Eight Pieces of Empire (26 page)

“Where are we going?” I asked Ivan. “Nothing is even open.”

“You’ll soon find out,” replied Ivan with a smirk.

“Zhirus!”
Musa grinned.

A
zhiru
is a divorced or widowed Chechen woman, or one considered past “marrying age,” one who is exempt from all the traditional Chechen conventions of female chastity. But to call a woman a
zhiru
is not to call her a whore; it simply means that she has a social license to engage in sex.

Musa used his good arm to pull his coat over his lame one. “I’m going to my second wife,” he barked at his first one, who in her gentle but vapid way looked neither surprised nor disappointed and kept sweeping the floor with an old broom. We headed out the door and got into his sputtering Lada, driving down Avturkhanov Street into town. Leafless trees, many with mangled or missing limbs from the months of bombing the city had endured, lined the median, while on either side of the street stretched row after row of windowless, burned-out early-twentieth-century neoclassical buildings—an occasional candle flickering behind thick plastic sheeting in place of glass in the odd apartment still semihabitable. The main square—always vast but now much larger due to the “removal” by bombardment of most structures that had once defined it—boasted the remains of Dudayev’s presidential palace on the right and the pile of concrete rubble that was once the parliament building on the left.

We ended up in a neighborhood of the single-story homes that seemed to have gotten through the war more or less intact, and pulled into the courtyard of one. There was little sign it was anything more than a simple single-family dwelling. An electric generator hummed outside. Once inside, I realized it was a private restaurant-hideaway—probably the only one functioning in postwar Grozny.

We were ushered toward a corner of the one large room surrounded by plastic curtains with floral patterns. A waitress threw the draperies back. We entered and sat down, and the curtains closed again. Two bottles of vodka adorned the table, along with another of Russian champagne and a small dish of black caviar. The three of us—Musa, Ivan, and I—sat down; there were three other seats. Musa grinned like a Cheshire cat. Ivan played sheepish but quickly warmed up.

Within a few minutes the curtains were snapped open again just long enough for three women to be ushered through. In their twenties and
thirties, they were stylishly but not provocatively clad in long, nearly ankle-length dresses, the hair of each adorned with the traditional Chechen female half-scarf worn loosely from the top of the head and ending in a knot at the back of the neck.

With the curtains now between them and the prying eyes beyond, the women doffed their head scarves and made it clear they had come to “relax.”

Musa’s female companion was a tall, attractive woman with reddish-brown hair by the name of Zina. She was twenty-eight years old, divorced, boisterous, and obviously headstrong. That a woman was going to drink alcohol at all was provocative enough in increasingly Islamifying Chechnya. She did not even wait for Musa to pour, grasping a shot glass and demonstratively projecting it in his direction. He obliged her.

Next to Ivan sat Fatima, a chirpy woman of about thirty with short brown hair. And placed across from me was Louisa, who gave off a warm, reserved air. I didn’t ask, but she was also probably in her late twenties or early thirties.

Musa proposed a first toast to our female companions. Zina twirled her shot glass between her red-enameled fingertips. Fatima and Louisa complied with equal alacrity.

“Lawrence, there is nothing more powerful on Allah’s earth than the beauty of a woman, and here we are blessed by three of the most beautiful women in the world. But I want you to know something else. Just because a woman is beautiful and feminine does not mean she is any less valorous or brave as the most fearless fighter or man of the gun.”

At first I did not completely understand the correlation between the toasts and our female guests. Musa elaborated.

“All three of the women seated around you played a great role in the campaign,” Musa said gravely, referring to the war.

I had met a few Chechen women among the fighters. Others had helped out as safe-house nurses or aided the fighters in other ways, cooking or keeping a lookout for the
federali
, or “federalists,” as the Russian troops were known. One field commander, Doki Makhayev, whose hideout house I had frequented, had several female fighters in his entourage,
but most of them had battle-hardened demeanors and mannish features. (Makhayev was later killed by the Russians while trying to escape his village hidden in a truck under a crate filled with watermelons.)

