The culprits, p.14
The Culprits, page 14
There was a pull on his feet and he was dragged from the flat bed. After falling, he was stood upright, his taped-together hands affecting his balance. Beside him some men were cigarette smoking. They pulled off his sack. Ruslan whimpered, for he knew immediately where he was—they called them “filtration camps,” and they were used to weed out those deemed a threat to the nation. And while they existed mostly in the South, at times of crisis they’d pop up in the forests surrounding Russia’s two biggest cities.
Ruslan looked upon a clearing in a moon-brightened pine grove. In it was a large canvas tent with a light burning inside. Beside it were holes, a couple of dozen or more, each one freshly dug and as deep as two coffins. And while this scared him (he was a Caucasian, after all, and he’d heard all the stories) it was the sound coming from the pits that caused him to drop to his knees and start pleading for mercy.
Little one.
The men in the pits, having heard the truck coming, started moaning, and wailing, and for help loudly calling.
He had a thin, threadbare blanket. The only food he was given was dark, hardened bread scraps (which they threw in his pit after whistling to him). The soil was alive with worms and beetles and ants that looked reddish when viewed in the daylight—these became his friends. He chatted with them to help pass long hours. When screams came from the tent, he’d say to Comrade Worm or his friend Boris Beetle: “Hey! Do you hear that? I think that they’re having a Georgian!” Or, if the moans sounded at all Asiatic, he’d comment, “It’s an Azeri, I’m sure of it, you can tell by his shrieking …”
He tried to escape often, clawing and scraping at the walls of his enclosure; this brought earth tumbling down and made his pit even smaller. To pass unendurable hours, he learned to look up at clouds and at swaying pine branches; late at night, he often thought, they looked like the arms of dark, friendly giants. One day passed, and another. It was on the afternoon of the third day that they pulled him out by his armpits, Ruslan screaming and moaning and begging for mercy. He was then treated to techniques originally applied to Middle Ages witches, the torturers wearing the robes of medieval clergy. Their efficacy, of course, was now honed with practice, and electricity, and an improved understanding of bodily mechanics. But the worst part? The part most diabolical and blithely inhuman? The tent was warm. They had heaters made in Bulgaria, which they ran off the same generators that powered their flesh prods. When Ruslan was led back to his freezing, dark earth pit, an uncontrolled shivering overtook his thin body, and cold seeped through his wounds like a strong, airborne vinegar.
He never knew when they’d come for him. He’d go for a better part of a week without a session, and then have two in one day, for no reason he could think of. At first he would pray they’d leave him alone, his knees pressed against earth and his eyes peering upward. This didn’t last long; God, and his love, died right before him. In the absence of hope, he turned bone thin and obedient. He drank his own urine, and choked down earth to quell stomach rumblings. He survived thanks to the presence of a ruthless camp doctor, who calculated how much Ruslan’s body could suffer. He began to look upon his life as Unreal—as something chimerical and far off and glimpsed in a daydream. After a while he wondered if death had already come to him, the camp an afterlife punishment for hedonistic Muslims. This helped, just a little: he imagined that one day it would stop, and he would float into the air and face a forgiving Allah. He stopped counting the days, or the time between feedings.
On the nineteenth day of his internment, he was led from his hole, Ruslan muttering and trying to find strength in his scarred legs. He was tied to a chair. Five minutes passed slowly. As he waited, he adjusted to the warmth of the tent, his body convulsing and voiding itself and registering pain more effectively.
The camp doctor came with a syringe pointed upward. “Hold out your arm.”
Ruslan offered a forearm that was thin and bug ravaged.
“You won’t feel this,” he stated, to which Ruslan said nothing.
