might even get a chance to finish telling me about your wife.”
The jeeps stopped twenty meters ahead and idled, while behind them, the tank gradually ground up the incline. The soldiers who emerged were not the tattooed kontraktniki, like those Ramzan remembered from the zachistka; no, compared to those hulking Russian bears these were half-starved jackals. We may live to see the sunset, he thought.
Four soldiers bearing machine guns approached. He raised his open palms to the Feds. Dokka followed suit.
“You went to a filtration camp before. You survived. They didn’t hurt you,” Dokka stammered, unable to convince even himself. Ramzan wanted to grab Dokka by his ears and shake that stupid self-deluded skull until its one grain of logic rang out. Leaning forward, he felt the empty space between his legs.
“Stop speaking, Dokka. Just be quiet.”
One of the soldiers approached the driver’s door. He had gone at least a week without shaving, but the growth couldn’t conceal the concavity of his cheeks. All around the snow stretched indifferently.
“Water,” the soldier croaked. Misunderstanding the request, Ramzan held out his identification card.
“Water,” the soldier again said. “We’ve been eating muddy snow for days. We need clean water. Can’t you speak Russian?”
“I think we should give him water,” Dokka whispered, his opened hands still facing the windshield. It was the first sensible thing Dokka had said that day.
“I have water at my feet,” he told the soldier. “Don’t shoot me.”
The soldier accepted the grease-smeared canteen, sighing as he brought the brim to his lips, and his relief became Ramzan’s. The soldier didn’t suspect that the water had spent the previous day circulating through the engine radiator.
Dokka’s hands remained skyward when they were ordered out of the truck. Ramzan protested briefly and halfheartedly; he had, after all, given that first soldier a canteen of water, and was this how his hospitality was to be repaid? But he dropped the remonstration when that first soldier, his thirst now quenched, pressed the gun barrel to Ramzan’s forehead. They lay facedown in the snow with their wrists bound behind their backs in plastic zip-strips. To keep his head above the snow, Ramzan had to arch his back and puff out his chest and flail like a beached whale. From that uncomfortable vantage, he watched the soldiers unpack the sacks of rice and grain from the truck bed. A few more seconds and they would find the Makarov handguns, fragmentation grenades, Semtex bricks, and lead wires, and he would die here, flopping like a goddamn sea mammal, many kilometers from home. How he wished he had stitched his address into his trouser inseam. He hadn’t taken the precaution for fear that the security forces would implicate his father, but now, with snow melting through his jacket, he could think of no inhumanity grimmer than an unmarked grave. Perhaps he would be forced to lie upon Dokka to save ammunition. Such a death would insult the gunrunner. He would demand his own bullet. For the water canteen, they could at least do him that small honor. Beside him, Dokka had given up. The heat from his face had thawed a soup bowl in the snow. He wept into it.
“Don’t worry,” Ramzan said. His tone surprised him. He could see the end and he was calm. “Today, we’ll find out whether the imams or commissars were right.”
“You’re brave,” Dokka said. “Here I am, crying. I dishonor you.”
How often is immense unhappiness mistaken for courage? He opened his mouth and filled it with snow. It melted as he listened to Dokka’s sobs. The soldiers at least would remember which of the two had faced his bullet with clear eyes.
But the soldiers, in an act of unexpected compassion and restraint, decided not to summarily execute them. After finding the weapons, they pulled Ramzan to his feet, then Dokka. Shaking their heads at the mucus frozen to Dokka’s lip, they turned to Ramzan, and spoke only to him. They were lost. Three nights earlier, the cold had killed their radio, and they had driven through blanketed fields in vain search for human habitation. They hadn’t been tracking the red truck. It was an accident. As the gun barrels pointed them toward the UAZ jeep, the commanding officer asked, “Are you familiar with the Landfill?”
Ramzan nodded.
“Can you give us directions?”
“Directions?”
“I told you. We’re lost.”
He could not believe it.
“If you take us there, you’ll live. At least until we get there. That much, I guarantee. And likely after. I know a lieutenant there.”
“Okay.” He