moments of unpredictable loveliness. The blind man who played accordion for her as she splinted the broken leg of his guide dog. The boy who narrated his dreams while recovering from meningitis.
Then, one evening, a knock sounded from the door as she prepared for sleep. She considered and disregarded Laina’s advice as the doorknob slipped in her greasy grip. When she opened the door she wanted to scream. Natasha stood right there, in front of her, close enough to hold. She did scream, and she embraced Natasha, and later, on the divan, she took Natasha’s hands in her own and rubbed until hers were dry.
CHAPTER
3
DESPITE AN ADMITTEDLY unimpressive first day, Akhmed left Hospital No. 6 with his eyes on the stars and a swing in his gait. Sure, Sonja was a cold, domineering woman, whose glare could wither flowers and cause miscarriages, and Deshi was clearly a lunatic, and though there wasn’t a sliver of compassion between the two of them and the only fate worse than having those two as caretakers was having them as colleagues, it had been a good day. Havaa was safe. His medical training was put to use, and for the first time in months, Ula wasn’t his only patient.
He was the first person from Eldár admitted to medical school, an institution so distant and rarefied his inclusion had been celebrated as a village-wide achievement. There had been feasts in his honor, collections to pay for his textbooks. In 1986, Akhmed became the greatest hero in village history since an Eldár barber trimmed the beard of the great Imam Shamil one hundred and forty-one years earlier. There was talk he would move to Volchansk, or even—they would drop their voices to a whisper—Grozny. Anywhere farther was too far to dream. Did he realize the hopes the village had pinned on him? Not really. Despite telling Sonja he had graduated medical school in the top tenth of his class, he had, in fact, graduated in the bottom tenth, the fourth percentile to be precise, and he blamed his inability to find a job on prejudice within the Soviet Medical Bureau rather than on the fact that he had skipped a full year of pathology to audit studio art classes. Eventually the village had offered him an abandoned house on the outskirts, haunted, it was said, by the ghost of a pedophile. He had turned it into a clinic. Even though the villagers overcame their fear of the pedophilic specter—though many wouldn’t let their children enter—and even though their lives were undeniably improved by the presence of a clinic, Akhmed always felt he had let them down, or at least let himself down, by returning to the village that had celebrated his escape. But after applying to twenty-three different hospital positions, and receiving not one interview, he was, today, finally, a physician at Hospital No. 6. And not only a physician, but third in command! When put like that, it was a higher honor than he could have ever imagined. He trekked along the service road more confidently than he had that morning, and imagined what those smug search committees would have had to say about it. They probably wouldn’t say anything. They were probably all dead. In this way the war was an equalizer, the first true Chechen meritocracy. He was an incompetent doctor but a decent man, he believed, compensating for his professional limitations with his empathy for the patient, his understanding of pain. Passing the field where the wolf’s frozen carcass lay in moonlight, he thought of Marx. Perhaps here was where history had reached its final epoch. A civilization without class, property, state, or law. Perhaps this was the end.
The final fifty meters through the village were the most dangerous of the eleven-kilometer slog. His footsteps, if overheard, could prove as lethal as land mines. He slowed as he approached the only house without blackout curtains. The light of generator-powered bulbs burned through the windows. Ramzan, sitting inside, picking at a shiny slice of meat, didn’t look like an informer or a collaborator, looked no more menacing than a man in the throes of a mighty indigestion. In the next window, Khassan, Ramzan’s father, sat reading at his desk. Khassan hadn’t spoken to his son in the two years since Ramzan had begun informing, and though Akhmed never blamed the old man for his son’s crimes, the electric bulbs bathed both in the same light.
The glow of their house shrank to a glimmer