AFTERWORD

YELLOW ON BLACK

Here I am, back in London. We seem to be doomed to return to this city.

January8, 2003. An interrogation about Nord-Ost ⁵⁸ has been scheduled for the fifteenth in Moscow. An FSS investigator will be coming. He’ll ask questions about what happened in what way, and aggravate the wound once again. Right now, though, I’m leaving the Heathrow passport and customs area, looking for the person I agreed to meet. But nobody is there. Very strange. Did something go wrong? Suddenly Yasha jumps out from behind. After a short exchange of greetings, he quickly walks ahead. “He’s here, waiting in the car.” That’s all Yasha says to me.

“He” is Akhmed Zakayev. I brought him here from Copenhagen last December 7, after he was released from jail. But Russia has demanded that Zakayev be extradited from London too. He is under British surveillance, and is not allowed to leave London. His passport has been taken away, and he can’t go to any public places.

I am almost running to keep up with Yasha. Finally, he leads me to a car. There, in the back seat in the dark, is Zakayev.

“We couldn’t wait to see you. How is it there, at home? Tell us.”

“At home” means in Chechnya.

He is a Chechen who has wandered the globe, for the last three years unable to walk down the Urus-Martan street where he was born. But it is I, a Muscovite, a Ukrainian of Russian citizenship, who tell him how a tunnel under Minutka Square has been restored, how victims of the terrorist act of December 27 are in the Ninth Municipal Hospital, how Gantamirov is building a new market in Grozny, and how Gantamirov’s people are tearing down the Krasny Molot factory to get bricks for the construction. This factory, before all these wars, was Europe’s biggest producer of oil drilling equipment.

Zakayev cannot leave the car. It is highly unadvisable for him to be in a London café, as the British authorities are afraid that the Russian FSS will steal him. It’s just like in Soviet spy films. That’s how bad things have become again. What have we turned into? What has happened to the country that Putin pushed into war, that was then so jolted by the Nord-Ost October tragedy and left with so little chance for normal life?

I believe less than ever in the usual way of measuring time. More and more, it seems to me that each of us has his or her own personal calendar, and that we all live by these calendars—and not from January to February to March—depending on the circumstances that we find ourselves in. Or perhaps we choose them ourselves.

I have a calendar like this, for the 2002 Nord-Ost year, which has passed so quickly, and for the beginning of 2003. This calendar has no chronology and no external logic. It has nothing but images tied together by the logic of feelings surrounding this tragedy.

“Feelings?” someone might say, dragging the word out disappointedly. “What about analysis? Practical conclusions? A sober prognosis?”

I’m not very good at prognosticating. Besides, we live in the time of Putin, when it is once again permissible to sacrifice thousands of lives “in the name of a bright nonterrorist future.” There are people who can analyze this, but few who can sympathize. And since feelings are so rare now, they are the most important thing in my calendar.

EARLY DECEMBER. It’s been forty days⁵⁹ since the Nord-Ost hostage crisis has passed. And it seems like it’s time for everything to go back to normal. But this doesn’t happen at all. Maybe it’s because of the weather? Moscow in December is bitter and freezing, with no snow. The relentless cold really gets you down. It makes you feel so sad . . . Sometimes hostages who survived the nightmare musical visit me at the newspaper. There is Ira Fadeeva, for instance, in a black beret, coat, and sweater. She has something yellow in her hands. It’s a big bouquet of long yellow roses in memory of her son, who was killed. Ira is thirty-seven. She went to Nord-Ost on October 23 almost by chance. They lived nearby, and were getting ready to go to another theater when they realized that the tickets had expired. But they already had their coats on, so she persuaded her fifteen-year-old son Yaroslav, a tenth-grader, to go with her to Nord-Ost instead.

