And that was the moment when my old friend Sonia Mikich, bureau chief of the German ARD office in Moscow, jumped out of the vehicle to intervene before I physically assaulted her cameraman, buying me off with mineral water and chocolate.
The column of 400 (or now 401, with me) reached the crossroads near the Friday Mosque within the next half-hour and then began moving down the main artery through town. Local women came pouring out of the homes, bearing traditional greetings of bread and salt and offering the tired and cold marchers beds for the night and basins to wash in. But there was no time to linger if the column was to make it to the larger city of Achkoi Martan, as planned. The big push to Grozny was scheduled for the next day.
I had to work quickly, too. This was my out! Making Sonia promise that she would not leave town without me, I dashed back to Hussein’s house to grab my kit, and then dashed back to the convoy to stash my tapes and kit in her car. I would pick them up if and when I ever got back up to Moscow, I said. The point was to separate the tapes from my person and salvage one or the other, but not lose both.
“You’re staying?” she asked with incredulity. “I think not!”
Although I was not her cameraman, Sonia was sensitive to needless risk in the line of reporting. She had been my friend Rory Peck’s employer that sad October day in Moscow, 1993, when that extraordinary cameraman got his head blown off while reporting on Boris Yeltsin’s bombing of the Russian parliament.
I assured her I would make every effort to leave. Maybe I could slip out with the Slavic Buddhist monks; my moustache was not in keeping with their naked faces, but at least I shaved my head like they did. The lack of an orange robe was admittedly a problem. On second thought, maybe I could just insinuate myself into the mass of other, heterodox marchers. The Eastern Orthodox and Jews wore beards, as did the man identified as Chris Hunter, a young Englishman who led the Friends involved in the march, meaning the Quakers.
“Just get in!” cried Sonia Mikich, as I started off-loading my tapes and camera kit.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Shirvani. He clasped his hands together in a sign of friendship and victory, and raised them above his head, smiling.
“Adik yurl!” he shouted.
And then Sonia’s ARD-mobile was spinning wheels down the road to catch up with the marching mothers and their other pacifist allies, passing them at some speed in order to get to Achkoi Martan to capture the glorious entry of the column on the penultimate day of their extraordinary action for peace and dignity. An action, I might add, that with the help of Sonia Mikich eventually won them a place in the annals of peace and protest marching (and won Sonia quite a few awards and well-deserved kudos, too). But that was later.
On the evening of March 27, the goal was to reach Achkoi Martan.
The mothers never made it. Neither did we.
“Stoi!” barked a sergeant of the armed forces of the Russian Federation, as Sonia’s driver pulled up at the roadblock three kilometers outside Martan. “Stop!”
There was really no need to be told; two or three huge slabs of concrete had been lowered to completely block the road into town, and on either side of the highway the muddy fields seemed to be infested with armor: APCs of both the eight-wheel and track variety, known as BTRs and BMPs, and more distantly and menacingly, perhaps a dozen hulking specimens of the huge, self-propelled Russian cannon that fall under the general rubric “howitzer.”
“Privet, rabonik!” called out Sonia’s cameraman Maxim, the guy I had nearly assaulted outside Samashki. “How’s tricks, guys?” There followed a friendly banter about where everyone was from, and which school they had attended, and a variety of other Russian chitchat that put my Chechenized nerves on edge. Sonia had just set herself up with a Russian agent who was going to turn me in!
Of course Maxim had no such intention; his glad-handing, hale and hearty attitude, rather, was survivalist subterfuge honed through years of dealing with state authority.
“Keep him in the car!” he hissed in German, as he got out to schmooze with the well-armed guys wearing Spesnatz uniforms. He was referring, of course, to me.
“What seems to be the problem, sir?” asked Sonia when a huge specimen of Spesnatz ambled over to look at our papers. He stood at least six-foot-five, was built like that “Russian” boxer in Rocky III, and wore a black band around his forehead, the same way so many Chechen fighters wore the green Islamic band around theirs.
“Terrorists,” he said. He was about to launch into an interrogation when the first group of Peace Marchers arrived, now traveling in a variety of cars culled from Samashki. “Excuse me,” he said. “Do not leave here.”
We sat and smoked in silence, watching as car after car pulled up and dislodged a knot of soldiers’ mothers, Buddhist monks, religious pacifists, or Chechen ladies who had attached themselves to the peace action. What quickly became apparent was that the Spesnatz were not turning anyone back, but herding everyone into the general area around Sonia’s car and basically creating a detention camp in the middle of the road.
Reaction varied by group. The Chechen women howled and wailed, their cries falling on deaf ears; the Slavic converts to Buddhism staged a sit-in directly in front of the barricades, chanting softly as their leader, a Japanese activist whose name was so impossible to recall he was simply referred to as “monk,” tapped on his prayer drum. The religious pacifists—Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, and Quaker—tried in vain to reason with the soldiers, attempting to contact the commanding officer for an explanation about why we were detained.
The one uncontrollable element among the detainees, of course, was the mothers. No sooner were they out of their transport and under “field arrest” than they fanned out to make contact with their captors. They pestered the arresting soldiers for information about this boy from Moscow serving in that unit, or that boy from the Komi region whose unit had been dispatched to this place.
“Any of you know Dima Andropovich Alexanderov?” asked one particularly insistent woman from some town in the Maritime Province of the Russian Far East.
A guard attempted to hold her back from breaking through the security perimeter around a knot of BTRs, but in vain. The woman just had to ask that gunner sitting atop the turret who, indeed it turned out, had once gotten drunk with Dima Andropovich a few weeks ago in Grozny.
With one soldier on board, or glad to see some sort of surrogate mother, the wall broke down, and soon the women were swarming all over the road, notebooks out to record sightings of this conscript or that, to take down greetings, or pass along messages from the folks back home.
“They don’t feed you very well around here, do they?” opined one matron, sticking her finger into some draftee’s ribs. You could almost hear him groan, “Aw, Mom! Not in front of the guys!”