One night, I found everyone at Alkhazur’s nightclub glued to a tiny television powered by a generator. It was tuned to the so-called Presidential Channel, a frequency that only operated when President Djohar Dudayev deigned to talk to the nation from a secret location in the mountains. The broadcast link was provided via a Turkish satellite connection paid for by diaspora Chechens in Istanbul. Finally, the president appeared on air. I did not even need a running commentary. Dudayev smirked, scowled, threatened, joked, pontificated, and generally hammed it up in front of the camera. Truly, what a strange man. And given present circumstances, it was almost embarrassing.
And I was starting to learn something of the clickity-clack growl of the Chechen tongue. I do not want to exaggerate my fluency in the language; I never got beyond a handful of nouns and verbs, greetings and goodbyes, and I depended on Russian as a means of communication. Still, here is a list of words I put down in my notebook for memorization. I have no idea why the list appears the way it does, or even if the conjugations of the verbs are accurate.
predatl—traitor
michawu—where
tzigawu—there
igawu—over there
kuzawu—here
jal—dog
so-ne-le’e—I want
huna le’e—you want
tsuna le’e—he wants
tkun le’e—we want
ho su-ne yeza—I love you
busa dika yurl—six nights
ura dika yurl—six months
de dika yurl—six days
sura dika yurl—six years
Why I was focusing on the concept of “six” I cannot today explain. Nor the “I love you” in the middle of the list, or why I passed over the most memorable Chechen noun-adjective construct that stuck in most reporters’ minds: dick cunt. It meant “good boy.”
The word at the top of the list, predatl, was actually a loan word from the Russian. In both Russian and Chechen, it meant “traitor.” The reason for its appearance was that it reflected Hussein’s primary concern about certain personalities in town, which of course then became my concern as well.
The primary focus of Hussein’s attention was a group of elders, and specifically the local imam, or prayer leader, at the Friday Mosque on the southern edge of town. Like virtually all religious leaders in the post-Soviet Union, ranging from the Russian Orthodox Patriarch in Moscow to every parish priest, deacon, or rabbi in Siberia, the imam had been appointed and remained a paid employee of the formerly Soviet, but now legally Russian, state. The fact that it was his stamp and seal that ratified the various ceasefire agreements only added to the suspicion on the street (or at least in the Hussein household) that the imam had at least two masters: Allah and the FSB, or renamed Soviet KGB. Complicating the picture even more was the fact that the imam’s brother, also an Islamic cleric, was a welcome guest at Hussein’s house—and the man who had taken upon himself to turn Hussein, a former collective farm captain and atheist, into a believing and prayer-conscious Muslim.
Welcome to the post-Soviet hall of mirrors!
I have no idea what evidence Hussein possessed about the imam’s alleged collaboration with the Russian military. Certainly, the imam was the point man for all negotiations and contacts with Russian authorities in the area, and frequently traveled out to Post 13, the bunker-and-trench checkpoint on the Sernovodsk road, to meet with said authorities. Accompanying him was a small group of other elders, one of whom was the obsessive diarist of the town, Akhmad Amaev—a man I started to refer to as “the Samuel Pepys of Samashki.” He was also the father of Hussein’s armored vest tailor, the guerilla who bore such a striking resemblance to the youngest of the Cartwright brothers on the TV show Bonanza that I had nicknamed him “Little Joe.”
From what I gathered, in Hussein’s view the imam was guilty of accommodation with the Russians. But did that mean treason? Or was the Imam merely reflecting the opinion of the people in town—minority or majority—who did not think that hand-to-hand fighting with the Russians on the streets of Samashki was the best of their options?
The irony of this apparent distinction was that in many ways, lifelong residents of Samashki were both more traditional and less nationalistic than more recent returnees from the Chechen diaspora, such as Hussein and his men, and thus less likely to take up arms to defend the new national homeland, but more insistent that the theoretical protocols governing behavior—adat—be rigorously observed. A son or younger brother must not smoke in front of a father or elder brother; if a person older than you enters a room, you must rise and stay standing until the elder has sat down. If you see an elder on the street, you must stop until he passes. You must never, ever speak to an elder until spoken to. For Hussein and his men, these protocols (admittedly observed more in the breach than rule) were stark nonsense. So was the idea of absolute loyalty to one’s taip, or clan. While this was allegedly a fundamental building block of the Chechen identity, I never learned what Hussein’s taip was because he dismissed it as being completely irrelevant. And as for religious zeal, such as dancing the zikr-well, I remember Hussein taking lessons from his father one day about the basics of how Muslims pray. Amazingly, he apparently did not know how.
“The war has destroyed the concept of taip, as it is destroying other social barriers in traditional Chechen society,” he explained. “And this is good.”
But wasn’t the war, in essence, about protecting and preserving traditional Chechen society from further Russifying encroachments?
One answer, I guess, was to be found in the new Russian disco music playing on Sultan’s radio night after night, and the delirious consumerism, based on sex appeal, beamed into the living room via the new Russian private television stations, if and when the generator was fired up and working. Buy this toothpaste or buy that deodorant, and dream of that new kitchen set for your house in a town that has no plumbing!
The alternative to that sort of saturation bombing of the soul was to be found elsewhere, and in traditions of which Hussein and his men did not partake.
That was zikr, or the wild dance of remembrance I had first seen in prewar Grozny more than a year before. In Samashki, there seemed to be one held almost nightly in different parts of town, although I never saw Hussein or any of his military clan participate.
I would be coming back from Alkhazur’s or my rooftop wait, returning to Hussein’s when I would turn a corner and then catch a buzz-like reverberation.
Distant singing voices, male, deep.
A chant, weaving its way up into and beyond the firmament. Next came the rhythm.
Clapping. Stomping. Yes, stomping, like at a barn dance in Montana.
Yes, there at a house among the houses in the darkened, drab, and muddy town of Samashki, something was happening. A zikr for another young man just killed that day.
“Ho—ahhhh!” came the tone of the tenor, sustained over a millennium.
“La illah il Allah,” came the multibaritone backdrop.