The Law of the Mountains.
Commander-in-Chief, General Asian Maskhadov won the presidential elections by a landslide, with war hero Shamil Basayev coming in second, while poet and political theorist Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev took a distant third, collecting less than ten percent. None of this was surprising. The most notable thing about the polls, in fact, was how enthusiastic people were to line up and cast their ballots, and how proud they were to have participated in the freest and fairest voting the election- and referendum-drenched post-Soviet lands had ever seen.
And, with the elections over, the press and observers packed their bags to leave, flying back to Moscow, and then on to destinations such as Warsaw, London, and Rome.
It was time for me to depart as well, but in a rather different direction—a three-thousand-mile trek East to a dot on the map of Kazakhstan that identified the place as a town called Little Hope.
It was Hussein’s hideout, and I had to go.
“Bring this letter to my son,” instructed Hussein’s father, handing me a folded envelope. “Tell him the potato crop was good this year.”
“Barkal,” I said in my best Chechen, hoisting my bags to my shoulder. “Adik yurl.”
“Adik dali,” he said, wrapping an arm around me.
18
A TOWN CALLED HOPE
The made-under-license Fiat they call a Djiguli lurched off snowpack and slid toward the shoulder of the road while another truck trundled by, splattering us with slush and gravel. In summer, the road leading north from Alma Ata was a normal two-lane highway, probably filled with potholes. But in February 1997, long stretches had been reduced to a one-lane track of packed snow and ice creased by two trenches, marking the impact of a thousand wheels passing. The result was that every time two vehicles met, one had to give way by climbing out of the twin wheel ruts and off the road, waiting while the other went by. In that most of the oncoming traffic consisted of large trucks, this meant we had become used to being the ones forced off the road.
Vladimir, my skinny little half-Jewish, half-Korean driver, turned off the engine to save gas and I lit another cigarette. I figured we had come about three hundred kilometers in twelve hours and had another one hundred kilometers or so to go. Our destination was the address on the envelope Hussein’s father had given me, a town whose name in Russian meant “Little Hope.” The problem was that no one seemed to know exactly where it was. Most towns in Kazakhstan had had their names changed from Russian to Kazakh since independence in 1991, and memories of the old names were fading fast.
So was the day. The sun was setting somewhere in the great hazy grayness that was both earth and sky in the Kazakh winter steppe, and it was getting very, very cold again. And Vladimir’s car would not restart. I stood on the frozen tarmac while he started to fiddle with the engine and pulled out another smoke. I could not taste the burning tobacco for the cold, and it was impossible to distinguish what was smoke and what was exhaled breath turning to instant steam.
“Hold this,” said Valdimir, putting pliers in my hand. “And put your hand on the Prexodilitisa Vam Oxdeylnovost when I jiggle the Krastvernix Otonomskildelnya!”
My largely self-taught Russian was perfectly adequate—indeed fluent—for situations such as bombardments, hostage taking, refugee-related affairs, and general death and destruction. War Russian, I called it. But now I was being faced with Mechanical Russian, and aside from the occasional verb such as “give me” or “take this,” I did not understand a word. Nor did I really and truly understand what I was doing tracing Hussein to his Kazakhstan exile. It had been almost two years since we had met, that second or third night in Samashki, and a cold and sober review of our relationship might have been summed up as follows:
“A foreign journalist lands in a small town in a small country at war. He somehow befriends a leader of said small community and convinces said leader to allow the foreigner to stay. The foreigner also gains access to the community’s secrets, such as its defense system. After a relatively short period of time as the guest of the leader, the foreigner leaves. Almost immediately thereafter, the small community is subjected to hell by its enemies. Many people logically assume that the foreigner who left with the town’s secrets right before its destruction might have had something to do with that destruction. Because the foreigner is no longer around, not illogically they focus their wrath on the leader who befriended the foreigner and gave him access to the town’s secrets. The angry townspeople then drive the leader that befriended the foreigner out of town. The foreigner, meanwhile, remains blissfully oblivious to the impact of his very presence in the small community in the small country at war, and particularly the impact his presence has had on the life of the expelled leader because the foreigner was only there observing.”
Yes, that was it. The foreigner was not an actor; he was merely observing, and thus innocent of any crime, or hurt, or fallout.
Not. It was all much more like a real-life, warped paraphrase of the Heisenberg chaos theory about the observer affecting the observed.
And more. The observer, oblivious to the fact that he has affected anything other than his own career enhancement, now assumes that the observed will respond in a positive manner to being put under the microscope again.
Said I to myself: What you really want is a film crew, recording your “Look, It’s Your Life!” knock on the door, Hussein’s opening it a crack to ask who stands outside, his realization that it is the great foreign correspondent who participated directly or indirectly in the trial-by-innuendo that ended with him getting run out of town—and you still expect Hussein to give you and your driver a bed? Get real! Be happy if he does not strangle you on the front steps.
The voice of the media mercenary replied: Yes, get real. Very real. Tell this mechanical driver of yours to pull over the next time you smell a wood-burning shack and get a roof for the night. You are a media mercenary on assignment and need every piece of footage you can get to put this show together. This Show. Don’t forget you are on assignment, Mister Truth-in-Reporting. Enough altruism. You need that door getting cracked open, and you need whatever Hussein’s response is to the fact that you have now once again shown up on his doorstep, camera in hand. And you need it on tape. And for that you need daylight. Approach your prey in the full light of camera-friendly day. Your Prey. And remember: You only get one shot at this.
And then the nice guy replied: You are so tired of war and violence and all the attendant fear and anxiety that you just want to go home, home to a hole, maybe a grave. But you have come this far, way too far, by convincing other people that what you say you believe in and care about is what they should believe in and care about, too. Your driver will sleep in the freezing car if you tell him to. Don’t. And, as for the need for daylight footage suggested by your media mercenary alter ego, tell him to go fuck himself Have a little respect. Hussein is not your prey; he was your protector, and if he lets you into his house on this freezing February evening in the middle of northeastern nowhere, Kazakhstan, he will de facto have become your protector again. Drive on until you find his home, and hope you arrive in the middle of the night with your damned camera stuffed safely in your bags, and turned off. This is not just a “story,” as your media mercenary alter ego would have you believe. This is your life.