A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (30 page)

It was the Cossack colonel, Ramzan came to believe, who had tied the knot in his intestines. His deep timbre could constipate the Volga. The smoke of three daily packs blew through his sentences. He spoke with a velvety menace as he asked Ramzan if the sun was shining over the village, and the collision of the colonel’s tone and the childlike question gave Ramzan the impression that to the man on the other end of the line death was an unremarkable hazard of his trade. The sun was shining, beaming even, yet Ramzan felt compelled to lie, to say the cloud cover sat as thick as spoiled milk, as though enough small lies would absolve him of the larger truths divulged. But he didn’t lie. He said yes. The sun shone. The colonel grunted in approval, then read from the military meteorological report for the village. Static breathed through the transmission. Ramzan lifted the antenna toward the sky like a lightning rod pulling the full force of the colonel’s voice from the heavens. When reception returned, the colonel asked about the silver Makarov pistol.

But when Ramzan left his house in early December 2004, two weeks before Dokka was disappeared, he still had forty-five minutes before hearing the Cossack colonel’s voice for the first time. A blue nylon duffel bag the size and slump of a dead cat dangled from his wrist; inside
swung the satellite phone. He opened the back door and, stepping into the wind, crossed the field. The sun filled the frozen slant of the outhouse half roof, but the privy hadn’t yet consumed his hope and dread, as it soon would, and he passed without looking back, walking as snow hardened into the deep treads of his leather boots, following the narrow corridor of bedsheets left stiff on the clothesline, over the brittle yellow grass, over his grandparents’ plot, to the uneven edge of the field and into the forest.

Snow had thickened the ground. The quiet of his house followed him into the woods. Two hundred meters in, raising his head in a long scream, he tore a hole in the silence through which he could walk more freely. His father, he hoped, would mistake it for the wounded bawl of his pack. Before the wars, the winter had been warmer. A meteorologist might beg to differ, but weather prediction was an act of infidel witchcraft that could not be trusted.

For the duration of the three-kilometer hike, he scanned the snow but found no tracks wider than a rabbit’s foot. The conditions that allowed the forest to flourish had devastated its wildlife. The village economy depended upon logging, and when the enterprise and its administration vanished with the Soviet flag, the villagers were left without the means or infrastructure to extract any real money from the forest. So they hunted. Aided by the wartime influx of munitions, they hunted deer, wild boar, brown bears, and wolves like men who believed they would always be hungry and the forest would always be full.

The cell of subsistence hunting eventually metastasized into the gun-running operation that would take Dokka’s fingers and transform Ramzan into a man who hiked three kilometers in December to make a phone call. His first taste of trading came when he worked for a small crafts concern that bloomed under the relaxed regulations of perestroika. He scavenged the mountains for the stone sculptures of shaman artisans. The hamlets he found were no more than high-altitude islands in a sea of mining waste, and he exchanged petrol, medical supplies,
and tinned food for the carved stone. The artisans always chose to bargain through a
shura
of elders, upon whom time had acted like a substance that repeatedly dissolved and refroze their faces, and Ramzan, in his early twenties, felt like a foreigner among these aged creatures, and nearly always gave much more than the carvings were worth. To his mind, the stone sculptures of goat hooves, a child’s hands, and a mutilated deer weren’t worth the last spittlely sip of a shared vodka bottle. He took the sculptures to an industrial park outside of Grozny, where they were examined, priced, crated, and shipped to distant countries where wealthy cosmopolitans would pay vast sums to display the hoof of a Chechen goat.

In 1999, years since Ramzan had ventured into the mountains for sculptures, he traded cured meat for shotgun shells in a neighboring village. A welder there made homemade ammunition. New buckshot was prohibitively priced on the black market, so the ingenious man packed the casings with ball bearings cannibalized from trolley wheels. They exchanged words before ammunition and meat, and soon realized that each had worked in the industrial park. The welder explained that immediately following the birth of his first son he had begun working as a night watchman at the industrial park so he could, at the very least, get a good night’s sleep. They talked about how, in 1991, the crafts concern had stopped purchasing authentic mountain sculptures and begun mass-producing them in Grozny with the help of a professor at the Fine Arts College and the serf-labor of his undergraduate sculpture class. The recollection was a tunnel through which trust traveled. They shared nothing in common but the memory of the industrial park, and it was enough. Ramzan took the welder fresher cuts of meat, and in exchange the welder gave Ramzan a Kalashnikov. Ramzan returned to the welder several days later with the hind legs of a brown bear bleeding in his truck bed.

