TASHKENT, 1919

  OSMAN STROKED Pinto’s cheek with his knuckles, as if to check if his scar was properly healed. Pinto’s beard was wispy and unevenly spread—there was a bare patch on his right cheek, where Osman liked to plant a kiss. Osman’s touch tickled Pinto, but he said nothing.

  You’re very beautiful, Osman said.

  So are you, Pinto said. More and more every day. One day you’ll be so handsome I am going to lose my mind.

  Well, we’re already past that, Osman said, and kissed him again.

  When I was a kid, I wanted to be a tree in a garden, Pinto said. They say, as the gardener, so the garden. I say, as the garden, so the tree. This garden is not too bad. I could be happy in a garden like this.

  Isak Abramovich’s garden was thick with prickly flower bushes and plants. A couple of pomegranate trees stood guard at the far end. Along the wall, there was overgrown wormwood surrounding a rampant rosebush, which throbbed with the scent. Osman and Pinto sat smoking on a couple of low stools right by a copse of tomato stalks. The tomatoes were small and green in daytime, but at night they swelled and darkened, so they now looked like shiny steel balls, or dark eyeballs. Over the tomatoes loomed large sunflower heads, folded in for their sunless sleep.

  I find it funny that we are hiding in the garden, like schoolboys, Pinto said. A perfect place for a first kiss.

  The Kuran says there will be a high wall between Heaven and Hell made of earth and sand, Osman said. Atop the wall will stand the wretched souls and they will call out to the people in the garden: May peace be with you!

  I wouldn’t care to listen to the wretched souls, but it would be nice to be living in peace, with you. This garden might be as close as we ever get to that.

  Who was it that built the wall between Heaven and Hell, and why? Pinto refrained from asking because he didn’t want to spoil the moment by being a sofu. Whoever it was, He did a good job with this night and the stars, which Osman was presently admiring, releasing cigarette smoke slowly, out of the side of his mouth, as if not to obscure the view. Things were clear and simple to Osman: the sky was beautiful; food was good; love was good; touching your beloved was even better; one day, peace would be upon us; the future was bound to be better or at least as good as now; God was kind, He made us, and everything around us, and everything for us, including the wall between Heaven and Hell. Pinto gave Osman a kiss on his shaven cheek.

  Everything I’ve ever had, everything I’ve ever been, the whole world, I’ve always hidden and carried inside me, Pinto said. When you are right here, and I can touch you, it all comes out with ease, like a breath. But the other day I woke up in the middle of the night and you were not next to me, and for a moment I thought you were just a dream and I wanted to die. It was only after I smelled you on the pillow that I knew you were real.

  I know. You told me all that when I came back.

  I almost died. Don’t ever leave me.

  I’ll always be here.

  Where were you? Pinto asked. Osman made a couple of cigarette smoke rings, but said nothing.

  I was going to go out to look for you, Pinto said. Then I worried you might come home and find it empty. And then what would I do? I don’t know where I would go to look for you.

  I came back to you. I always do. It doesn’t matter what I do. I do what I have to do. Why do you have to torture yourself like that?

  Manuči used to say that between the Garden of Eden and Gehenna there is no more than the breadth of a hand. If we could somehow expand it into a proper garden and never leave, well, that would be life.

  Life is when you’re alive, wherever you may be, Osman said. What more do you need? Every soul is certain to taste death. But before that it’s all life, all the time. Where there is life, there is no death. Everything that lives wants to keep living. When death comes, that’s the end of life. That’s it. I am here, then I am not here, but maybe elsewhere, in a better place.

  Osman had a particular way of nodding right after he said something he deemed significant: he would nod twice, then tip his head to the right and raise his eyebrows. This time, two parallel plumes of smoke came out of his nostrils as well. He also put his hand at the back of Pinto’s head, where it sat, warm, life pulsating in it. He pressed his lips against Pinto’s thick, wiry hair.

  It is dark in here, Pinto said, and tapped himself on the temple. La gran eskuridad.

  There’s no darkness in there, Osman said. You have a soul, that’s the candle. The candle never burns itself out. If it did, a man would just be organs pickled in blood.

  I disagree, Pinto said. I disagree. It is dark in here.

  Then look up at the stars.

  I am looking up at the stars. It’s still dark inside.

  Did you start taking morphine again? Osman asked.

  No, Pinto said.

  Fine, Osman said. I believe you.

  As you should, Pinto said.

  Above their heads, the Milky Way was thick like sugar, and one or two falling stars streaked across the dark patches beyond it. The moon hung low above the roofs, indifferent to the spectacle, and to the people watching it. A single shot broke the nocturnal silence, and suddenly all the dogs of Tashkent were barking. Yet they were far away, elsewhere, outside the walls of the garden.

  I don’t want to go anywhere, Pinto said. I don’t ever want to go anywhere. I want to stay here.

  You don’t want to go home to Sarajevo?

  You’re my home.

  I am not. I have nothing. You have your family.

  I don’t know what they would say.

  About what?

  About us.

  They would say nothing. We would tell them we are friends and they would ask no more questions.

  You don’t know them.

  I know you. I know the stories you told me.

  We would lie?

