him onto the frozen charcoal. He found the corner where Dokka’s bookcase had stood, and there he bent down and scooped a handful of ash into his coat pocket. The dark dust dissolved into his palm. “A bunch of big tough wild dogs,” he said to the pack, which waited for him on the banks of the frozen debris. “But too afraid to follow me …” To follow him where? Where was he?
Across the street the curtained windows were two black eyes on the face of Akhmed’s house. If Akhmed had left at dawn, and said he would be gone all day, who was looking in on Ula? The most painful revelations were the quietest, those moments when the map opened on the meandering path that had led him here. An ailing woman would spend the day alone; he hadn’t envisioned that.
“I could call on her, see if she is all right, if she needs anything,” he said, glancing to the dogs for approval. They were all ripples on the same pond. “If I’m looking after a bunch of dogs, the least I can do is look after her. Don’t take that tone with me. I am not breaking in. I have the key right here.” He displayed the spare key Akhmed had given him with a grin, nine years earlier, on the day the bank that owned four-fifths of Akhmed’s house was bombed into oblivion. The dogs cocked their heads, unconvinced. “No, I haven’t been called for, but that’s beside the point. Are you sure you want to discuss etiquette? I have a lot to say about ass-sniffing as a way to say hello.”
Two paces toward the house a burgeoning worry spread through him. What if the dogs thought he was leaving them for human company? Well, he was, but he had to break it to them gently. They were sensitive souls, even if they occasionally dug up and ate newly buried bodies. He dropped to one knee and opened his arms. All but Sharik licked the aftertaste of oats from his breath, and he told them how much he loved them, how much he needed them, how he would never leave them. Then the bald dog sniffed his ass.
His highly critical canine audience observed as he knocked at the front door. “See?” he said to them. “I have no choice but to use the key.”
He pushed open the door and crossed the thick mustiness to the bedroom. A pair of slender legs, no more than sheet creases, shifted beneath the covers. For three minutes he watched her from the threshold, a second slice of his day spent watching a second addled mind at rest; then she rolled over. He looked into her eyes and they took their time looking back.
“You’ve gotten old, Akhmed,” she said, and he couldn’t suppress his smile. Like a child, this one.
“I’m not Akhmed,” he said. Akhmed had been eight days old when they first met in the living room of Akhmed’s parents in 1965. He had held the infant in his arms and a relief profound as any he would ever feel had seeped right through him. Akhmed’s eight-day-old eyes had held the reflection of ten thousand possible lives. Khassan wasn’t an emotive or superstitious man, and nothing like it had ever happened again, but he had found, layered in the infant’s half-lidded eyes, innumerable, wanting faces, none of which he had recognized.
“I’m sorry,” Ula murmured. “My head isn’t right.”
He sat on the bed beside the bone of her hip. “Don’t apologize. I spent the morning talking to dogs.”
“If you’re not Akhmed, then why are you here?”
“I wanted to see if you needed anything. If you wanted someone to talk to. Akhmed won’t be back for a while.”
“He won’t be back?” she seemed to ask, but he wasn’t sure. She had but two notes in her, and on the wire stretching between them her questions and answers warbled the same.
“Not for a little while,” he said. Three full water glasses and a bowl of hardened rice sat on the nightstand.
Sensing his uncertainty, she again asked, “Why are you here?”
“I miss speaking to people,” he said. When he admitted it aloud he wanted to laugh. It was that simple. He was that lonely. He had come to an invalid woman to offer the help he needed. “I miss being able to speak. For nearly two years Akhmed has been the only person I’ve had a conversation with.”
“You said you spent the morning talking to