I cannot vouch for the meaning of Chechen tenors’ lines, but the bottom is all Quranic Arabic, the Shahidah, or Confession of Faith. I have heard those words in a thousand different circumstances before—in mosques as diverse as those in Egypt, Syria, Iran, and Uzbekistan, and from the lips of Muslims not only from those counties, but also in New York, Moscow, London, and Cape Town. But never, ever had the words of the Muslim Creed filled me with such unexplainable awe as there in Samashki, Chechnya. And at the moment the dirge moves from soul piercing to something that has no name, a door opens and a crack of light spills out on the muddy lane and a voice calls out in the darkness and suddenly I am inside among a mass of people, forty sweating men thumping, stomping, and dashing barefoot in a tight circle around the wooden floor of the living-room, chanting “Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God!” into delirium, while above it all that solo tenor keeps on keening, backed up by a wall of baritones, invoking the Highest Name for mercy, forgiveness, understanding for our foibles, and the strength to effect His terrible revenge on those who betray His trust.
“La illahi il Allah!”
My shoes are off as is my coat and flak jacket, which has never seemed so ridiculous an accessory as here and now. The camera is out and the lens fogging up with the sudden change of indoor and outdoor heat and the blast of human-based humidity—or maybe it was just the viewfinder or my glasses.
Swirling, self-hurling, stomping, singing!
And as suddenly as it started, the zikr is over, or at least put on very sudden pause.
Bread and beef broth in bowls and then bowls of tea to fortify the soul. Sweets. Now a bearded man in a far corner, who looks like Commander Santa but might be anyone with a white beard and skull cap, stands, and every one else in the room does the same, turning their palms toward heaven while the bearded man who might be Santa recites the Muslim Creed. Then either he or someone else strikes a high, plaintive note and the rest of the men in the room respond in one baritone voice, and the mystic ceremony begins once again, slowly working its way from the communal, harmonic chanting of God’s name, to the first slow clapping of hands and then the first hard stepping of foot on floor until it evolves, as it must, into the wild, barn-dance, stomping circle of ecstatic men transfixed by the moment, as am I. The nocturnal barrage has begun again, although none of the spiritual athletes seem too concerned. The zikr devotees might dance all night, dancing in the face of doom, remembering.
Then one night, the news carried on Moscow radio got everyone’s attention. It stated that up to four hundred “Dudayevist bandits” had gathered in Samashki and were threatening local leaders for advocating a peaceful surrender of the town and allowing the train to pass.
“Four hundred armed men?” chortled Xamid, smiling at the audacity of Russian lies.
Hussein was less amused.
“That is the start of their propaganda campaign,” he said darkly.
“We have to act.”
8
HUNTER AND HUNTED
Beginning on March 13, the roads surrounding Samashki were completely blocked. At their regular meeting on March 17, General Alekseev arrived with Kosolapov. On the same day, a military train arrived at the Samashki station to restore the railroad. Conscripts serving in the railroad forces who arrived with the train repaired the mined railroad tracks between Sernovodsk and Samashki… residents were in a difficult position. On the one hand, the Russian military, as a consequence of negotiations held on March 23-25, got the military train through Samashki. Had that not occurred, another Russian general participating in negotiations threatened to use force… Dudayev fighters who turned up through the forest demanded villagers not allow the train to pass through. Pro-Dudayev snipers wounded two soldiers, and previously, in mid-March, two railroad bridges were blown up between Sernovodsk and Samashki.”[8]
That report, culled from page twenty-two of the meticulously researched Memorial Human Rights Center report on the massacre at Samashki, dramatically underlines the problems involved in reconstructive history—and especially the problem of dependency on the Moscow press. I say this with all due respect. But the fact remains that the Memorial report, while correct in general, is wrong in particulars. There were no “Dudayevist snipers” or “fighters who turned up in the forest” attempting to blow up bridges to stop a military train from plowing through town. Said train never made it to Samashki. And the forest snipers were natives, with names. Hussein, his brother Ussam, their cousin Shirvani, and their nephew Sultan—and men named Xamid, Seylah, and Ali.
And me.
The plan is to attack the train if it comes or to scare off the track repair team if it approaches the section sabotaged the night before. I missed that bit of action because I was either rooftop waiting, or at that zikr, or maybe sleeping. If they had told me, I would have come along, although apparently it was not pretty.
“We ran into a patrol,” says Hussein. “Sultan was sick at what he did, what he had to do, but he is better, now.”
First blood.
Hussein jerks his head in the direction of a back room, where his fifteen-year-old nephew is listening to some Russian pop music on a radio, and mimes a puke.
I spend the morning with Ussam and Seylah as they sort out a batch of shells they managed to acquire overnight from a merchant who had somehow made an appropriate transaction with some deserting Russian soldiers. I wonder if that is the sort of thing my original guide, Isa, is involved with. I have not seen him or his brother Muhammad for days, weeks. I stand on the bed and record Ussam and Seylah as they meticulously clean the hundreds of bullets dumped out on a comforter on the floor, making little piles of good and bad bullets (how did they know?) before loading the sharp, pointy Kalashnikov rounds in banana clips, and the big, heavy-caliber stuff into a bandolier belt. The AK rounds look almost delicate next to the metal-piercing machine-gun slugs. The bullet part is as big as a man’s index finger, sticking outside the shell casing brass. Some have little red rings around the stubby tip identifying that sort of round as being tracers or something. I don’t know and am embarrassed to ask, because admitting I am not knowledgeable about this lethal stuff would cause a loss of face.
Sultan is dispatched with the heavy machine gun hidden beneath a load of hay in a small donkey-drawn cart. He is supposed to look like an innocent shepherd or something. Hussein, Shirvani, and Xamid go through a different part of the thicket, while Ussam, Seylah, and Ali bring the ammunition. I tag along with them, grateful for my personal load of cameras and tripod because it absolves me of asking if I could help carry one of the bandoliers. But what would I say if they asked? Refuse out of general press principle? I guess so. What would they think? Would I tolerate my presence if I were them? Hussein seems to be taking his personification of the Chechen spirit literally and seriously. It is like I have become his own private camera team. Come to think of it, I am.
We weave our way through the thicket until we get to the edge of a large, denuded field overlooking the Samashki-Sernovodsk road that runs parallel to the railway tracks.
Seylah grabs the bandolier of heavy-caliber slugs, scoots out from the thicket and disappears from sight, the way a rabbit does when it has found its hutch. In this case the hutch is the forward gun pit, which is basically just a hole in the ground covered with twigs and scrub. That is where Hussein is already hiding. Well, not exactly hiding. Lurking in wait with a heavy-caliber machine gun is more like it. He is wearing some outsized plastic glasses he picked up somewhere. They are clearly not his.