  Well, we are friends.

  Friends don’t fuck.

  You haven’t had many friends, have you?

  All I want is to fall asleep with you, and wake up with you. Every night, every day. And not worry what other people say. Or about kids throwing rocks at me.

  We could find a small house, Osman said. Somewhere up in the hills—in Alifakovac, or even higher up, in Hrid, and live as friends. We’ll have a walled garden, maybe with two rooms.

  I want to sleep with you.

  Okay. We’ll sleep together.

  Everyone will see we love each other.

  Maybe. But a terrible disaster has taken place everywhere. Things have changed. Maybe in Sarajevo people will be better than they used to be. Maybe they are all kinder now. Maybe they’ll pretend they don’t see.

  When we walk around here no one is looking at us.

  They took walks in the evenings, through the narrow alleys between walls and houses of baked clay and straw, then in the shade of tall, slender poplars lining the boulevards, along the irrigation canals used to water them when the Saar was high enough. They would stroll all the way to Kauffmann Square, to the shady trees, a few of which were cut, and the overgrown flower beds, some dug up for the soil, or to bury a corpse. After years of army, war, and imprisonment, just to go for a stroll was exhilarating. Sometimes, the dust refracted the sunset, so the square would be enfolded in golden fog, and Pinto and Osman would move through it as through a dream. Occasionally a soldier, or even a civilian, would salute Osman, and Pinto couldn’t figure out whether it was Osman’s rather worn and dusty uniform, or his Cheka authority, which was not quite visible to Pinto, that made them salute. In the center of the square was a statue of some Russian general, who looked important and cruel, even while coated in thick dust and turtledove shit.

  That is not true, Osman said. They’re all looking at us to see if we are spies.

  Still, they don’t care if we sleep together, Pinto said.

  You can’t know that.

  One day in May, when everything was lush and blooming and the irrigation canals were full, they walked past the White Palace all the way to the Saar, where they took their clothes off and dunked each other in the murky, cold water. Later they lay naked on the bank, with their naked legs intertwined. A pair of turtledoves in a tree branch above watched them, cooing, as in a poem. They heard guns from the town, but it was only a couple of shots, probably an execution. They made out, but the sun was down, and their patas were so shrunken from the cold they could not make love. Still, it was the most beautiful evening they had ever had.

  We cannot stay here, Osman said.

  Why not?

  We are not from here.

  We are not from anywhere.

  We are from Bosnia, from Sarajevo. I want to go home.

  You are my home. I am your home. Am I your home?

  Home is where people notice when you are not there.

  Who is going to notice we’re not there.

  Somebody will. Besides, I don’t want to die here. When you’re dead, there is no home anywhere.

  I’ve just never been happier in my life. In the midst of a cursed revolution, in the middle of nowhere, I am happy like a little girl. I keep waiting for the sky to crash, for everything to end, but I am so happy that I can sometimes imagine staying happy for a long time.

  Nothing lasts forever.

  That is a terrible thing to say at this moment.

  After Osman had come back home the other night, he fell asleep right away, and Pinto, awake through the sunrise, watched his face until it was lit up by the dawn. Pinto had no idea where Osman had been or what he had done that day. He imagined him galloping on a horse, pursuing bandits, shooting from his hip; sometimes he would envision, against his will, Osman being shot and tumbling off the horse, but then would quickly shut down the thought. He knew that Osman had to arrest people, interrogate them; he probably beat them, but Pinto could not imagine that he would torture or execute them—Osman was the kindest man in the world. But there was no way of knowing. Sometimes, he would come back home with his eyes empty, and would just go to bed without a word.

  Pinto listened to Osman’s breathing and an occasional incomprehensible word he squeezed out of whatever dream, or nightmare, Osman was in. Pinto did not want to leave Osman’s side, that old cot, or that room, or Tashkent, before the end of his life. It was hard to recall how he had managed to live without Osman before; even harder to see how he would survive without him. Osman just went about the business of staying alive as if it were his daily chore. He had walked right into the Bolshevik midst and announced himself: Here I am! He had volunteered to join the Cheka, because he reckoned that it would give them time to figure out how to get back home to Sarajevo. Pinto and Osman reached a tacit agreement that whatever he was doing for the Cheka should not be talked about when they were together, and occasionally Pinto would see his face and thoughts darken for a moment, as though the shadow of a bird had passed across his face.

  But in this dark garden, under the sugarcoated sky, Osman seemed lit from the inside, like a furnace with a crackling fire in it.

  I am going to kiss you, Pinto said, and leaned to reach Osman’s lips, teetering on one leg of his stool. Osman’s mouth tasted like smoke and the sweets he’d had with his tea. Isak Abramovich stepped out of the light of the door and into the shadow of the garden, startling them, so that Pinto fell off the stool. Osman grabbed the lapels of his coat to break his fall, which caused Pinto to roll on the ground, stopping just before he tumbled into Isak Abramovich, who carried on a tray three glasses and a bronze pitcher, no doubt full of vodka.

  What are you two doing?

  Oh, nothing, Pinto said from the ground. Talking.

  We just open our mouths and words come out, Osman said. And they never go back in.

