Mothers and Sons

摘要

The base lies about 10 dusty miles from the shattered city of Grozny, down a choppy dirt road at a place called Khankala in the benighted Russian region of Chechnya. It is, as military facilities go, entirely unremarkable, except that it is the last place Nadezhda Nesterenko ever wanted to find herself, as well as the only place she thought of going, once the news arrived last March. She was home in her village of Brodki in Lipetsk province that day, 550 miles from Moscow, where she works as a hired hand on a dairy farm. When a message for her arrived from Russian military authorities, she says, she nearly died. Her 20-year-old son, a senior sergeant named Vladimir, had been in Chechnya since November 1995, and she knew all too well what a charnel house for Russian soldiers the war there had become. She read the message, fearing the worst.