An armored train?
We scampered down the makeshift stairway to the ground floor, across an exposed field (thanks to the cover of several cows), and into the bramble forest. After several minutes, a sentry called out to us in Chechen to halt and identify ourselves.
“Allah ul Akbar,” we called back the password. “God is the Greatest.”
The youths were apparently guarding the flank. On and on we ran, taking protective gullies when there was one, and hunching low when there wasn’t, until finally we ran into a familiar form: Shirvani, sitting beneath a tree, having a smoke. I wanted to embrace him.
“Toms!” he chortled. “You missed all the fun.”
At that precise moment a helicopter came swooping over us at tree level and everyone dove for cover. My dive landed me in a deep thicket of thorn, and I emerged a wounded man: In addition to various minor nicks and cuts and penetrations, a pencil-size needle, about as big as a cigarette butt on one end and as sharp as a pin on the other, had jammed its way through the pad of my left-hand thumb, and was sticking out the other side. The funny thing was that it was not all that painful. The reason for that was that I could not feel it at all. Or move the thumb. I discovered that fact when I attempted to pick up the camera. It dropped straight back down to the ground.
There was no time to reflect on my new onehandedness. The crack and blast of a duel on the far side of the thorn bush ridge beckoned. I crept up the ridge until I could see Hussein, some fifty yards in front of me.
“Toms!” he called, casual as could be. “Come on down to the party!”
I did as commanded and scampered out of the thorn-and-bramble forest to find Hussein, Sultan, and Seylah howling with laughter and pointing toward a ball of fire and smoke about a mile away. It was an armored personnel carrier that the Russians had themselves destroyed.
“There were two columns, and we tricked them into attacking each other!” gasped Hussein, laughing. “It’s been a regular circus here, ha!”
And one that I had missed.
Not all members of Hussein’s band were thrilled with my war enthusiasm. One of the men, Xamid, had taken to staring at me and directing non sequitur questions and comments that I imperfectly understood. The thing that I did understand was that he had taken a visceral dislike to me.
Returning from one of my nocturnal rooftop vigils one night among the nights, I accidentally interrupted some sort of planning conference and heard Xamid saying, in Russian, “He just wants fighting, although he himself is afraid.”
Was he talking about me? Even if only a paranoid projection of mine, so much was clear: I was—had become—utterly and completely dependent on the tolerance and humor of seven men who were holding guns and not cameras, and laying their lives on the line on a daily basis for a cause with which I was only romantically associated. I decided to keep my distance from Xamid to the extent possible.
My favorite in the group of men using Hussein’s home as their base was his tall, lanky cousin, Shirvani. When not out inspecting the defensive lines, he was reading. Much of the time it was a Russian translation of the Quran, although he did not seem particularly religious. He had spent his youth in Kazakhstan as a shepherd on a collective farm, before getting drafted into the Red Army. His term of service was spent hoisting nuclear warheads at a base in Uzbekistan.
“Two of my Chechen comrades on the same team died of cancer,” he laconically recalled. “The Russians always gave us the dirt jobs.”
The younger men, Ali, Seylah, and Ussam, shared much less of themselves. They were all mechanics, as I recall—but maybe I only recall it that way because they were all mechanically adept; then, so were all Chechens, it seemed. It was almost a generic national trait, like the Chechen familiarity with weapons. Then there was Ussam’s wife Rana. But due to adat, or the custom that suggested maintaining a respectful distance between males and females, I learned nothing about the woman who cooked all our meals (and, I suspect, cleaned all our boots every night.) Once, however, she did whisper to me that she would have preferred to be back in Kazakhstan and not here with a group of guerrillas in a surrounded town. As for Sultan—well, at heart he was a fifteen-year-old kid just feeling his hormones. I remember catching him sneaking up a ladder on his grandfather’s roof in order to peek at (or maybe signal) the girl in the garden next door, planting onions. Hussein’s father and mother, meanwhile, remained silent spectral presences. I never even learned their names, and the only time we spoke could hardly be called conversation.
It happened one morning as I was on my way to the latrine. The German shepherd chained in the yard started growling and yapping, snarling and barking, but not exactly at me. Suddenly my human ears tuned in to dog decibels, and I dove for the remnant corn stalks in the garden while the dog did a tail-between-the-legs dash for the nearest wall, just as a SUK fighter-bomber came ssscreeEEAAMMing overhead, or at least near enough to seem to be aiming at me.
“You finished with the… the unspeakable… or trying to dig a new one?”
It was Hussein’s father, wool cap jauntily perched on his head, a jug of ass-wash water in hand, and a sardonic smile on his face.
“Please, you go first,” I replied, picking myself up from the garden floor.
My fear of flying had been permanently replaced by another phobia: to die in an outhouse, literally blasted into shit.
Although Samashki was theoretically surrounded, there were always visitors bringing news from different parts of the everchanging “front” as well as the occasional vehicle bearing the occasional foreign journalist or relief worker on a quick drive through. The journalists always looked edgy and like they wanted to get back out as soon as they had shot their obligatory B-roll shots of guys with guns.
“…security is tight in this Chechen town, with rebels ‘inspecting all vehicles…’”
News.
Once, Hussein flagged down one of these “foreigner vehicles” (so called because they tended to be big, white, and brand-new land cruisers) that belonged to the Doctors Without Borders organization, and began berating the terrified French medics inside about how they were letting themselves be used by the Russian authorities. Moscow only allowed them to deliver symbolic aid, he charged, and only to places where Moscow wanted it to go. In other words, the foreign do-gooders were de facto participating in ethnic cleansing, as well as the creation of unnatural dependencies. Poor doctors. They could only nod and hope Hussein was not really as mean as he seemed. At a certain point, I thought it best to tell them that they were not in danger.
“But you speak English so well for a Chechen!” uttered a very surprised and relieved doctor.
Nor was all my time spent with Hussein and his men. For entertainment mixed with information gathering, I had become a regular over at Alkhazur’s blacksmith shop, which also served as a local after-hours men’s club of a certain fashion. Every night, fighters, petty merchants, and diverse hangers-on would gather in the blacksmith’s livingroom to drink tea, watch scratchy Chechen television (beamed in via satellite by a Turkish fund) and play cards. I never understood the rules of the game, but it always seemed to end when losers were obliged to perform something I took to calling the “duck dance,” a shake-your-bottom sort of movement that was sufficiently humiliating in a good-natured sort of way to send peals of laughter around the room.