 |
| Source: http://tinyurl.com/5suttyz |
‘An injury like this has probably never been described in literature before,’ said a district doctor in Gudermesa. ‘The bullet must have entered the skull through the left temple, curved along the inner side of the forehead, shattered the man’s eyes and exited out the right temple. The brain remained intact.’
The doctor yawned. ‘Excuse me. I’ve been operating on people for five days in a row. Go inside. The man’s name is Yavuz Bigayev. The Chechens have already caught the sniper who shot him. Ask Yavuz to tell you what they did to the Russian bastard…’
An oppressive blast of air hit us in the face as we entered the room. The fresh May afternoon breeze stayed outside. All the windows were sealed with adhesive tape. Inside, the injured lay on eight beds with steel frames. We recognized Yavuz immediately. His head resembled a massive, overgrown melon. Bandages that were wound around his head, soaking yellowish blood stains, showed only lips and the right ear. He spoke softly and continuously, as if he weren't badly injured at all.
‘I didn’t know what it was like – to kill people. I didn’t want to know. Then they shelled our apartment building. I lost everything. Stray shrapnel killed my brother Ruslan. So I bought a machine gun and joined Aslanbeck’s unit. My first battle was on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t shoot much. They laughed at me, told me I was a bad soldier and always positioned me at the back line. I’m over fifty, you know. I never did military service. I like books. Before the war I used to work as a librarian at the Oil Institute in Grozny. I had such a great library there. I read almost every book there.
We won The New Year’s battle. We wrecked hundreds of tents and shot thousands of Russian soldiers. I don’t know if I killed anyone. I can’t even say what was going on in my mind. I don’t know if I was scared or angry or just full of regret. Maybe I wanted revenge. I shot from a distance. I was acting like I was obsessed. I didn’t feel tired. When I saw a Russian tank that my friends had set on fire, I screamed like a madman. I screamed because I was excited, seeing Russian soldiers jumping out of the tank with their bodies on fire. I shot at them standing, with my machine gun propped at my side.
We almost didn’t sleep at all. We were always fighting. Sometimes we would pray together in a circle, which made us feel much stronger. In Chechnya we call it ‘zikr’. When you stand in a circle, dancing or praying, it is as if the power to survive, or the courage to die, makes you so much stronger. Sometimes I would go to a basement, cover myself with my fur coat and dream that funny dream of mine….’
An American truck pulls over and unloads a large container in front of my house. I sign a paper which states that I’m inheriting stuff from my uncle who moved to the States years ago where his family lost track of him. I open the container. It’s full of books and manuscripts… but what manuscripts!
Out of forty-six books by Aristotle that were known in ancient times, less than half have survived. But suddenly before my eyes unknown scrolls unfold, containing the 14th and 15th volumes of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. I take out the books, trembling with excitement. I carefully fish out piles of scrolls from the container. The Gospel according to Paul covered in dust. Seven volumes of The Three Musketeers 15 Years later by Alexandre Dumas. I open a tattered notebook, Dostoyevsky’s diary written in prison in Omsk. Chavchavadze’s translations of Pushkin into Georgian. Unknown Koran suras from Mekka.
I wake up deafened by thundering gunfire and crawl out from the basement. A hunched Russian granny emerges from the veil of purple smoke that's engulfing the street. She’s carrying a bucket. I scream at her, ‘Mother, take cover, or you’ll get killed!’ And she disappears again into the thick blanket of smoke. She is desperately looking for water. I am back in my world. The houses around me are on fire, grenades are falling in front of me into the ruins of a furniture factory.
The Russian army uses katyushas against us. They are now much more sophisticated than fifty years ago and make it practically impossible for anyone to hide. The URAGAN launcher shoots 220 mm rockets, each of them weighing 270 kilos. They sometimes launch five, ten, fifteen rockets at a time. The rockets will burst into million fragments that pierce concrete walls. A single rocket reduces all life within two hectares to nothing. Rockets can fall as far as thirty kilometers. When Russians come with the URAGAN, go and hide, and silently pray for survival. It’s toughest for the old - where should they go? They can’t just jump over a concrete bridge into a river. Oh my god! GRAD is not much better, either. It has a smaller caliber – 122 millimeters – and has a firing range of twenty kilometers. We rebels can barely escape, but civilians, they have no chance.
