‘I noticed them a while ago. Well, what of it? Let them go. They’re not after a fight, so that’s OK,’ the major replies. But the policeman does not let it rest and he runs off to complain to the colonel. The colonel arrests the major and gives orders for an ambush to be set up on the path of the resistance fighters. And it is the rear of the unit that runs into the ambush. In the brief battle, they lose eight men and several are wounded and taken prisoner. The enemy loses three armoured personnel carriers, two infantry fighting vehicles and their fatalities alone number thirty. At dawn the guerrillas shoot down a second helicopter. Among the dead is the British journalist, Roddy. Usually they wouldn’t allow him to stay in the front or rear, as these are the most dangerous places. He was meant to stay in the middle of the column. But it seems he got a little confused in the dark and fell behind. He died instantly. Such an easy death is what every warrior dreams of.
The events of that night were retold from the accounts of eyewitnesses: the villagers and the fighters breaking out of the encirclement. The policeman was later found and dealt with. In the morning you left the sealed-off village in the car of a policeman who was on your side. His ID carried sufficient weight that at the checkpoint they didn’t bother to check your papers or search you. Only now that you were in relative safety did you realize how thin you’d become: in the two months you’d been on the move, you’d lost twenty-two kilos. You were perpetually hungry, but you couldn’t manage to eat a normal portion. Your stomach started to hurt unbearably from even a small amount of food. Your body had grown unaccustomed to food and it violently rejected whatever you tried to eat. And you suffered for a long time before you could feed yourself properly and without upsetting your stomach. You still didn’t know that it was the last time you’d take to the forest and you lived in the hope of seeing your comrades. And that hope dragged on.
27
Then the long, agonizing days of waiting began. The attempts to find temporary work to bring in at least some kind of income. You came to the realization that nothing you’d experienced so far could compare to the agony of sitting around and waiting, feeling redundant. Accustomed to living an active life, you found it extremely hard to take this enforced idleness. Then came the news of Angel’s death. Alongside him died the finest fighters and some of your closest friends. Over the past few years you were always trying to keep some distance, not to get too close to anyone. You’d learnt to know, through some sixth sense, when a particular fighter was doomed. You could tell who would die soon – you didn’t know how, but you could feel it. And that’s why you tried to stay aloof. You were tired of losing friends and comrades in this war. There had been many occasions when a fighter you hardly knew had come and bared his soul to you, as if saying farewell to the world. And soon after, that fighter would die. Listening to his dreams, his childhood, his plans for life, you would keenly sense that he had been marked by the Angel of Death. And you didn’t want to get close to those fighters. In a situation where the team means pretty much everything, it’s too easy to make close friends. And so hard to lose them. You too had a small circle of friends, and now you’ve lost even them. Their deaths shocked you so deeply that it took you a long and painful time to emerge from a profound depression.
You had your work for the official Chechen press, first with a newspaper and then with a magazine, that you only found thanks to your writer friends. You led an underground, semi-legal existence. You constantly had to change address – every two or three months, following the age-old rules of underground life – and, given Grozny’s catastrophic shortage of housing, this was not easy. You lived in fear of running into old acquaintances – with the exception of a narrow circle of friends – and particularly former brothers-in-arms who, for whatever reasons, had switched sides to join the occupying authorities. You lived in more or less round-the-clock expectation of arrest or of simply being shot on the spot, which nowadays was common practice. Faced with the choice between arrest and being shot, of course you’d have chosen the latter, like many of your comrades had done. But now you were unarmed, so even that option had gone. Your articles in the newspaper, written under a pseudonym, had led to accusations that you were inciting war against Russia. Then there was hope. The hope that the Chechen people would find the best way to escape from the Russian bone-crushing machine. And there were the dreams where you’d meet your dead brothers-in-arms and occasionally some of the few who were still alive.
The war went on. More comrades and enemies fell. The land continued to be too hot under the feet of the occupying troops. The guerrillas carried out ever more daring operations, and the enemy again began to feel its impotence in the face of the Chechen people’s hatred. And, along with their people, Chechen presidents were killed. And the enemy knew they were doomed to lose this war. Like all the wars that had come before, they would lose this one too. The people, whose finest sons had sacrificed themselves, managed once again to preserve their Chechen spirit. They did not bow down before their nation’s butcher. Your people defeated the enemy, as they had done so many times in history. This great battle was still raging, but for now you had stepped back a little from the thick of it. You were waiting. And you kept waiting and waiting, until you realized there was nobody left to wait for. You had been waiting for someone to contact you on behalf of a warrior, and you remained faithful to this mission till the end.
All your fallen brothers-in-arms had won their battle. They’d departed this world as victors. Those who fall in battle have not lost; it’s only the survivors who lose battles. On both the winning and losing sides. All the survivors have lost. They all die over and over again in their subsequent lives, whereas the fallen die only once. And that’s how you too lost your battle. The fallen were consumed in the sacred flame of battle and they won. While you will continue to glow like an ember of that fire for the rest of your life. And not because you couldn’t die or you were too fond of life, but because you hated life too frequently to let her be rid of you so easily and simply. Too often life for you was worse than death yet you kept on stubbornly choosing it. Now you have to continue running across the blade of the knife and dying every day in your memories. Dying along with all your fallen brothers-in-arms, with each one separately and all of them together, until the Angel of Death comes for you. What form he takes doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.
Epilogue
I often come here to the rocks. I come to listen to the sea. And the sea talks to me. I listen for ages to its unhurried tales of something of its own, something eternal. Thoughts come easily to the sound of its sad whispering; its grandeur cleanses me, freeing me of earthly troubles. To the sound of the slow, pensive whisper of the sea, I often go back there, into the past. I now live in a small, quite beautiful town on the edge of the sea. Here, in the Land of the Midnight Sun, there is peace and calm. Once it was like that in my country. But that world was so long ago that sometimes I wonder whether it existed at all. From here, from the vantage point of time, so distant from those events, I keep running over and over in my head the happenings of the past couple of decades. Trying to understand what our generation did wrong. Was there really no way to avoid bloodshed? Can our generation be to blame for this carnage? There was another way. It was slavish allegiance to the Empire. That’s right, slavish. Not to be a people with rights in a democratic country, and not even to be second-class citizens – to be third-class citizens, ‘persons of Caucasian ethnic origin’. You can only solve the issues of self-determination for nations and peoples in a civilized way if you live in a civilized world. But the world of those peoples who had the cruel misfortune to live on the one-eighth of the earth that was under the patronage of Russia can hardly be called civilized. And our generation bears no guilt for that. We simply acted as our fathers and grandfathers had over the centuries. We had the chance to break free from the deadly friendship that the rulers of Russia had foisted upon our people and we seized that chance. And if it were to happen all over again, none of us late-twentieth-century idealists who believed in the centuries-old dream of our people would choose a different path. We would once again step into the fire and blood, even knowing that we would lose the battle. The Empire won all the battles, yet it could not conquer us, assimilate us and make us its slaves. Winning the battle, it lost the war. The Empire never did manage to obliterate our spirit of freedom And so we were doomed to be free.