Thomas Goltz - Chechnya Diary

“Bombs,” he said, helpfully. “They start at exactly nine every night, and it is now a quarter to the hour.”

I was being sent to the basement with the women and children.

It was too humiliating for words.

“I would rather stay here with you and your men,” I blurted.

An awkward silence descended, and the commander narrowed his eyes.

“I do not understand.”

“I told you my mission was to make a film about the Chechen spirit.”

“Yes…”

“I need someone to embody that—spirit,” I said, picking my way around words. “I want to do a portrait of you and your group of—warriors. But to do so, I need your cooperation—so I can capture moments on camera.”

Silence. Utter silence, save for a radio voice in the adjacent room spewing out Moscow propaganda about events in the war that day.

“I see,” he said, taking a sip of tea. “You want to build a career on this experience.”

“No, not exactly,” I hastened to say. “It is just that an American audience needs a—”

“We do not care what the Americans need or do not need,” said the commander, cutting me off. “We have only one question: What is in this for us?”

I could have lied and said that the impact of my program being seen by millions of American viewers would lead to such immediate and visceral understanding of the present situation that the public would demand of the world’s sole remaining superpower to threaten Moscow with nuclear blitz if the Russian military did not immediately desist from all actions in Chechnya, and just go home. I could have lied and said “five hundred bucks a piece, for everyone, once I get that expense through the bean counters at ABC.” I could have fallen back on the need for “historical accuracy” or “freedom of reporting” or a variety of other press-related clichés. I knew that all such reasons would fail, because what the commander was asking concerned the value his cooperation with me might have for Chechnya.

“I do not know,” I replied.

“Hmmm,” said the commander.

And then the sky began to fall.

BoomBoomBoom

It was nine o’clock, I guess, and the first of the incoming rockets had started to hit the outskirts of the town. My interview or interrogation, such as it was, was over.

“Podval!” barked the commander, “Basement!”

He was already in his camouflage jacket and out the door with his five or six men behind him, leaving Isa and me to join the women and children huddling among the pickle jars in the cellar.

“Look at me!” cried one woman, demanding I focus my lens on her despite the bad light. “I am a teacher, a human being—but here I am, reduced to huddling among the garlic and tomatoes! Look at me!!”

How much bombing was there?

I don’t know.

Everything that happened in Samashki eventually became relative. What seemed like a tremendous nocturnal bombardment at the time was probably nothing more than a few shells lobbed over the town. The earth shuddered and crept with each incoming blast, and then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, the shelling was over and the embarrassment began. Murmurs shifted around the basement sanctuary, and then a decision to send some brave soul upstairs to check the scene in the nontroglodyte world. That world was declared safe, safe!

As people emerged from the basement, the intensity of the moment was lost with the fresh air, and everyone seemed to feel just a little bit ridiculous for having gone down to the cellar in the first place. At least I felt that way, oscillating between utter terror and near embarrassment for having been afraid.

“Let’s go,” said Isa, and we trudged through the mud back to his house, listening to distant gunfire from the forest.

I slept with my glasses on, although I was obliged to leave my boots by the door.

Iam hijacking an aircraft carrier, careful to conceal my identity and the fact that mine is really an inside job. I will keep the stuff I know the value of and already own, such as sleeping bags, sleeping pads, knives, and mess kits, but destroy everything else, because I do not know what they are worth. I am getting ready to scuttle the ship when somebody grabs me by the collar to shake some sense back into me and tell me to get up and go.

“They are shelling again! We have to go to Martan!”

The screech and boom of renewed incoming rounds had somehow become integrated into a dream, but now I was very much awake and very much interested in what Muhammad was saying. It did not really make much difference whether he meant we had to evacuate ourselves to Achkoi or Urus Martan. It was just time to go, and get out of this place called Samashki that seemed to be getting bombed long-distance every day just because some locals had denied some Russian soldiers a good, old-fashioned drunk. I scraped my kit together fast and made for the door, scattering a convey of tame turkeys on my way. When we got to the main road, it was awash with terrified humanity, with people much more frightened now during random daylight bombing than during the on-the-hour barrage of the night.

“Where’s Isa?” I panted.

“He left at dawn for Martan,” said Muhammad. “We have to get there, now! ”

Muhammad waved down a passing car that was already crammed full of women, children, and graybeards, and tried to push me in. But something stuck, or maybe something snapped. I could not just flee like that. I had seen too many refugees before. Doctors, lawyers, greengrocers, tradesfolk, all grappling with one another to be first out and away, reduced to aggressive beggary by their plight. That my foreignness put me in another category made me more determined to wait until that last woman and child had been removed before I cut and ran.

There were other factors, too. Commander Ali and his identical twin sons were observing the shuttle to safety from their cement bunker and seemed to sneer at (but not stop) the sudden exodus from town.

“Let’s go!” wailed Muhammad.

“Skora,” I replied. “Soon.”

Then a jet screamed over and everyone on the road dove for the muddy ditches, even if the aircraft was merely terrorizing and not actually bombing the column of would-be refugees. Picking myself up from the mud, I ditched Muhammad and shuffled over to Commander Ali’s bunker.

“What’s happening?” I demanded.

“They are bombing the forest,” came the even reply.

“What are you going to do?”

“Wait until they come in and fight like men.”

I waited with Commander Ali and his men, filming women and children boarding buses and trailers pulled by tractors. Refugees, refugees, trundling off in both directions. It was so sad, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted action—and Commander Ali and his men were not providing any of that.

Perhaps that other commander who had semiarrested me the night before might provide some, I thought. I ran over the road, hunched down for reasons I cannot possibly explain now. Everyone else was standing.

Remarkably, I was able to locate the commander’s house, not so much due to my uncanny ability to remember the urban details through the fear filter of the night before, as due to the fact that I recognized the older woman from the kitchen, now squatting outside. She was shucking dried cornhusks with her apparent husband, the older man, looking on. The contrast with the relative chaos of the main street some two blocks away was extraordinary.

“As-salam aleikum,” I saluted the stoic, elderly man, and he sort of jerked his head in the direction of one of the green metal doors that defined the outside perimeter of all the houses along that particular muddy stretch of street.