the trees in back. Near the handle the blade went brown with the blood of an Imperial conscript, or perhaps it was just rust. His father had taught him to thrust it forward, turning the blade before ripping it out, in case Tsar Alexander II might rise from the dead to pillage Eldár.
The edge followed the grooves in his palm, his life line, his love line. He carried it to the bed and wrapped the blade in the blanket so it wouldn’t wake Ramzan prematurely. He took a breath and the air filled him completely. The previous night was a place he wouldn’t return from. After the headlights had faded, he had crossed and uncrossed his fingers, picked up and set down the water glass, and amid these trivial gestures, he had died. “You are nothing without love and pride and family,” he had once told Akhmed. The first two had disappeared the previous night in the back of a truck; he was on his way, fingering the blade that would soon cut through the third.
“Did I ever tell you the story of the cobbler’s drunken son?” he softly asked. Ramzan heard nothing. “When I was a child, our village was plagued by a cobbler’s son, an eighteen-year-old who inflicted more property damage than could be expected from a man who couldn’t make his two feet move in the same direction. The cobbler was respected throughout the village until his son discovered the effects of fermented beet samogon. The liquor made pariahs of them both, proving right the aphorist who first stated that as the son inherits from the father, so the father inherits from the son. For years the cobbler appealed to the imam, apologized to the fathers of the women his son dishonored, and paid for, replaced, or returned the stolen goods. He offered to mend the shoes of any soul his son had wronged. So it was. But there came a point when the son’s capacity for ruin outpaced the cobbler’s capacity for restitution. He was in debt. Half the village walked on shoes paid for by his son’s drinking. One day the son vanished. No mention of him, no funeral, no gossip of work on a distant collective farm; he just disappeared. A month later my grandfather visited the cobbler with the village elders. They took him honey and raisins and welcomed him back. I, still a boy, was told to honor and respect the cobbler, as all