The culprits, p.26
The Culprits, page 26
Ruslan’s head spun, and he suddenly felt frightened. “No,” he said. “My uncle has already received some payment.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm.” She paused. “They must think he’ll be some use to them later. Because other families they get nothing. At least, this is what I’ve heard. I have known other girls who have done this. I knew Zarema Mazhikhoyeva, the Tverskaya bomber. And afterward, I heard whisperings, about promises and money and how the two had added up to nothing. I bet you my aunt ends up getting zero. I tell you, malchik, I’d laugh if that happened. I’d laugh all the way to paradise.”
Another time, the two of them lazing on the apartment’s old sofa, they fended off boredom with a game they’d invented.
“Mountains.”
“Quince jam,” countered Ruslan.
“Dancing the zikr.”
“The taste of malted rye flour.”
“Goat’s milk.”
“The sound of wild dogs braying.”
“Firing guns during weddings.”
“Ha! That’s a good one …”
“Go.”
“Caucasian autumns.”
“Wrestling matches.”
“Sweetening tea with jam instead of sugar.”
“Mountain polo.”
“We were always better than you.”
“Not on your life.”
“I used to play, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Were you good?”
“I don’t remember. I mean, I do and I don’t. Everything is a jumble.”
Pause.
“Watermelons,” said Suli.
“Mmmmm. Yes. Watermelons. Why do you suppose they grow so well down south?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I only know that I’d like one that hasn’t been battered all day in a bouncing truck.”
“Fresh curds.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And dandelion tea.”
“Yes. Dandelion tea.”
“I know!”
“What?”
“Big families.”
“Yes. Rooms full of aunts and uncles and a half-dozen children. These Russians—how they can live with only one or maybe two children. I don’t understand it. I don’t know how they can do it.”
“No, me neither.”
“It must be so lonely.”
“Yes.”
There was a pause.
“There’s not much else, is there?”
“No,” said Ruslan.
“There’s rubble.”
“And checkpoints.”
“And mortar rounds off in the distance.”
“And the buildings of Grozny, looking like vegetable graters.”
Suli looked as though she might start crying.
“You know,” she said, “who is behind this, don’t you?”
“Behind what?”
“Chechnya, the bombings, this.”
“I don’t know.”
“Everybody.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Everybody is at fault.”
“I don’t—”
“When it comes to something as fucked up as Chechnya, everybody is a culprit. Putin is a culprit. Bush is a culprit, for supporting the ‘anti-terrorist’ forces in Chechnya. Shamil Basayev is a culprit. Khattab is a culprit, with his videos of hostages losing their fingers. General Dudayev is a culprit, Aslan Maskhadov is a culprit, and Boris Yeltsin—now he, he was a culprit, and drunk as an uncle on top of it. Chevron and BP are culprits, if only for funding the protection of the pipeline. The OMON are culprits and the contraktniki are culprits and the FSB are culprits. The Russian police are culprits, as are the soldiers. The Russian people are culprits, though no more than the Chechens—yes, yes, I’ll admit it, after beating the Russians in 1996, what did we do? At the first glimpse of freedom we turned to kidnapping and smuggling and narcotics trafficking. Stalin was a culprit, for shipping us all to Kazakhstan in the forties, and making us all so pissed off in the first place. General Yermolov was a culprit, for saying, ‘The only good Chechen’s a dead one.’” She paused to catch her breath. “The Cossacks were culprits, for using the Russian word ‘terrible’ as the name for our capital. Three hundred years of fighting and resistance and stupid blood vendettas are the culprits. Everybody and everything is a culprit. When something like this goes on for so long, things like right and wrong, justified or not justified … pluh. They go out the window. They don’t exist any longer. There is only business and vengeance. And after a while even business goes out the window, until none of it, not one moment, makes sense to anybody any longer. Everything, that is, but the desire to get even.”
She stopped, her hands shaking with anger. Ruslan didn’t know what to say; with his mind as it was, he hadn’t understood most of it. The apartment door opened. Mohammed sauntered in with a loud, laughing Karim. Suli rose and lowered her head and rushed into the kitchen. Ruslan went with her. A minute later he smelled the rosemary scent of green Taliban hashish. Working over the sink, Suli lowered her head and began furiously peeling.
