He rationed what he had, waited for Osman to go on a mission chasing down counterrevolutionary bandits, and then set out to use the morphine. The first couple of days were heaven, even if its bitterness made him gag, so much so that he overrode his own plan and kept at the drug until he ran out of it. He’d imagined, to the point of hallucination, all the bites and kisses, all the harsh and beautiful ways in which he would make love to the absent Osman, and then he would just levitate above the bed, thoughtless and painless, light as the last breath. Then there were a few horrible, painful days. In their small room with a window facing a mosque where no one ever dared to pray, he pissed and vomited into a bucket, lived through terrible, painful nightmares. Isak Abramovich stopped by to check on him, to see if he was alive, but Pinto would not let him in. When Osman came back, Pinto opened the door, but then sat down on the floor, exhausted, because he hadn’t eaten for days. Osman embraced him like a child and held him in his arms, and Pinto cried, and cried for a while, and Osman with him. Through that deluge of tears Pinto kept looking at Osman’s boots, caked in dust and mud, his left pinkie toe squeezing its head through a laceration on the left one. Then Osman put him in bed, washed his face, emptied the bucket, kissed him on the forehead, and fell asleep. He woke up the following day, after the Šabat sunset, washed, shaved, and trimmed his mustache. He did not mention what had happened, and just waited for Pinto to clean himself up, for they were going to the Boyms’ house to have some tea or raisin wine.

  The narrow alleys were watered to keep the dust down, and here and there they were shadowed by noisy, laughing boys who eventually pulled at their sleeves demanding something from them. Osman broke a few cigarettes in half, threw them up, and let the boys fight it out; then they asked for matches to light the cigarettes that were not destroyed in the scuffle. By an irrigation canal they saw a bare-chested Sart washing himself with care and attention, scrubbing his skin as though brushing his horse. He looked them in the eyes as they were passing and said something, laughing, at which Osman laughed as well. What did he say? Pinto asked when they turned the corner. I don’t know, Osman said. He just seemed happy.

  But when they got to the Boyms’, Pinto was still immersed in the aftermath of his nightmares and talked to Isak Abramovich about the despair that overwhelmed him in the middle of the night, the horror of an absent future, of only living in the present, which is constantly degrading. It is hard to see what the point of any of it is, he said. We just live because we are afraid to die. We live out of cowardice. Isak Abramovich refilled Pinto’s tumbler with plum wine and told him that he should be happy just to have survived the war, and the camp, and that he had his beloved friend by his side, and if the past can be lived through, so can the future. There has never been a time when there was nothing, Isak Abramovich said. On Monday, Pinto forced himself to get up and make it to the hospital, where cutting off someone’s arm or dipping hands into their stomach would distract him enough to forget what his body and mind still craved. After a dreadful week, when every one of Pinto’s limbs and organs hurt, his craving finally subsided.

  Osman and Pinto kept going to the Boyms’ on Saturdays, even when the Bolsheviks imposed an early curfew, because, Pinto realized, Isak Abramovich’s wise voice and fatherly demeanor, Klara Isakovna’s smiles and curiosity, and even the oversweet raisin wine, were now analgesic. And Osman always enjoyed the vodka, more than he should have. The Boyms’ home smelled like warm milk and burnt sugar, even if milk and sugar were hard to come by at the time of the revolution. The smell was somehow exuded by the lace tablecloth, the deflated cushions on the chairs, the tchotchkes crowding the shelves, even by the part of the velvet curtain that was not refashioned for clothes. Everything in the house looked old, like residue of some previous life that was no longer available. Pinto understood that the unchanging quality of the home in which Isak Abramovich and Klara Isakovna lived was a way for them to mourn Svetlana Teodorovna, whose fading photograph stood on the windowsill next to where the piano used to be before the Bolsheviks requisitioned it.

