You go into the hospital to take leave of your wounded friend and to give him a shot of pain-relief from your supplies. As you are saying goodbye to him, you intuitively feel someone staring at you. Turning round, you meet the gaze of large black eyes – infinitely deep, like lakes at night, far too beautiful for war. And these eyes meeting yours suddenly glint with an inner lustre. Or perhaps it’s the glimmer of a tear? Her gaze continues to plunge into your eyes as her lips whisper, ‘It’s you? You’re alive?’
‘Strangely enough, yes. As you can see,’ you reply, not quite sure what this question signals – joy or annoyance.
But the owner of the astonishing eyes, a slender, youthful, beautiful dark-haired girl of eighteen or nineteen, dispels your doubts: ‘My God! How glad I am to see you alive! You’re not wounded?’ And receiving a reply in the negative she continues, ‘I need to talk to you. Wait for me in the street.’ You nod and leave.
Of course you remember her. You happened to meet a few times in the encircled city. A native of Grozny, she’d stayed behind along with her brother, bandaging the wounded on the front line and cooking food for the defenders of the capital. The Chechen women have always stirred your admiration: mothers, sisters, daughters, wives. In these troubled times, many of them have found the strength to be with their men, to protect their children from the wild enemy soldiers, to die from the rounds of automatic gunfire. And, through it all, to remain beautiful and feminine. You often recall the speech of a Russian officer in the First Chechen War, given at a checkpoint where his unit was on duty. Addressing the three of you who made up the international group of journalists, he said, ‘You see, they will always remain Chechens. No matter how much we go on the rampage here, we cannot win against them. They lived for seventy years in the same country as us, yet they never became “Soviet people”. I’ve seen what their women are like. They have so much courage and grit that I take my hat off to them. These fragile creatures defend their men so bravely at the checkpoints that there’s no shame in standing down in the face of such powerful love. And I would never take their men away from them. It’s hard to conquer a nation whose women find the strength to defend and remain true to their men. I respect this nation and I’m grateful to their women for having such hearts. You cannot take their men away from them. It is a terrible sin.’ In the pale light of the hospital streetlamp you watch the girl approaching and you take a step towards her. You see that she is agitated.
‘Please don’t think badly of me, but I have to tell you…’ she begins. ‘It’s just I don’t know if I’ll survive, that’s why I’ve decided to talk. No matter what happens, I want you to know that I love you. Since the first day we met. I don’t know why, but from the moment I saw you I felt sure of my love for you, and as time has passed this feeling has only grown stronger. I don’t need you to search in your heart right now to answer whether you love me. I know you had no idea of my feelings. I need only one thing: promise that you’ll find me when you are able to. If I’m alive, then find me alive, but if not, find my grave and make sure it’s mine. I promise you will come to love me. I feel it. I’m sure that you will love me. It will all work out for us – my intuition has never let me down. Do you promise you’ll find me?’
‘I promise. No matter what, I’ll find you. Even if it takes me the rest of my life. I’ll find you and ask if you still love me, and if you answer “yes”, I’ll take you with me straight away. If I make it out of here alive…’
‘You will survive. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. I feel it. Believe me, I know, without you I can never be happy. But now we have to part. You’re going with the advance guard, they’re waiting for you. I’m sure we’ll be together. Stay alive… Stay alive and find me…’ she whispers, disappearing into the snowy darkness.
Neither of you is aware that you are seeing each other for the last time. Yet her intuition didn’t deceive her. You survived. So did she. Several years later you kept your promise. You found her. Or rather, you found her mother… She hadn’t mentioned you to anyone, she left you no letters. But you knew she waited for you. And now she was married. Her unsuspecting mother told you her address and let you know she’d been married against her will. You went to find her. But you didn’t meet her. There was no point. You couldn’t have asked her the key question, and without that question the meeting would have brought her nothing but pain. You merely saw her one last time, silently bade her farewell and left without being seen. She probably never found out that she also kept her promise; you fell in love with her… You managed to fall in love with her in the brief moment her hurried whispering lasted in the snowy night. With her astonishing confession of love as she stood facing the Angel of Death, she will remain in your memory for ever. For the rest of your life you will love perhaps not her, the actual woman, but that mysterious night and that beautiful confession. You will love a woman capable of declaring her love while gripping an assault rifle and standing between two worlds. And perhaps you owe your strange survival on so many occasions after that night to her confession and your promise? Or perhaps, intuitively sensing that you couldn’t survive any other way, she deliberately gave you a straw of life to cling to? Who knows? But all the same you will believe in the sincerity of her love for you. And this belief will preserve in your memory one of your warmest recollections.
14
These days and nights are so alike and so unlike each other. You greet each dawn to the rumble of guns and the whine of aircraft, and, having set up a watch, you sleep like a log to this Satanic music. And each night you fight your way across the white fields, while in the sky above fiery flowers burst into bloom. Only these bouquets are offered not to you but to the Angel of Death. Each day flourishing towns are turned into ruins merely because your path cuts through them. A profound sense of guilt and grief haunts you as you see houses so lovingly built turn to dust before your eyes. The dull, gnawing sensation that you are almost as dangerous to your own people as your deadly enemies expels from your heart all other emotions – fear, pain, desire for life – filling your heart with one great indelible feeling: hate. This hatred and rage, born of the despicable guile of the adversary, who can only destroy towns but dares not enter them until after you’ve left, makes your spirit invincible.
You leave your wounded comrades to be hidden by locals,[46] who understand perfectly well what will become of them if they are found by the enemy. The mortally wounded are given hand grenades. They know what to do with them. And you go on your way. If the enemy crosses your path, you simply wipe them out. But you do not seek encounters with them, and the enemy tries not to cross your path. They prefer to fight you from a safe distance, and then to enter the village you’ve left and fight its civilian population. Your enemy has always been mindlessly cruel to those who are weakest. The master of world literature, Leo Tolstoy, who served as an officer in the Russian Army and fought against your people in the nineteenth century, drew attention to this trait in his brilliant tale Hadji Murat. Yet he was perhaps alone among the enemy camp in grasping the essence of your people’s fierce resistance to the Russian invaders. And once he’d understood it, he was the first man brave enough to glance into the inner world of his former foes. He was the first to create faithful translations of selections of Chechen folklore. It was he who acknowledged the mindless cruelty of Russian soldiers towards the defenceless and the weak. Such are their rules of war. But you need to walk on. Straight ahead.
46
The route for the breakout from Grozny ran through the following villages: Alkhan-Kala, Zakan-Yurt, Shaami-Yurt, Katar-Yurt and Gekhi-Chu in western Chechnya. From Gekhi-Chu the route swerved sharply into the mountain forest, which extended all the way to the mountainous Shatoy district, where we arrived from 12 to 14 February 2000.