Little one. It was a serum devised by CIA-employed pharmacologists, and used on Viet Cong prisoners to extract information (only to be abandoned because its effect was not what they’d planned for). Later, it had been traded to the Russians for certain KGB data, and labelled N20 in the labs of Cold War–time Russia. It was a solution that released the whole of the universal subconscious, such that the victim’s brain was flooded with every scrap of knowledge ever held by anyone in our planet’s long history. In so doing, this drug—this evil N20—rendered its victims instantly omniscient, and by extension spit-drooling and mad as a cobbler. After an hour of howling (trust me: that first rush of clarity is a mind-tripping doozy) Ruslan was led shaking to the cold of his earth pit. Visions of all things blazed before his eyes. He held his poor head as it erupted with knowledge. He covered his ears, which screamed the secrets of living into the depths of his blown mind.
When the FSB came a few hours later, Ruslan was wet-nosed and snivelling. What was left of his mind thought, Now they will shoot me. They pulled him up, his body caked with black soil. Sure enough, he was led in a different direction. This is it, he thought again, I am glad, now they’ll kill me. With all of his might, he tried to open his mouth and jitteringly thank them. He trudged through leaves and low green ferns. In the back of his mind he thought of his brothers and sisters, whom he wished he could hug to his frail, trembling body. He thought of his two doting parents, who’d spent all of their money on his flight from his homeland, there being nothing for a young man in the hell called the Caucasus. He thought of friends that he’d had in his big northern city—young and wild, every one, their capacity for joy heightened by the horrors behind them. He thought of the women he’d bedded, including little Anya, the one who’d left behind Russia to forget all about him. He thought of watermelons, and wildflowers, and the crags of ancient, squat mountains.
He felt a humility before all things that he wished he’d known more of.
They reached a rutted track. Again a sack was pulled over his head. He waited for the gun crack that would put life behind him. It didn’t come. He stood there waiting, and begging forgiveness from Allah. He heard lighters flicking and two contraktniki chattering about last night’s DVD movie. (It was the one in which Stallone was a skilled mountain climber.) Despite knowing everything, he couldn’t sift through all of the information inside him and decide why death hadn’t yet claimed him. He smelled forest, and cigarettes, and diesel fumes spitting. He heard a loud, clanking chug and then brakes whining shrilly. He was thrown in the back. He lay there, his mind a fiendish wild cloudburst of every known colour. Sleep came in fits and in spurts while the truck was in motion. He came awake fully when he heard sounds of the city.
The lorry stopped. Ruslan was dropped amidst cold Russian chatter. Every part of him hurt, though he didn’t much notice. He heard a motor’s loud gunning, and the cry of old women. People rushed to him, and someone pulled off his hood gently. He was on an Apraxin laneway, his body lying in slush that was dirtied with oil. There were cries, and loud weeping, and dark-skinned hands reaching toward him. To his feet he was lifted, his arms on the shoulders of two Apraxin stall owners. In this way he was walked to his uncle’s TV store, his ears ringing with shouts of, “Ruslan’s alive, Allahu Akbar, please, Dadya, come now and see him!”
And then it was Dadya, running toward him with both his arms outstretched. He kissed Ruslan’s cheeks and wept, “Oh, my nephew.” And Ruslan—he cried, before all those assembled, thinking how odd it was that Apraxin would be in the Hereafter. He also noticed one thing that struck him as funny: in heaven his dadya had grown his beard longer.
His uncle hugged him again and into his ears whispered, “I have missed you.” He then led him inside. He closed the cellar door to the street’s outside clamour. As Dadya dropped to his knees and offered his gratitude toward Mecca, Ruslan looked at the shop’s once-cluttered stock shelves. They were now empty, Dadya having sold everything to pay Ruslan’s ransom. Ruslan wiped away tears, his head erupting with thunder and lightning bolts flashing. When Dadya was finished praying, he once again hugged his nephew and in Avari asked him: “You told the contraktniki nothing?”
Ruslan shook his head no, and in a way this was truthful. He had told them nothing, even though he’d pleaded to make a confession. I’ll tell you everything! he’d called out every time that they burned him. I’ll confess to anything! he screamed every time they genitally seared him. In response, they’d just laughed and drunk more Bacardi. In fact, the more he offered to help, the more they seemed to relish the hurting. So no. He hadn’t talked. He had wanted to, but hadn’t. His torture had had nothing to do with his talking. (Little one, there was nothing he could have possibly told them.)