  The Pintos’ house in Sarajevo looked nothing like the Boyms’, what with its divans, sofras, and low stools, stacked thin rugs instead of a carpet; a piano was as unimaginable in the Pintos’ house as a locomotive. But the milk-and-sugar smell was just the same. Maybe that was how all Jewish houses smelled, regardless of where they were. Whenever Pinto had a sore throat Manuči would burn sugar in a pot and then add hot milk to it and he would drink it; he loved it so much that his throat was sore much too often. But when the feigned soreness was deemed to have lasted too long, Padri would instruct Manuči to make marshmallow tea, which little Rafo hated, and his throat would abruptly heal. All that had been long ago, in Sarajevo, in a home that was so far away it no longer existed, in the world that had probably been razed.

  Then, one day, there was someone else at the Boyms’, and his presence somehow changed the smell of the house, not least because this man smoked cigarettes with a harsh, acrid odor. The first time Pinto saw Jozef Lazar at the Boyms’, he was sitting across from Klara Isakovna in his faded Imperial uniform, beclouded by thick smoke and Pinto’s suspicions. On the table before him lay his soldat’s hat brandishing a pale shadow of an eagle on its front. A rush of fear went through Pinto, for it seemed clear to him that the presence of the man who introduced himself as Lazar, Jozef, was going to change everything for the Boyms, and for Pinto and Osman, and that this man was going to be here, around and among them, for a long time. In the way the man’s eyes darted sideways, as if looking straight at people was difficult and uncomfortable, Pinto recognized there was more than one version of him. Moreover, Pinto noticed that Lazar, Jozef, read him in a glance, and nodded at him not so much to greet him as to mark the completion of his assessment.

  By the time Pinto asked Osman about the guest at the Boyms’, he was sure that Jozef Lazar was not an Albanian soldat who was getting French lessons from Klara, but someone whom Isak Abramovich was hiding. There were rumors that a British spy was on the loose in Tashkent, and when Pinto asked outright if Jozef Lazar could be the spy, Osman avoided answering until he finally shushed Pinto by pointing at all the ears sprouting out of the walls, at all the eyes peeking through the windows and keyholes. The two Bosnians shared a small room that contained two beds, though they always slept together in one of them, in an old requisitioned house where the tenants in all the other rooms were former prisoners of war, coming from all over the deceased Empire: Hungarians, Slovenes, Bohemians, Poles, Croats. Osman shook his head to confirm the necessity of silence and restore, tacitly, the understanding that Pinto should never ask him about his work.

  Pinto could not sleep, and spent the night now longing for morphine, now imagining the many ways in which everything could go wrong. What they had in this small room, within whose walls they could arrange their life as they wanted, place flowers and tchotchkes in the sunny spots, make love in the morning, and kiss before sleep—all of that, so new and fragile, was now in peril because Lazar, Jozef, was in their life, casting a shadow. Pinto wanted him to go away, and never come back. As soon as Osman opened his eyes in the morning, and smiled at him, Pinto said: I need to know who that Lazar is. No, you don’t, Osman said, and put a finger on Pinto’s mouth, then stroked his hair, then kissed him, then touched his pata, so Pinto gave up on his inquiry.

  That first time Pinto met Lazar, he nodded back at the troubling stranger, concealing his trepidation and unease, whereupon Klara Isakovna said, with her soft Russian inflections, On cesse de s’aimer si quelqu’un ne nous aime. What? Pinto asked, and Lazar exclaimed: Ça c’est véridique!

  On their next visit, Pinto declared to Isak Abramovich that Jozef Lazar seemed to be a decent man—pošten čovjek—to which Isak Abramovich responded with a meaningful finger wag. Isak Abramovich understood that Pinto chose not to ask the questions that begged to be asked—who exactly was this Jozef Lazar and what was he doing here at their house? Pinto was not mentioning the rumor about the British spy all of the Cheka was looking for, all over Tashkent, and Isak Abramovich appreciated that just as well.

  The first time Pinto saw Osman in Jozef Lazar’s presence, he was touching his vodka glass to the stranger’s, and Pinto had no doubt that Osman knew exactly who was who and what was what. Later that evening, when Pinto and Osman were alone in their room, he simmered in silence for a while, his face turned to the wall to punish Osman. Finally, he faced him to tell him through clenched teeth that if Osman could not trust him after everything they had gone through together, perhaps there were other things too he was hiding from him.

  Listen, Osman said. I do what I have to do to keep us alive and to get us home. I don’t like what I do. But I have to do it.

