Tonight you are at the radio communications post. You often sit here, and you’ve witnessed many events from this post. You witnessed the entire battle of the Black Wolf unit against the attacking enemy forces. You heard how, with several men lost and nearly all of them wounded, including the unit’s commander – only three fighters were unharmed – they were forced to retreat slowly, fighting their way out in ferocious hand-to-hand combat. And nobody broke rank, not even the wounded. While the enemy, stunned by such obstinacy, did not dare push the assault further. The fighting went on the entire day. That day the enemy launched five assaults on Black Wolf’s positions. It was mainly the infantry delivering the attack, supported by artillery, mortar and tank fire. By evening, all that remained at the unit’s positions were half a dozen burning enemy tanks and infantry fighting vehicles and almost an entire company of dead enemy soldiers. Such battles were flaring up with astonishing frequency all around the city’s circular front line. And often they would end with the Russian Army denied even token success.
Today is one of those rare nights when, in the chill air, a disquieting lull freezes over the city like a black shroud. The city seems rapt in prayer, withdrawn into itself, like an ancient old man. In the sky around the city hangs a fiery necklace of illumination rounds, fired by the enemy who have come to kill it. Occasionally you hear long bursts of automatic gunfire in the distance: a sure sign of the clash of hostile reconnaissance teams, those aristocrats of war. It’s the lulls in combat you find difficult. You cannot get used to them. Lulls mean danger. And so you listen especially attentively to the night. The night is silent. Almost angelically peaceful… But you know this is just an illusion: the night is not peaceful at all. A night like this is particularly dangerous. It is like a boa constrictor, playing dead as it waits in ambush for its victim, only to spring to life at the right moment in a dappled, lethal strike. Only the radios, those remarkable surrogates for living people, attest with their crackle that this city, in which you’re listening to the night, is still alive. It is mauled, mortally wounded, but still alive. And it will stay alive for as long as its living defenders remain there. Motionless in the glacial darkness, the city reminds you of a lion, mighty king of the animals, mortally wounded yet still dangerous to the pack of hyenas encircling it with burning eyes, patiently waiting for its death.
The familiar call signs and the usual talk on the airwaves do not distract you from your contemplation. But suddenly you hear an unknown voice in the enemy tongue. It is a Russian radio operator who has hacked into your radio channel. You, too, often hack into their channel, so this is nothing unusual. The operator is making random calls to the defenders of the capital. One of them responds. The bored radio men fill the airwaves with insults and curses, threats and challenges to fight. The other militiamen, who are used to such scenes, do not react to the dialogue between the nervous comrade and the enemy radio operator. But as passions reach boiling point, you decide to intervene.
No – you don’t utter a word; you simply bring the live microphone of the radio set to the speaker, from which quietly flows the magical music of James Last. You could of course have given them Edvard Grieg, but you decided not to. You thought Grieg is better understood when listened to in solitude. The spirit of his music is too independent to be confined to a collective audience. And so you let them listen to the wonderful, sad music of James Last. The airwaves instantly fall quiet, with only the bewildered voice of the Russian radio operator softly saying, ‘Who’s that?’ You reply, ‘James Last, “The Lonely Shepherd”.’ You are perfectly aware that using the airwaves for music is categorically forbidden – radio communications have an altogether different function – but this is a special case.
The sad, enchanting music fills the airwaves, rising to the dark frosty sky like the doomed city’s final prayer. The city prays not for its own salvation: it prays for the salvation of the souls of those destroying it. And it knows that thousands of human souls, both destroyers and defenders, are praying alongside it. Each soul prays for something secret of its own. In this twilight silence, the city softly weeps tears of smoke, flowing straight to the sky, to God. It weeps for itself as it will never be again. Weeps for its inhabitants whom it will never see again. Weeps for its defenders, those who’ve fallen among the bones of the ruined buildings, and those still alive, still defending the city’s mournful shadow with a sacred tenacity. The city weeps for an island of love and life in a sea of hate and death. It knows, it senses, that it will drown in the sea of death and hate; it will choke under the terrible wave of cruelty. Left without its defenders, it will call to the Sky for a long time yet, in the thin voices of crying women and children led to their execution, the mute moans of dying old men, the infinite hatred and scorn for their executioners in the eyes of its gunned-down and tortured inhabitants. And the Sky in response will weep fire. Its fiery tears will fall on the remains of the city, burning up the last souls in the dying city. The Sky will wail with a bloodcurdling howl, like an outcast angel. Again and again the Sky will cast down fiery tears upon those who left without protecting the city to the end. To the last soul. The streets of the city, where once, long ago, happiness smiled, will now for a long time, for endlessly long, be colonized by horror, hate, fear and betrayal. For a long time Grozny will frighten the world with the appalling sight of its ghost.
And so the city prays. Through the rare silence. Through the sad music. Through the black tears of the smouldering ruins. Through the whispered prayers of its defenders. And not a single person dares commit the sacrilege of interrupting the prayer of the great city sentenced to death. After this fantastical music, after the tenuous panpipe, whose trembling sound has faded from the airwaves like the dying moans of a wounded bird, you listen along with the others for several moments to the silence. Then you hear a quiet, almost whispered, ‘Thank you’ – and the psychological battle between deadly enemies ceases for this one extraordinary night. The Sky grants the city respite until dawn. And at dawn, as if ashamed of the night of silence, it will cover the city in a cloak of fire.
9
From time to time the city would experience a lull, if you can call the soft banter between the mortar men and gunners a lull. The defenders would try to make the most of this time. They’d go about their day-to-day business: replacing the tired fighters in the trenches at the first line of defence, washing and mending their clothes and boots, stocking up on food and ammunition. Despite the winter, the city was full of mud. The smog from the blazing industrial plants, the dust from the bombed houses and buildings, the streets and roads ripped up by bombs: all were a source of mud, and there had always been mud in the trenches and dugouts. Under such conditions, the problem of personal hygiene soon arose. For a while I would simply warm up some water on the wood-burning stove which I used for cooking, and I would wash in some secluded spot. This was hardly the same as a bath or shower, but it allowed me to maintain basic hygiene. But one day a comrade came and invited me to go for a wash. When we got to the place, I was quite astonished to find a long terrace hung with rows of hoses and pipes gushing with hot water. Under this improvised communal shower the fighters were washing themselves and laundering their clothes. It turned out that since Soviet times, water from a hot mineral spring located right in the city centre had been routed here through a pipe for drainage, and the fighters had adapted it to their needs. The salts in the water made it unfit for drinking, but for washing it was perfect. The high mineral content made the water an excellent disinfectant. It was piping hot – around 80°C as it emerged from the conduit – so the showers had been set dozens of metres beneath the pipe. This ensured it cooled to the desired temperature. On almost any given day, even under the most horrific of bombardments, you would see fighters washing there. And they would carry on doing so right until the breakout from the besieged city.