Dadya hugged him tighter.
“Oh my son,” he said, for in the houses and dachas and yurts of his homeland, every loved man is a son, no matter his father. “You have distinguished yourself.” He then leaned so close that Ruslan could smell cumin, and garlic, and cherry-scented tobacco. “You are sick. But don’t worry. Inshallah, we will make you better. Then we will make them pay. Trust me, my son, it is the way of our people. They all will pay dearly.”
It was like being in two places. At the same time he hung from his uncle’s thick forearms, he was pulled by cruel hands from his pit in the cold ground. At the same time he was carried through an empty TV shop, he was dragged by the heels through a snow-covered forest. At the same time he was put to bed by Apraxin babushkas, he was dumped into his pit, his cold body covered with wounds raw and gaping. At the same time he felt the warmth of his small bed, he felt the comfort that came late in a session of torture, when the soul leaves the body for places that are unreal.
Trauma and N20 were the tag-teaming culprits. He was never quite awake, and never quite sleeping. He was lost in two places, a ghost between planets. At times he was conscious of old kerchiefed women, brought in by his uncle to care for poor Ruslan. (“Oh good,” he’d hear them say, “the boy he is sleeping.”) Other times they would be there, in his Apraxin bedroom, laughing as they touched hot tongs to his body. This went on for weeks, Ruslan hovering and floating and never landing in one place. He cried like a baby, and wet his bed often. He soaked his pillow with the sweat that came from his fevers. He sat bolt upright in bed and began loudly shrieking, his eyes reflecting an image of tall pine trees swaying, his neck muscles distended as he screamed in the darkness. His screams would then set off a macabre chain reaction, for all through the market young men were going through the same process, be they Ingush, Ossetian, Dagestani, or Chechen. Upon hearing Ruslan (or whomever) they’d all open their mouths and produce screams in concert. And when this happened, all of Apraxin Dvor would awaken, and listen to a choir of men suffering.
But then, little by little, each day infinitesimally better, Ruslan began to exist in one place more than the other. He’d hear a dog barking, but in Apraxin Dvor only. He’d hear the sweet giggle of little brown children, and not transform these sounds into something despicable. He’d awake to babushkas changing his bedsheets while saying, “Don’t worry, it happens,” and feel only a modest degree of terror.
Or he’d open his eyes and find his uncle with strange men wearing beards and djellabas, and he wouldn’t confuse the faces of these visitors with the faces of the contraktniki. Friends visited, too—tall, young, dark-haired men whose cocksureness would melt into something nervous the moment they took a look at what had become of their Ruslan. The only other visitor was a kind Georgian doctor, brought in by Dadya to check for signs of infection. Ruslan took one look and raced to his room’s dusty corner, where he muttered and whimpered and held himself, rocking.
With time, he started asking for small things: water with lemon, warm bread with honey, a chance to speak on the phone with his worry-sick mother. But then he’d slip back, and have another hard night in the forest, followed by a morning in which he wanted only an end to his short life. It was a matter of three steps forward and two and a half backward. And then, on a day in which the city had a blanketing snowfall, such that the lions of Griboedov looked to be wearing twin white shawls, Ruslan opened his eyes and was just in his bedroom. He saw white walls, the lonely dresser, the poster of a handlebar-moustached James Hetfield (and he remembered his favourite Metallica song was called “Enter Sandman”). Oh yes—he finally knew where he was, and he wept just to be there.
He tried to make sound. It came as hoarse coughing. Again he tried, and heard footsteps approaching. The door of his room opened. Dadya entered and crept over to him and held on to him tightly. After a time he released him, his eyes turning glassy: the boy was so thin, so all-over trembling, so permanently scarred with N20 madness.
“You have survived.”
“Yes,” Ruslan whispered.
“You are the son of my sister and I love you.”
Ruslan looked at him.
“Rest, son. Rest.”
“Dadya?”
“Yes?”
“They have Vakha?”
There was a pause.