And one day the welder vanished to join the independence fighters. For the next year, Ramzan struggled to survive. The task, already
a great challenge, was compounded by his diabetic father. In a country where clean water was scarce, insulin should have proved impossible. But Ramzan found a way.

In a small, unassuming collective farm, known locally as the Miracle Fields, Ramzan worked as a petrol farmer for the insurgents, or the Feds, or more likely both. The pipeline running through the untended pear orchard conveyed oil from local wells to a regional refinery, but the pipe was riddled with so many bullet holes that the refinery had long since ceased operations. The reek of rotting, unpicked pears filled the air as Ramzan dug pits, called barns, alongside the pipe. Dark fountains of oil filled the barns, which fed into a system of irrigation channels that, in earlier times, had been used to water the pear trees. Perhaps as much as half of the oil seeped into the soil, into the groundwater below, but the oil spouted from the pipe in such abundance that no one ever thought to seal the barns with concrete or plastic. Twice a day, a tanker truck arrived to siphon the oil through a long rubber hose and distribute it to covert factories, where the crude oil was refined into a highly sulfuric diesel with eighty-year-obsolete machinery looted from the National Museum of Oil Production. The women who bottled the diesel in glass jars and sold it on street corners were the nearest entity to a working gas station for several hundred kilometers. Sometimes the moonshine diesel worked, and sometimes it caused the cars to explode, but it always filled the coffers of the insurgents, or the Feds, or more likely both. Ramzan, for his part, was well paid, and he used his earnings to buy insulin and syringes on the black market. Due to regular territorial disputes along the pipeline, the work was more dangerous than the war itself, and Ramzan was sustained not by love for his father but by the fear of failing him.

In 2001, when a band of wounded rebels briefly occupied the village, Ramzan recognized the welder among their ranks. They embraced as brothers, as though bonded in a crucible more dramatic than an industrial park. The welder introduced him to the field commander, a
man with very bad teeth and dental-floss stitches in his chest. Impressed by Ramzan’s familiarity with the mountains and eager to set up supply routes for the coming winter, the field commander referred Ramzan to a Saudi sheikh who had come to Chechnya to support the holy warriors in their
ghazawat
against the infidel oppressor.

The sheikh wasn’t the first foreign Wahhabi Ramzan had seen break sharia law, but he was the first to break it in the name of Internet poker. “The Qur’an specifically says,
‘He who plays with dice is like the one who handles the flesh and blood of swine,’
but makes no mention of playing cards,” the sheikh explained at their initial meeting, conducted between bets in the midst of the quarter-final round of one of his tournaments. The sheikh had perhaps the only working computer in Volchansk, and connected to the Internet—a technology that surely allowed far too much freedom to be pious—via a portable satellite dish. The sheikh, a short, brimming, gourd-like man, smiled at the computer screen. “I play in the morning,” he said, “when it is still late night in Western Europe and America, and the judgment of the other players is clouded by whiskey. All my winnings, of course, go entirely to jihad.”

No fundamentalist undercurrent ran through the national culture before the first war. Sufism had always been the predominant Muslim sect, and Wahhabism was a foreign, wartime import. A few times a year, Arab Wahhabis came through the village in search of recruits. They promised rations, shelter, an eternity in Paradise, and, until that day of glorious martyrdom, a monthly salary of two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars. Few young men followed the monochromatic Wahhabi faith, but many were quite willing to be radicalized for a monthly salary that eclipsed what they would otherwise earn in a year. The war of independence so quickly conflated with jihad because no one cared about the self-determination of a small landlocked republic. Arab states would gladly fund a war of religion, but not one of nationalism. And in this way it didn’t matter who won the war between the Feds and fundamentalists: the notion of a democratic and fully sovereign Chechnya would be
crushed regardless. Martyrdom was the easiest way to make a living, but death didn’t appeal to Ramzan, and he was pleased when the sheikh, gleeful after winning the ten-thousand-dollar tournament, crossed his spindly legs and offered a different proposal.

