the villagers were, because he had put the good of our small society, our teip, above his own. His son’s name became a blasphemous word, erased from the collective memory, stricken from even the whispers of women. The story, when told, always ended at this pinnacle of honor and sacrifice. It never went on to tell how the cobbler, who didn’t mend another boot in his life, lived to the age of ninety-nine as a hermit, drinking himself senseless every day and night, alone but for the ghost of his son, whom he pleaded with in unbearable calls that I could hear from the far side of the village.
“They never tell you about that part, about how long you might live with it,” Khassan continued. He held Ramzan’s limp fingers. Thirty-two and three-quarter years had passed since he had first felt those fingers and they had astonished him, delicate as sparrow feet and holding on to his thumb as if he were the sturdiest branch in the forest. “They never tell you about that part.”
For two long years he had hated himself for imagining this moment. Disappearance by disappearance he had tallied the lives his son had extinguished—and if Ramzan hadn’t snuffed them, he’d held them to the wind—Alman, Musa, Omar, Aslan, Apti, Mansur, Aslan the Hirsute, Ruslan, Amir, Amir Number Two, Isa, Khalid, and Dokka, postponing this inevitability until the next day, the next disappearance, until he watched Akhmed’s beaten shadow eclipse the flood of headlights, and knew the next day would be the last. Twenty-one years and five months earlier, Ramzan had bounded from this bed and out that door to the kitchen, shirtless and wide-eyed with awe; he had pointed to a single hair sprouting from his underarm, as thrilled as if he’d found a diamond there. “You were right about the trumpet blast,” Khassan said. The regret was already there, a blank wall he’d spend the rest of his life staring at. “These are the end times. There can be nothing after this.” Now that it had arrived, all his talk of mountaintop sacrifices seemed the absurd, grandiose fantasies of a confused old man. There was no voice in the sky.
Ramzan’s chest rose and fell, oblivious to the decision already made by the hand holding his. Khassan had held that chest when it was no wider than a chicken’s, had held it to his own and felt something so tender and precious pass between them that he would have done anything for this boy. But this? Had the bottle of sleeping pills not sat open on the nightstand, he would have acted sooner. But from the many times he had perched on the mattress, he knew the pills would keep Ramzan comatose until evening. He could wait. Now that he had, in his heart, stepped over the edge, it didn’t matter how long he fell before hitting the ground. “I want to tell you something,” he said. “But I don’t know what. I don’t know.” Pride wouldn’t allow apology, not even now. “You are my son. You are mine,” he whispered, as a spell, as a gift, a last lullaby, a branding. Ramzan’s head turned, so slightly, into the pillow, and it nearly broke Khassan to see this shimmer of life. Sleep, just a while longer, that’s it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering? Khassan lay on the bed and breathed with his son. He followed Ramzan’s lead. Together they drew from and gave to the communal air, his open hand on Ramzan’s chest, rising and falling in this silence they made.
Three knocks broke it. Khassan sat up and carried the cavern in his chest to the front door. No one in the village, not even Akhmed, had visited the house since Ramzan’s collusion became known. Were his former friends standing on the other side with honey and raisins to welcome him back into society? You are too soon, he wanted to cry. I haven’t done it yet. I’m still climbing to the summit. He blotted his forehead with a purple handkerchief before opening the door.
On the other side stood a woman foregrounded against the teal sky. She wore a padded gray coat over scrubs. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Akhmed’s … I’m his friend. Are you K?” She passed him the manila envelope he had given Akhmed two days earlier. His pulse quivered as he accepted it; if it still contained his letter to Havaa he would give