up. But his address was written on the manila envelope by Akhmed’s hand. The contained correspondence was thinner than his. “In his house,” she said in explanation. “I found it there. He was taken last night.”
That shadow floundering through light to the dark bank on the other side. The dementia that was to consume his memory in nine years would leave him that. When all else had faded, those headlights would still shine; they would be the light at the end. He could hardly speak, think, act, breathe. What was happening? What was this? He discovered Ula’s name between his lips. The woman dropped her eyes and shook her head, respectful but firm, perhaps accustomed to delivering bad news. As soon as she turned to the road, he tore open the manila envelope. It held two letters. One was written by an FSB colonel, the other by a rebel field commander. Each letter gave orders for the unhindered passage of its unnamed bearer. A third message lay at the bottom of the manila envelope, written on a scrap of paper so slight he nearly missed it. Mercy, the note read. Mercy.
The dogs, dozing beside the house, stretched their legs on the ground and lumbered after him, Sharik last, as he hurried to Akhmed’s house. He held the manila envelope against his chest, blocking it from the wind.
The front door was propped against the doorframe. He passed over a clean living room floor, an inexplicably alphabetized bookcase, and the dogs followed, Sharik last, because the front door wouldn’t close, and what did it matter, they were cleaner than the last beasts to enter.
Ula lay fully clothed on the unmade bed. After the past hour watching the rise and fall of his son’s chest, he knew immediately that she was gone. White tennis shoes jutted from the end of her baggy brown skirt, as if in death she would be reborn in good health, given a newly wired nervous system, allowed in her private paradise an afterlife of marathons. He closed the bedroom door, afraid the dogs might nibble at the body. Claw patter trembled through the thin walls. If he had to come back, he would be a dog.
For a moment he stood by the door, surprised by the scent of soap. Then one foot forward. Then the other. He folded her hands together and placed them on her stomach. The room was clean, as was the body, and though he could explain neither, he wasn’t surprised. A burgundy headscarf framed her face. Cupping her skull like a fragile bowl into which he had poured his most valuable possessions, placing his thumbs on her lids, he opened her to the dead afternoon light. She stared straight through him, to the unfolding infinities that bookended her thirty-five years, through him to the place where they would soon meet, when the trumpeter’s breath failed, when he would descend the notes of the final melody to the silence where Mirza waited.
He could have wrapped her in a white elasticated bedsheet, the nearest to a burial kafan in the depleted closet. The body was usually washed in scented water, but a martyr was buried unwashed, in the clothes she died in. He could have enshrouded her. She weighed so little. Even a man of his age could have carried her outside. In the backyard he might have set her on a cushion of snow. The ground was frozen. He could have plunged the spade head but the ground would hold. He knew no burial prayers, but he could have stood quietly and let canine panting mark the minute. He had spent his entire life burying, and unearthing, and reburying the dead, and he could have done it once more. The spade would have scraped through the frost. A shovelful of snow scattering on her torso. Three thousand years before a Russian empire existed, native tribes buried their dead in kurgans that grew so large they became part of the land, surviving the construction and collapse of subsequent civilizations. He would have thought of this as he entombed her. He would have shoveled until he couldn’t lift the spade, until the tomb reached his chest, until it compacted into a monument that would last until the spring thaw. But he didn’t have the energy to do more than close her eyelids, fluff the pillow beneath her head, and point her toward Mecca.
At home he picked three sets of clothes. Extra layers, heavy on wool; no longer