Ira survived, and Yaroslav was killed. She fled the hospital, identified his body in the morgue, found the bullet’s entrance and exit wounds, and received a death certificate with a dash under “Cause of Death.” You can understand that any way you want; he’s dead, but there’s no reason. Why? Because the official version is that “only four were shot, and all of them by Chechen terrorists,” and Yaroslav was the fifth.

That’s why there’s a dash. And what about his mother? His grand-parents? The government suggests that they stop whining, and not disturb the investigation with questions that are tactless, from the point of view of official ideology. All the hostages were supposedly killed by gas that was used to save others, and there was no other solution. For the umpteenth time in our history, ideology wins out, and the people who don’t fit in with it are on their own.

Ira left the morgue and jumped off a bridge. Former hostages committing suicide are a terrible reality that we are faced with this December. But Ira was rescued from the Moscow River. Now she suffers so much that there are no words to comfort her. At least I don’t know any . . . And naturally, there is no help from the government that sentenced her son to death. If you’re not a victim of terrorism, there are no rehabilitation centers, psychotherapists, or psychiatrists for you. Ira is a victim of her government’s ideology.

NOVEMBER 23 . It is a month after Nord-Ost, probably about six in the morning. I’d love to doze off after a sleepless night. But the telephone rings. “Anna Stepanovna, come get me from the police station . . . I’m in trouble again.” I rush to my car. God, it’s cold, I’m shivering terribly. Smug cops at the Novo-Alekseevsky Street station are saying nasty things. Ilya is in the depths of their spit-covered, stinking cell, hounded, dirty and unshaven.

Ilya is an old friend of my children. I’ve known him since he was a boy. Back then he was a sturdy little red-cheeked kid who went to the music school on Merzlyakovsky Street with his cello tilted over his shoulder and made a lot of mischief with my son, pestering the teachers. Later, when he was sixteen, he started to go out with my daughter, who played the violin. Their romance did not last long, but we all stayed good friends. A year ago, the twenty-four-year-old Ilya joined the Nord-Ost orchestra. And of course, he was playing that cursed evening.

How well we understand misfortune when it strikes our dear ones! “Mom, Ilya is there!” my son shouted to me over the phone on October 23. “What should we do? Can you help him? Talk with the Chechens! Please, mom!” But I couldn’t help him at all. Because you couldn’t use personal connections there; you couldn’t plead for just one of them and probably end up sacrificing the rest. You could only plead for everyone. Ilya was held there for three days; he had seen the gas come in, and passed out. But he was lucky. One of the very first Luzhkov ambulances took him to the toxicological ward of Sklifasovsky hospital, the best one in Moscow, and he was saved. But now, a month after the gas attack, something is wrong with him. His nerves are on edge. He is reexamining his whole life, but he can’t come to terms with it, and sees a reason to fight everywhere. “Anna Stepanovna, I feel like a teenager again . . . What’s wrong with me?” “You just need to be treated.” “I can’t stand seeing injustice. How can the hospital help with that?”

Right now, early in the morning, Ilya needs some very practical help. He is at the police station because he threw a toaster at someone. And the evening before, he had tried to lecture an Azerbaijani vegetable salesman on the street because the salesman had peed on a church fence on Sukharevka Street right in front of him. After that, he stopped at a night club frequented by a very cultivated crowd, where poets recite new works, and got into a fight with someone who said something he didn’t like. “What’s wrong with me, Anna Stepanovna? Take me away from here. They’ve been holding me in this cage like a monkey, forcing me to stand.”

One policeman at the station, who seems reasonably bright, goes into details about the terrible shock to the Nord-Ost musician’s fragile psyche, and asks me, “Can you get him to shape up? If you promise to do that, I’ll let him go.” How can I promise him anything? I’m not a psychiatrist. But I promise anyway. And the policeman continues, “Keep him at your place for now, for a while at least. Let him cool off a bit, otherwise he’ll wind up here again, and things will be more serious.” In the meantime, it’s already nine.

