A Russian Diary (32 page)

“On September 1 we had been among the first to be herded into the gymnasium because our class, 2A, was at the front of the procession, near the school doors. I sat down in the hall in front of my class. At my back were pupils and their parents. The explosives were hanging above me. Artur Kisiev was with his son, like everyone else. The fighters said, ‘All the daddies come to the front, please.’ Five minutes later they shot them in the corridor. That's how two of my pupils lost their fathers, Misikov and Kisiev. I said to my children, ‘They won't shoot children.’

“Aslan was lying at my feet and said he was hungry. I did everything I could to feed him. The first evening there was a young mother next to us with a little child who kept crying. She was rocking him, but he wouldn't stop. At first a fighter pointed his rifle at her as if ordering her to keep him quiet. Then he gave a deep sigh and took out a bottle of water. ‘This is my water. Give it to the child. And here are two Mars bars. Get him to suck them through a cloth.’ The mother was afraid it was poison, but I said to her, ‘We're not going to get out of this alive anyway. At least let the child quieten down now’ She broke off a piece of one of the bars and gave it to the child to suck through some cloth. The remainder, one and
a half of their Mars bars, I hid behind my back. I broke off a big piece for Aslan and quietly gave the rest to the children from my class.

“The second night, when everybody was terribly thirsty and they weren't letting any of the children go to the toilet, I said, ‘Just do it on the floor.’ They relaxed and started doing as I suggested. The boys were given cut-off bottles to pee in. I told them to drink from them. The children didn't want to, so then I drank some of the urine of the oldest pupil, a boy in the sixth grade who had been in my class in the primary school. I didn't even hold my nose, so that the children should see it wasn't that bad. After that they started drinking it, Aslan too. On the morning of September 3 Karina Melikova, a girl in the fifth grade, unexpectedly asked to go to the toilet. They let her out and her mother, who teaches one of the primary classes, told her to pull some leaves off the houseplants in the office, because they let them go to the toilet in the office where they had broken a hole in the floor. Karina managed to pull off some leaves, hide them between the pages of a notebook and bring them back to the hall. We gave the leaves to the children, and Aslan ate one that second day. Karina and her mother were both killed. Whose fault is that? I lost Aslan at the very last moment.

“Immediately before the assault many people were feeling very ill. Some were lying there unconscious and being trodden on. Taisya Khetagurova, the teacher of Ossetian language, wasn't well. I crawled over to pull her to the wall, to stop her being trodden on, and left Aslan for a moment. And that was it. I didn't hear the explosion or the shooting. The world simply disappeared. I came to when special operations troops trod on me. They just walked over our bodies and they walked over me too. I began to be able to feel again and started crawling out. There were bodies beside me, piled one on top of another. Why did I survive and not them? Why did seven of my second-grade pupils die, when I, who am already sixty-two, didn't? And where is Aslan? I see him in front of me every night, creeping toward me like a little mouse. His mother is half-dead, I know. I have met her.”

Marina leafs through Aslan's school books. That has been her main occupation this autumn. She went to the school, rummaged through
everything in the office of 2A and found Aslan's books from his first year, and those, unwritten in, that Raisa Kambulatovna had prepared for her pupils entering second grade. For hours Marina reads and rereads the five lines from the only annual dictation test her son was destined to sit: “The eighteenth of May. In the garden a wild rose is growing. It has lovely, fragrant flowers …” Behind Marina's back as she gazes at these books is a bed on which Artur's favorite things are laid out: an open pack of cigarettes, his student record, his registration card, his coursework. And his portrait. He looks very stern but has thoughtful eyes. Milena is completely silent when she moves in front of the portrait.

“For the first two months I was completely numb. I didn't go out. I neglected the house. I wanted nothing to do with my daughter. I was completely isolated. I couldn't bear to turn the tap on, I couldn't bear to hear the sound of running water. Why didn't they let the children drink? It angered me that people went on eating and drinking after September 1. I was going crazy. I still am.”

Marina shows me a letter that was brought to her home together with a new satchel, charity for Aslan “from the schoolchildren of St. Petersburg.”

“Why did they have to do that, when everybody knew our son had died?”

There is a letter “from Irusya, fourteen.” It reads, “You survived those terrible days. You are a hero!” There follows an invitation to be pen friends.

