Let Our Fame Be Great (54 page)

‘My mother and I at the time were in the cowshed. We have five head of cattle, two sheep, eleven chickens, one cat and a dog called Barsik. My mother says that animals cannot speak, so you can't just
abandon them to their fate. Leaving my own home would also not be right. It is better to meet your fate where you are, than to run away from it.'

In his next few paragraphs, he speculates on the true source of wealth (‘. . . a deep thick-walled basement, which we don't have . . .'), and on the identity of the men fighting the Russians. He describes how his collection of books has stopped meaning anything to him, and – incidentally – the horrors of everyday existence.

‘A Russian woman has been killed in one of these houses by a Russian shell from a Russian tank. She had bent down to look in a saucepan in her kitchen. Half of her head ended up in the dish. Her husband ran around the yard with this saucepan and its contents and asked everyone there what he should do. This “everyone” was a few old women, a drunken man and me, out looking for cigarettes.'

This combination of terror and black comedy is what makes his diary so extraordinary. As January and February progressed, and the Russian army's frustration at its inability to capture Grozny increased, the ferocity of its bombardment increased with it. But Yashurkayev remained primarily concerned with the fate of his neighbours, his livestock, his water supply and whether he could find enough cigarettes to keep himself sane among all this madness. ‘I am particularly worried about Barsik, and what will happen if he wanders around and sees bodies. He might start eating them from hunger.'

The politics that was driving the war was scarcely relevant to him, and it is given no more space than any other aspect of his life, but the ironies of his situation scar every paragraph.

One day, for example, he found his yard full of dead doves, which he along with his neighbour Salavdi gathered for food. ‘Yes, it would seem the Chechen doves have lost the war, and failed to become the doves of peace. And so far I haven't seen a single dead crow.'

And then a little later: ‘Radio Liberty is reporting that fifteen shells are landing on Grozny every minute. I counted forty-seven and the minute had not even ended, and I did not count more. If the world was only listening to Radio “Russia”, then it wouldn't hear a single explosion.'

As he wrote, he wove in his thoughts on the deportation, on the
nineteenth-century war, on democracy and the Chechen leadership. His account seamlessly links what is happening in Grozny around him with everything that has happened in his homeland in the last two centuries. It is a very Chechen book.

‘When the government in Chechnya became Chechen, it lost that aura that any government puts around itself. For a Chechen, it had ceased to be a government but was someone's son or brother who ended up in a good position when the Muscovites left. And, by what right? Why not me? How is his father better than mine?'

Barsik becomes an ever greater presence in the book, as the people around him die or are driven away. The dog's actions gradually allow the reader to picture his character. At one point, Barsik steals one of Yashurkayev's boots, and places it in front of the room in which Yashurkayev used to sleep before the war. Taking this as a sign of some kind, Yashurkayev decides to sleep in that room, although it was very cold and he normally chose to sleep elsewhere. In the morning, it turns out that a bomb had shattered the window in his normal room, and that most of the glass ended up on the bed and would have done him serious damage. From then on, he listens to Barsik's advice more carefully, and holds long, imaginary conversations with him.

The bombs that fell gutted apartment blocks, and shattered factories. The shoddily built five-storey buildings that housed workers all across the Soviet Union required little encouragement to fall down. When they collapsed, they buried anyone sheltering in the cellar under tonnes of concrete. Metal gates became shredded like doilies in the rain of shrapnel, and life in the city became ever more animal and basic.

Parallel with this, Yashurkayev's distant, ironic tone starts to become angrier, as he describes the murders of civilians all around him, how a shell landed by his house and miraculously failed to explode, how the roof of his barn is destroyed, and how Barsik is so scared he hides under the sideboard and refuses to come out.

The shelling starts to terrify him, and those of his neighbours who are left. One neighbour refuses to lend another a packet of cigarettes, since he would not get them back if his friend was killed. Relationships break down, but the neighbour is lucky because Yashurkayev was feeling light-headed that day and wanted to help everyone he saw.

