‘So you wanted to chronicle this tragedy. If I’ve understood you correctly?’ the officer clarifies before continuing. ‘We know that you’re a journalist. We’ve read all your articles – you weren’t lying to us. I found them interesting. You usually write on themes like…’ He lists all the topics you write on. ‘Listen, I believe you. Do you mind if we drop the formalities?’ He shifts to a more confiding tone. ‘It’s just that they had to be convinced that you were telling the truth.’ He has consented not to be one of them. ‘I’ve come because I need your help. That’s right. We need your help and I personally am quite sure that your humane values won’t allow you to refuse. You are free to refuse, of course… But do you think that would be wise?’
‘How can I help?’
‘You can save a man’s life. He’s a good guy, a man worth saving. He’s being held prisoner by your side. Here he is’ – he shows a photo of a young man. ‘He’s a major. And an only son, like you. We know that he’s alive and we’ve a rough idea who’s holding him. If you write a letter asking them to swap him for you, he could be saved.’
‘Well, I can write a letter easily enough. But a letter doesn’t mean that the rebels will want to hand over a major for me. I’m just a journalist to them, an outsider.’
‘You’re more than just a journalist to them. I think they’ll hand over a major for you. Trust me, I know what I’m saying.’
‘OK. But who should I address the letter to?’
‘You just write it. We’ll do the rest. OK?’
You write a brief letter, addressed to some unknown recipient, in which you ask them to swap you for Major So-and-So; then you are taken to the cellar. But soon you are summoned to your old friend the colonel. He is waiting for you outdoors, armed and in uniform.
‘Do you have any close friends among the rebels?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Who might be worried about your plight?’
‘Anyone at all. I used to work with them, after all. And there weren’t that many Chechen journalists working among them. So all the rebels knew us.’
‘You’re lying again! Why can’t you tell us the truth?’ he breaks into a shout. ‘You want me to send you to the special forces for them to train on?”
‘I don’t understand what I’ve lied about. I was telling the truth.’
‘The truth? You were telling the truth? The rebels have taken two of our soldiers and they’re demanding we exchange you for them! Otherwise they will kill them! But don’t get your hopes up! We won’t swap you! We’ll swap your guide for those two soldiers! And if the rebels don’t agree, then you can kiss goodbye to your guide’s home village! We’ll raze it to the ground! And you personally will be responsible for the destruction of that village! You, and nobody else! You won’t leave here alive, I’m telling you! You’ll go to the filtration camp, and your guide will go home. Your mission to infiltrate us has failed, and now they’ve decided to get you out? Take him!’ he orders.
You don’t believe him, thinking this must be just another ruse, but you are wrong. Your friend Adlan has indeed spent several days waiting in ambush with his group and they’ve captured two officers whom they want to exchange for you. And the colonel has done his utmost to see that the exchange does not take place, to see you join the ranks of those missing without a trace, but he has lost. They do not torture you again, although they continue leading you off to interrogations. But as both sides already know the questions and answers, the interrogations do not last long, usually around two or three hours. Now they have switched entirely to a war of nerves, and so far you are more or less coping. Although it is hard to say which of their tortures, the psychological or the physical, is the more barbaric.
One morning, the doctor comes for you earlier than usual. He lets you take a tepid shower – the first wash in your two weeks here. He carefully tends to your wounds. He removes the old stitches from your split lip and puts in new ones, using a special absorbable catgut suture. An officer friend of his brings you a new army shirt. You ask what all this fuss is about, and the doctor replies: ‘Today they’re taking you to a filtration camp. You’re unlikely to get your dressing changed much there.’
You feel chilled by this news, but, trying to stay calm, you ask, ‘Which filter camp are they taking me to? Do you know?’
‘You’ll be taken to PAP-1,’[32] the officer says. ‘I managed to find that out. The situation there is rather worse than in the others, though you’re not likely to find it much worse than here. The key to your survival is that you mustn’t change your story, come what may. No matter what they do to you, stand firm. You can do it. You’ve already proved it here.’
‘Thank you,’ you say to these true friends. ‘I’ll never forget you.’
They feed you some salad, stewed meat and tea with biscuits.
‘Andreyich, maybe you can find him a jacket?’ the doctor asks the officer. ‘He’ll freeze if it’s cold there.’
‘Doc, there’s no need…’ You stop the officer who has already got up. ‘You’ve done far too much for me as it is. Maybe I won’t be needing any jackets there…’
They look at each other and silently shake their heads, lost for words.
‘Thank you, for everything! Well, I’ll be off. I want to say goodbye to my friend before they come for me,’ you say, breaking the silence.
‘Yes, of course. They’ll be here for you soon. Go say goodbye to him,’ the doctor says.
‘And don’t worry about your friend. We’ll look out for him,’ the officer promises.
You barely have time to say goodbye to your comrade before you’re loaded into an armoured personnel carrier and the colonel drives you to the filter camp. The ‘filtration centre’, or, more accurately, concentration camp, scares both you and the officers, because there have been endless rumours about it, each more fantastical than the next. According to these rumours, what goes on there is enough to make Khankala and its torture seem like a holiday resort. And so you brace yourself for something still more terrible. You’re met by the head of the filter camp, a dry, stubby little man of around fifty. They blindfold you and take you somewhere, then they place you face down on the concrete. And they start beating you. Several of them have surrounded you and are beating you. In silence. You too remain silent. Groaning and shouting would be pointless. In any case, this beating could be the prelude to something worse… Suddenly the beating stops. They help you up and carefully, warning you about obstacles so you don’t bang your head, lead you to a cell.
10
As it goes, the filter camp, with all the brutality of its system, does not bring up such dreadful memories as the military base at Khankala. The filtration centre vaguely resembled a Russian prison, and life there was possible, if you could describe the prisoners’ existence in even the best of Russia’s prisons as ‘life’. The only difference was that in a prison, you’d have a bare modicum of rights, if only in theory, whereas in the filter camp there weren’t even token rights. There were zero rights; you were entirely dependent on the mercy of the team on duty and the investigator or operative allocated to you. In this system, the investigator did not play such a key role as in an ordinary non-military case. Here the most important work was done by the intelligence operative assigned to you. He decided how you lived, when you underwent torture and beatings and so forth. And thus he played an essential role in the prisoner’s life. The operative assigned to me wasn’t too bad. I met him around fifteen minutes after arriving in the cell. I’d been summoned for interrogation. There were three men in the room, and they were firing the same old wearisome questions. I answered on autopilot, without even thinking. By now I was as sick of the answers as of the questions. One of them broke from the monotony of question-and-answer by throwing me a new question about my reasons for remaining in the war zone – besides the journalistic work, which ‘nobody would have asked you to account for; there’s a war on, after all’.
32
The notorious camp PAP-1 (Passenger Bus Garage No. 1) was located in the Leninsky district of Grozny. It was in operation from February 1995 until the end of the first war.