The real war was one of supply, explained the sheikh, who had been trained as a tax attorney before giving his life to Allah, and would return to tax law in five and a half years, when Allah failed to warn him, for the final time, of his opponent’s full house. The
dzhigits
had to be restocked and rearmed, the sheikh said, and failing to do so was more destructive to morale than a barrage of mortar rounds. At times, the sheikh continued, when the fighters were encamped in mountain caves, without the firepower to defeat a pack of wolves much less the Federal army, the jihad subsisted purely as a prayer in the hearts of its devout adherents. By this point, it was difficult to pretend that a few thousand men hiding in the mountains could overcome one of the world’s largest armies. Yet they had to pretend. The illusion of victory in the minds of the newly converted was, in itself, victory. And morale was essential in maintaining this ancillary conquest for Chechen souls. If the foot soldiers died in bomb blasts, they would blame the Russians. If they died of hunger, they would blame the Wahhabis. Trustworthy transportation was needed more than all the prayers of the Arab world, yet was so difficult to obtain, for the sheikh was a foreigner and didn’t know the land. Ramzan did. In the end, he was easily coaxed. The sheikh gave him an envelope with ten pale green twenty-dollar bills and Ramzan pinched the money with his fingertips. For some reason, he’d always imagined American bills would be thicker.

While his neighbors slogged farther into the forest in search of game, Ramzan drove to Volchansk, Shali, even Grozny. The weapons he would deliver to rebel encampments all came from Russian munitions factories. Some he purchased in bulk from a crooked Federal captain who would order his company to attention when Ramzan arrived, and would
then walk down the line with an open parachute bag as Ramzan read aloud from the sheikh’s handwritten list of needed munitions; in reports to his superiors, the captain would refer to such incidents as rebel ambushes in which his soldiers had no choice but to surrender. Others came through the smuggling routes that ran through the border regions like veins through marble. One day, when discussing supply routes, the sheikh showed him a map of the entire republic, pasted together from a dozen low-resolution pages printed from the Internet. “What’s wrong?” the sheikh asked when Ramzan goggled at the misaligned segments held by peeling tape. It was the first time he had seen a map of his own country. The Soviets had banned maps of the entire republic for fear that such a symbol would serve to foment national solidarity, or, at the very least, make long-haul truckers a little too complacent. In the frenzied smuggling following the Soviet collapse, no one, to Ramzan’s knowledge, had ever thought to sneak a map across the border. And here was one, right in front of him. His country looked like a rectangle drawn by a man suffering from delirium tremens. He hadn’t known that. It did make him feel patriotic. “This is a beautiful map,” Ramzan answered, at last. The sheikh let him keep it.

Over the sixteen months he worked for the sheikh, Ramzan transported semiautomatics, machine gun belts, Makarov pistols, aluminum pails of loose bullets divided by caliber, telescopic sniper rifles, hand grenades, clothes-hanger trip lines, brown paper–wrapped blocks of Semtex, stopwatches, coils of multicolored rubber-coated wires, black-and-white photographs of Russian military bases, maps redrawn to include road blocks and checkpoints and ruins, jars of thick dark grease, red plastic jugs of petrol, batteries, butane lighter fluid, compasses, bandannas, powdered soap, iodine tablets, cigarettes, sacks of rice, spotted potatoes, plum jelly, dried apricots, condensed milk, lentils, ground pepper, communiqués, translucently thin rice paper, pens, envelopes, letters from family members, pay, prayer rugs, paperback Qur’ans, and
steel septic pipes used to launch homemade rockets, which he also transported. Compensation was subject to the exigencies of combat. Sometimes it came in envelopes: U.S., Russian, British, or E.U. currency. Other times as a cut of the delivered goods: a pair of dull leather military boots, a basket of fresh corn, a boar’s hide, a sheepskin overcoat, a silver Makarov pistol. When he felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime.

Combat enlarged the resupply journeys beyond the simple calculations of time and distance. Covering a hundred kilometers could take weeks to prepare for and days to execute. He packed his truck to capacity and used only a frayed blue blanket to conceal its contents. It didn’t matter if the Feds caught him with a butter knife or an atomic bomb. A gunshot would announce the same sentence. He drove toward ridges that sawed farther into the sky as he approached. Danger resided beneath, on, and above the main roads—land mines, patrols, and helicopters—and so he instead followed the trails of shepherds, flattening the tall grasses. Plains grew to foothills and foothills to mountains. He ascended switchbacks so sharp they required three-point turns. Both side-view mirrors snapped off. The rock scraped the paint from the door. Now and then he’d glance down to the gullies of indefinable green funneling toward slivers of water that marked the depth and decline of the land. Cloud cover dwarfed distant cities and villages. Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.