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Streaks of pale skin began under her eyes, striping the ash on her cheeks.
Sonja’s hand found hers between the chairs. “Will the Feds take me to my father?” she asked, while knowing the question had no answer she wanted to hear. Her father was her door to the world; he was the singular opening through which she saw, heard, and felt. Without him she didn’t know what she saw, or what she heard, and what she felt; all she felt, was him gone.
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.
“What?” Ramzan asked. “You haven’t fastened your seat belt,” the commanding officer observed. “My seat belt?” He glanced around. All the soldiers were wearing seat belts. “We’re not going anywhere until you buckle up,” the commanding officer said. Ramzan nodded, yes, of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.
The interrogator took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, laid the live wires on Ramzan’s chest and mapped the border of their shared humanity. Ramzan offered his soul. He begged to be enslaved. The known universe contracted to the limits of the cement floor, and on it, the interrogator was both man and deity, prophet and god.
The botanist was a decent man, but Khassan was in love, and thus capable of infinite hate.
“And I mourn the father you might have been,” Ramzan said. The taunt peeled from his voice and behind it lay unvarnished, unfathomable need. Khassan’s face felt so heavy. He had expected false accusations, dissemblance; he hadn’t expected honesty.
She stood firm, steadying herself against an oak tree, and managed to fire twice more before a machine-gun round opened her stomach and dropped her to her knees. It was supposed to hurt, but this much? The first-time mothers said it hurt more than they had ever imagined. And was it worth it, she would ask. Oh yes, they would say. Oh yes. The torchlight fell upon her again. The second bullet put a hole in her chest, and she felt her breath leave, but neither the third, nor fourth, nor fifth, nor sixth, nor seventh, nor eighth, nor ninth, nor tenth, nor eleventh, nor twelfth, nor thirteenth, nor
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It was 12:16. Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.