  When you are young, everything is easy, Isak Abramovich said. Svetlana Teodorovna used to say that when you are young, you have no end. As far as you can see, everything is a field that is your life, but you cannot see the end of that field. You cannot see the end.

  Pinto rose up before Isak Abramovich, as if done with worshipping him. Isak Abramovich sat down on a large rock that was usually used as a table and placed the tray on the ground. Osman took it upon himself to pour the vodka into the cups, and when Pinto straightened up his stool and sat down, they were facing one another, their knees nearly touching. But Pinto could not look Isak Abramovich in the eye, because he didn’t want to find out if he had seen them kissing.

  Ever since he woke up in the hospital and Isak Abramovich welcomed him back to the world, Pinto spoke in Bosnian to him, while the good doctor spoke back in Russian. From the beginning, they would pick the words from the other’s language and insert them in their sentences and thus they exchanged and learned them. Pinto sometimes clandestinely imported Spanjol, just as Isak Abramovich smuggled in Yiddish words, while Osman added Arabic words he had learned in mosque. Over time, they developed their own pidgin, and they understood one another, no need for any translation.

  Back in Kishinev, when I was younger, Isak Abramovich said, and wagged his finger to announce the beginning of a story, I had a friend. A very good friend, Benyamin. Benya. I loved Benya very much. We grew up together, Benya and I. We went swimming together. We read the Torah together. We read all kinds of books, to each other, novels and poetry and whatnot. We loved Tolstoy, because his people blush all the time. Benya was pale, like an angel, with a permanent blush on his cheek and thick, straight eyebrows. I liked to touch his eyebrows, they were like two little brushes. He would put his head in my lap, and I would stroke his forehead, and read to him. People say that a man can only love God and a woman. But I loved him, more than God, far more than any woman, and I never wanted to love anyone else. My father wanted me to get married but I kept avoiding it. I wanted to be with Benya.

  Isak Abramovich sat with his back to the house, so that his face was in the dark, but Pinto and Osman could tell that his eyes were full of tears. He poured the entire glass of vodka down his throat, and slammed it down on the tray at his feet as if it had contained bitter potion for his sorrow.

  But then, one day, Isak Abramovich went on, a carp spoke in Hebrew from a fishmonger’s stall—everyone around the stall heard it, including my mother who happened to be there—saying that a great evil would soon be coming upon us. The carp just opened its mouth and said it, twice, and everyone heard it. And then only a few days later a terrible pogrom took place. The pogromchiks went from Jewish house to Jewish house, killing and stealing. We climbed on the roof of our house and they tried to reach us with hooks on long sticks to bring us down and slaughter us, but they couldn’t, because we were hugging the chimney. Finally, they gave up and moved on. But they killed our dog, just because they were in the mood for murder.

  What happened to Benya? Osman asked.

  The pogromchiks killed him. The police stood by and watched as they killed Benya. He was twenty-eight. They caught him on the street, beat him on the head with sticks and mallets, threw him into a ditch.

  What is it that makes people do things like that? Pinto asked, not expecting an answer.

  Nothing hurts more than losing a friend, Osman said.

  Isak Abramovich refilled their glasses, and said:

  The fat carp told us it was coming, but who was going to believe a stupid fish? And the funny thing was, once the carp stopped talking, they sold it. To my mother, of all people, who made soup out of it. It was very good, the carp soup.

  Isak Abramovich chuckled, and raised his glass to indicate that the story was over.

  To good friends! he announced.

  They downed the drink, then grunted to express the burn the vodka made.

  Heals the soul, Osman said.

  The world is full of souls that need healing, Isak Abramovich said, and poured them another round. But this time they sipped their vodka in silence, looking up at the sky in order not to talk.

  * * *

  Isak Abramovich knew that Pinto’s ideal soul-healing potion was morphine because Pinto had outright told him, just as he had confessed that he would be tempted to steal it for himself if he were ever to be allowed to administer it to the patients. I don’t want to touch it, Pinto said. It is poison. The armed guards thoroughly searched everyone on the way out, except for Isak Abramovich, whom they patted lightly, because he had run the hospital for many years, and had a kind and calm demeanor that worked even on the Cheka ruffians, and they didn’t want to have to liquidate him. For his part, Isak Abramovich didn’t want Pinto to get shot, because he liked him and needed him at the hospital. Pinto was Isak Abramovich’s only other physician, except for Kaczynski, the dour and reticent Pole who didn’t believe in anesthesia and kept the Cheka apprised of the goings-on in the hospital. Pinto, of course, eventually succumbed to temptation and stole a handful of morphine vials. The wise and forgiving Isak Abramovich said nothing about it, just added a lock to the cabinet with the morphine, and kept the keys in his pocket. But he also smuggled out a few small vials of morphine, the extra supplies of which he had long kept hidden through the war and revolution in case of an even greater calamity. He sat Pinto down, with Osman at his side, and told him that he could have those vials if they were to be the last ones. Because if he kept using morphine, Isak Abramovich said, one of them, probably, all of them, were bound to die—from the Bolshevik bullets, from overdose, or from sadness. Osman nodded along as Isak Abramovich was speaking. Pinto took the vials.