“Yes, we think so.”
Ruslan’s eyes welled, and prophetic visions streaked before them: bombs and rock concerts and his uncle drinking tea with men quoting the Quran.
“Dadya?” Ruslan peeped.
“Yes, son.”
“What will happen to me?”
“You will honour yourself, of that I will make sure.”
Ruslan slept around the clock, waking occasionally to eat and visit the bathroom. Though he was now in one place and one place only during his waking hours—the city, Apraxin Dvor, his little TV shop bedroom—the filtration camp still came during intense blood-soaked nightmares, Ruslan waking in a sweat while shaking all over. The babushkas would come running, and place cool, dripping cloths on his sweat-dampened forehead. Days passed. He began spending some of his time listening to music. He began to eat normal meals, though he was subject to bouts of fear and confusion. One afternoon, when eating a lunch of hot rice and chicken, the rice started to wriggle like the bugs in his cold pit. Another time, he decided he was ready for a walk in the market; though his uncle was with him, the crowds and the noise left his nerves badly jangled. Instead, they walked to the canal, where Ruslan stood and watched N20 thoughts dart past his sad eyes, their depth and intensity reflected in water.
Though Ruslan had never been a great reader, his uncle brought him books, mostly about history, and war, and the South’s liberation struggle. In this way Ruslan read about the original Imam Shamil, who led the first war against the Russians two centuries earlier. He read about the great WWII expulsion, when Stalin accused every Chechen and Dagestani of sympathizing with the Nazis. He read of the Cossack general named Yermolov, who famously said, “The only good Chechen’s a dead one” (and then later, in a gesture of diplomacy, the Russians would build a statue in his honour in the middle of Grozny). Ruslan couldn’t understand a word. The words on the pages fell apart into fragments, and then floated away like moths in a strong breeze. Still, he pretended. When asked what he thought, he’d say, “Thank you, I liked them.”
More rest. More short walks truncated. More beetroot soup and pieces of cold chicken. More nightmares invaded by ban-doliered Russians.
More: time.
One afternoon, with Ruslan feeling groggy and shaky all over, Dadya came into his room and sat down beside him.
“Ruslan,” he said, “I have people for you to meet.”
“People?”
“Yes. They would like to speak with you.”
There was a pause. “Dadya. I am tired.”
“It is important.”
“Will it take long?”
“I don’t think so.”
Another pause, this one awkward.
“All right.”
Uncle thanked him, and called “Okay” to those outside. Three men entered, all wearing djellabas and prayer caps and beards long and bushy. Ruslan, meanwhile, had the feeling he’d seen them before, huddled at the fringes of his fever-caused daydreams. He gave a cautious “Hello.” Two men answered with a nod and said, “Asslam-o-Alaikum.” The third, however, came closer. Ruslan felt sure he knew him. He sat on the bed right beside him. Ruslan puzzled, and stared, and felt his eyes blearily crossing—he saw that the man, despite his beard, was little older than he was. And then, just like that, he knew how he knew him: he was his boss’s son. He was the lost son of his lost boss. Yes, he was sure: he’d seen him in Gostinyy, a full lifetime earlier.
“Hello, Khassan,” he said weakly.
“Asslam-o-Alaikum,” Khassan answered in a voice warm and gentle. “It’s good to see you again. Much time has passed since we last met.”
“Yes …”
“Many things have happened since then.”
“Yes.”
“You were buying wine.”
Ruslan craved sleep, and food made by babushkas.
Khassan bent closer, as if to exclude all the others who were in the room listening. “I underestimated you,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
“I am sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Ruslan said, yawning.
“Ruslan.” Khassan’s deep-set eyes were burning. “You have a decision to make.”
Ruslan blinked. Khassan’s face half came into focus.
“If you wish us to go,” Khassan said, “we will do so.” He glanced over his shoulder, indicating the two others. “But if you wish us to stay, you’ll walk with us. You’ll become one of us. You will be one of God’s soldiers. You’ll make the infidels pay for what they’ve done to you. The decision is yours and yours only.”
