On the second floor of the souvenir shop, Wei Ran, who was holding the Kancha dagger in his hand, waited for a while. A woman in her forties or fifties limped in, holding a particularly luxurious-looking cane.

into the reception room.

Unlike the Chechen women I saw along the way, the person walking towards me was not wearing a headscarf. Instead, she was wearing a smart suit and had a refreshing short hair style similar to that of a man.

Of course, even so, Wei Ran recognized at a glance that this woman was the worthy girl Gan Na who they hid in the school's underground air-raid shelter back then!

Some people actually survived...

While Wei Ran muttered to himself, he placed the dagger he had just bought on the edge of the table, smiled and shook hands with the other party gently.

"I heard that you want to see me?" Ganna, who had changed her name to Alamat, asked with a smile, and at the same time raised her hand to signal Wei Ran to sit down on the sofa in the living room.

"I really want to meet you and ask you about some things that happened in the past." Wei Ran took a symbolic sip of the coffee handed by a young girl, but he was not in a hurry to continue, he just looked around.

Seeing this, Ms. Alamat smiled gently after a moment of silence, stood up again and said, "It seems to be a very important matter, come with me."

"Thank you." Wei Ran thanked him again and followed him into a room covered with a bright red wool carpet.

"Click"

Ms. Alamat closed the door, first motioned Wei Ran to sit on the sofa, then limped and sat behind the desk, gently put her cane on the table, and asked patiently,

"Can we talk now?"

"Should I call you Ms. Alamat, or should I call you Gana?" Wei Ran asked with a smile.

As soon as he said these words, Alamat subconsciously grabbed the cane on the table.

"Ganna?" Ms. Alamat asked, playing with her cane and pretending to be confused, "Did you recognize the wrong person?"

"maybe"

Wei Ran spread his hands indifferently and said straight to the point, "I'm not here to pry or reveal your secrets. I just want to know what happened in the underground air defense system of the middle school during the first Chechen War?

I want to know if anyone who hid there survived? And where are those who didn’t survive buried?”

As questions were asked one after another, the expression on Ms. Alamat's face began to change.

After a long time, she asked in a hoarse voice, "Who are you?" Taking into account the fact that she was making a lot of noise, you must be "an errand boy." Wei Ran said nonchalantly, "Of course, I didn't."

Any malice."

"no offence?"

Alamat glanced at the scenery outside the window. After pondering for a moment, he asked, almost as if to clarify his identity, "Did you move that courtyard?"

"That was just a misunderstanding"

Wei Ran said apologetically, "Regardless of whether we can get the answer or not, the incident in that courtyard will not involve you in the end. There is only so much I can guarantee. As for your losses, I will find a way to compensate you."

Alamat shook his head noncommittally, picked up his cane again, limped to the floor-to-ceiling window, looked at the busy commercial street outside and asked, "How did you find it there?"

"Civil air defense maintenance records of the Grozny Fire Department, and Soviet civilian air defense construction records."

Wei Ran, who was well prepared, sat on the sofa and replied with a normal expression, "Grozny's underground system is very complicated, but after comparison, I found that in the center of the battlefield, only the underground air defense system of the school was not included in the maintenance of the fire station.

Management scope, but how could a school not have an underground air defense system?"

"That's because the air defense system construction there was substandard, and the person in charge at the time embezzled a large portion of the construction costs."

Alamat punched his cane, "What else do you know?" "I found an addict who survived two wars."

Wei Ran smiled, "He told me that all the unique products he needed back then were bought from firefighters.

A kid named Alyosha delivered door-to-door deliveries through the underground system of sewers and thermal wells."

Hearing this, Alamat shook his head helplessly, "Who are you? Ordinary people will not find out these things."

"I'm helping some people go home, and I'm helping a mother find her missing son." Wei Ran answered vaguely, and at the same time he took out a business card and handed it over with both hands.

"Historian? Director of Time Library?"

Alamat muttered while comparing the only two titles on the business card, then looked up at Wei Ran and asked again, "Are you Chinese?"

"Yes." Wei Ran nodded calmly.

Putting away the business card, Alamat sighed, "I didn't expect that there was someone else who knew what happened there, and he was a young man."

After a pause, the woman began to recall a little abruptly, "It was Christmas in 1995, an Orthodox Christmas. My brother Alyosha and I, as well as my father and Alyosha's father, were there.

With the help of a group of Russian soldiers, he escaped from his hiding place.

We all thought it was a precious opportunity to start a new life again, but we didn't expect that it was just an end in advance..."

