At the turn of that year, the start of the last year of the twentieth century, I reached a dead end in myself. I felt great tiredness, but sleep came fitfully and brought no relief. The black dog of depression which had periodically stalked me throughout my life took hold. I thought often of the dead Yana, and felt mediocre and spent. I passed long, empty evenings staring out of my apartment window at the falling snow, listening to the muffled noise of passing traffic.
I met Xenia Kravchenko at a dinner party thrown by a Belgian friend in her apartment in the backstreets near the Arbat. Xenia was tall and willow-thin, with a tomboyish haircut and worn jeans. What I remember most vividly about our first meeting was not her appearance or anything we said, but an overwhelming, almost supernatural realization that Xenia was the woman I was going to marry. That sounds foolish, but I felt it, powerfully. ‘Suddenly, he realized that all his life he had loved precisely this woman’ – I quoted the line from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita to a mutual friend that very evening. A few days later, Xenia and I kissed for the first time on a park bench on Patriarch’s Ponds, not far from where Woland, Bulgakov’s devil incarnate, first appeared in Moscow.
Xenia was intelligent and beautiful. The two words go easily together. But in fact the truly intelligent, those women who are aware of their own power over men, realize that they have something of the Medusa in them. Xenia had a great cathartic force hidden behind her calm, an uncanny ability to expel people from their old selves. I felt, after my first weeks with Xenia, that I had been purged by her Gorgon presence, undergone a profound change. It was at times cruel, but it was epiphanous.
There was no great crisis or drama to it. On the contrary, I often found Xenia maddeningly diffident about life in general, and indeed about me in particular. She seemed to drift in a cloud of invincible innocence, refusing to take the world around her seriously. Yet she became a mirror on which I found my life violently dissected. My addiction to the phantasmagoria of Moscow, the voyeuristic streak which led me to seek out all that was most putrid and sordid and corrupt – all this suddenly seemed childish, and tired, and false. Though I didn’t really realize it as it was happening, Xenia was shearing me away from my old, corrupt self, forcing me to think of myself as someone normal and whole. A potential husband and father, even.
Xenia’s looks and self-confidence cushioned her against the harshness of the reality which surrounded her. She had somehow managed to remain aloof from the swinish, grubby life of Moscow. It was as if she and her family had survived from another, gentler age of Russia. She came from a long line of artists, and lived in a magnificent apartment which had been in the family since 1914. The old place was packed with dusty antique furniture and paintings; it had a stillness and permanence to it that I had hitherto only seen in old English country houses. The family’s dacha, too, where I write these words, stood on a high bank of the Moscow River at Nikolina Gora among the country cottages of Stalin’s cultural élite, just across the road from the Prokofievs, relatives of the composer, and the Mikhalkovs and the Konchalovskys, families of writers, painters and filmmakers. Her family had known their neighbours for three generations, and they all seemed to have grown as charmingly feckless as the defenceless gentry in The Cherry Orchard. Their charm and absentmindedness was quite unlike the iron-willed Soviet generation which my mother represented. They had been among the lucky ones; their lives had, through good fortune, not been scarred by the Soviet century.
Xenia moved into my apartment. We ate our meals in my bedroom, with its blood-red walls, as my cat rolled in a pool of sunlight by the window. Xenia would stay in when I went to work, sketching and painting, and when I came back we cooked large curry dinners and drank cheap red wine. I was as happy as I have ever been.
In autumn 1999, a new war began in Russia. Its opening shots were not bullets but massive bombs placed in the basements of apartment houses on the outskirts of Moscow and Volgodonsk, in southern Russia. I stood among the smoking rubble of destroyed buildings in the Moscow suburbs of Pechatniki and on the Kashirskoye Highway as firemen dug through the wreckage of the very ordinary lives which lay strewn about. Cheap sofas were splintered to matchwood among the piles of bricks, and plastic toys crunched under my feet. In all, over three hundred were killed in the attacks.
Chechen rebels were blamed, and within weeks the Russian Army was rolling into the breakaway rebel republic. Foreign reporters were banned from travelling independently, except in Kremlin-orchestrated bus tours which carefully avoided the front lines. I spent much of the winter devising new ways of getting to Chechnya covertly, sometimes with the rebels, sometimes with pro-Moscow Chechens, and several times by attaching myself to Russian journalists and striking deals with local Russian commanders to spend time with their units.
On my last trip to Chechnya – the thirteenth – I and my friend Robert King, a photographer, found ourselves near the village of Komsomolskoye. The Russian Army had trapped the remnants of the main rebel force, which had retreated from Grozny, in the small hamlet and had been pounding it for three days with rockets and artillery. We arrived on the fourth day, just as the dawn fog was lifting, to find that the Russian battalions which had been dug in around the village for days were gone, leaving only drifts of litter and fields of mud churned by tank tracks. We drove into Komsomolskoye unchallenged.
Other Chechen towns and villages I had seen had been bombed flat, the houses replaced with deep, smoking craters. This place was different. The village had been fought over house by house, and every building was riddled with meticulous patterns of bullet holes and the walls punched through by shells. The villagers’ vegetable plots were criss-crossed with the doomed rebels’ shallow trenches and improvised fortifications. The place smelled strongly of cordite, of burned wood, of fresh-turned earth, and of death.
The rebels’ bodies lay in groups of three or four. The first we saw were in the corner of a house, piled face-up among the debris of the collapsed roof. Their hands were tied, and their chests churned into a bloody mess by bullets. Further on, we came across the corpse of another rebel, a giant of a man with a bushy red beard, his hands secured behind his back with twists of fencing wire. Buried deep in the side of his head was a Russian entrenching tool with which he had been beaten to death. In a narrow ditch were a row of bodies, tangled promiscuously together, lying where they had fallen after being machine-gunned. Robert moved among the wreckage snapping photos, his professional instincts taking over. I scribbled in my notebook as I walked, spilling the images on to the page as words as fast as I could – perhaps in order that they would not linger in my mind.
In all, we counted over eighty bodies, and this was only the edge of the village. In all, the Russians claimed to have killed eight hundred of rebel commander Ruslan Gelayev’s men in and around Komsomolskoye. I had little stomach to go further. I was also nervous of mines and booby-traps. I walked over to a breeze-block house which had been partially burned down. The corrugated concrete roof had collapsed and shattered among a jumble of iron beds and plastic picnic chairs. Among the shards of the roof I noticed a blanket, which seemed to be wrapped around a body. I picked up a piece of roofing – a foot-long fragment of tile – and began clearing the debris. I gingerly moved the blanket to reveal a man’s face, and as I did so the tile touched his cheek. The flesh was hard and unyielding, absolutely nothing like touching a human at all.