Three Fingers

“NEVER GO WITH A MARRIED MAN.”

When they were alone in the kitchen, Irina’s mother struck a match. A ring of blue flame encircled the front right element of the gas stove. The flames turned orange as they lapped around the base of the plain iron samovar. Since Ivan’s departure, Irina had ceased to view her parents as a unit of authority, coming to see them as two people in a relationship that was complicated by her presence. The warning against married men—the first time her mother had recognized her as a woman—encouraged her to distance herself from this triangle. Before she could assure her mother that she did not think married men would be a problem since in the closed city men with wives were grey-faced science teachers, brownuniformed checkpoint guards or security officers who had started their careers in the KGB, her mother said: “And when you are married, watch your husband’s stomach. A man who has a family and responsibilities must have a belly. If your husband grows thin, some young hussy has met a married man and you must put a stop to it. Feed him! His belly is your security.”

All summer, in the mountains, Irina pondered this advice. At the beginning of the summer, when her father drove her up to where the air blowing in the windows of his wheezing Moskvitch sedan turned cool, she watched the bottomless vertical fissures of cliff-faces narrowing as they funnelled towards dark lakes. Clefts of rock above the waterline glistened with snow until mid-June. This would be her last summer with her grandmother, carrying in firewood, collecting eggs from the chickens, eating halal mutton with thick noodles and brewing tea over live coals in the copper samovar decorated with caliphate designs. Her grandmother spoke to her in broken Russian, but all other conversation was in Bashkir. In the Urals, the doubling of Russian and Bashkir, Christianity and Islam,