been educated in Grozny, and Akhmed, just graduated in the bottom tenth of his class with no job prospects and the noose of the village’s expectations tightening around his neck, did his best to transform Dokka into a local celebrity, partly because he had never befriended a man from Grozny, but mainly so Dokka could replace him on the tongues of gossiping widows. An arborist by training, Dokka was assigned to a three-year position researching the potential environmental benefits of clear-cutting, the professional equivalent of Siberian exile. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the timber industry disappeared—along with Dokka’s funding—he remained to take advantage of this rare opportunity to research new-growth forest. By then he had moved into a home large enough to accommodate both books and furniture, and the villagers, most anyway, didn’t run to the other side of the road when passing him. Though Esiila’s father belonged to the camp still questioning Dokka’s mental health, Khassan fully endorsed the young arborist, and Dokka was willing to marry Esiila for such a small dowry, the father would have been judged insane himself for refusing.
Havaa watched the conversation as she would a chess match, each side testing the other, searching for weaknesses to exploit. Now and then her mother glanced at her and the reflection of candlelight revealed an unfamiliar intensity in her eyes.
“Has Ula shown any signs of improvement?” her mother asked.
“No. She hasn’t left the bed for over eight months now.”
“Are you any closer to a diagnosis?”
Again, Akhmed shook his head. “Her vitals are fine. Whatever she has exceeds my ability to detect, let alone treat. I make sure she rolls over every couple hours to prevent bedsores. What else can I do?”
“You don’t think there is anything wrong with her, do you?” The question was a queen driven eight squares forward.
“I think the human mind isn’t built to sustain trauma after trauma.”
“Perhaps she needs to learn to care for herself. Perhaps your care is her paralysis.”
Havaa focused on her fingernails. She wanted to speak but didn’t, wanted to flee but couldn’t.
“I’ve considered leaving her for a few days, seeing if her body might jump-start her mind. It seems too cruel.”
“Both of our spouses have disappeared into themselves. Cruelty may be the line to draw them back.”
The conversation then veered back down the unmined road to the past, but when they each reached for the water pitcher, her mother’s fingers brushed his, and they all blushed.
Akhmed stayed with them the following day and night, and the one after that, spending most of the daylight hours planted in front of the living room window, staring across the street to his house. At night, when he thought Havaa was asleep, she heard him sneak into her parents’ room. It wasn’t until just after the fajr on the third morning that he finally left. He didn’t return. Esiila stood at the window, where he had, and she could see him across the street watching from his living room window, and they stood there with a bridge running between their eyes. Something awful had happened, but Havaa couldn’t put a name to it. She and her mother didn’t speak for the rest of that day or the next, as if Akhmed had been the substance through which they communicated, and without him they were alone with what they knew. The longer they went without speaking it, the heavier that first word became. On the day her father was to return, her mother hummed while she swept, scouring the silence with the dust from the rooms. Daylight dissolved into marbled twilight and Havaa fell asleep waiting for her father to appear.
They steeped in that silence for eight more days and nights before the uneven crush of gravel broke it. The door edged open and her father’s full weight collapsed against her mother’s chest. She would remember the yellow-gray of her father’s cheeks, how she’d seen that color frozen in deer urine but never on a human face. “Help me,” he whispered. Only then, when he tottered forward, did she see the dark red rags rubber-banded to his wrists. Akhmed must have seen from his house because he ran in with his doctor’s satchel before she could scream.
Akhmed would later explain that the bolt cutter had severed each finger so cleanly no skin remained to stitch over the bone. He would later explain that though ten strips of duct tape closed the wounds for the journey from the Landfill, infection was a greater threat