In Alamat's sighs from time to time, Wei Ran also understood everything he had experienced in that basement from another perspective.

Just as he guessed, there was indeed an escape passage under the iron frame bed on the second floor of the basement of the teaching building.

Or rather, the firefighters who sold books at that time deliberately placed the iron frame bed directly above the escape passage.

But even so, when the air raid came, of the four father and son pairs, only Gana and Marikov managed to escape alive.

As for Gana's father Lamin and Malikov's son Alyosha, they lost their lives on the spot when the ceiling above their heads collapsed. When they returned to the ground at a sewer manhole near the school playground, they were far away.

Then I saw the collapsed teaching building and the two helicopters that crashed on the wreckage of the teaching building.

In addition, Alamat also clearly remembered that before they could escape from the school, they saw two armored vehicles firing at the wreckage of the helicopter from a distance, completely blowing up the helicopter and the remaining building wreckage.

And a fire started.

"I followed Uncle Malikov to find an opportunity to hide in the cellar of the school cafeteria, and I hid there until the end of the war."

At this point, Alamat's tone began to tremble uncontrollably, "Just before the end of the war, Uncle Malikov and I saw foreign mercenaries searching for something around the bombed teaching building more than once.

Those people even brought in several bulldozers and excavators to dig up the collapsed teaching building in an attempt to find something."

"Other buried corpses?" Wei Ran asked subconsciously. "Maybe."

Alamat sighed noncommittally, "Then the war ended, and Uncle Malikov and I took the opportunity to leave Grozny and flee to Sochi, where we started a new life. He used the money he and my father paid to study together to start a new business.

I went to a small bar. During that time, I also met my husband, who was also a refugee from Nakhcho. In 2004, we had our daughter.”

"now that…"

"In 2008, Uncle Malikov died of lung disease." Alamat said, wiping the corners of his eyes with the backs of his fingers. "Before he died, he said he regretted not being able to bring my father and his Alyosha out.

He hopes that after the war in Chechnya is completely over, I can rebury him with them."

"So you're back?" Wei Ran asked softly. "Dan Xike" Yes

There was a hint of regret in Alamat's bleak smile, "In the summer of 2009, shortly after the second Chechen War ended, my husband and I came back with our daughter.

We took advantage of the fact that everything was not perfect at that time, so we asked my husband to pretend to be Alyosha, spent a lot of savings to buy the land where the school's teaching building was located, and then borrowed money from the people who built the house.

By chance, we dug up the basement there."

"You found him

They?"

"found it"

When Alamat said this, his big eyes were already flowing uncontrollably, "But there were a lot of explosives in those ruins. My husband was killed by those explosives, and my leg was also injured at that time.

Injured by the explosion."

Wei Ran opened his mouth, and finally stood up silently, picked up the tissue box on the desk, and handed it to Alamat, who was standing by the floor-to-ceiling window in tears.

"Thanks"

Alamat took out a few tissues and tried to wipe away the raging tears, but the large, quiet room was gradually filled with sad crying.

Wei Ran secretly sighed, but did not say anything. He just opened the door gently and walked out. After helping to close the door, he walked to the living room outside and sat down again, waiting patiently for the room.

The poor woman inside calmed herself down.

I don't know how much time passed, but Alamat, with red eyes, opened the door and waved to Wei Ran.

When the latter walked into the room again, she had already wrapped herself in a light gauze scarf to cover her face.

"Do you want to continue?" Alamat asked hoarsely, sitting back behind his desk.

"Sorry, please continue," Wei Ran said hard-heartedly. "We dug up the bodies of Alyosha and my father, and put them together with the bodies of Uncle Malikov, and... and my husband's body.

They were all buried outside the city. But I didn't dig out the other corpses because there were too many explosives inside."

"So they are still buried inside?" Wei Ran asked in surprise, "So the basement of that house..."

"If they hadn't been poached by those foreign mercenaries back then, they would definitely still be there."

Alamat took a few deep breaths and said, "I just built a double-story basement next to it that was similar to what I remembered. Then, while adopting orphans who lost their parents in the war, I used that basement to secretly do a high-alcohol business.

make money.

However, the business including that yard was taken away by others a long time ago. Now I just want to guard this shop and be satisfied with raising those poor children."

"Snatched?" Wei Ran raised his eyebrows. "The liquor business is very profitable in Chechnya."

Alamat said with a hint of helplessness, "Business or the children downstairs, I can only choose to protect one."

"Ms. Alamat" Wei Ran stood up in a very formal manner, "We want to dig out the people still buried inside."

"That house has been robbed," Alamat reminded again.
To be continued...