I take Ilya to my car, and he immediately falls asleep; the whole night he’s been fighting with windmills. At 9:30, I have to give a talk at an annual conference called “The KGB: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” I’ve been invited to speak about how the secret services acted from October 23 to 25 as they tried to fight the terrorists. I go there with Ilya and seat him in the far corner of the beautiful Moscow Helicon Opera Theater on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, which the KGB conference has rented. Ilya quickly falls asleep again, and I give my talk, assigning Sasha Petrov, a very nice activist from Human Rights Watch, to look after him. Sasha understands everything without a word, but I don’t let Ilya out of my sight anyway, worrying that he might wake up and decide that everyone around him is an enemy. “What’s wrong with me, Anna Stepanovna?”

OCTOBER 25. Today is the day before the twenty-sixth, with its early morning gassing. It’s raining hard, typical for a Moscow fall: protracted and inescapable. I’m standing on the first floor of the captured building, as a negotiator. The terrorists bring out male hostages, pointing automatic weapons at them. They go downstairs single file from the second floor to get the water and juice that has been brought to the theater building as agreed. The hostages haven’t eaten or drunk in three whole days. They’re also coming down because I asked them to. I insisted on seeing the hostages before talking with the terrorists. So now the men and boys are coming down gloomily to meet me, one after the other. One of them, with a sharp nose and wearing a gray sweater, suddenly begins to shout: “You there! Bring us disinfectant! I asked for it this morning!” But the terrorists cut him off rudely: “What do you mean, you asked for that?” A young man nearby in a black tuxedo and white shirt, an orchestra member, whispers: “They said that they would start killing at ten . . . Please . . . pass it along.”

Later, after everything was over and the government announced “victory” despite the many human casualties, I couldn’t find this young man in the black tuxedo anywhere. However, the man in gray who was shouting about disinfectant gave an ideologically correct interview that was broadcast on all the TV channels, and of course, was invited to the Kremlin. There he thanked Putin on behalf of all the hostages for his care and attention.

OCTOBER 25. Once again, the day before the attack. Abubakar, terrorist number 2 in the siege of Nord-Ost, his submachine gun tilted forward, is a muscular OMON soldier in military camouflage, like all the troops in Chechnya on both sides. He wants to speak his mind before dying. He is sure that he will die here, that he won’t come out alive. Abubakar is a young man who already looks old. He explains what brought him here. “You live very well here!” he says to me. “And we live in the forests! But we also want to live like people. We want to, you hear? We’ll force you to listen to us!” This last part echoes on all sides from somewhere above, where the terrorists have established posts throughout the building.

The hostages are taken back upstairs. Then they are brought downstairs again, in single file. “I passed along what you said.” “I see,” the orchestra musician in black and white says, barely moving his pale lips. A fellow I never met anywhere again. “Starting at ten . . . Pass it along . . . Plead with them . . . ”

A CHEERFUL AMERICAN OCTOBER 23. Lightly dressed, I run into my hotel in Santa Monica. This ocean suburb of Los Angeles is incredibly bright and beautiful, with many colors and palm trees. I just gave a lecture at the local university to journalism students and their instructors. The lecture was about our life, and of course, the endless civil war going on in my country without any truce: the second Chechen war, which has been generating nonstop terrorism for internal use for four years now.