  Fine, Pinto said. Are you saying that Jozef Lazar is your work? Is he a spy? Is he the spy they are looking for?

  Do you want to lose you head? Osman asked. Do you want me to lose my head? I do what I have to do. What you don’t know cannot hurt you.

  Yes, but what you know can hurt me. You can hurt me, Pinto said. He can hurt us.

  Who is he?

  Lazar.

  Lazar is just someone who needs help, Osman said. He wants to stay alive, just like us.

  I don’t just want to be alive, I want to live with you. Other than that, I have no reason to be alive. I am a nothing and a nobody. I don’t care about anything or anyone else.

  All right then. Let’s stay alive, Osman said. Stop asking questions.

  * * *

  Some fifteen years before, Isak Abramovich and the late Svetlana Teodorovna had traveled all the way from Kishinev with Klara the toddler and a piano that had been imported from Vienna, only for the Bolsheviks to drag it out with ropes through the living room window as soon as they took power in Tashkent. The comrades would keep returning to rummage through the drawers full of the late Svetlana Teodorovna’s threadbare finery, grope Klara Isakovna, or smash the rest of the unhidden china. But after Osman earned enough standing with his smarts to maneuver among the Cheka spooks and brutes, the Bolsheviks stopped barging in, even if they kept a lazy watcher or two across the street at times—which was really a way, Osman explained, to protect the Boyms from the more dangerous elements. Osman would report to Comrade Stark that the old man seemed to be behaving, doing his work at the hospital, staying away from counterrevolutionaries, spending his time with his young daughter, tending his garden. And if he was to be arrested and liquidated, who would run the hospital?

  Osman’s job at the Cheka was supposed to be monitoring, infiltrating, and liquidating the Mohammedans resisting the working people building a better, more just world. Osman was to identify and eliminate those who aided or aimed to join the marauding rebels led by a criminal named Irgash. But Comrade Stark knew that before he turned red Osman was a Mohammedan himself so the Cheka watched him closely too, and Osman watched them back. He was not all that interested in monitoring, infiltrating, or liquidating anybody—what he really wanted was to find a way back to Sarajevo, for Pinto and himself. But he had to show the results of his combating reactionary elements, while making friends and allies wherever and however he could, imagining paths back home to Sarajevo.

  Sooner or later this sky is going to fall, Osman said one night soon after Pinto had come out of the jail. And whole new constellations are bound to appear. We might be able to read them, and they will take us back home.

  I don’t know, Pinto said. I really don’t know.

  What Pinto didn’t know, since Osman would not tell him anything, was that Lazar had in fact been hiding in the Boyms’ secret tiny, windowless back room, the door to which was behind a movable kitchen cupboard. From the way Isak Abramovich told Pinto that Klara Isakovna learned a lot from their guest, it was clear that his presence was disrupting the Boyms’ life too and that Klara Isakovna must’ve had feelings for the guest, all of which made Pinto surprisingly protective and jealous. For one thing, she was only eighteen, barely a woman. Not so long ago, Pinto was the one whom she had asked to speak German with her, to tell her stories of the strange country he came from, of his family, of his student years in Vienna, of the passionate life and adventures he had had there. He would come by the Boyms’ without Osman and they would huddle, he and Klara Isakovna, by the tiled stove, replenishing their tea from the samovar, and talk about the endlessness of elsewhere. She could not stop considering the terrible fact that there was a world out there existing and changing without her—a world, she passionately believed, she could reach only by way of learning a new language. In response, Pinto would recite the only Heine poem he knew by heart, passed on to him in Vienna by a mouthy, drunken student with a delicious curl on his forehead: Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland. Der Eichenbaum wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft. Es war ein Traum.

  And then it was Jozef Lazar who was making her laugh, and in French too. The evening he saw him for the first time he kept hearing Klara Isakovna’s laughter, even in the garden, even as Isak Abramovich reminisced, with Bulochka, his little mutt, in his lap, about a bunny he used to have as a boy in Kishinev; he grabbed Pinto’s forearm, as if to stop him from running into the house and breaking up the cozy party. Klara Isakovna could not stop laughing at her own mispronunciation of the phrase amour-propre; she kept saying it over and over, as if it were a punchline of a joke. What was so funny, Pinto wondered, what’s so funny about amour-propre?

