The situation at Post 13 was the same as before. “Smoke on the Water” ringing through the air, and silent smoke vectoring over Samashki in the distance. Other hacks were arriving on the scene. Chris Bird, of the wire service, and Paula Robatelle, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, French-language division. Next arrived two cars filled with a very pushy team from the British Channel 4, working on a general documentary on the war in Chechnya. They had just sort of stumbled onto the Samashki story without knowing what it was. Like everyone else, they were told they could not enter Samashki without the new special permissions issued in distant Mozdok. We told them of our experience, but they all decided to take the drive anyway.
The small crowd of newshounds staking out the distant town had the effect of creating a diversion, and the camera operators and wandering journalists instinctively started to act in silent collusion with one another, distracting soldiers while semisecretly filming the APC in the middle of the road, as well as elements of life in the camp trenches. Ha! A soldier on top of a bunker washing his hair! Ho! A blonde woman in fatigues emerging from the camp mess with a tray of steaming tea!
News…
Noodle dinner. Vodka and Turkish beer. The nightly pounding of some Chechen settlement or position by the Russian artillery. One thing was clear; it was no longer Samashki they were pulverizing. Probably Bamut, as Achkoi Martan had surrendered, the head of the Russian-appointed administration, Salman Khadjiev, had announced.
News…
“The desk wants some real copy,” said Lawrence after checking in with Moscow via his SAT-phone. “And they want some pictures to go with it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I am going to Grozny,” said Sheets. “Come along. We’ll try to be back by late afternoon.”
“Ok,” I said, heartsick. I felt that I was abandoning my people.
At the crack of dawn on the morning of April 9 we were pulling out of Slepsovski for Sernovodsk. Up and not so much over the Sundja Hills as along them, we drove down a sometimes dusty and other times muddy farm road that had become the main connecting road to the Mozdok-Grozny highway. It was a bone-rattling ride, until we finally hit asphalt. The main highway was still a pretty bumpy drive, due to deep holes and craters and the general destruction of tarmac-chewing tank treads. Every hamlet and house along the way seemed to have been shattered by aerial bombs or point-blank artillery fire.
I asked Nodar to stop so I could film some generic destruction.
“Don’t bother,” said Lawrence. “You’ll get enough in Grozny.”
This was an understatement. Starting with the outskirts of the city, Grozny was such a shattered mess that it boggled the mind. “Destruction not seen in Europe since Stalingrad,” was the usual way to describe it. Gutted, pockmarked, ten-story apartment buildings sagged like ugly Leaning Towers of Pisa, long emptied of their erstwhile residents. Less mauled, but still virtually destroyed structures suggested continued life through messages scrawled on exterior walls: Don’t Shoot! People Live Here!
We rolled up the windows as we passed through the industrial zone, once home to the Chechen oil refineries, but now only the source of the thick black smoke that hung over the city like an evil cloud. Flames shot out of natural gas pipes at every intersection. The empty shells of heavy ordnance lay everywhere, as did the twisted wrecks of cars, trucks, tanks, and APCs.
The impression of vast, gratuitous destruction and carnage was only underlined and framed by the weirdly ordinary. There were blossoms on the trees, beer and candy salesladies on virtually every street, and paddleboats gliding across the city’s reservoir, its filtration and delivery system long since bombed into rubble. Long lines formed at wells to fill milk containers and other vessels with dubiously clean drinking water, shuffled to basement “homes” via pushcarts.
But the strangest thing was that everyone was smiling.
Smiling.
They would not take the smiles off their faces, no matter what they had to say.
“Shock,” said Sheets succinctly.
One of those smiling people we met was Tzutzayen Hampash, age twenty-nine, who owned or managed or had taken control of a restaurant near the reservoir. There were no doors or windows and no kitchen, really—just part of the building where Mr. Hampash kept a coal fire burning both for heat as well as to grill his kebabs.
“How are things?” asked Lawrence.
“Couldn’t be worse!” smiled Hampash.
We culled a few operational details. Hampash first opened on January 12, shortly before the fall of the city. It was not clear whether he aimed to serve approaching Russian troops or retreating Chechen guerrillas, and we thought it indiscreet to ask. Then a renewed onslaught, coupled with the Ramadan fast, forced a new closure for most of February, but Hampash had reopened on March 14, and business had been pretty good since. He had sixteen customers that very day. We declined to be the seventeenth and eighteenth. Our decision had nothing to do with money or the lack thereof. Roving packs of dogs were eating corpses throughout the city, and we were worried about where Hampash got his meat. Our concern may have been legitimate in the abstract, but it was dumb and downright unfriendly in the concrete circumstances at hand. Hampash was open.
We drove to the city center.
Or what was left of it.
The gutted, blackened, and pockmarked presidential executive building still stood on the main square and represented a recognizable monument for general orientation, as well as the backdrop for victory photographs being shot (via the new Polaroid camera craze) by the roving units of Russian troops in town. A Russian flag blew in the breeze above the building like some warped reminder of the Soviet banner flying atop the Berlin Reichstag in 1945, as if the conquest of the two cities were equal in martial glory in Russian eyes. Curiously, that same red banner of the defunct USSR flew from the flag masts atop any number of APCs prowling the town on patrol.
I took a picture of Lawrence in front of the presidential building and he took one of me. Then we were interrupted by the warnings of a demolition team about to raze the building across the square that had once served as the local parliament, or council of ministers, I forget which. We stood our ground and trained our cameras on the building.
Boom, went the charge. Crash—the five-story structure came tumbling down, filling the square with dust. To look at the pictures we took, it might appear we were at ground zero when the bombs went off.
We sought out various locations that meant something to us, like the French House hotel. Destroyed. Then the Mona Lisa restaurant. Crushed. A private family home where Lawrence had stayed during the siege. Obliterated. Finally, we drove over to the guest house where Zviad Gamsakhurdia had set up his Georgian government in exile after his ousting from power in Tbilisi in 1992, and where his remains were reinterred during my first visit to the city in February 1994. It was difficult finding the place, due to lack of familiar reference points. The two-story building was half blown away, and the interior walls were exposed. The Georgian Apostolic cross marking Zviad’s grave, however, was still in place, even if shrapnel-hacked and scarred. Nearby was the memorial to the Deportations of February 23-24, 1944. The commemorative plaques had been blasted off the walls and the ancient cemetery was completely destroyed by bombs, or more likely, given the dearth of craters, Russian soldiers who had used the evocative sight for target practice. But in the middle of the holy rubble stood the stone Quran, unscathed—down to the green cloth “page marker” resting on the Surat An-Nas.