Читать книгу Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall - Andrew Meier - Страница 24

CHECHNYA LIES A THOUSAND miles south of Moscow, between the Black and Caspian Seas. Weeks before, I had opted for the slow route south. On an airless Moscow afternoon early in a summer of record temperatures, I boarded the Quiet Don, the North Caucasus express bound for Rostov-on-Don, nearly twenty hours to the south. From Rostov, the threshold to the Caucasus, I was to drive on across the steppes before coming to the foothills of the mountains and crossing into Chechnya. It was not the beaten path. Deadlines forced most correspondents to fly from Moscow to Nazran, the capital of neighboring Ingushetia, the tiny republic with the closest airport to Grozny. But I wanted to proceed slowly, to see the land that stretched between Moscow and Grozny, to mark the gradual descent into the lands of kidnapping, war, and a fast-evolving faith in Islam.

Like nearly every Russian, I knew something of the journey before it began. Tales of the Caucasus – martial epics featuring swarthy mountaineers with bejeweled daggers and mysterious black-eyed lasses – featured prominently in the nineteenth-century imagination. For Pushkin, and Mikhail Lermontov after him, the Caucasus was an exotic land to be envied, a realm free of the strictures of tsarist society. Both Pushkin and Lermontov, the poet and writer best known for A Hero of Our Time, were exiled to the south. Tolstoy went voluntarily. For young Tolstoy, the Caucasus proved a martial and moral training ground. In Chechnya he saw his first battle, wrote his first story, and heard a tale he remembered his entire life and returned to in his last work of fiction, Hadji Murad. Nearly a century after Tolstoy’s death, relations between Moscow and the “small nations,” the belittling term Soviet officialdom used for the peoples of the Caucasus, had grown only worse. Yet even among Russians, their name for the lands – Kavkaz – rarely failed to conjure, in its two clipped syllables that rose like a gallop, a romantic genie.

The Kazan station teemed so with sweating multitudes that I nearly missed the train. Inside, I found Kolya, lying on the opposite bunk in our narrow cabin. He was a bear of a man with a mop of ginger hair. Only hours later, once we’d emptied a bottle of Dagestani cognac, and Zhenka, the round-cheeked dining car girl, had thrice come and gone, delivering plates of glabrous chicken and half-fried potatoes, did I learn his last name.

“Nabokov,” he said, without an inkling anyone had ever shared the name.

Freckles covered Kolya’s red skin, and his left shoulder was tattooed with twin mountain peaks. “Mount Ararat,” he said, rubbing a meaty palm over the skin. He had served in the Soviet border guards in Armenia, then a decade in the coal mines of the Don Basin-until the mines started closing. “Gorbachev,” he said of the days when everything suddenly changed. “Glasnost, all that.” When the work ran out, he’d gone to the far end of the empire, to mine gold in Magadan, once home to the Kolyma fields, the primary source of Russia’s rosy gold, and the Gulag’s largest labor camps. He lasted only a couple of years in the Far East, before coming home. Back in Rostov, he moved into the new world, “cooperatives,” the Soviets’ last-ditch experiment at small semiprivate enterprise.

Those were wild but good days, especially once he got to know the Chechens. “Best people in the whole union,” Kolya declared. For years he’d partnered only with Chechens. They had joined forces in trade, jewelry, and electronics in the years before the war. He didn’t know about now, but back then the Chechens were his best friends. “They’d do anything for me, and I’d do anything for them.” He could not say the same of his fellow Russians. “Walk into a Chechen’s house,” Kolya said, “and you are in his protection. I wouldn’t suggest trying it in Moscow.”

For a time we sat in silence, opposite each other on the hard bunks. We let the rhythmic clank of metal on metal fill the cabin. Beyond our curtained window, figures appeared in the blurred rush beside the rails: drunken wanderers roused to consciousness by passing thunder; Gypsy families bedding down in a dusky field; a babushka on a shortcut through the woods, the day’s haul slung across her back. Even as the sun set, the temperature ran high. The window, however, remained locked shut. It did not matter. In such moments, I realized, as Kolya returned to the Chechens, there are few places in the world where strangers can find such closeness, with such ease, as on a Russian train.

We talked for hours. Kolya was not optimistic on the war. “They’re not ones to give up,” he said, looking into the woods. The pines and firs were aflame in the midsummer sunset. The musty compartment had caught the glow. “Chechens don’t like to be screwed. This is no longer about independence. This is about revenge, honor, and this is forever.” Before long the sun disappeared, and the cognac with it. Our little table grew crowded. Beer bottles swayed amid the plates of half-eaten chicken. Zhenka had warmed to Kolya. She now stopped by every time she delivered another meal to the far end of the train. Her cheeks red, and her brow aglow with sweat, she sat on the edge of Kolya’s bunk, moving closer to him with each visit. As the hours passed, their giggling turned to laughter and then, as the last bottle emptied, to silence. Outside, as the woods gave way to black fields, the figures beside the tracks grew fewer and in the darkness lost distinction.

I managed a few hours’ sleep before Kolya’s snoring woke me. It was early morning, but we had reached someplace far from Moscow. Overnight, the world beyond our window had turned pastoral. In the first sun of the morning, we passed men baling hay, shirtless boys playing daredevil on Ural motorcycles, children swimming in rivulets in their underwear, brigades of large women weeding between the rails, old men fishing. The lands to the south may follow a farmer’s schedule, but commerce seemed to center on the train. In the stations, men elbowed one another to board the cars and offer dried fish and vodka, while the babushkas lined the platforms, squatting behind buckets of apricots and walnuts, cherries and raspberries.

Kolya awoke with a groan just as we passed the town where he had mined coal, Shakhtnaya (Mining Town). At the station’s edge a cluster of young men, their heads shaved, gathered by an olive gray army truck. Parents stood beside them, fussing. A farewell. One man pumped an accordion, while his wife clutched two bottles. They sang their son onto the train, through the corridor, and into a cabin down the way. In a moment the train jerked back to movement, and the forlorn parents barely escaped. At the end of the short platform a young couple kissed. They sat on a low wall of concrete under a weeping willow. The girl had tucked her knees up, beneath a long white skirt.

Kolya belched and stretched. He’d taken the train up to Moscow from Rostov only the day before. He’d been in the capital just a few hours, to visit “the big brother.” His older brother had served in the KGB, first in Leningrad, then in East Germany. Now he’d been given a big job in the Kremlin. The résumé was strangely familiar. Putin had followed the same career path. Kolya had gone to Moscow, he said once we were well into the cognac, to get his brother’s blessing. A deal was cooking. He needed a Kremlin seal to nail it down. He did not elaborate. He was just happy his brother had consented so fast. They’d had plenty of time to go to a big restaurant, just off Red Square. They’d gorged themselves. Kolya loved his brother and revered him. “Even up there,” he said, pointing to the grimy ceiling above us, “he’s still just like me, a normal guy from a shitty little town in the provinces.”