We dumped the truck back at headquarters and proceeded on foot on another round of visits to some slit trenches and machine gun nests on the north side of town, and then ambled over to the Samashki cemetery.
“Look around! Look! This is the cemetery of our elders, our brothers and sons!” said Hussein, picking up a piece of tombstone broken off by a random Russian bullet and placing it atop the marker. “The last time Ivan attempted to destroy us, back in 1944, he took every last stone to build that mill I showed you before, grave-robbing from this solemn place in order to erase all memory that we ever lived here.”
Zzzinggg! Zzzinggg! And then the retort of a gun somewhere in the hills west of town. We were getting sniped at in the cemetery. I instinctively ducked behind a larger tombstone, but not Hussein. He marched on, seemingly oblivious to the danger. When I finally caught up with him, he was finishing the Muslim creed of faith, the Fatiha, and wiping his hands over his face.
“Here is the Chechen spirit,” he quietly breathed.
I looked at the hand-painted name on the simple tombstone. The birth and death dates suggested it belonged to a ten-year-old who had died almost exactly two years before.
“My son,” said Hussein, without further explanation. “It is why we are here. We will not let Ivan plow under the graves of our people, ever again.”
Then I noticed the day and month of birth. Hussein’s son had been born on the day of mourning on which Chechens commemorate their Day of Genocide of 1944. He had never been allowed to celebrate a single birthday.
7
DOG OF WAR
I am starting to feel I have almost taken the Samashki story as far as it can go without getting bombed, meaning really bombed—and that is what I am waiting for. And that is sick. I am standing on rooftops with camera on standby, stinking of bated garlic breath, waiting for some shell to fall close enough that I get a good, solid “bang” but hopefully far enough away that I don’t die in the process. Just the people who have been looking after and feeding me and washing my boots after a hard day’s slog through the mud. Jesus Christ. I am worse than the usual casual voyeur of the death and destruction of strangers. I actively want the death and destruction of my friends because if it does not happen I do not have “a story.” (Diary entry, early March 1995)
I had planned my sojourn to Chechnya to coincide with Genocide Commemoration Day of February 23-24 because I was sure it would make good television. Either the Chechens would launch a series of revenge attacks on Russian positions or the Russians would make preemptive strikes against Chechen positions that the Russian would assume were getting readying for symbolic attacks. The main point was someone would attack someone else, and that meant good television, if I could only be in the right place at the right time. That had been my plan, anyway.
But February 23-24 passed without major incident, as did the days and then weeks that followed, with my tagging along with Hussein or other members of his group around the streets of Samashki, or, once the sun set, my setting up my camera atop the apartment building Drudzhba (Friendship) in anticipation of night bombing.
It was a cold, nasty experience that was also a waste of precious battery life. I kept the camera on standby as opposed to off in order to preserve juice, hitting “on” whenever a roll of artillery erupted in the black distance—but it was always too late for the camera to catch anything useful or useable, such as a huge and distant two-second explosion. Even if I could react to the incoming ssschreeeeech! and catch the visual explosion on the edge of town, it never matched the audio aspect of incoming destruction.
The first serious daylight soundings of Samashki’s defenses, meanwhile, caught my camera cold. Literally. Thanks to my nocturnal vigil on the town’s rooftops, not one of the dozen or so battery units I had brought to fire the camera had any juice left—and the battery charger that connected to a car cigarette lighter refused to work. Alkhazur, the blacksmith, was of no help, nor several other men identified as electricians. My last chance seemed to be a local beekeeper, a man who allegedly dabbled in bomb-making on the side. Directed to his house, I explained my problem. The beekeeper took the charger in hand, unscrewed the mount and stared at the circuitry.
“Hungry?” he asked, and suggested I sit down.
The table was soon set with tea, bread, the standard pickles and some rather good fried chicken, as well as a bowl of honey. For a moment, I was afraid the man was going to smear some of that over the dysfunctional unit—nothing else seemed to work—when he reached for a bottle of vodka, poured a small shot over the charger, and began scrubbing it with a toothbrush. Satisfied, he then set the charger near the gas stove.
“I don’t think we want to melt it,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” came the reply.
I was lifting a spoonful of honey to my mouth when suddenly the world rocked and roared and a huge cloud of smoke bellowed up and over the bramble forest and the forward lines. Instantly, I was on my feet and about to dash in the direction of the blast, now echoing with the rasp of machine-gun fire on full automatic. Hussein’s men, from what I could tell.
“Sit down,” said the electrician, pouring tea. “There is no sense in your going anywhere until that thing dries.”
He had a point. Aside from the purest form of war voyeurism (or unless I planned on picking up a gun), without a functional camera I had no business in the zone. So I sipped the tea and waited. The battle seemed to be being fought in the next muddy street.
“Terplenia,” said the bee man. “Patience.”
After another cigarette he inspected the charger, screwed the mount back together, and beckoned me toward a car. Its battery was dead. We pushed it down a short slope and it started, and I could only hope that the cigarette lighter in the dashboard still worked. It did. As soon as we plugged it in, the first of the five green charge light indicators on the battery began to blink. In itself, this meant only that the car lighter worked, not that the battery was collecting and holding a charge. Another cigarette, and the second indicator began to blink, the first now a steady green glow. I stripped off the battery and stuck it on the camera, attaching a second battery to the charger. Then I tried to turn on the camera. With a beautiful click and whirr the device lit up. I hit the play button, and it began to record.
“Barkal, bolshoi barkal!” I nearly crowed for joy, running off to war again.
Well, almost. I still had to collect a minimum charge to make any activity worthwhile. So we smoked another cigarette while waiting for the second indicator to start flashing green. Then I begged the beekeeper to drive me as close to the front as he could safely go. I would save time (and, carrying the flak jacket and camera gear), energy—and also allow the battery to continue to charge. I figured I had about ten minutes of juice when we ditched the car and started working our way through shattered farm houses, ditches, and trees toward the front; the beekeeper had decided to come along, too.
We took a look at the lay of the land from the second story of one of three large, new, but abandoned houses on the extreme edge of town, which were often used as sniper nests. The forest obscured any view of the battleground, but smack-dab in front of me I could see the cause of all the commotion: an armored train, periodically spitting fire and lead toward the forest.