As the months go by, the Russian soldiers inexplicably leave him in peace, perhaps because of his white beard, but their regular appearances terrify Barsik, who is becoming increasingly traumatized.

‘It turns out my Barsik is a very clever dog. I never thought about this, I kept him just so he could bark in my yard. But when the shooting starts, he lowers his tail, and makes himself very small and prevails upon me to leave the building. If I refuse, he leaves me, looking both reproachful and guilty and runs to hide in his corner.'

Soon he has a new animal to worry about too. One of his cows gives birth to a calf he calls ‘War'. As if as a counterpoint to this happy news, he follows it with a paragraph about Russian soldiers executing several young men in cold blood.

And so his life wore on: conversations with Barsik, feeding his livestock, survival, death and friendship. It was the life of a Chechen surrounded by a war that had been brought to him by others. Sometimes, the fighting slackens and sometimes he leaves Grozny to see family or friends elsewhere, but it never dies away completely.

And then suddenly the tale stops.

‘I have decided to stop with that. For now, anyway. If these writings have not given anyone an impression of the tragedy of a people, and of its roots, if they have not included the whole depth of the events, everything that was unembraceable, inexplicable, then at least they have done one good thing. They have stopped one man from going mad . . . Or at least, he hopes so.'

It is a profoundly disquieting finish. In the 200,000 words or so that he wrote to describe spring 1995 in Grozny, there is not a single paragraph that is not imbued with war. And the fact that it ends without resolution is the most upsetting element of all.

Excerpts of the diaries were broadcast on Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe years later, and that is where I first came across them. The unresolved ending prompted me to find out where Yashurkayev was. Did the diary end because he was killed? Or just because he got tired of writing? Was he still in Chechnya?

As it happened, I found him in Belgium, living in a little provincial village in the rolling Flemish countryside. He had arrived here in 2000, after a Russian bomb destroyed the house he had lived in
throughout the spring of 1995. The chaos in Chechnya had become more than he could bear, and he had chosen a second deportation: this one self-imposed.

Here, as if in mocking answer to the horrors described in his book, everything was neat and orderly. The trains were frequent and clean, the fields I looked out on from the train window were cropped and green. When I arrived at my destination, the cars were shiny and European. Stolid Belgian citizens ignored me as I sat outside the train station and waited for him to pick me up.

He arrived in a black Volkswagen, and smiled as I dashed through the traffic to his car. He was lean and hard-faced, with white hair and a firm jaw-line, but looked delighted to see me. He has now had his diaries translated into several European languages, but was pleased to talk more about them.

Over lunch – fish, potatoes, a vegetable stew, peppers, brandy and beer – we talked about the war, and the deportation, and why he had not left Grozny with his livestock before the fighting started.

‘War is – well, you know, everyone expected it, but, well, everyone says there will be a third world war, but no one is taking their livestock anywhere at the moment. And such a large, insane, uncontrolled war was hard to imagine,' he said, trying to make sense of the danger that had engulfed his quiet life.

‘I built my own house with my own hands, and a man who himself built his own house with his own hands, he somehow becomes very attached to it, Not in a material sense, but at the time I looked down on people who left.'

So he stayed and survived the war, and had only stopped writing for other, complicated reasons that he struggled to describe. I told him his diary was some of the most touching war writing I had ever read, and he thanked me. But, I said, I had one other question. What had happened to Barsik?

Yashurkayev looked down at his plate, and his son – who was sitting on the sofa – spoke across to me.

‘He was killed. The Russians killed him,' he said.

The savagery of the Russian assault on Grozny in 1994 drove wavering Chechens back squarely behind Dudayev, no matter how erratic his rule had been. Zakayev, the actor who helped lead the national revival, came home as soon as war looked inevitable. Dudayev made him culture minister, but he never really took up the post, going instead to his home town of Urus-Martan to help lead the resistance.

Nationalist poet Yandarbiyev was already installed in the heart of government, as Dudayev's deputy, and other cultural leaders were too. The war made them forget their differences, and unite to fight the invader. They fought in family groups, or friendship groups, taking advantage of their superior knowledge of the geography of Grozny and other towns to outflank and outwit the lumbering Russian tank columns.

