dogs.”
He smiled and nodded. “I didn’t think you’d remember that. He must be the only person you’ve talked with in that time, too.”
“Who?”
“Do you know my name?” he asked. She strained but came back with nothing. “That’s okay,” he said. “That’s just fine.”
“Tell me a story,” she said.
“A story?”
“There were the stories of paintings. All true.”
He frowned. He didn’t know the stories of any paintings. “I only know one story,” he said. “I can say it happened, but I can’t say if it’s true. Did you ever meet Akhmed’s mother?” He took her empty stare for a no. “I’m glad you remember that because you couldn’t have met her. Cancer took her when Akhmed was seven. Her name was Mirza.”
She nodded because she was expected to.
“If I tell you this story, do you promise you will forget it?”
“I can’t promise anything,” she said distantly. He held her wrist, felt its plodding pulse. A mind too feeble to tell the time of day can still get the right blood to the right places, he thought. He’d never told anyone about her. “I will tell you about Mirza.”
He heard about the mass deportation nearly two years after it occurred, he told Ula, only after he himself had been deported to Kazakhstan. On February 23, 1944, Red Army Day, a day when Khassan had been shooting Nazis in eastern Poland, the Soviet NKVD rounded up Chechens in their town squares and forced them into Lend-Lease Studebaker trucks. Those who resisted or whom the NKVD deemed unfit for transport were shot. Packed into a coal wagon, Khassan’s parents and sister slept on maize sacks and ate dry maize meal as the trains slowly steamed eastward. Local soldiers cut their hair and dusted them with delousing powder when they arrived on the Kazakh steppe. Khassan never knew what happened to his sister, only that she had been seen climbing into the coal wagon in Grozny but hadn’t been seen climbing out. His parents slept in a kolkhozniki dormitory cellar, on a bed of dry mattress straw, and when hungry they made a flour of the mattress straw and fried thin powdery slabs that left them feverish but full. When they ran out of straw, they slept on the stone floor and made soup from grains picked from horse manure. By the time Khassan reached Kazakhstan in autumn 1945, conditions had improved but his parents had already perished, and he pieced together the story of their last year from the memories of their neighbors and friends, and from Mirza.
Mirza had been a child when Khassan left for war, and in 1947, when he came upon her straining water through cheesecloth, he didn’t recognize her as the girl who, at the age of eight, had been brought up on criminal charges for drawing a charcoal mustache on her lip and goose-stepping around the barnyard, ordering livestock to become more active builders of communism. “Let me have some,” he said, thirsty after his long way. “Go fuck yourself,” she said simply. It was their first conversation. She would become the love of his life, but he couldn’t have known that as he turned and stepped into dung so deep it reached the knot in his laces. He couldn’t have known it as he pried the pail from Mirza’s fingers and washed his boot in her clean water.
A year later the schoolmaster died and Khassan replaced him. He was without qualification or experience, but after the war, the squabbles of children approximated peace, and he was happy. Among his pupils was Mirza’s youngest sister, a quick-witted girl, with fingernails bitten so short she couldn’t lift a kopek coin from a counter, who once set a tack on the chair of the commissar’s chubby son to see if he would explode. Though he saved the commissar’s son from the tack—and thus Mirza’s sister from a bullet—he recognized that thread of recklessness running through her family just asking to be snipped short.
For May Day 1950, Khassan organized a children’s parade. Adults lined the stone-marked road to cheer their children and avoid the penalty of ten years’ hard labor for nonattendance. Twenty-three of the ninety-six children marching that day wouldn’t live to see their native Chechnya. The commissar’s son would be among them because the cholera ward, without respect for political class, was the nearest to an egalitarian society that most of them would ever come. Mirza’s youngest sister was one of the four who held on a raised pallet the plaster