The students are astonished. They ask “How can this be?” And I tell them about the sharp radicalization of the Chechen resistance units, about how these units are being joined by those who want to avenge their tortured, kidnapped, and murdered relatives. I tell them that Maskhadov’s moderation no longer satisfies the young militants, that Basayev has gotten the best of him. After the lecture, I run to the hotel and the desk clerk tells me that I got a call from the Moscow paper I work for, that something has happened there. When I call, they tell me: “Hostages have been taken at Nord-Ost. Nobody knows what to do.” “Nobody knows?” “Nobody.” “What about Putin?” “He’s not saying anything.” It is night. Lena Milashina, our correspondent, calls the hotel: “The terrorists want to see you. They just made this demand. You have to tell them if you’re coming or not live on the REN-TV channel; you’ll be called from there.” They call. I say “yes.” My son manages to get through to me in the midst of all the people calling me: “Please don’t do this! We can’t take it anymore! You don’t understand what’s going on here!” It’s a difficult conversation. My son feels desperate; he is very upset. He’s tired of worrying about me. He can’t even express in words how tired everyone around me has gotten from these experiences that take up their whole lives as I cover this infernal, endless second Chechen war. My son gets furious when he doesn’t get a definite promise that I won’t do it. But later, he will help me more than anyone else with the negotiations, talking with the terrorists on the phone until my arrival from Los Angeles. After the attack, the FSS will put him under surveillance, listening to his phone conversations.

But that’s down the road, later. In between my trips to Nord-Ost, I will be sitting at headquarters. What headquarters? What is their task? I couldn’t tell you that. More likely the seizure of the building than rescuing people, as it turns out later. So I’ll sit there on the twenty-fifth until late at night with an officer called Zhenya. I’ll be shaking feverishly from cold and fear. The rain is pouring down, as luck would have it. My coat is soaked and there’s nowhere to dry off. And right then my son calls again and says that he has thought it over, and that it would probably be best for the situation if he’s the one who takes water and juice to the building with me, since he is just my son, and not from the secret services. “The terrorists won’t mind, right?” He looks like me, and it’s clear from his passport that he’s my son, which will “calm down the terrorists.” I pass our conversation along to the officer, Zhenya—maybe that’s what would really be best for everyone? After all, at this moment everyone is thinking of only one thing: what can be done to help, for heaven’s sake? What can be done?! Zhenya looks very closely at me and asks, “That’s what you want to do?” And only then do I come to my senses and answer “Over my dead body.” Next morning, when they start taking the corpses to the morgues, and relatives plant themselves against the locked doors of the hospitals, we’re all tortured by our inability to help them. I go to the newspaper and tell my colleagues about my son and his suggestion late last night. Dima, the editor in chief of our oppositional paper, which is being persecuted by the government, starts to cry. “What terrific kids we have!” And I suddenly realize that I almost roped my son into this, and that I don’t even have any tears left. Not after living in Chechnya through 2002 with its endless purges, not with the constant series of corpses I’ve witnessed and had to deal with, as if I were part of a military burial team . . .

DECEMBER 2. Again, early in the morning. A call from the Moscow Echo radio station: “Last night Malika Umazheva, the head of the Alkhan-Kala village administration, was killed in Chechnya. Could you comment on this, please?”

“What, she was killed?”

The troops drove around the village in armored vehicles all evening yesterday. At the midnight curfew, unknown masked men in camouflage entered Malika’s home and took her into the barn. Her teenage nephews, whom she had raised after the death of her brother, grabbed hold of the camouflaged men and begged them not to kill her, but in vain. Malika was shot. Those beasts, who had become adept during the war at killing off people like this woman in her fifties with high blood pressure, heart problems, and constantly swollen legs, went away. Another of my heroines was dead.

Malika was the administrative head of one of the toughest Chechen villages, Alkhan-Kala (Barayev’s village with endless purges, shootings, and disfigured corpses), after the previous head was killed. And reason should have told her to stay put, be careful. But she did the very opposite. She became the boldest, bravest village head in this zone of military lawlessness, where it’s so difficult to survive.

And acting that way was a real feat. Alone and unarmed, she stood up to the tanks that rolled into the village. She was the only village head to shout “You beasts!” right to the faces of the treacherous prosecutors who had been intimidated by the generals and simply kept records of the torture and killing. And she cried “Bastards” at the generals who had tricked her and secretly killed residents of her village. She fought desperately for a better life for Alkhan-Kala. No one else dared to do so in present-day Chechnya, not even the men.

