He was from Chechnya, and his mother was dead and all he had to remember her by was the golden bracelet with the Koran attached to it that she had placed round his wrist before she died. But when she died and how she died, and how old he was when he inherited her bracelet were questions he either failed to understand or didn’t wish to.
“Chechens are hated everywhere,” Leyla explained to Melik, while Issa kept his head down and went on eating. “But not by us. Do you hear me, Melik?”
“Of course I hear you, Mother.”
“Everyone persecutes Chechens except us,” she continued. “It is normal all over Russia and the world. Not only Chechens, but Russian Muslims everywhere. Putin persecutes them and Mr. Bush encourages him. As long as Putin calls it his war on terror, he can do with the Chechens whatever he wishes, and nobody will stop him. Is that not so, Issa?”
But Issa’s brief moment of pleasure had long passed. The shadows had returned to his wracked face, the spark of suffering to his doe eyes, and a haggard hand closed protectively over the bracelet.
Speak,
damn you, Melik urged him indignantly but not aloud. If somebody surprises me by talking Turkish at me, I speak Turkish back, it’s only polite! So why don’t you answer my mother with a few obliging words of Chechen, or are you too busy knocking back her free food?
He had other worries. Carrying out a security inspection of the attic that Issa now treated as his sovereign territory—stealthily, as Issa was in the kitchen, talking as usual to his mother—he had made certain revealing discoveries: hoarded scraps of food as though Issa was planning his escape; a gilt-framed miniature head-and-shoulder photograph of Melik’s betrothed sister at eighteen, purloined from his mother’s treasured collection of family portraits in the living room; and his father’s magnifying glass, lying across a copy of the Hamburg Yellow Pages, open at the section devoted to the city’s many banks.
“God gave your sister a tender smile,” Leyla pronounced contentedly, in answer to Melik’s outraged protests that they were harboring a sexual deviant as well as an illegal. “Her smile will lighten Issa’s heart.”
Issa was from Chechnya then, whether or not he spoke the language. Both his parents were dead, but when asked about them he was as puzzled as his hosts were, gazing sweetly into a corner of the room with his eyebrows raised. He was stateless, homeless, an ex-prisoner and illegal, but Allah would provide the means for him to study medicine once he was no longer a beggar.
Well, Melik too had once dreamed of becoming a doctor and had even extracted from his father and uncles a shared undertaking to finance his training, a thing that would have entailed the family real sacrifice. And if he’d been a bit better at exams and maybe played fewer games, that’s where he’d be today: at medical school, a first-year student working his heart out for the honor of his family. It was therefore understandable that Issa’s airy assumption that Allah would somehow enable him to do what Melik had conspicuously failed to do should have prompted him to throw aside Leyla’s warnings and, as best his generous heart allowed, launch himself on a searching examination of his unwanted guest.
The house was his. Leyla had gone shopping and would not be back until midafternoon.
“You’ve studied medicine then, have you?” he suggested, sitting himself down beside Issa for greater intimacy, and fancying himself the wiliest interrogator in the world. “Nice.”
“I was in hospitals, sir.”
“As a student?”
“I was sick, sir.”
Why all these
sir
’s? Were they from prison too?
“Being a patient’s not like being a doctor, though, is it? A doctor has to know what’s wrong with people. A patient sits there and waits for the doctor to put it right.”
Issa considered this statement in the complicated way that he considered all statements of whatever size, now smirking into space, now scratching at his beard with his spidery fingers, and finally smiling brilliantly without answering.
“How old are you?” Melik demanded, becoming more blunt than he had planned. “If you don’t mind my asking”—sarcastically.
“Twenty-three, sir.” But again only after prolonged consideration.
“That’s quite old then, isn’t it? Even if you got your residence tomorrow, you wouldn’t be a qualified doctor till you were thirty-five or something. Plus learning German. You’d have to pay for that too.”
“Also God willing I shall marry good wife and have many children, two boys, two girls.”
“Not my sister, though. She’s getting married next month, I’m afraid.”
“God willing she will have many sons, sir.”
Melik considered his next line of attack and plunged: “How did you get to Hamburg in the first place?” he asked.
“It is immaterial.”
Immaterial
? Where did he get
that
word from? And in Turkish?
“Didn’t you know that they treat refugees worse in this town than anywhere in Germany?”