She brooded for days, before again speaking.
The weather outside grew hotter and hotter. As June wore on, Ruslan and Suli learned they had another thing in common: they would both wake in the middle of the night, sweat-soaked and shaken by hellacious nightmares. One evening they awoke at the same time; he heard her yelps and she heard his moaning. They both emerged in the hallway. Nodding, they went to the kitchen and sat in half darkness. Suli made tea, and they moved their chairs next to the window. Sipping, they watched the sun rise over a landscape of buildings. This helped. There was something about the morning’s first sunshine that made everything simpler, and easier to fathom.
And though Suli never laughed—she treated the slightest of grins as though it caused pain in her jawbones—there was that time in which the two of them were side by side in the kitchen, Ruslan in his skirt chopping up spinach. Suli, meanwhile, was stirring a pot bubbling with chard leaves and mutton. Both of them had grown damp in the apartment’s humidity. They were talking about Khassan and his three stupid henchmen.
“Omar,” said Suli.
“What did he do?”
“Many things. And nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s the way he looks at me. Like he wants to throw me to the carpet and then do things to me.”
Ruslan’s N20 fog cleared for one second, just long enough for the old Ruslan—the Ruslan who was witty and jaunty and a charmer of women—to open his mouth and say, “I’d like to punch him in the mouth, that fat, lascivious mongrel.”
Suli was tasting the soup at the moment he said it, and she laughed so hard broth from her nose spouted. Ruslan chortled too, and pretty soon they were both holding their bellies and riotously laughing. But then, one moment later, the thought of that fat, leering Omar aroused in Suli an ugly emotion. Her face bloomed hotly, and she began softly weeping for the first time in front of him. Ruslan watched silently. She moved to the stove, and still Ruslan stood there, listening to her tears land in soup flavoured with tarragon.
“I begged them,” she choked. Though she no longer seemed to be crying, her tears kept coming, as though a sorrowful rain were falling inside her.
“I did too,” Ruslan told her.
(And later, after they’d served lunch to the Wahhabis, roly-poly Karim came up to Ruslan. “Hey dyevushka,” he said in his bad Russian, “the borscht it had, mmmmm, anchovy? It taste, like, salty or something?”)
Khassan was coming less and less often; apparently he was busy with what Karim described as “last-minute, mmmmmm, details.” Ruslan began reading the Quran, especially the parts highlighted in light blue. June gave way to July, and the air it grew denser. The sun blazed in the sky like a vengeful pariah. Ruslan felt his mind slipping deeper and deeper into the future. Often, he gazed out the window and saw paradise form in heat rising off pavement. Oh yes—he saw jungle vines curl over Soviet apartments. He saw babushkas transform into garlanded sirens. He saw pines turn to trees bursting with sweet fruit.
On the evening of July the fourth, Suli came to him. It was just before midnight, and Ruslan was lying awake, listening to insects and jaguars and aroused howler monkeys. He heard her timidly knocking. Tomorrow was the day, and both of them knew it.
“What is it?” he whispered. She stood in the shadows, dressed in a skirt and a T-shirt. She said nothing, and for a moment Ruslan wondered if he was imagining the whole thing. “Suli?” he said.
She crept forward sniffling, and crawled into his bed of matted-down vine leaves. She turned her back to him. No warmth came from her body. For the longest time they both lay there, trying to understand this strange, awkward moment. Finally, Suli reached behind her and took hold of his right hand. She put it onto her belly. Ruslan was surprised, for it felt slightly bloated.
“You see?” she said softly. “You see why I have to do this?”
Seconds went by. Her voice, when it came, was a rasping.
“I can feel it. Inside me. Moving. Breathing. One of theirs. I have dreams, Ruslan. It’s a ghoul, I know it, a little living Putin. Whenever I sleep, it practises its judo kicks on me. It sees things, it knows. Ruslan—it knows what I’m thinking, it knows what I’m feeling. Thank God I’ll die before this thing is born. This world … this world already has more than enough sorrow.”
