On and on through Chechnya at war.
Grozny, Vedeno, Shatoi, Gudermes, Shatoi (again) and back for another night in shattered Shali or neutral Novi Atagi as the guest of Rizvan Laylorsanov, or that basketball player who strummed the guitar and sang songs about peace while projectiles screamed overhead, and then, again, Stari Atagi for a funeral for eight.
“How were they killed?” I asked.
“Aviation last night,” came the response.
The graves were dug and only waited for the white shrouded corpses to arrive in reusable wooden litters. The mourners parted to let the bearers through; one by one, the bodies were lifted from their litters and placed in the graves. The bodies were positioned to face Mecca, and then wooden beams were placed across the shrouded corpses. The imam called out the Fatiha, while the mourners lifted the palms of their hands toward heaven and murmured the sacred words: Bismillah ARRahman ar Rahim.
In the name of the God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,
All Praise to The God, Lord of All The Worlds,
The Compassionate, The Merciful.
The burial rites were repeated twice, three times, four. After the fifth body had been gently placed in its final resting place, the prayers were not so much interrupted as counterpointed by the woop-woop-woop of helicopter blades churning through the sky. And then came another sound from behind a row of older gravestones, perhaps some fifty meters away: a baritone humming sound, above which rose the most melancholy, almost-lachrymose, spine-stinging tenor voice I have ever heard, ringing through the graveyard air.
“AlllAAAH Vidimo Xarjist O!”
It was a dirge circle, consisting of perhaps a dozen men, eyes closed, with tears streaming down their faces, singing the deceased into eternity.
“Vedeno Khankale Surmut Way, Bizteriq Khambundo Wansee yeq!”
Again, the sound of helicopters approaching; again, not a hint of movement from the men in the circle. But slowly, a change of pace, as if to give audio-witness to a complete lack of fear. First the fingertips began tapping on the upper leg, softly, gently, as the tenor continued his chant over the solid bass and baritone of the voices around him. Then full finger-tapping that actually resulted in a muffled beat. Then the full extended hand, fingers and palm, striking out a basic rhythmic pattern, as the chorus of dirge chanters moved from merely humming to mouthing real words to the beat.
La illah il Allah, La illah il Allah!
Distant explosions and with a sudden woosh, a jet overhead. But from the group of men squatting in the cemetery, not a flicker of movement, not a single eye peeped open to make a visual assessment of the situation, not a hint from anyone that maybe it just might have been better to move to some sort of shelter.
Who were these people?
The chant continued for another five or ten minutes; maybe an hour. I had long since turned the camera off, and was merely sitting as close to the circle as I thought decent for an outsider, desperately wanting to be inside it with them to get just a little closer to that ineffable thing that inspired and sustained them, to share in their spirit. Then the dirge slowed, the hands turned into tapping fingers, and then they stopped tapping altogether, and then it was over, because it was time for prayers. One by one, the men rose, removed their shoes, formed lines, and then lifted their palms toward heaven, their mosque the cemetery, their prayer mats the grass.
I spotted him near the cemetery, a stooped old man scurrying back from Grozny’s fresh produce market, a bag of vegetables in his hand and a hero’s decoration dangling from his tattered suit coat. His name was Viktor, and I followed him home to his third-story flat on WhateverSkaya street, an apartment in one of those buildings found in virtually every Soviet city and usually called Dom Geroi, or Heroes’ Houses. The stairwell leading to Viktor’s abode was also standard for a Soviet structure dating to the 1940s or ’50s: flagstone steps, worn in the middle, working their way up through a maze of tangled electrical wires, graffiti, and general neglect for the common space shared by all tenants, including decorated veterans of WWII.
“Prekhadite!” said Viktor, asking me to enter.
The apartment was—what?
Normalna, in the Soviet sense: a couple of dumpy easy chairs and a sofa pushed against the edges of the living room, a cluster of still-life pictures pinned on the flower-pattern wallpaper walls. A piano, out of tune, a stuffed chair or two, and dominating everything else a very large, glass-encased bookshelf filled with encyclopedias and other untouched classics (Tolstoy and Lermontov, as well as Soviet-approved translations of Hemingway, Henry James, and Jack London, all favorite “socialist” authors) churned out by Soviet-era publishing. The kitchen had a tiny fridge and the toilet and bathroom were two different rooms, with no sink in the former, and a rotational spigot in the latter that served, by turns, both for washing hands and taking a shower. All standard Soviet issue.
What was different about the apartment were the bullet-blasted holes in the ceiling and walls. Viktor pulled off his suit coat and rolled up his shirt to show me the shrapnel cuts he had received when the first RPG smacked into the wall of his study where he had been sitting, waiting out the madness on the streets of his hometown.
“I am a Russian, a veteran of the Great War, and a conqueror of Berlin,” he intoned. “I have seen filth and horror—but I never expected my army to do this to me!”
The sound bites comparing Berlin to Grozny were good material and exactly what I wanted. But then Viktor threw me a curveball. Without reference to the fact that I was shooting, he got up and walked to his library and extracted a large folder and plopped it down on the living room table. It was his Book of War, consisting of diary entries and press clips and assorted photographs of the men in his unit, men drawn from across the depth and breadth of the Soviet space, and of every ethnic background one could think of.
“Ah, this is Kasimov, my Azeri friend. We forced the fascists out of bunker twenty-three at Selow with our mortar, and this is Bedrossian, the Armenian who saved my life in the eastern suburbs of the fascist capital when he warned me the woman on the bicycle was carrying a grenade and shot her dead before she could reach my trench.”
The veteran turned page after page, reading every line, finger-scrolling over the text.
“Then on May 2, following our short celebration of International Workers’ Day, we pushed on to Potsdam and the enemy entrenchments there. It was a hard fight.”
Viktor was giving me the closing moments of World War II and the street fighting that ended with the capture of Berlin, but I was not really interested. I wanted his account of the Russian conquest of Grozny, and although he was well placed to do so, his focus remained on the war he had fought exactly fifty years before.
“Then, on May 4, Colonel Tikhamirov announced the 104th would have the honor to advance on the enemy down the Prinzlauer Allee, and into the heart of the fascist beast.”
Viktor was reading, mesmerized by the propaganda prose he was voicing, maybe even chanting, so soaked in memories he was not even aware when I turned off my camera.
“On May 6, following the dispute between captains Bugadov and Trishkin, the order was given to advance, despite the desperate fire of the enemy from the city center; it was then that Corporal Liftinski, who had been with me since Stalingrad and was a fine socialist soldier, sustained a curious wound in his abdomen that neither myself nor the medics were able to abort, and Corporal Liftinski died in my arms at three-thirty-seven that afternoon. After burying him in a garden-he always spoke passionately of his garden in Irbit, where he farmed as part of the First of May Tractor Commune in that district—we continued to advance on the enemy, cogently aware of snipers…”