As for you? You’re grateful to the fighter. You appreciate what pain is. You still haven’t forgotten when it was you dreaming of relief from a bullet. He brought her a swift death rather than letting her perish in agony. He released her soul from the burden of torture and for this she forgave him. But what were these women doing in a city under siege? Did they have nowhere else to go? Surely they have some place they could go. All the rest of the city’s residents have gone somewhere. Perhaps they saw the columns of refugees abandoning the doomed city and decided to remain true to these ruins till the end. Perhaps they realized that the most horrific image born of war is refugees.
You saw the refugees leaving the almost dead city and felt a strange, bitter mix of shame and fury, humiliation and hatred. Gazing at these people driven by the fear of death to face the untold humiliations and insults of drunken, louse-infested enemy soldiers, you shuddered as though discovering something chilling. You saw drivers in private cars scavenging the roads for passengers. These were Chechens charging fantastically high prices, a month’s earnings for cab drivers in peacetime, to drive their fellow countrymen out of the zone of fire. You saw people, the most dangerous species on the planet, omnivorous predators, meekly paying these vultures their money to save their pitiful lives and you understood: the enemy has won against them.
People striving to reach enemy territory, where they’ll face endless humiliation just so they can rejoice over a can of rotten stew and a packet of pasta while looking to the enemy for protection – an enemy who has come to destroy, to ‘filter’ all the males ‘between the ages of ten and sixty’. The enemy has not conquered them, as there was no fight: he has defeated them. Perhaps those who meet the enemy with weapons in their hands will lose the battle and the enemy will conquer them, but the enemy can never defeat them. Because their spirit is invincible. These refugees do not equal the entire nation, in whose name its finest sons have doomed themselves to a fiery hell. That nation is fighting by their side, it is dying from bombs and shells, it is starving and freezing, disappearing without trace and looking its executioners in the eye, silently falling from the bursts of automatic gunfire upon the tormented earth of its desolate motherland. This nation is invincible. Just as its spirit is invincible. But perhaps you are too harsh on these people saving themselves and their children from a senseless, cruel death beneath the rubble of houses and from the shrapnel of bombs and shells? Don’t people have a right to save their lives by any available means? Of course they do. You are far too harsh on them. You cannot blame people for choosing humiliation over death. For fleeing from hell, hoping for proper remains and a proper resting place after death. And can you judge those drivers growing rich on the nation’s disaster? Why bother? One cannot judge these vultures; God will be their judge. Everyone can be understood. And should be understood. Then why does it seem as if the enemy has humiliated your motherland not through war and devastation, not through starvation and killing, not through violence against civilians, but through the swarms of refugees, with their desperately pitiful look, turning to their centuries-old enemy for protection from death? Why are you haunted by a sense of shame and hate, humiliation and fury? Why do you not want to live, you desperately don’t want to, after the terrible image of faces distorted with fear, of people driven into the unknown – into the known – by the instinct for self-preservation? Why is there such gloom in your soul that you start to hate life even more than you hate the enemy? God will be the judge of us all. May He forgive us.
8
The world’s best composers are Edvard Grieg and James Last. So different in style. They are the best because they have been granted that title here, by you, inside the flaming ring that encircles the besieged city. You already knew these composers before, and many others besides, but only now have you recognized them as the finest.
You were wandering as usual through the city’s ruins, filming after the latest bombardment. You saw a half-ruined house, an old building from the seventies. For the Chechens that is relatively old. After all, not a single Chechen house has stood for longer than fifty years. Ever since Civilized Russia arrived in the Wild Caucasus… The house is a good one. Clearly built with money earned by seasonal work in Kazakhstan, Siberia or central Russia. In Chechnya among those of a certain age you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t travelled for seasonal work at least once. In our beloved republic, despite enjoying vast natural resources, efficient agriculture with fine pasture for animal husbandry, and being industrially developed, unemployment among the indigenous population reached disastrous levels. The Chechens, no matter how highly qualified, could only dream of finding work, even a rank-and-file job, in many sectors in their home republic during the reign of the ‘most just and humane system on Earth’. Jobs in those sectors were available only to members of other ethnic groups living in Chechnya, first and foremost the Russians. And that was why the natives left each spring for the construction sites of Russia. They had to survive somehow.
Under the battered canopy are quite a few scattered cassettes. There’s a whole range of styles and genres of music. You grab the first two that come to hand: Edvard Grieg and James Last. You’re a bit peeved not to have found any more of your favourites. But never mind, you don’t get to pick and choose in war. You take both the cassettes with you. You could imagine the original owner putting on Grieg’s music and drifting into a deep reverie… This brilliant music cleanses his soul, making his thoughts purer. But that would be too trite. A tired old literary cliché. So you imagine nothing, just silently leave with the cassettes. Besides, in this strange, drawn-out war you’ve become something of an egotist. Or rather you were an egotist from the outset, along with all your fellow human beings, but until now you’ve managed to mask your personal ethics. In this place, though, such pleasantries are meaningless and your egotism shines through more clearly. There is somewhere for you to listen to the tapes: you have an old car, a Lada, with a young fighter at the wheel. The commander of the Almaz unit has seen to that. In this car you travel the city, filming its death on a video camera. You have naïve hopes of preserving at least some of this footage. You also drive to the firing positions in this car. It has a stereo with the usual selection of pop-music cassettes. But from now on you will listen to these composers and be carried away for a time into the mysterious, fantastical world of classical music. This music will accompany you on all your trips across the city. The sound of this mysterious music will remind you that you are vastly alone in this unjust world. And James Last’s ‘Lonely Shepherd’ will accentuate and deepen your loneliness and longing, seeking and finding an ally in you. The music of Edvard Grieg and James Last will ring out to the roar of guns, and the rumble of bombs, and the whirr of shrapnel. And it will stop ringing out on the snowy, blazing night when the abandoned car catches fire…