“Hamburg will be my home, sir. It is where they bring me. It is Allah’s divine command.”
“
Who
brought you? Who’s
they
?”
“It was combination, sir.”
“Combination of what?”
“Maybe Turkish people. Maybe Chechen people. We pay them. They take us to boat. Put us in container. Container had little air.”
Issa was beginning to sweat, but Melik had gone too far to pull back now.
“
We
? Who’s
we
?”
“Was group, sir. From Istanbul. Bad group. Bad men. I do not respect these men.” The superior tone again, even in faltering Turkish.
“How many of you?”
“Maybe twenty. Container was cold. After few hours, very cold. This ship would go to Denmark. I was happy.”
“You mean Copenhagen, right? Copenhagen in Denmark. The capital.”
“Yes”—brightening as if Copenhagen was a good idea—“to
Copenhagen.
In Copenhagen, I would be arranged. I would be free from bad men. But this ship did not go immediately Copenhagen. This ship must go first Sweden. To
Gothenburg.
Yes?”
“There’s a Swedish port called Gothenburg, I believe,” Melik conceded.
“In Gothenburg, ship will dock, ship will take cargo, then go Copenhagen. When ship arrive in Gothenburg we are very sick, very hungry. On ship they tell to us: ‘Make no noise. Swedes hard. Swedes kill you.’ We make no noise. But Swedes do not like our container. Swedes have dog.” He reflects awhile. “‘What is your name, please?’” he intones, but loud enough to make Melik sit up. “‘What papers, please? You are from prison? What crimes, please? You escape from prison? How, please?’ Doctors are efficient. I admire these doctors. They let us sleep. I am grateful to these doctors. One day I will be such a doctor. But God willing I must escape. To escape to Sweden is no chance. There is NATO wire. Many guards. But there is also toilet. From toilet is window. After window is gate to harbor. My friend can open this gate. My friend is from boat. I go back to boat. Boat takes me to Copenhagen. At last, I say. In Copenhagen was lorry for Hamburg. Sir, I love God. But the West I also love. In West I shall be free to worship Him.”
“A
lorry
brought you to Hamburg?”
“Was arranged.”
“A
Chechen
lorry?”
“My friend must first take me to road.”
“Your friend from the crew? That friend? The same guy?”
“No, sir. Was different friend. To reach road was difficult. Before lorry, we must sleep one night in field.” He looked up, and an expression of pure joy momentarily suffused his haggard features. “Was stars. God is merciful. Praise be to Him.”
Wrestling with the improbabilities of this story, humbled by its fervor yet infuriated as much by its omissions as his own incapacity to overcome them, Melik felt his frustration spread to his arms and fists, and his fighter’s nerves tighten in his stomach.
“Where did it drop you off then, this magic lorry that showed up out of nowhere? Where did it drop you?”
But Issa was no longer listening, if he had been listening at all. Suddenly—or suddenly to the honest if uncomprehending eyes of Melik—whatever had been building up in him erupted. He rose drunkenly to his feet and with a hand cupped to his mouth hobbled stooping to the door, wrestled it open although it wasn’t locked and lurched down the corridor to the bathroom. Moments later, the house was filled with a howling and retching, the like of which Melik hadn’t heard since his father’s death. Gradually it ceased, to be followed by a slopping of water, an opening and closing of the bathroom door and a creaking of the attic steps as Issa scaled the ladder. After which a deep, troubling silence descended, broken each quarter hour by the chirping of Leyla’s electronic bird clock.
At four the same afternoon, Leyla returned laden with shopping and, interpreting the atmosphere for what it was, berated Melik for transgressing his duties as host and dishonoring his father’s name. She too then withdrew to her room, where she remained in rampant isolation until it was time for her to prepare the evening meal. Soon smells of cooking pervaded the house, but Melik remained on his bed. At eight-thirty she banged the brass dinner gong, a precious wedding gift that to Melik always sounded like a reproach. Knowing she brooked no delay at such moments, he slunk to the kitchen, avoiding her eye.
“Issa, dear, come down, please!” Leyla shouted and, receiving no response, grabbed hold of her late husband’s walking stick and thumped the ceiling with its rubber ferrule, her eyes accusingly on Melik, who, under her frosty gaze, braved the climb to the attic.