  Bulochka never barked but had a howl that sounded like a child crying. It is possible that inside each living creature there are voices of other living creatures, Pinto said just to say something. He could hear Klara Isakovna take a deep breath, then giggle once again as Jozef Lazar talked about the wit of La Rochefoucauld and described to her how beautiful Paris was, with its palaces, art, cafés, and parks.

  When he was at the Boyms’, and Lazar was there too, Pinto would always try to eavesdrop on what the stranger was saying to Klara, looking for excuses to place himself in the garden right under the window of the room where they had their classes. When not speaking French, Jozef Lazar spoke broken Russian. But whichever language he used, he never talked about Tirana, allegedly his hometown, nor Galicia, where he claimed to have been captured, nor any place in between. He talked mostly about Paris, never quite explaining what he had been doing there. It bothered Pinto that Jozef Lazar had not come up with a better false identity—Jozef Lazar wasn’t even an Albanian name, Pinto was convinced. Whoever Lazar may have been, his true, deceitful self was coming through his demeanor like dye through cotton cloth, what with his verbose, gratuitous poetry quotes in nasal French, and the way he sat in the chair as if on a throne, with his back straight and his shoulders never slouching. His limbs and movements were officer stiff; he appeared incomplete without a rifle or a whip, or both, just as an officer would be.

  Pinto had met no Albanians among the soldats he treated at the hospital; no soldat whose broken head he had bandaged or whose wound he had stitched together knew of any Albanians in their units. Pinto asked Osman again, in a whisper, if he knew who the man hiding at the Boyms’ was, or whether he was the British spy, and Osman just shook his head.

  Why won’t you tell me? What do you think I could do or say? Pinto asked. Do you think I will go and tell the Bolsheviks? Or that I would get drunk and babble it out? Or that I would take some morphine and forget where we are and what is happening?

  You do not need to know who he is, Osman said. I don’t really know who he is. I just know that if he is found out he would be killed, just like Isak Abramovich and Klara would be liquidated, and you and me as well. We would all be shot in the head. I already told you far too much. Do you understand that?

  I understand it, but I don’t accept it.

  Just let him be, Osman said.

  I let him be, Pinto said. What am I doing? What can I do? There is nothing I can do but let him be. I just want to know who he is so that I can properly let him be.

  Only once during Jozef Lazar’s residency at the Boyms’ was Pinto left alone with Lazar. They were in the garden, where Jozef Lazar, who never left the house, would get fresh air, and Pinto, jealous as ever, joined him just so he could read him and gather some clues. Shadowy wisps of clouds floated among the stars, like gun smoke. Das Meer hat seine Perlen, der Himmel hat seine Sterne, said Jozef Lazar wistfully and out of the blue, as if recollecting something from a different life. Pinto had never heard him speak German. As far as Pinto knew, he was not even supposed to speak German. Pinto recognized that it was the right moment to ask Jozef Lazar who he really was, what he was doing here, and whether he was the spy the Bolsheviks were looking for. But the night smelled of acacias and woodsmoke, of crisp autumn cold, and the two of them seemed to be alone in all of Tashkent. The silence was overwhelming, raining from the firmament, only the rare and distant dog howls bouncing around town. Pinto just smoked silently next to Jozef Lazar who held an unlit cigarette in his hand as if planning to hold it in perpetuity. Pinto was burning to say that he knew Jozef Lazar was not who he appeared to be, but that his secret was safe with him. He used to declare the same thing to the married men he had met in Vienna. If there were no righteous humans, Padri used to say, the blessings of God would become completely hidden and Creation would cease to exist. And because the sky was above them and the stars kept silently multiplying as the night progressed, Pinto knew there must have been righteous humans somewhere beyond the walls of this Godforsaken garden. So he asked nothing. Eventually, Jozef Lazar got up, said, Bonne soirée!, and went inside. Pinto stayed alone in the garden until Isak Abramovich came out to warn him that nights were cold here and that it would be too easy for Pinto to catch catarrh. Pinto did not move, perched on his little stool, so Isak Abramovich sat next to him.