These female companions, in contrast, projected a kind of war-tinged elegance. It was hard to believe they had been taking potshots with AKs or lobbing grenades.

Zina explained that she had worked as a secretary at an iron and cement factory in Grozny that was later bombed into bits of concrete and twisted metal. With her feminine bearing, who would have believed that she was a sabotage woman? Zina went on, saying it was easier for her to go unnoticed carrying a handbag that contained a homemade bomb; she claimed, in once such instance, that she left the cheap Chinese Gucci-type knockoff filled with explosives and a detonator along a rail line used for Russian equipment transports. The cheap exploding bag had done some expensive damage, she proudly announced.

Fatima and Louisa, who had worked in various Chechen businesses and government departments before the war, used their charms to “move” explosive materials around the country. This meant employing a bit of cleavage to engage notoriously corrupt Russian officers and agreeing on prices for anything from RPGs to ammunition. They would later be left in a designated location, and the rebels would then pick them up. “The commanders find doing business with a babe more palatable, for some reason,” Musa joked. I felt like I was in the middle of a scene out of the 1966 classic film
The Battle for Algiers
, except I imagined Algiers looked like Club Med compared to pulverized Grozny.

Musa and the three “sabotage women” raised their glasses to
touolum
(victory) in Chechen.

There were more toasts, a dinner of fish and chicken was served, and the bottles of vodka were quickly emptied and just as quickly replaced with fresh ones.

Zina eventually suggested that we all head back to her place. We piled back into Musa’s Lada, six of us in a car meant for four, heading into a district close to the epicenter of destruction that was once the center of Grozny. We passed a long-since-burned-out tank with its turret blown
off in the median, and turned right. Zina’s building looked to be about half habitable; the front had taken artillery hits and it was possible to see into the apartments, opened like tin cans. We parked and marched up a pitch-black flight of stairs. Zina took out a key and opened a penitentiary-style metal door.

Considering the building’s battered exterior, the apartment was comfortable, with a table, sofa, and an unexpectedly elegant hanging lamp. There were only two rooms, one large living room and a little room off to the side that served as a bedroom. Zina produced a bottle of cognac and tea, and Musa said something about “going to take a rest” in the little room. Zina followed him in and closed the door. Ivan and his girlfriend kissed passionately on the couch, gearing up for their turn. Louisa looked at me and smiled.

Suddenly, loud banging on the metal door erupted. Someone was beating on it with the butt of a gun, and loud male voices ordered us to open up in the name of the law, or specifically, in the name of the newly minted morality police.

Zina was there in a flash, almost in anticipation of the bust.

It did not go the way the two baby-faced officers anticipated.

“Who the hell do you think you are,
molokososi
[literally, “nursing babies”]?” screamed Zina. “
I fought in this war
. And where were you? Do you have any idea who I am?”

The two boys looked stunned at this rare reproach of Chechen male (even adolescent) authority, but still demanded to know who we were.

“None of your fucking business!” snarled Zina. “This is my apartment, and I will do whatever the hell I want with whomever I want.” Then, as Musa, Ivan, and I looked on, Zina attacked, kicking and clawing and punching the morality squad boys, who were now thoroughly stunned. They backed away slowly, silently, glaring menacingly until Zina slammed the door in their faces, livid with having to prove anything to anyone.

The appearance of the morality squad at her
zhiru
door underlined a trend in postwar Chechnya. What had started as a secular conflict had become more infused with elements of religion, and a more radicalized,
militant form of imported Islam was replacing the tolerant, Sufi-based traditions in the country, and this meant that Zina, who believed she had fought for Chechen freedom, was already much less free.

All the commotion had taken an unfortunate toll, with Zina and the other two “sabotage women” loudly denouncing the audacity of the morals police punks and Ivan’s trying to settle them down. Time was now running out, it was getting late, and postmidnight was not an advisable time to wander about Grozny. We piled, all six of us, into Musa’s tiny Lada to drop off the girls. Louisa’s long dress became shorter with her sitting down on my lap. I’d never again come even remotely close to a self-described sabotage girl.