Ruslan said nothing. What she said had overwhelmed him, and he had closed his mind to it. He was now on a raft, floating along a green, lustrous river. Fish jumped, and swans drifted, and the native girl next to him had glistening soft bronze skin. He moved closer to his virgin, who looked a little like Suli. She accepted his closeness. They both slept so deeply that nothing would rouse them—not the passage of hours, not the first hint of sunlight, not the round-the-clock ringing of satellite telephones.
It was Khassan who found them, curled together like puppies, one of them stone-faced and the other one smiling.
The whole world was quiet save for the soft, idling hush of a Mercedes sedan. The driver was Omar. When he heard footfalls on pavement, he looked at them, scowling. Khassan opened the rear door and Suli climbed inside. Ruslan followed, the green of the jungle replaced by fine leather. Khassan sat in front. Omar put the car into gear, and was about to pull away when Khassan said something in Arabic. Omar braked. Khassan turned.
“Ruslan,” he said in Avari, “you and I will trade seats. I don’t want you distracted by your sweetheart.”
And so they changed places, and rode through a day slowly dawning. No one spoke. In the absence of conversation, Ruslan listened to the thrumming of tires against an undulating roadway. Khassan and Omar smoked so many cigarettes that the air turned blue and scratched at Ruslan’s throat like a three-week-old kitten. Every few minutes he opened his window and let the air of the morning ruffle his head scarf.
The car left the city, Khassan choosing a rural route to avoid the militsia-packed freeway. The sun rose above, over fields grey and grassy, and a bank of pink light fell upon the Mercedes. They passed timber-house towns and spurts of pine forest. As Ruslan looked out of his window, he saw old Orthodox churches, built from nothing but wood beams fitted tightly together. They passed streams of clear water and fields of alfalfa, and they even saw the odd tacked-together pyramid, which in the countryside was said to cure everything from disease to bankruptcy. As the morning progressed, the sun became hot and white-blazing. Inside the car, Omar turned the air conditioning up so high that Ruslan’s skin sprouted goosebumps, and he resisted the temptation to curl his arms around himself. Somewhere in the flatlands between Malaya Vishera and the town of Bologoye, they pulled over; all four wandered into dense, white-barked forest, each picking a place where he or she could privately make water.
Otherwise, they didn’t stop. At one point Khassan asked, “Is anyone hungry?” This startled Ruslan: it was the first time anyone had spoken in more than an hour. Suli said nothing, feeding a silence broken rarely by quick, jabbing comments. For example—outside the city of Tver, a place where prisons housed the homeless who’d been arrested in Russia’s two major cities, Omar gestured and said in bad Russian, “I have there friend, a good one. Maybe he dead now.”
They kept to country roads, their progress impeded at times by horses and wagons. Villages turned into towns. They passed through Kiln, and Gorodnya, and along the maple-lined banks of the wide Volga River. At one point they got stuck behind goats walking slowly. Omar honked, and cursed, and leaned his nicked head out to yell at the herder. When the road finally cleared, he hard-gunned the engine, spewing up earth that was black and mushroomy—this caused the herder to wave his fist and at them curse loudly. And yet, aside from that one confrontational moment, the trip acquired a tranquility that defied its true nature. Ruslan’s mind stilled. Tiny details seemed to take on a spiritual significance: the play of wind in pine branches, the slow, lazy movements of a cow’s mouth while chewing, the latches on the doors of small wooden churches. They all, it now seemed, pointed at some higher order. (He glanced over his shoulder at the girl he’d spent his last night with, only to find that her brow was furrowed and the muscles around her mouth angrily tightened.)
Finally, the skies of Moscow appeared in the distance, Khassan mumbling something that had to do with a nest and its vipers. Soon there was smog and more cars and the market in Mitino, where pirated copies of Lotus or Excel sold for three euros. Omar merged onto a multi-lane ring road, and then followed signs to the aerodrome at Tushino. Ruslan took deep breaths. He closed his eyes and imagined what Allah might look like: bearded and smiling, with a touch soft and caring.
What he saw was a world so little like this one.
