than blood loss, and so he had no choice but to cauterize, no choice but to put out each finger like a cigar stub on the side of a heated butcher’s blade. But when he ran in he couldn’t explain what he was doing any more than could a man asked to put out a forest fire with only the water he could carry in his mouth. He asked her mother to start the stove and asked Havaa to go to her room. She hesitated. In the zachistka, she’d helped him when his fingers were too large and fumbling. Why wouldn’t he let her do the same for her father? The thunderclap of her name, this time shouted by her mother, and she ran.
The clatter of kitchen utensils passed through her closed bedroom door. Akhmed shouted for the butcher’s blade, and for more petrol, and with an intake of air the bar beneath the door brightened.
For three days her father slouched on the divan. Each night her mother unwound the gauze to polish the dark stumps with ointment. After a minute or two she cut a new strip of gauze, taped it around the shiny nub, and sighed, knowing she had nine more.
Late afternoon on the fourth day he stood. He paused at the coat stand, studying the buttons, and decided it was too warm for a coat. Havaa opened the door for him and he set his hand on the back of her neck and the heat of five missing fingers held her shoulder. They walked like that to Khassan’s house. Ramzan opened the door. They both looked to Ramzan’s fingers. Not even a nail was missing, and Ramzan blushed, and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“How …” Ramzan began to ask, but didn’t finish. “You look better.”
“I need a gun,” her father said.
“What? No, Dokka.”
“I need to know that my family can protect itself.”
“Dokka, they let us go from the Landfill. Do you know what they’ll do to you if they have even the idea that you are involved with guns again?”
“What, Ramzan?” her father asked, raising his hands. “What will they do to me?”
Ramzan looked down. “Fine,” he said, after a moment. “Come in.”
They walked past Khassan’s desk to Ramzan’s room. Ramzan popped the rigged floorboard and retrieved a Russian-made Makarov pistol from a cache beneath the floor. “Why did you bring the girl?” he asked.
“To pull the trigger,” her father said, looking down at her. “She’s six years old. It’s about time she learned how to handle guns.”
Ramzan took her outside, showed her how to load and unload the bullets, to set and release the safety. He told her to aim at the feral dogs clustered at the tree line, but she chose a tree trunk instead.
“It’s a semiautomatic,” Ramzan explained, “so you don’t need to cock the hammer. Don’t hold it out, that’s for American movie stars. You want to keep it just in front of you, your elbow against your chest, like you’re carrying a water pitcher. This won’t have the kickback of a high-caliber gun, but it isn’t designed for children, so you’ll feel it. Where do you think you should aim? The head? Never on the first shot. Too small a target. Aim for the chest, right in the center, that’s the kill shot.”
When she returned to the front of the house, her father sat back on the stoop, eyes closed, basking in the sun with a faint smile on his lips. She put the gun in his jacket pocket. He still hadn’t said what had happened to his fingers. As they walked home, she was worried he might, but his feet ground into the glinting gravel, and hers did too, and they conversed only in footsteps.
Two women and a man waited for them at the front door. The man’s hair looked painted and polished on his head; in another life he’d had a good job, a good flat, and a good wife, but now his lustrous head of hair was the only good thing he had left. “We heard you have beds,” one of the women said.
Her father looked at his shoe as if just stepping in dog shit. With a sickle-moon smile he shook his head, but they all knew it wasn’t in response to the question. Havaa would never know her father had spent the past three days paralyzed by the realization that his fingers would never again save Boris Yeltsin, or rake April soil, or flip the pages