The dead man was an African, his skin deep black but with European features, perhaps a Somali. He seemed to have been one of the foreign fighters who had come to Chechnya to join the jihad, and finally made his rendezvous with his Maker in this bleak corner of the Caucasus. He looked like a decent young man: someone you would ask directions from if you were lost in a strange city, or trust with your camera to take a photograph of you.
Later – and I was to think of him often – I imagined him standing with his cheap luggage and polyester suit in an airport on his way to the holy war, nervous but excited. And I thought of a family somewhere going about its daily business, squabbling sisters and nagging mother, not knowing that their son was lying here in the wreckage of a Chechen house where he’d died fighting someone else’s war.
I had had enough of Komsomolskoye. We hurried back to our car, a battered Russian military jeep driven by a young Chechen called Beslan, who prided himself on his driving skills. We had four hours before the only Moscow flight of the day left from Nazran Airport in Ingushetia. Beslan promised to get us there in good time. He gunned the engine as we swung out on to the main road, and we careered westwards towards the border. Robert and I were jammed in the back seat with our Chechen guide, Musa, an official in the pro-Moscow government who talked us through checkpoints by waving his government ID. Two Russian policemen, whom we had hired for $50 a day as bodyguards, shared the front passenger seat. Halfway to the border, we saw a Russian Mi-24 helicopter gunship hovering menacingly over a copse, from which smoke was rising. The chopper turned slowly in the air to face us.
The next thing I remember was that the view of damp fields in the windscreen was replaced by a wall of earth. I recall bracing my arms as hard as I could against the front seats, and there was a moment of great physical stress and then relief as I felt my body yield to the overpowering laws of physics and fly forward through the windscreen. Fortunately for me the glass had been shattered seconds before by the head of one of our police escorts.
The moments that followed were filled with infinite peace. I lay on my back on the gravel of the road, spread-eagled, looking up at the douds drifting across the big Chechen sky. I was conscious of being alive in a way I have never been before or since, and though I realized that I was probably badly injured, the signals were somewhere far away, like a ringing phone which could be quietly ignored. Slowly, I flexed my fingers along the surface of the tarmac, rolling tiny stones and bits of grit back and forth. Somewhere, I could hear voices, and I breathed deeply through my nose to check for the smell of gasoline, or cordite, or burning. I smelled only the smell of clay, and the flowering grasses by the roadside.
My mind frequently wanders back to this moment, ascribing to it different meanings as the mood takes me. The only thought that I can attribute with complete honesty to that time and that place is this: I felt a deep contentment that I had someone in Moscow who was waiting for me, and an overwhelming urge to return to Xenia and to Moscow, and never leave again.
A bearded face loomed above me, and began to speak. Something like a reflex took hold of me; I began answering, quite calmly, and issuing orders. My shoulder was dislocated, and, I suspected, some ribs cracked. I told the Chechen villager to put his foot on my collarbone, pick up my useless right arm, and pull. Shock must have blocked the pain, because I continued giving instructions until the joint popped back into place. I saw Robert kneeling by my side, and he gently unwound the scarf from my neck and made a makeshift sling. As I sat up I saw that Beslan’s beloved jeep had crashed into a four-foot-deep shell hole blasted in the road. Beslan himself, I noted with some satisfaction, had smashed his head on his own steering wheel, and was dabbing away blood. The two policemen were more badly injured, lying by the roadside, concussed.
Things started to move quickly. I produced money to pay off everyone. A car was summoned from the nearest village to take Robert, Musa and myself onwards. I had only two thoughts in my mind – to get on the plane, and never to return to Chechnya. Even when our second car hit a pothole and my injured shoulder was dislocated a second time, the desire to head for home blotted out all pain, indeed everything else in the world unconnected to pushing on to Ingushetia, and safety.
Somehow, we made it. Nazran Airport was crawling with officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the KGB’s successor, who fingered our accreditations suspiciously and questioned us as to where we’d been. Robert and I made a suspicious pair. Both of us wore the Russian military coats and black knitted caps which were our feeble disguise against foreigner-hunting kidnappers. We were both filthy, and smelled strongly of smoke and corpses. With a superhuman effort of will, I maintained my calm, insisting that we had never left Ingushetia and never been into the forbidden territory of Chechnya. As we boarded the bus to the plane, more FSB officers rushed up, wanting to look at Robert’s undeveloped photos. I cajoled and joked with them and, after an agonizing few minutes, they went away. We walked up the steps of the old Tupolev 134 in dread that they would change their minds and haul us off the plane, and back into the world of Chechnya.
Only later that evening at the American Medical Centre in Moscow, as a doctor from Ohio cut the stinking Russian Army T-shirt off my body with a pair of cold steel scissors, did I burst into tears of pain and relief. Xenia waited for me outside the Casualty Department. Never had I felt so profoundly that I had come home.
War and memory are strange things. You see disturbing things which skitter off the surface of your mind like a pinball bouncing down the board. But once in a while some memory or image or thought suddenly lodges in a hole and penetrates right into your deepest heart. For me that memory was the dead black man in Komsomolskoye, who began to haunt my dreams. My shoulder healed quickly enough, but my mind seemed to have been infected. At Xenia’s dacha, we walked along the river, chatting. But when we found an empty meadow where the spring silence was broken only by the creaking of the pines swaying in the wind, I collapsed into a deep, damp snow bank and refused to move. ‘Just leave me here for a few minutes,’ I whispered, my eyes fixed on the grey-white sky. ‘Just leave me alone.’
I became convinced that the unquiet spirit of the dead rebel I had touched had entered me. I relived the moment of physical contact with his cold cheek, and believed that somehow, like an electric charge, the man’s spirit had jumped into my living body. I dreamed of the churned fields of Komsomolskoye, and imagined the angry souls of the dead men flapping limply along the ground, like wounded birds.
It was Xenia who pulled me out of it. She drove a reluctant Robert and me to a church near my apartment, where we both lit candles for the dead men. But more importantly, she helped me by making a home, a real family home, the first I had had since leaving London seven years before. I left my bachelor apartment and rented a dacha deep in the Moscow woods near Zvenigorod, not far from Xenia’s parents’ at Nikolina Gora. We painted the rooms bright colours. I bought Dagestani kilims and old furniture, and we dismantled the old Russian stove in the living room and used the heavy old tiles to build an open fireplace where the stove had stood. Xenia replaced the brass knobs on the grate we had bought with two small clay heads she had sculpted. One was a portrait of me, the other of her, and our little clay images faced each other across the hearth.
Epilogue