Omar pulled onto the road that led into the aerodrome. As they approached the huge stadium, Ruslan saw that a market topped by tarpaulins had cropped up beside it. From the car, he could see hordes of young people, all long-limbed and heavy metal–loving and having no idea—no idea at all—what was about to befall them. They were innocently buying cold drinks, and T-shirts, and pills that would cause them to see mighty things and grind their poor teeth together. One by one, they were joining the forty thousand or so who were in the stadium already. (As Ruslan watched, a single sad thought kept coming to him: I once was one of you. I once liked heavy metal. I once would’ve liked to have come here.)
The Mercedes passed the drome’s public entrance and headed for a lane marked For official vehicles only. They stopped at a checkpoint. Here, Omar nodded at a narrow-faced Russian who wore high lace-up boots and olive green fatigues. The soldier checked the licence plates, looked over at Khassan, and then waved the car through with a dismissive gesture. Omar pulled onto a lane that skirted behind Tushino, toward a place filled with lorries and vans and trucks used for towing airplanes. To their left was the drome, and on their right were the airstrips, looking hot and deserted in the day’s blazing sunshine. Through the smoked glass of the Mercedes they could hear bass notes thumping from inside the stadium. Omar kept driving. The bass notes faded. They approached a small hangar at the end of the airfield. Another paid-off Russian waved the car inside; a second later they were sitting in a damp, gloomy blackness.
Someone flicked lights on, illuminating the hangar in hues pale and orange. Ruslan saw they were parked amongst forklifts and trucks and other vehicles used for loading. Khassan got out, and the rest of them followed. While they waited by the car, he walked toward a dark pocket at the rear of the hangar. From this distance Ruslan heard shards of a conversation in Russian. Omar lit a cigarette and blew smoke into air that smelled strongly of diesel. From outside the garage, Ruslan could hear the beep beeping of large trucks reversing.
Two minutes passed. And though Ruslan’s head was a maelstrom of knowledge, certain memories broke through in these last minutes of his life. Playing in fields dotted with flowers. Racing on stallions that snorted with fury. Jiggling and bouncing in the trunk of a Lada (before squinting in the sun of a big Unreal City).
A Volga filled up with every colour of primrose.
The feel of his back against rugs made from tigers.
Kissing—really kissing—a near-pretty girl whose left eye turned inward.
Khassan returned carrying vests built from thick, dark grey nylon.
“Open your shirts,” he commanded Ruslan and Suli.
Suli hesitated, and glanced over at Ruslan.
“Go on—open them,” Khassan stated.
Ruslan began fumbling with buttons; seeing this, Suli reluctantly followed, her tiny breasts clothed in a bra beige and wispy (and yes, oh yes, they all couldn’t help noticing the slight bulge of her stomach). Ruslan’s mind went blank, or at least as blank as it could go. Khassan was fastening his vest, which contained nails and ball bearings and one-half a kilogram of explosives. Khassan tightened the straps, making sure they wouldn’t come loose. He then tried to slip a finger between Ruslan’s skin and the nylon; when he found this was difficult, he grinned and stared into Ruslan’s blank, dark eyes. A moment passed. Khassan leaned forward and into Ruslan’s ear whispered, “If you give yourself up, or lose your nerve, we pay your precious Dadya a visit. Do you understand, dyevushka? Do I make myself clear?”
Ruslan nodded. Khassan grinned and turned his attention to Suli, who was breathing in short gasps. He worked at the straps, clasps, and buckles, careful to avoid the protruding wires of her TNT-filled vest. When he was finished, he leaned over and whispered a threat into her ear—no doubt it was directed at the aunt who was receiving Suli’s payment. There was a long moment of silence. Then came the girl’s razor-thin chuckle. Everyone froze, as though they’d heard someone screaming. Suli straightened, and her eyes regained the steeliness that was her most pronounced feature.
“Go ahead, motherfucker. See if I care.”
Khassan lifted his hand as if about to strike her. Suli didn’t shrink, or step backward, or so much as blink at him. Instead she smiled, and took the two wires that hung from the bottom of her bomb pack, her little twig fingers never looking so potent.