Issa was lying on his mattress in his underpants, drenched in sweat and hunched on his side. He had taken his mother’s bracelet from his wrist and was clutching it in his sweated hand. Round his neck he wore a grimy leather purse tied with a thong. His eyes were wide open, yet he seemed unaware of Melik’s presence. Reaching out to touch his shoulder, Melik drew back in dismay. Issa’s upper body was a slough of crisscross blue-and-orange bruises. Some appeared to be whiplashes, others bludgeon marks. On the soles of his feet—the same feet that had pounded the Hamburg pavements—Melik made out suppurating holes the size of cigarette burns. Locking his arms round Issa, and binding a blanket round his waist for propriety, Melik lifted him tenderly and lowered the passive Issa through the attic trap and into Leyla’s waiting arms.
“Put him in my bed,” Melik whispered through his tears. “I’ll sleep on the floor. I don’t care. I’ll even give him my sister to smile at him,” he added, remembering the purloined miniature in the attic, and went back up the ladder to fetch it.
Issa’s beaten body lay wrapped in Melik’s bathrobe, his bruised legs jutting out of the end of Melik’s bed, the gold chain still clutched in his hand, his unflinching gaze fixed resolutely on Melik’s wall of fame: press photographs of the champ triumphant, his boxing belts and winning gloves. On the floor beside him squatted Melik himself. He had wanted to call a doctor at his own expense, but Leyla had forbidden him to summon anyone. Too dangerous. For Issa, but for us too. What about our citizenship application? By morning, his temperature will come down and he’ll start to recover.
But his temperature didn’t come down.
Muffled in a full scarf and traveling partway by cab to discourage her imagined pursuers, Leyla paid an unannounced visit to a mosque on the other side of town where a new Turkish doctor was said to worship. Three hours later she returned home in a rage. The new young doctor was a fool and a fraud. He knew nothing. He lacked the most elementary qualifications. He had no sense of his religious responsibilities. Very likely, he was not a doctor at all.
Meanwhile, in her absence, Issa’s temperature had after all come down a little, and she was able to draw upon the rudimentary nursing skills she had acquired in the days before the family could afford a doctor or dared to visit one. If Issa had suffered internal injuries, she pronounced, he would never have been able to gulp down all that food, so she was not afraid to give him aspirin for his subsiding fever, or run up one of her broths made from rice water laced with Turkish herbal potions.
Knowing that Issa in health or death would never permit her to touch his bare body, she provided Melik with towels, a poultice for his brow and a bowl of cool water to sponge him every hour. To achieve this, the remorse-stricken Melik felt obliged to unfasten the leather purse at Issa’s neck.
Only after long hesitation, and strictly in the interests of his sick guest—or so he assured himself—and not until Issa had turned his face to the other wall and fallen into a half sleep broken by mutterings in Russian, did he untie the thong and loosen the throat of the purse.
His first find was a bunch of faded Russian newspaper clippings, rolled up and held together with an elastic band. Removing the band, he spread them out on the floor. Common to each was a photograph of a Red Army officer in uniform. He was brutish, broad-browed, thick-jowled and looked to be in his midsixties. Two cuttings were memorial announcements, decked with Orthodox crosses and regimental insignia.
Melik’s second find was a wad of U.S. fifty-dollar bills, brand-new, ten of them, held together by a money clip. At the sight of them, all his old suspicions came flooding back. A starving, homeless, penniless, beaten fugitive has
five hundred untouched dollars
in his purse? Did he steal them? Forge them? Was this why he had been in prison? Was this what was left over after he had paid off the people smugglers of Istanbul, the obliging crew member who had hidden him and the lorry driver who had spirited him from Copenhagen to Hamburg? If he’s got five hundred left now, how ever much did he set out with? Maybe his medical fantasies aren’t so ill-placed after all.
His third find was a grimy white envelope squeezed into a ball as if somebody had meant to throw it away, then changed his mind: no stamp, no address and the flap ripped open. Flattening the envelope, he fished out a crumpled one-page typed letter in Cyrillic script. It had a printed address, a date and the name of the sender—or so he assumed—in large black print along the top. Below the unreadable text was an unreadable signature in blue ink, followed by a handwritten six-figure number, but written very carefully, each figure inked over several times, as if to say
remember this.