at all, idled inside, huddling in twos and threes around fires burning in emptied cooking oil tins. If an emaciated villager was out in the cold and snow, he walked listlessly as if to nowhere. Occasionally someone would approach Sergey to ask for money which he refused politely. Instead he gave them the gift of words: he asked them how they fared and what they thought was the solution to the famine. In reply, he received repeated solicitations for money. On the third day, Ahmad saw someone throw a stone at him. Sergey kept his composure, but hastened his pace back to the Orchard.
Ahmad got an earful when word reached Khan from Mulla Ali that he had not appeared in the class for three days. He had not caught Sergey committing any wrongdoing, but deep down he felt the stranger was not without malice and that was why he decided to sneak into his rooms the next weekend. The day before, when Sergey left his room to find Sara and ask for tea, Ahmad unlatched the window that Sergey never opened. On Thursday, right after Khan and Sergey had mounted their mules, Ahmad was in front of Sergey’s window. He looked around, then gave the window a push and climbed in. His heart pounded in his ears as he turned the handle to Sergey’s bedroom. The door screamed open to a small space with a bed under the window and a small desk right by its side. The nice wooden case under the desk was where Sergey stored his bottles of bitter water; Ahmad had seen him a few times, through the half-open door, squat in front of the case and then come back out of the room with a bottle in his hand.
Ahmad pulled the case out and opened it. The unparalleled bitterness of the first sip on his tongue distorted his face into a grimace. It was much worse without orange juice, but something inside him wanted to swallow it down anyway. He looked into Sergey’s two suitcases and ran his hand over the sumac knit pullover. In the desk drawer was a wooden doll. Ahmad took it out. It was a painted woman without limbs, smiling in bright colors and intricate flowers as if in a summer garden. As he picked it up, Ahmad realized the doll was cut in half and something was inside it. He twisted the top and bottom apart and inside was another doll very similar to the first but smaller, also cut in half. Inside the second doll was a third doll and inside the third, yet another. Ahmad laid six of them on the desk. He did not know what they meant and why they were inside one another. When he did not find anything else interesting, he took one of the bottles and climbed out of the window. Before he went away, he made a snowball and threw it at the flag that hung listlessly from the pole. He hid the bottle in his room and wandered around in the garden only to come back for a second sip after a little while and then a third. Soon he was sitting cross-legged in the second-floor corridor, feeling the happiest and then the loneliest. He had to share that feeling with Salman.
Among the apple trees that were like wizened hands turned to the sky, and with the main building well out of sight, Salman sneered when Ahmad crinkled his nose and stuck out his tongue to signal bitterness. He could gulp down as much as Ahmad dished out. “In a single breath.” Ahmad filled up half of the glass. Every swallow felt like hot nails scratching down his throat, but Salman was too proud not to force the liquid down. Afterward they shoveled a lot of snow into a big heap and Ahmad rode the wheelbarrow as Salman pushed it round and round until he dropped down panting on the snow. Salman took some of the magic water with him and drank it in the morning before heading for the bathhouse. Many a morning, as he worked the fire, he had heard the jinns’ horrifying whispers calling him by name and mumbling other unclear things. No matter how many times he uttered the name of God, they would not leave the bathhouse. With the magic water in his blood, his mind was peaceful, impervious to any nonhuman creature.
Ahmad refilled the bottle with water and placed it back in the wooden case.