on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor. Later that afternoon the door would quietly close and her father would enter. He would speak with that deliberate, deceptive tone he used when reading her a story whose ending he already knew. She would ask if the army men would be staying with them and he would say, no, they’re not refugees, and leave it at that. She wouldn’t know that her father and Ramzan had spent nearly an hour conversing with the field commander. She wouldn’t know that the field commander, impressed by Ramzan’s experience as a trader in the mountains, had put him in touch with a sheikh who was looking for a capable man, a man like Ramzan, to deliver arms to the rebel encampments. All she would know was that the following Sunday, a day before the Feds arrived, her father lost Boris Yeltsin to a rook.
Three mornings after the rebels tottered from the village, Havaa woke to her parents’ hushed panic. Her father hoisted her in his arms before she could change out of her nightclothes. The impact of each footstep jolted through her, and as he ran into the forest, she watched the village shrink over his shoulder.
“What is it?” she asked.
“We are being liberated,” her mother panted from beside her.
A rotten log shielded them from all but the zachistka’s sound. When a ten-second spray of gunfire flooded the sky, Havaa couldn’t have imagined it was directed at eight villagers deemed too dangerous to be transported to the Landfill. Lying on the mossy topsoil for hours, she thought of her father’s defeat the previous afternoon. She knew that Russian soldiers could destroy a village, but she hadn’t known her father could lose a chess match. He lay next to her, twitching at the slightest shift in the wind, his fingers white around the handle of the kitchen knife. The rising smoke was so thick dusk came at three o’clock. Her father peered over the log with a pair of binoculars. He passed her the binoculars, the two-night payment of an ornithologist, who was now homesick, studying birds in Ecuador. As she spied Feds through the gaps between tree trunks, her father explained the difference between kontraktniki and ordinary draft soldiers.
“The draft soldiers in blue uniforms are scared teenagers. They are what we might call the victims of absurdism,” he said, not one to miss an opportunity to lecture a captive audience. “They would surrender if you waved a soup spoon at them. Most can’t find Chechnya on a map and don’t care if Putin, Maskhadov, or Father Christmas presides over the republic; most arrived by train in passenger carriages but most will return as Cargo 200, sealed within zinc-lined coffins in the freights. But the kontraktniki, the ones you see wearing sleeveless black T-shirts to show off their tattoos, they are nihilists, immoralists, or misanthropists, take your pick. They were released from prison provided they serve a certain number of years in Chechnya. They want to be here because this is the only place they can express their true nature, and, if I weren’t hiding behind a log, I suppose I might even admire them because they are committed to the dialectics of their philosophy, no matter how horrid.”
At that moment, a blond-haired conscript had pulled Khassan from the line of men that were to be taken to the Landfill. He hid Khassan in a tin-roofed shed and gave him his grandparents’ name and address. “You must survive,” the blond-haired conscript said. “You must survive and tell my grandparents. Tell them their grandson is not like the other solidiers. Tell them that they raised him well, that he’s trying so hard to stay the boy they raised.” Khassan would write a letter to the conscript’s grandparents, but without access to a functional postal system, it would remain in his drawer for seventeen months, until the autumn morning when a Russian woman knocked on his door, asking if he had seen her son. It wasn’t uncommon to see the mothers of missing Russian soldiers searching the Chechen highlands for their sons. Khassan wouldn’t be able to help her, but he would ask her to post his letter from Russia. He wouldn’t know that in Novosibirsk the grandparents of the blond-haired conscript would receive his