I was sent to sneak along the Sunzha River which flows through the center of Grozny and document Russian positions behind the Caucasus Hotel. I move slowly, jumping from door to door, brushing my shoulders against the houses on a deserted street. Every fifty meters I stumble upon a corpse, gnawed by dogs. Dogs love the flesh of children the most. Maybe it tastes sweeter. There are always more dogs feasting on a child than on an old man. I’m very careful, even though Russian soldiers aren’t supposed to be on this street at all. I step carefully, moving from one shadow to another. Then I hear a sharp crash and see a cloud of black smoke with a white lining, and then nothing. It’s dark, completely dark. I fall on my knees and crawl snake-like to a wall. I sit there, resting the back of my neck against the wall. I touch my face with my hands. They're wet. Maybe blood. I realize I have no eyeballs anymore and can’t lie down unless I want to bleed to death. I decide to wait until they find me. It’ll all depend on who that will be, Russians or my people.
They start to shell the street with heavy grenades, howitzers with 152-millimeter calibers. These grenades weigh almost fifty kilos. One can shatter a house into pieces. The Russians have apparently decided to exterminate the city. Using a launcher they blast a block of houses to pieces, including the people hiding in the basements. Then they send a group of foot soldiers to seize the place and start working on the next block. Systematically. Step by step. As if they were not sons of Ivan the Terrible, but sons of Hitler.
Maybe I’ve gone crazy. I sit for hours and hours, trying not to fall over. I get some rest, half-sleeping. Then half-awake the same dream comes back again. The container with books looks bottomless. I take out more and more scrolls. They fill up my kitchen, living room, balcony, old books, one literary gem after another. I hold the original edition of Kitab Al-Shifa, The Book of Healing by Avicenna. In the preamble, unknown so far, he confesses his admiration for Aristotle. Did you know that his real name was Abū Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā? I step on books and experience an infinite pleasure of discovery. An unknown novel by Francis Scott Fitzgerald lies in front of me about the Great Gatsby who became the Small Gatsby. An unknown version of Waiting For Godot, in which Godot actually comes. As it turns out, Gogol never burnt the second version of his Dead Souls. I hold notebooks written in the Maestro’s minute handwriting. My heart skips a beat when I come across a secret plan to topple Stalin, written in 1937 by Andre Breton and Lev Trotsky. Or when I read Agatha Christie’s confession in which she admits that she never wrote And There Were None but she stole it in 1920 from some New England newspaper. Or when I find Kafka’s first attempt at writing The Process in which the main character’s name is not Josef K. but Karel J.
They found me on the third day. My people. They brought me here, to this hospital in Gudermesa. They operated on me and told me I’d never see again. A while ago they brought to the town the sniper whom they'd captured firing at people on the streets and at our positions from a nine-story apartment building behind the hotel. It’s the one who blew my eyes out. No doubt about it. My commander came to see me and said, ‘You can do whatever you want with him.’ Then a few hours later he came back for me with a car and drove me to a brick factory where he'd been holding Russian captives. I only know his name was Aljosha and he was about thirty. ‘They’ll bring him in a minute. You can do it,’ he said to me.
I sat on a chair in a room and heard cannons shooting nearby. I slid down the chair, put my head on the arm rest and fell into a half-sleep again. It would make me fell better to be in this aware unconsciousness. Books, books, books.
At the bottom of the container I find a pile of clay plates sealed together with duct tape. It’s the complete edition of The Code of Hammurabi. Almost 150 kilos. I haul the books home together with my neighbors and my brother Ruslan who have all come to help. Books and books everywhere. A totally unknown novel by George Orwell with the title 2084 written, at the end of his life when he realized that 1984 was just a weak cup of tea compared to what’s happening in the world at the end of this millennium. An original manuscript of Apollinaire’s Alcohols written in Polish. Well, his mother was Polish, which not many people know. I sit on the steps and read an unknown speech by Boris Pasternak, that he drafted while he was getting ready to receive the Nobel Prize. There’s no mention of him refusing it, which he finally did. I read and suddenly hear a whizzing sound. Then a rumble and then a deadly blast that shatters ear drums and compresses the diaphram. The last thing I see in my dream is my dead brother Ruslan with his throat cut by nickel shrapnel. Above him a notebook, written in pencil, burning in the air. Stories by Isaak Babel, so far unknown. The notebook falls to the ground and smolders among the ruins of our house. Shit.
(to be continued)
