Let Our Fame Be Great (55 page)

I wondered whether it was true that he had not been able to remember his name. For a man with a past like his, admitting his name would have led to life in prison. But I was not going to interrupt him. I'm not sure I could have stopped him talking anyway.

‘I've never mentioned this before to anyone. I have never said a word of it. But my cock is two and a half centimetres shorter than it was. I could not go with a woman now and I am ashamed. People sympathize with me but they do not understand really.'

The torture, he said, became unbearable after a while. He lit the next cigarette before he told me what had happened. His hands were even shaking a little, which was shocking in such a proud man.

‘When they were torturing me, I swore at them, using every word I could think of. I used prison slang, and normal slang, and all the other prisoners told me not to do it because it made them beat us harder, but I told them to help me swear, because then at least we would be shot,' he said. ‘And then came the time for them to shoot us. They did not say they were going to shoot us, they said it would be the “liquidation” and that moment my heart began to beat so loud it was like the people in the first compartment could have heard it, and we were in the fifth compartment. And I was scared, scared for the first time. But when I took my first step, it calmed down. My heart calmed as if it had never beaten, and from that moment onwards I have never been afraid again.'

With Dedushka now even less cooperative after the fake execution, the Russian guards turned to ever more extreme methods. The train they were kept on was moved from place to place, but the prisoners were constantly kept in pain or suspense.

‘When I was let out, I could hardly walk. They beat me on the feet. They would hang me upside down and beat me. You know, when you are beaten on the feet, you feel the pain in your head,' he said.

He was lucky as it turned out; a group of French journalists asked the Russian authorities for permission to see the train, and the pressure they put on the jailers freed the captives. After three months in the train carriage, Dedushka was allowed out.

‘Some of the prisoners went back to Chechnya, and I went back to Chechnya with them and that was when I heard that my boys had been shot. What did I have left to do then? That was when I decided to go to Moscow to be treated by doctors. I could not even walk for ten or fifteen metres.'

While he was in Moscow, the war ground on, with desperate clashes in which the Chechen forces grew in confidence and the Russians became more mired in the mess they had created. As 1996 dawned, Yeltsin had elections coming up. The messy, costly war on Russia's southern flank had proved disastrous. The authorities were lying frantically about the human cost, but the people were not fooled. The adventure was ever more unpopular and the Kremlin had to get it over with.

Dudayev had been assassinated by now – a rocket had allegedly been fired down his satellite phone signal; either that or it was a car bomb – and Yandarbiyev the poet led the talks in Moscow, with Zakayev the actor by his side. They won a ceasefire, and a Russian withdrawal. Incredibly, the Chechens had won.

As I sat and talked to Dedushka, I became increasingly convinced that his life story was too perfect a mirror of Chechen history to be real. He had been deported as a blameless infant, mistreated, brutalized, and imprisoned. On release from prison, he had fought, been grievously wounded, and then set free in a ruined state to make the best of what had survived the war.

Likewise, the Chechen nation had been unfairly deported, abused in captivity, then allowed home but not given the rule of its own land. When it had finally achieved some freedom, it had been only the prelude to a new, dreadful war that left the capital city in ruins and the country strewn with mines.

As Dedushka had survived his terrible interrogation and been released, the Chechens as a whole had defeated Russia's brutality and won independence. Estimates of the cost of the fighting vary wildly, because of the nature of the war, and the fact that no one has made full lists. According to the best estimate from the most reliable sources, the two years of fighting in Chechnya killed at least 50,000 civilians, and probably more than 100,000. Around 15,000 Russian soldiers and perhaps 5,000 Chechen fighters also died.

It had been a terrible loss for every Chechen family. As Dedushka had lost two of his sons, others had lost parents, daughters, brothers and friends. Dedushka's punishment, I thought as I sat and listened to another one of his anecdotes about prison life, was his nation's punishment, and I could not resist asking him if he agreed that his life mirrored that of the Chechen people.

He shrugged, and changed the subject. ‘Perhaps I will visit you in Europe,' he said, ‘if I get married and my new wife wants to come.'

Would that be your fourth wife, I asked, trying to keep track of the marriages he had told me about.

‘What are you talking about, my fourth?'

Well, perhaps it would be his sixth then, I ventured.

He just smiled and I wondered if I had understood him at all.

For, of course, his punishment did not end in 1996. I was talking to him after all in a refugee camp by the Bosphorus in Istanbul, and by that time the Chechen attempt to win independence had collapsed in the face of brutality as bad as anything the Caucasus had ever seen.

By the time Russian tanks returned to Grozny in 1999, fighters on both sides would have thrown away the last remnants of humanity, and were lashing out to kill without thought for the victims.

And that is where the story takes us next.

Hundreds of people stood outside the tall metal gates. White-faced and red-eyed from four days of worry, fear and no sleep, they were now waiting to find out if their lives would be ruined for ever. Occasionally, the gates would open a crack, and a couple of people – normally a man and a woman together, sometimes two women – would emerge, blank-faced and stunned. Then, another trickle of bystanders would be admitted through the gates.

The day was grey, and tiredness had rendered me stupid. Every now and then, a stray wisp of wind would push a putrid, sickly, overripe smell into the street. It was unpleasant, and seemed to cling in my nose. I was smelling it for the first time, or I would have known it at once. It was the smell that human bodies make when they rot.

