Chapter Twenty-Four
...seeing other peoples’ deaths, we learn about our own
-Belgi
After the explosions on February 16, 1999 a strange situation developed in Hoit. On the one hand, a new stream of refugees began arriving from Uzbekistan, and the people told terrifying stories of how the militia and the NSS were running riot, hunting down all the believers indiscriminately, how at all the guard posts posters had been put up with photographs of hundreds of young men who were wanted…. And yet, despite all this, an inclination to return began to build among those who had already lived here for months, as if there were something more terrible than a rampaging militia in store for them here.
This is what one of the young men who fled from Hoit in the late spring of 1999 recorded on the dicta
