“What’s his name?” he asked. That man had a sister in Shali who would have given her travel agency — now no more than a once prestigious name — her parents-in-law, and nine-tenths of her immortal soul to hold that note now lying at the bottom of the trash can, if only to hold the final wish of the brother she regretted giving so little for in life.

In the shoebox the identity cards were layered eight deep. She held a card to the light and set it back down. “He’s one of these,” she said.

While Sonja spent her afternoon in surgery, Akhmed spent his in the canteen, folding bedsheets into rectangles that soon filled the wicker laundry baskets. At first he had protested, complaining it was the duty of a maid, until Sonja reminded him that those were the only duties he was qualified to perform. While folding he imagined his wife lying on a grayer bedsheet, her head propped on her favorite of their two pillows, the thick foam one that cramped his neck on those nights when they fell asleep sharing it. If she had the energy, she might lift one of his art books from the stack beside the bed. Those hard clothbound covers held worlds of marble statues, woodblock prints, lily pads, bouquets, long-dead generals, and placid landscapes where aristocrats in funny hats pranced around. At night he narrated the scenes to her as if he knew what he was talking about, inventing biographies for every portrait, intrigues for each glance within a frame. Since he had first started skipping first-year pathology to audit still-life drawing classes, he had maintained an abiding interest in art, and for a man who had never been to Grozny, he had amassed a respectable collection of art books. Each morning he reordered the stack so that the first book she reached for was new to her.

He folded the sheet and set it beside the others. How long since he’d last changed Ula’s sheets? Ten days, at least. She rarely rolled from her side of the bed, and when he carried her to the living room divan and stripped the linens from the mattress, he found her tawny silhouette sweated into the fabric. That musky darkening was so particularly, irrevocably Ula that he would hesitate to wash it. But then, scolding himself for being sentimental, he would fill the basin with soapy water and submerge her outline and watch her disappear. He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray brown hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of bitten fingernails tossed behind the headboard, or a dark shape dissolving in soap. As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there. The dishes no longer prepared or eaten, no more than the four- and five-ingredient recipe cards stacked above the stove. The walks no longer walked, the summer woods, the undergrowth unparted by their shins. The arguments no longer argued; no stakes, nothing either wanted or could lose. The love no longer made, desired, imagined, or mourned. The illness had restored to Ula an innocence he was unwilling to pollute, and the warmth of her flesh cocooning his was a shard of their life dislodged from both their memories.

It had begun in late spring 2002, a year after the zachistka that claimed the lives of forty-one villagers, on the morning she slept through breakfast. “I feel sick,” she mumbled, and he carried her tea to the nightstand. Had he known the cup was the first of hundreds he would take to her bedside, he would have made a more bitter brew. He took her temperature, pulse, and blood pressure: all normal. Her eyes were clear, her skin colored. When asked she couldn’t provide a coherent description of her pain. It was like a loose marble tumbling around her insides, migrating from her ankle to her knee to her hip, and back down. Some days her toes contained all her hurt. Or her fingers. Or elbows. Or kidneys. Eventually it settled somewhere between her chest and stomach, only leaking into her legs on Mondays. Pain is symptomatic rather than causal, even he knew that, and the only reasonable conclusion was that the sickness was seated in her mind. But while he didn’t believe she was physically sick, he couldn’t deny the reality of her suffering. A year earlier the zachistka had leveled a third of the village. Angels descended. Prophets spoke. Truth was only one among many hallucinations.

For the first few weeks he had resisted taking her to Hospital No. 6. He may have graduated in the bottom tenth of his class, but he was still a licensed doctor, and a decent one, even if he didn’t always know what he was doing. What would people say if they knew he couldn’t diagnose his own wife? Already his patients rarely paid their bills; if news of his ineptitude spread, they would starve. But a month passed without decline or recovery and this static state, this purgatorial non-progression, finally convinced him that his wife’s illness exceeded his abilities. He tried to take her to the hospital. Three times they ventured to Volchansk in Ramzan’s red pickup, but army cordons blocked all roads into the city. He dreamed up and in his notebook drew ways of conveying her: a sedan chair, a tunnel, a kite large enough to lift her bed. After the fourth attempt, when an unspooled shell casing popped Ramzan’s tire ten meters past the house, he gave up. What would the hospital doctors say anyway? With so many real injuries to tend to, they would dismiss Ula and her phantom sickness. The thought of her forced to defend her pain made his fingers curl into fists.

For eight and a half months he cared for her with paternal devotion. But each morning as he set the teacup on the nightstand, he wondered if physical deprivation might revive her ailing mind, and so, ten days before Dokka lost his fingers, Akhmed left her teacup in the kitchen. As the day wore on she called his name in cries more confused and desperate with each iteration, until his name was no longer his but a word of absolute anguish. Unable to stand the call of his name, he stayed with Dokka’s wife and daughter for three nights. On the fourth morning he returned and found her on the bedroom floor. The beginnings of bedsores reddened her shoulder blades. In that moment he came to understand that he would spend the rest of his life atoning for the past three days, and that the rest of his life wouldn’t be long enough. He lifted her from the floor and set her beneath the sheets. He took her a glass of water from the kitchen, then five more. “You never have to get up again,” he promised her. He laid his head on her chest and her heart pattered against his temple. “Akhmed,” she said. “Akhmed.” His name was now a lullaby.

He never again tried to coerce Ula into health. It would end. Everything did. But when he emptied the bedpan in the backyard, or brushed her teeth despite her protestations, the afterglow of resentment still smoldered. She was gone but still there, the phantom of the wife the war had amputated from him, and unable to properly mourn or love her, he cared for and begrudged her. And so the previous day, when he had offered to work at the hospital until other accommodations could be found for Havaa, he had hoped Sonja would agree for his sake as much as the girl’s. That morning, when he left Ula alone with four glasses of water and a bowl of lukewarm rice on the nightstand, he double-locked the door and entered the dawn chill with the confidence that Havaa’s future meant more than his wife’s, and he trudged eleven kilometers through a broken obligation that only a child’s life could justify.

When he folded the last sheet he ducked beneath the clotheslines and opened the cupboard. His trousers lay folded on the bottom shelf. Along the left leg inseam he found a familiar bulge in the stitching. If he were to die away from home, he hoped a kinder soul than Deshi would find him.