Beyond the gates were the victims of the Beslan hostage tragedy – the worst hostage raid in Russian history. The chaos of the storming of the school, where 1,300 hostages had been kept without food or water for three days, had ended. But no one had any idea of the death toll, and I was hoping to get into the morgue in Vladikavkaz to count them. Russian officials had been lying to the press and the hostages' relatives all week. They had told us there were only 354 hostages. They had said the attackers had made no demands. They had lied again and again.

The dead bodies would not lie to me, and eventually I too gained admission to the morgue, where I would be able to find out the cost of the disaster for myself. Ahead of me was a straight stretch of road, twenty metres or so, then a left turn around the back of the morgue building. The smell was stronger here. It almost had a solid presence, and it felt like cheese or sickness in my throat.

I walked steadily, automatically almost, to the corner and, turning it, saw a vision of hell. To my right was a row of stretchers, with transparent plastic sheets covering bodies. The row receded for a few metres to a broader courtyard where dense rows of stretchers held still more people: children, men, women, all mixed up together. At least a hundred bodies in all. And among them were the living, sleepwalking from body to body. They were searching for their children, their sisters, their mothers or their uncles among the army of the dead.

Two women, one of them with dyed red hair and clutching her face, stooped over a child's body, uncovered it, then pulled the plastic sheet back over its face and walked on along the row.

Many of the bodies were terribly burned and disfigured. In the furthest corner, a twist of gut emerged from a corpse's stomach like a spring bracken seedling turned rotten and vile. One or two bodies were just piles of pieces in bags, while others seemed unharmed. One boy's face is still with me. It was pale like a dairy product, with the same glistening surface as a cheap brand of cream cheese on sale all over Moscow. Freckles stood out on his face, unusually sharp against the pallid cheeks. His eyes were closed, and his long eyelashes fringed them rather beautifully. I had never examined a dead body this closely before. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, except that he was totally and unmistakably dead.

I spent perhaps twenty minutes in the morgue before I walked out, my clothes saturated with the smell of the dead. As I pushed my way through the gates, I saw Viktor, a photographer friend of mine, coming the other way.

‘Wait for me, will you, I'll just take some pictures, then we can go and get some breakfast,' he said.

I was not sure I could eat breakfast, but I wanted company so I stood by the gate, lit a cigarette and waited for him to finish his work.

He was out again in thirty seconds, pale and stunned. He grabbed my arm for a second, then bent double and vomited into the roadway. This was a man who had documented the wars in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan and the worst disasters Russia had thrown at him in a long career. This was the worst thing he had ever seen.

‘I need a drink,' he said, as he stood up. We bought a bottle of vodka and two plastic cups, and finished it that morning, drinking toast after toast to the dead.

In total, 334 bodies would pass through that and other morgues before the victims of this terrible crime were all laid to rest in a new, giant graveyard that would come to dominate the approach to the little town of Beslan, which had once been known only for its vodka factories and its shabby airport. Now it has a hideous global fame that will stay with it for ever.

That morning, I had been awakened early. Perhaps, it was five o'clock, I did not know. The previous three days had blurred into each other in a single progression of gunfire and explosions and other people's grief. With the siege over, I was getting my first night's sleep all week, and was untroubled by nightmares or shakes. Then my phone rang.

President Vladimir Putin, who had refused to negotiate with the hostage-takers and who must have ordered the storm operation in which hundreds of people had died, had come to visit the survivors. At five in the morning, he had presumably had to wake them up to do so, and my editors wanted me to see his reaction to the horrors all around.

It was too late, Putin had gone. The Kremlin was too slick to allow the president to feel the popular wrath bubbling over against his government, so it had not announced his arrival until he had departed.

I was left to wander through the streets of Beslan, which for the first time in three days were free of the throngs of journalists and grieving relatives who had been waiting for the siege to end.

A police checkpoint tried to block my passage to the school building itself, but the police were sleepy and talking my way past them was easy. In the thin morning light, the school was a tired-looking rose-brick building, with two storeys.

It faced a railway line. Perhaps, in happier times, the children had looked out from boring lessons and counted the carriages on trains rattling by. I walked along the side of the rails towards the school, and was surprised to see a man sleeping against the corner of the wall, in the school gardens. He looked shabby, like the homeless men who slept rough in Moscow.

It was only when I saw that a couple of metres from him were four or five other men, all clumsily dropped into the pile they had formed
when they had been shot and thrown out of the window, that I realized he was dead. These men had been murdered on the first day of the siege as it turned out, when the hostage-takers had feared they might form the kernel of resistance.

A little further was a gate passing from the railway into the school yard. Here children would have played in the grass and the beaten earth, but now there were rows and rows of body bags. Black plastic bags, numbering perhaps a hundred, stretched away from me almost to the end of the yard.

I felt blank as I looked at them. There was nothing inside me but despair. Overshadowing the whole scene, behind me, were three tanks. These were the tanks that the Russian forces had used to blast the hostage-takers out of their upstairs windows, despite the children that were still packed into the building. They had left huge star-burst blast marks on the bricks.

The sports hall where the hostages had been kept for their three-day nightmare was barely visible, but from what I could see the destruction was terrible. Blackened roof timbers lay mixed in with body parts on the floor where children had played basketball. The windows were blown out, and giant scars marked the walls, where the explosives and bullets of both sides had ripped up window ledges, plaster, bricks and concrete.