comatose for sixteen hours, and in these spells, when the house exhaled and the floorboards went silent, Khassan entered his son’s room.
On earlier excursions, he had explored the drawers, closet, and shelves. In the upper left bureau drawer, he found the thirty-centimeter blade of the kinzhal he’d given Ramzan on his sixteenth birthday, a knife his father had given him, and his grandfather his father. Within the pages of an algebra textbook a list bore the names of those Ramzan had helped disappear. The list contained three names when he first found it neatly folded between pages 146 and 147, farther into the textbook than his son had ever ventured in school. The last time he checked, a few weeks before Dokka’s was to be added, twelve names were listed. But most mornings, like this one, the second morning after Dokka disappeared, Khassan had no need or desire for further incrimination. Instead he sat on the bed, and held Ramzan’s hand, and spoke to him.
“I saw Akhmed this morning and he ran away from me,” Khassan said. “He ran into the forest and hid behind a tree because I am your father.”
In these moments when his son lay encased beneath the surface of a chemically sustained slumber, when his words were extinguished like sparks released into a vacuum, Khassan spoke freely. He told stories from his youth, begged clemency for certain villagers, and once suggested Ramzan drink peppermint tea for his cough. What else couldhe do when honor-bound to shun his son, when disavowal was his last vestige of paternal authority? The one-sided conversations were long treks across bridges leading nowhere, but he knew no other way to span the divide; he enjoyed the spoils of the collaboration he condemned, disavowed his son for lacking the compassion he had never taught him. “Let Akhmed be,” he whispered. “Let the girl be. Forget their names. They are gone.”
In the bureau he found the kinzhal sheathed unceremoniously in an undershirt. Three paces away, Ramzan’s Adam’s apple nodded like a bobber on the tide. One slice was all it would take. He had told Akhmed as much a few hours earlier. He could have taken one step, then the next, and the third. He could have lodged the butt of the handle against his breastplate and fallen forward and so taken gravity as his accomplice. There would have been blood, but he could have stomached it; a Chechen, he knew, had more blood in him than a Russian, but far less than a German. He could have, as he could have other times; but he pulled a green apple from his pocket and sliced through that instead. The core sat in two blocks of pale flesh and with the undershirt he wiped the juice from the blade and wished he had the fortitude to make the juice blood. What father fantasizes about killing his son? Even murderers, rapists, and politicians deserve fathers who separate love from repudiation, but Khassan couldn’t manage that; like dye poured into water, what he felt for Ramzan was a singular, inseparable opacity. Uncomfortable with only three paces between the kinzhal and the neck, Khassan carried the apple outside. He sat on the shoveled back steps and whistled three times.
He surveyed the yard while waiting for the dogs to emerge from the woods. The slate grave markers and stone perimeter of the herb garden were no more than dips and rises in the snow. The garden had been his wife’s suggestion, one of the few he acted on in their twenty-three years of marriage. Sharik, a pup then, had followed his nose around the yard as though pushing an invisible ball, and Khassan had planted seeds inrows marked with bent wire hangers. The dishes his wife had cooked for years soon tasted new, as though prepared by another woman, and Khassan had imagined that other woman when he made love to his wife five times that spring. Now she lay buried at the far end of the garden, beside the brown suitcase containing the bones of his parents, commemorated by a slight depression in the snow and a
On earlier excursions, he had explored the drawers, closet, and shelves. In the upper left bureau drawer, he found the thirty-centimeter blade of the kinzhal he’d given Ramzan on his sixteenth birthday, a knife his father had given him, and his grandfather his father. Within the pages of an algebra textbook a list bore the names of those Ramzan had helped disappear. The list contained three names when he first found it neatly folded between pages 146 and 147, farther into the textbook than his son had ever ventured in school. The last time he checked, a few weeks before Dokka’s was to be added, twelve names were listed. But most mornings, like this one, the second morning after Dokka disappeared, Khassan had no need or desire for further incrimination. Instead he sat on the bed, and held Ramzan’s hand, and spoke to him.
“I saw Akhmed this morning and he ran away from me,” Khassan said. “He ran into the forest and hid behind a tree because I am your father.”
In these moments when his son lay encased beneath the surface of a chemically sustained slumber, when his words were extinguished like sparks released into a vacuum, Khassan spoke freely. He told stories from his youth, begged clemency for certain villagers, and once suggested Ramzan drink peppermint tea for his cough. What else couldhe do when honor-bound to shun his son, when disavowal was his last vestige of paternal authority? The one-sided conversations were long treks across bridges leading nowhere, but he knew no other way to span the divide; he enjoyed the spoils of the collaboration he condemned, disavowed his son for lacking the compassion he had never taught him. “Let Akhmed be,” he whispered. “Let the girl be. Forget their names. They are gone.”
In the bureau he found the kinzhal sheathed unceremoniously in an undershirt. Three paces away, Ramzan’s Adam’s apple nodded like a bobber on the tide. One slice was all it would take. He had told Akhmed as much a few hours earlier. He could have taken one step, then the next, and the third. He could have lodged the butt of the handle against his breastplate and fallen forward and so taken gravity as his accomplice. There would have been blood, but he could have stomached it; a Chechen, he knew, had more blood in him than a Russian, but far less than a German. He could have, as he could have other times; but he pulled a green apple from his pocket and sliced through that instead. The core sat in two blocks of pale flesh and with the undershirt he wiped the juice from the blade and wished he had the fortitude to make the juice blood. What father fantasizes about killing his son? Even murderers, rapists, and politicians deserve fathers who separate love from repudiation, but Khassan couldn’t manage that; like dye poured into water, what he felt for Ramzan was a singular, inseparable opacity. Uncomfortable with only three paces between the kinzhal and the neck, Khassan carried the apple outside. He sat on the shoveled back steps and whistled three times.
He surveyed the yard while waiting for the dogs to emerge from the woods. The slate grave markers and stone perimeter of the herb garden were no more than dips and rises in the snow. The garden had been his wife’s suggestion, one of the few he acted on in their twenty-three years of marriage. Sharik, a pup then, had followed his nose around the yard as though pushing an invisible ball, and Khassan had planted seeds inrows marked with bent wire hangers. The dishes his wife had cooked for years soon tasted new, as though prepared by another woman, and Khassan had imagined that other woman when he made love to his wife five times that spring. Now she lay buried at the far end of the garden, beside the brown suitcase containing the bones of his parents, commemorated by a slight depression in the snow and a
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