The chief of our general staff, General Kvashnin, with his big stars and red-striped pants, fiercely and personally hated this modest village official, who had been elected by the villagers. What’s more, he hated her so much that he spread all kinds of slander about her, using his access to TV cameras for this purpose. And what did she do? She stuck to her guns and sued him in response to his lies, knowing very well that almost everyone was afraid to defy Kvashnin. This includes even people from the Kremlin, not just residents of Alkhan-Kala. They know that Kvashnin doesn’t forgive those who don’t fear him.

Kadyrov drove her away from his “high” government doorstep in Grozny, because he was deathly afraid of talking with this woman, who was never at a loss for words with any authorities. He knew that she would say only bad things about him: that he sold out his own people and that he looked good only compared to his Kremlin sponsor but not to the people he was supposed to take care of. He also knew very well that Malika would do everything she could to stop him from becoming the Chechen president “chosen by the people.” And twenty thousand votes depended on her. The Alkhan-Kala villagers worshipped her. And Kadyrov didn’t forgive those whom the people worshipped, because the people hated him.

I remember Malika’s words: “Anya, what a dirty war this is! Who do I fear most of all? The Feds, of course. Our militants are bandits, it’s true, and nothing is sacred to them either. But the Feds act badly in the name of the constitution.” That day, it rained cats and dogs in Alkhan-Kala. Malika sat in her office in the administration building, constantly putting her stamp on papers that were brought in and taken away by villagers. They all winced slightly, either from the dampness or from the knowledge that right here, behind this very desk, unknown people shot the previous administrative heads of Alkhan-Kala and that Malika herself was constantly being threatened. So at any moment, people said, someone with a submachine gun could crash through the window.

That evening, after we had discussed the frightening events, Malika and I went to the graduation at High School No. 2. She made a farewell speech to the twelve graduating students—three boys and nine girls. All of them, together with Malika and the rest of the villagers, had dug in the ruins where the Feds had blown up the bodies of their fellow villagers. They had picked out hands, feet, and pieces of clothing, and the boys had taken part in the funerals. Malika said the usual words about choosing a worthy path, but in the Alkhan-Kala context, they were full of meaning that had been lost in our everyday lives. About how their lives depended on the choices they made—they had to sink or swim. And that there was no room for error, or even compromise. I remembered these words on October25: Movsar Barayev, the leader of the terrorists who seized the Nord-Ost theater, was from Alkhan-Kala.

DECEMBER 5. Copenhagen. Akhmed Zakayev has been in a Danish prison for a month, at the demand of the Russian authorities, supposedly for helping plan the Nord-Ost terrorist act. We found out that on December 5 he’d be released. I’m standing by the walls of the Copenhagen prison, waiting for him. These walls are very gloomy and medieval, with lighted torches. An old woman with a shopping bag comes up and asks me to follow her. I never follow anyone I don’t know, but here for some reason I obey. We walk for a long time through twilit Copenhagen. Finally, we get to a door, an entranceway, another door, some people speaking a language I don’t understand, a long hallway, and an entrance to a room. There, Zakayev gets up from a couch.

We both would have cried, if we were still capable of it.

His Danish lawyer brought him here, to a private apartment, straight from jail. Akhmed doesn’t understand a single word of any language other than Chechen and Russian. It’s been very uncomfortable for him too. But right now we feel that we’re together in uncomfortable Copenhagen.

We get up, thank everyone, say good-bye, and leave. But where are we going?

Zakayev is an eternal wanderer in Europe. The year 2002 was coming to an end. The holidays approached unnoticed, as always. I wanted to live, but I wanted to wail even more. I returned to Moscow. The weather in Moscow was cold and biting, with no snow. Irina’s yellow roses still hadn’t withered; they stood on the floor by my desk, as if they were frozen. As if it were a desert winter: wind, earth hard as rock, without any white fluff. Will we all survive 2003?

I have no affirmative answer. And therein lies the whole tragedy.