I never saw her again.

IT TOOK VERY
little time for the more radical interpretations of Islam to begin to be institutionalized in Chechnya.

During the war, I witnessed the first “Sharia court” proceedings in the village of Komsomolskoye, where a well-known commander was given twenty lashes for “insubordination.” It was much more political theatre than punishment. The commander may well have been insubordinate, but the lashes were not of a particularly vigorous nature—they were staged for the TV cameras. When the “lashings” were over, the commander proudly stood up and flashed a broad smile, showing no sign of physical discomfort.

But the theatrics soon gave way to sobering new realities.

In September 1997, less than a year after I had seen the three sabotage women, Chechnya’s first public execution took place. Hundreds watched as a man and a woman convicted of murder were gunned down by firing squad in central Grozny.

The crowds of spectators grew as more executions followed: Later that same month, several thousand spectators assembled in Grozny’s Square of People’s Friendship. Half a dozen Chechen fighters, or by now “soldiers,” lined two manacled men up against a wall in the square, and a firing squad raked their bodies with volleys of automatic-weapons fire.
Chechen officials said it was the only way to deal with a massive crime wave sweeping the land, explaining Chechens were not afraid of secular courts and would have sought blood revenge against secular judges. The names of the condemned and those of their clans were displayed in front of them to shame their relatives into “correct” behavior.

The three sabotage women, their war credentials increasingly worthless, soon fled Chechnya for Europe, where they are today.

*
Raduyev was captured by Russian forces in 2000 and died in prison in mysterious circumstances, reportedly killed by other inmates or guards.

A DISAPPEARANCE

N
ow “Independent Chechnya”
became synonymous with a literal industry of kidnappings for ransom and random killings. Joining the several hundred thousand people already displaced by the war were tens of thousands more—those who had somewhere to go—escaping the medieval-quality anarchy. There were, of course, those odd exceptions: Those who could have fled but chose not to for one reason or another. One was a friend of mine. Her name was Galina Nizhelskaya. I met her during the war. She was working as a translator for the medical charity Merlin, which brought doctors to Chechnya from abroad.

Galina, in her twenties, was trying to complete her studies at the Chechen State University, which were regularly being interrupted by the war. She didn’t have a high opinion of journalists, and she started with an aggressive but predictable sideswipe, no doubt fueled by the constant pumping for information aid workers face from them, as well as her precarious life state. “You are all so self-important, haughty, conceited, you hacks. You just want information to sell; you are all nothing more than speculators.” I simply listened. I understood her need to vent. She was stuck in Grozny. I was not.

I noticed something else unusual about Galina. Her features were distinctly Slavic, round cheeks and a curly head of hair, vaguely resembling a younger version of the Icelandic rock star Björk. At the same time, her accent in Russian was imbibed by the giveaway staccato Chechen.

“You don’t look Chechen,” I told her.

“That’s because I’m not. I’m Russian,” she said.

Grozny, of course, was full of Russians before the Soviet collapse, but the ones left behind now were almost all elderly people with no place to go. There were very few young Russians, let alone ones studying at the Chechen State University. Galina explained matter-of-factly that Chechnya was where she had begun her education and that Chechnya was where she would finish it, even though she could transfer to another Russian university. I wondered what kept Galina behind in the smashed city.

The answer was a defiant independent streak. And the fact that Galina was—in a way—a woman without a country.

I asked about the tediousness, not to mention the danger, that life in Grozny meant for young people. Going out after dark was almost unheard of, and “there is no place to go anyway,” she said. Galina agreed to a longer interview, at her grandparents’, with whom she was staying, another reason to endure Grozny, despite the dangers.

It was a typical Russian-style house that had escaped damage thanks to being near the outer edge of the city. Galina explained that she stayed in Chechnya throughout almost the entire war. During the worst days, as Grozny was being pummeled, she moved to a village with a group of ordinary Chechen women, washing clothes, cooking for men, and waiting to go home.