I tried to act like an old hand at the relative aesthetics of killing in the traditional manner, but was quickly brought up short.
“You laugh,” said Vakha. “But this is not a laughing matter. The real reason we kill with the knife is both for revenge and to send the Russians a message.”
“I don’t understand,” I confessed.
“When we take prisoners, we take care of them in private homes and contact their mothers to come and take them away,” he said. “You have seen this on television, so you know it is not a lie. What you have not seen is the state of our fighters who fall into Russian hands. They are beaten, bruised, and buggered. Such humiliations will stop, or we will make sure that no Russian prisoners are ever taken.”
One of Vakha’s men drew his kinjal and pried open a can of Soviet Army spam, sliced it into hash and threw the mess on a stove until it was cooked, or at least hot.
“Eat,” said Vakha. He and his men would not partake, because of the Ramadan fast.
We left the guerrillas in midafternoon, and trudged back over the muddy fields to the main road. We hailed a car and soon began weaving our way westward over a series of highways, cutbacks, dirt paths, village lanes and tractor-gauged flats, toward the small city of Shali. Life seemed decidedly normal and the war far away. Kids played soccer and some baseball-like game in nearby fields, while in the towns and villages through which we passed commerce continued to thrive in lively roadside markets. Grozny, the central market for all of Chechnya, had effectively been destroyed—but the merchants had survived with their merchandise and had simply transferred their businesses elsewhere.
We stopped repeatedly to buy cigarettes and candy bars that we did not need, as an excuse to enter into conversation and check the rumor mill. Leaving each town or market, we would pick up a hitchhiker or two—soldiers on temporary furlough, an old man carrying a sack of potatoes, and even two women wearing lipstick and mink coats. Mixing philanthropy with intelligence gathering, Isa pumped each for any information they had about the roads ahead and behind. A thoroughly confusing jigsaw puzzle of go and no-go zones emerged, partially due to the activities of one Bislan Gantemirov, a former Dudayev guard who had turned into a Russian stooge and was said to be running the main “opposition” town of Urus Martan.
“Urus Martan is the main town controlled by the opposition,” Isa explained. “Actually, it is controlled by Gantemirov, who is working with Avtorkhanov, who is very tight with the Russians, and especially the KGB. They used him to start this war by promising him control of Chechnya. It is men from his clan who go around and negotiate with village elders, promising them safety now and wealth when the war is over.”
Gantemirov, Avtorkhanov, Labazanov, Zavgaev and even Khasbulatov—all Chechen men of influence who had turned into warlords and stooges for the Russians.
“Traitors,” I pronounced judgment on them all.
“Yes, and no,” said Isa carefully. “As I say, Chechnya is a very complex place. There are many people here who love their country and want independence, but hate Dudayev as much as they hate the Russians. They think he purposely brought the country to ruin.”
“Why would he do that?”
“There is a story going around,” said Isa with a half wink. “During the middle of the siege of Grozny, a black Volga pulled up to a Russian roadblock. The guard asked the driver for his papers and was shocked by whom he saw in the back seat—Djohar Dudayev! He reached for his gun, but found another hand restraining his. It was his commanding officer. ‘But sir!’ whispered the soldier. ‘We have captured the leader of the Chechen bandit formations!’ His commander slapped him across the face. ‘Arrest a general in the Soviet Army?’ he thundered. ‘Raise the barricade, and salute!’”
“And?”
“And what? That’s all! The Russians still think of Djohar as their man! A Soviet general! Hahaha!”
However far-fetched, the idea had a familiar ring: a “leader” sent from the Center to stoke the flames of lumpen nationalism that would lead to national disaster. Then the broken population would beg for the return of order that only the Kremlin could provide.
We arrived in Shali in the late afternoon, and it was there that one first apprehended the sounds, sights, and smells of war: the dull thud of the nightly artillery barrage on invisible Chechen positions to the north set me on edge, but everyone else around seemed as inured to it as a smoker oblivious to his own cough. Likewise, my eye was drawn to the horizon, where the gray haze of a winter evening darkened into a wide swath of black. Not quite funnel-shaped, the dark blotch of air reached upward and then leaned west.
“Gorody,” said Isa flatly. The city—Grozny. There really wasn’t much more to say.
We changed cars and continued westward via a more and more complex series of cutbacks that led us by the twin towns of Stari (old) and Novi (new) Atagi. The former had been bombed from the air while the latter had been spared, and I asked Isa why.
“The Russians are trying to negotiate with village elders into ‘neutralizing’ their towns,” Isa explained. “If the elders keep out Dudayev’s fighters, the Russians promise not to bomb them.”
“And what do the fighters think of this?”
“It drives them crazy—but what can they do? If the elders say they have to leave, then they must. The Iztarika have spoken, you see. It is a matter of respect and the Law of the Mountains.”
“But it also seems to be selling out.”
“Yes, it is that, too,” said Isa. “But what else can the elders do? Die for Dudayev out of general principle—even when he is unable to defend them?”
Indeed. Beyond resolving the question of secession from Russia, how were the Chechens going to sort out their own internal questions of split loyalties to different causes? How would the residents of the neighboring towns called New and Old Atagi be able to coexist?
Brain-drained from speaking nothing but Russian for three days, I began nodding off to sleep in the backseat. Isa’s nonstop conversation with the driver, in Chechen, began transforming itself into surreal, nonsensical bits and fragments, and then whole phrases of a language I did not know, but imperfectly understood, a language, as it were, half-way between English and Arabic:
“…And then she said the cat stared at the spit crank with the umbrella shaft loose.” Isa was saying. “Shakespeare and the truth on rosehips crap in the full front afternoon…”[6]
Then I began to hallucinate, or thought I was: There was a woman standing in the middle of the road, dressed in white, and waving at us. A mad smile stretched across her face, as white and stony as alabaster. I pinched myself hard. But the woman was still there, and we were heading straight for her. That is when the driver swerved hard and I woke up to find myself driving through a bunch of lunatics on the loose.
I stayed awake after that, through all the detours and cutbacks, until, two hours later, we pulled up in front of a large, well-appointed semirural farmhouse.
“Where are we?” I asked Isa.
“My home,” said Isa. “Urus Martan.”
I had been hoodwinked, fooled—and probably kidnapped.
Urus Martan—the center of the Opposition!
It was the last place in Chechnya I wanted to be, and was tempted to try and bolt—but to where, to whom? Straight into the arms of Bislan Gantemirov’s gunmen?
It was a good thing that I was too exhausted to react, because as word of Isa’s homecoming spread, men started coming out of the woodwork to welcome him, and it rapidly became apparent that even if Urus Martan was known as an Opposition stronghold, anti-Russian sentiment was rife.
6
Peter Fleming, brother of Ian, describes this same disconcerting audio phenomenon in