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honor, collections to pay for his textbooks. In 1986, Akhmed became the greatest hero invillage 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 as he reached his own. The doorframe was intact; the door still stood. Opening it, he tensed, waiting for a forceful grip on the shoulder, a rifle butt to the forehead. None came. He lit a kerosene lamp and walked into the bedroom. Ula lay on the bed. She rolled on her side and into the yellow glow.
    “Where were you?” she asked. Divorced from tone, the three words still suggested accusation, and he hoped his silence would extinguish her question, as it often did. “Where were you?” she asked again. Her head barely indented the pillow.
    “I went to see Dokka,” he said. “I helped him shear the sheep.”
    She smiled wide enough to show the tips of her teeth. Twelve years earlier those incisors were beloved by the city dentist, a young man who plugged his most lascivious thoughts into the open mouths of young women; but the dentist died a virgin when a misaimed mortar shell landed on his practice and carried him to Paradise in an