The terrible bombardment of Grozny that Yashurkayev and his dog Barsik endured was born of the Russians' inability to take the centre of the city and the great edifice which had been the headquarters of the Party's Regional Committee, and which Dudayev called the Presidential Palace. Groups of Chechens moved into the centre to fight around the giant concrete hulk, which was ever more scarred and damaged.

Among them, perhaps inevitably, was Dedushka, my foul-mouthed friend.

Dedushka, on release from prison, had lived in Siberia, where his gang had its business interests. Krasnoyarsk, a city of aluminium smelters far from Moscow, epitomized the collapse of law and order in post-Soviet Russia. Here business disputes were settled with guns and bombs in what were known as the ‘aluminium wars'. Reputations for hard business practices were made among the smelters, and small armies were employed by the bosses to keep their competitors
and their employees in line. It was, I suspect, fertile ground for a man of Dedushka's talents.

He returned to Chechnya in autumn 1994, he said, along with two of his sons, to fetch his father to safety. War was inevitable, everyone knew, and he wanted to take his father back to Krasnoyarsk with him. He had seen the propaganda sweeping the country, in which Chechens were demonized, and he wanted nothing to do with the hostility being poured out.

‘When I was going there, I heard how the Chechens were barbarous and sadists, and I knew it was not true,' he said.

He did not like being in Chechnya, and never had. The traditions were too strict for him, and he barely spoke the language after a lifetime in exile and in prison in Russia. But even this old cynic was swept up in the spirit of the times. Perhaps he saw this as a chance to get back at Moscow, which had ruined his life so comprehensively. Perhaps he was just having fun. Even he could not explain the fact that he and his sons then joined up with one of the groups fighting the invading army, and took up their positions on the edge of Grozny.

That was when the heaviest shelling came.

‘My sons were killed,' he said. ‘These sons that were killed, the oldest had two sons and a daughter. The youngest had two sons. And how can I go to my grandsons now, because they will ask what I did with their fathers. I would answer that they were killed in the war, but then they would ask why I was not killed too.'

I thought about that, and asked him why he had not been killed, and he paused for a while. Then he reached across and shut the door. He did not need to stand up to do so, since the room we were sitting in was only about the size of a small car. The door of his house was never normally shut, so two refugee children called out to him from outside, speaking in Chechen, but he ushered them away. And he began to tell his story.

‘I said to my sons that they should not come with me, that they should stay in Krasnoyarsk, but they came with me, and we were under shellfire. I was concussed terribly, and I lost my memory. And I knew nothing, nothing. The Russians took me then, and they held me for 103 days,' he said.

He later told me that he had been stunned by the same Russian raid that killed senior commander Umalt Dashayev, which places it on 28 December 1994. He did not even manage to see in the New Year in Grozny. I had not expected this, and was taken aback by the bleakness of his tone. He had gone from twinkling patriarch to tortured old man in less than five minutes.

‘See these teeth,' he said, reaching into his mouth and pulling out a plate of dentures. ‘See them, they are not mine. These Russians, they got a file, you know what a file is, and they put it between my teeth, and they twisted it like this. Like this. And they snapped my teeth off. The roots were still there, but nothing else.'

I did not know what to say. He was looking down at the table now, with its oilcloth cover, and fumbling in his packet for another cigarette. Realizing he was still holding his old cigarette end, he dunked it in his cold tea and put it on the table, before lighting a new one.

‘Then they took electric cables, they put one on my cock, and then put the other one on my ear, and they turned the power on. And they asked “What is your name, what is your name?”, but I did not know. I could not tell them what my name was. Then they would strip me down until I was as naked as when I was born, and they threw me out of the train. They were keeping us in these wagons, and they made us sit in a row on the rails. It was twenty-seven degrees below zero, and we were just sitting on the bare iron of the rails. Anyone who could not stand up after that was shot and the train rolled over them, they were listed as “unknown”.'