Isa was sitting at the kitchen table when Muhammad and I returned, listlessly playing checkers with some nameless character.
“Doktor Teymur,” said Isa. “Do you like our town?”
I tried to think up ways to express what I really was thinking and feeling, but thought it best to stick to my standard response.
“Da,” I replied.
Isa laughed and returned to the game.
I wanted to punch him but thought it best to just go to bed.
Where the hell was I?
PART TWO
5
BELEAGUERED GUEST
Morning. What hour? Ducks and chickens cackle. I open the door to the mud yard and discover all the turkeys sitting in the branches of the garden trees. Cowboy coffee, and I take these notes. Isa shaving by the gas oven that serves as a stove. How do they still have gas here, electricity? If I were the Ruskies (or Moscow) I would have cut off every last item of state-sponsored subsidies. But such is not the case. Gas and electricity flow, as does water—albeit that resource is only available at the pump. Literally. Isa and Muhammad’s joint has a bathroom replete with sink and shitter, but it does not work, because there is nothing like central plumbing. Middle-class dreams, yes—suburban piping, no. That means every house has got an outhouse. Isa’s, at least, is remarkably clean. I suspect most are in these parts—that is, as clean as an outhouse might be expected to be. Certainly, compared to other outhouses I have had the occasion to inspect, the Chechen WC is spic-and-span. Far enough from the house not to make direct olfactory intrusion, it is still close enough so as not to be dismissed or forgotten—and thus is kept clean. This is in keeping with other aspects of housekeeping. Specifically, the mud- and shit- and filth-clogged boots I deposited at the doorstep last night upon entering Isa’s abode were almost spit-polished clean when I woke up in the middle of the night to ‘inspect’ the alfresco WC, and appeared in the same state this morning, despite my nocturnal sludge through the mud garden to take a piss. It was then that I noticed the turkeys in the trees. (Mid-February 1995 diary entry)
Isa disappeared again that next morning before I could have a word with him about moving on. Muhammad tossed kernels of corn to the poultry in the yard. With him thus distracted, I decided to slip out with my camera and shoot some generic B-roll footage with a focus on the ‘battle zone,’ meaning the shot-up houses and abandoned tank turrets that I had been shown the day before. At least it felt like work. I sallied forth and shot frames of shattered windows and doors and morose-looking people cleaning up shattered brick and broken chairs and sofas, and I asked folks how they felt about having their homes wholly or partially destroyed by Russian bombs. Rotten, said most.
All in all, it was all pretty weak brew compared to what was going on in Grozny a mere twenty miles away.
Meanwhile, the human manifestation of that fight was everywhere apparent, consisting of a long line of refugees moving down the main street through town. People were crammed eight or ten to the four-seat Soviet-style Fiat sedans, roofs half crushed by excess household weight. The refugees also traveled in trucks, buses, and even hay-wagons towed by tractors, the densely packed carriages bearing mothers, children, and the elderly. All wore stoic expressions, and not one shed a single tear.
The refugees’ destination was the town of Slepsovski, a burg of about five thousand people located about thirty kilometers from Samashki down the road toward Chechnya’s “cousin” minirepublic of Ingushetia. The Ingush had elected to remain inside the Russian Federation when Chechnya had gone its own way. Its farm-town capital, Nazran, and second city and airfield, Sernovodsk, was where many of my journalistic colleagues were now based, as well as humanitarian organizations administering the growing tide of refugees washing up in that safe haven. Without a visa for the Russian Federation—much less official press permission to be in the area of conflict, the dubious charms, comforts, companionship, and, most important, communication capabilities of Ingushetia remained off-limits for me.
But then I saw a car coming the other way, traveling in the direction of Grozny, and with a piece of paper pasted to the window with PRESS written on it.
Colleagues? It was my ticket out of Samashki or Sharmalsheiki or whatever they called this dump, and I stepped out into the road to wave down the car, hoping that the people inside might recognize me as a foreigner despite my papakh and generic cold-weather gear. The car was slowing down to see what I wanted when I felt a meaty hand on my shoulder, forcing me to turn around.
“Kto ti!” demanded a huge bear of a man, sporting a beard so long and white he looked like nothing so much as Santa Claus with bandoliers. Flanking him were a pair of identical twins, similarly festooned with weapons and wearing identically suspicious physiognomies. “Who are you!”
I muttered something about being a foreign correspondent and Santa demanded my papers. As I helplessly watched the press car drive on, I handed Santa my new “press pass.”
“These papers are issued by Avtorkhanov!” growled my most recent captor, referring to the most notorious pro-Russian, anti-Dudayev militia leader. Then he flagged down another car heading in the opposite direction of the refugee stream and forced me in, directing the driver down the road toward Achkoi Martan and the same government building and government office where I had been interrogated the day before.
“Back to see us again, Mister Istanbul?” chortled the man who had issued me the makeshift press pass for the region. “Comrade Ali,” he continued, referring to Santa. “Why are you abandoning your post to waste our time with an issue we have already dealt with?”
Commander Ali sputtered something in Chechen, no doubt in reference to the need to double check and be ever vigilant. The truth, it appeared, was that he was illiterate, and had not been able to read the signature on my papers.
“Dismissed!” said the security man, and Commander Ali and I returned to Samashki.
“God damn it!” I cursed. “Another completely wasted day!”
“What did you say?” asked a smiling Santa, who now regarded us as the best of friends.
Indeed. I had been coughing up English to express my outrage, and there were not a lot of folks around to understand.
Isa was not so much incensed at my rearrest and release as he was worried that I had disappeared into Grozny. Or worse—that I had been arrested by the Russians after stumbling over a checkpoint.
“They are torturing all the young men they get their hands on!” he said.
“How do you know?”
“One of my cousins told me,” said Isa. “He just escaped from a filtration point.”
“I want to meet him,” I said, insisting that Isa take me to meet the man.
“Why do you have to talk to him? I just told you what happened.”
“Isa—I am trying to make a film!”
No more rumors, no more secondhand stories. I needed facts on tape.
Reluctantly, he agreed, and following the evening meal of fried potatoes, pickles, and tea, we set out for the cousin’s house.
I remember traveling with headlights out, the open fields along the roads we traveled lit by distant, multicolored flares. Eventually, we arrived at a typical Chechen farm—a roomy house partially hidden behind a courtyard wall with dogs and chickens and geese in the yard. Isa knocked on the door and gave the half-embrace handshake to a young man of perhaps thirty. He was introduced to me as the cousin, a man named Vakha.