“How could our address have got on to the wrong list?” Marina asks, crying from the hurt caused by this dreadful act of carelessness. “The satchel was unbearable. It was just the opposite of what we needed. I understand now that nobody is going to help me. Where is that Putin? Too busy with some drivel to give orders for all the bodies to be identified as soon as possible, those that can be. Then at least some of the parents could be at peace and have a grave to tend.”

Sasha Gumetsov and Rimma Torchinova are the parents of Aza Gumetsova. Sasha is beside himself with grief and self-torment. He cannot sleep at night, blaming himself for failing to save his daughter. He
has black rings under his eyes and hasn't shaved for many days. Sasha and Rimma are heroically going around Beslan from house to house, trying to persuade mothers and fathers who have buried their children to have the bodies exhumed.

“At first, of course, we believed that Aza was being held hostage. Gradually we had to recognize that was not the case. On September 4 parents were ‘identifying’ their children by the pants they were wearing, because you couldn't identify them from anything else. They only took charred bodies for DNA identification at the forensic medical laboratory in Rostov, but there were so many that a lot were just left here, unidentified. People took them back to their homes. This is a small town, we don't have any smart boutiques, and many of the children had identical clothes from the bazaar. That's how everything got muddled up. We could see how it happened as we went around the mortuaries ourselves, looking into every bag, examining every little finger.”

“How could you bear to do that?”

Not a muscle flickers on Rimma's face.

“I told myself, ‘Nothing could be worse than what the children went through in that school. I have no right to pity myself And I don't. Now the only question for us is how to bury our child, how to perform our last duty to Aza. In the mortuary there is the body of an unidentified little girl of a similar age to ours, but she is not Aza. That means that somebody else has our daughter in a grave. It might be the parents of the little girl in the mortuary. We realize, of course, that the chain of who belongs to whom could turn out to be very long. We are only too aware of that.”

“The chain of exhumations?”

“Of course. On the list we were given by the procurator's office there are thirty-eight addresses of people who might have buried the wrong child. Thirty-eight girls of roughly the same age and build died. The main thing is that we are on the right track: if the total number of remains in Rostov and the number of those missing are the same, then it is simply a matter of errors in identification. They have all been found, only they've been mixed up.”

On September 1, Aza went to school alone for the first time, without her mother, without flowers, as she and her best friends from Class 6G,
who were beginning to grow up, had agreed. One was Sveta Tsoy, a Korean girl, the only child of Marina Park: Sveta the dancer, Sveta the fantasist, Sveta the star of the Theater of Children's Fashion, Sveta who was identified only on September 27 by DNA analysis because her legs had been blown off and her body was unidentifiable.

Another friend, Emma Khaeva, was brimming with energy. She would make up impromptu poems. When she was running to school in the morning, she always found time to say good morning to all the neighbors and to ask the old ladies along her route how they were feeling. Her parents were lucky. She was killed too, but could be buried in an open coffin.

And then there was Aza, the only, adored daughter of Rimma and Sasha. Rimma didn't go out to work. She gave Aza every opportunity that Beslan had to offer: dancing, singing, languages, societies. “I used to tell myself the three of them were people of the twenty-first century,” Rimma continues. “They were not like us. They had a positive attitude toward life. They wanted a lot. Aza had her own opinion about everything. She was a philosopher.”

All we now know is that Emma, Sveta, and Aza were at first separated in the gym, but on September 3 managed to move toward each other. They decided to celebrate the birthday of Madina Sazanova, another of their classmates, and were last seen sitting together right under the window where the wall was blown in to make an opening for the children to escape.

“I haven't heard of anybody sitting by that part of the wall who survived,” Rimma concludes. “All that is left now is for us to bury Aza. We go round the addresses, working down the list, as if it were a job. We try to talk people into agreeing.”

What respect can anyone have for a state machine that dementedly replicates these cataclysmic events for its citizens: first
Nord-Ost,
then Beslan. The state refuses ever to admit responsibility for anything, and furtively shuffles off all its other duties too. Should there be exhumations? Leave it to the most vulnerable to worry about that. We will set them against each other, the families who have buried their dead and those who have no dead to bury, and everyone will forget to protest against Dzasokhov and Putin. They won't demand a genuine inquiry for a long time. They will have other things to worry about.

The state has distanced itself from everything that happened at Beslan, abandoning the town to madness in its isolation. Nobody else in Russia wants to know.

December 12

In Moscow, the National Citizens’ Congress has brought together delegates from every part of Russia. There were hopes that it would turn into a front of national salvation, but that hasn't worked out. The reason is simple: Georgii Satarov and Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who organized the event, don't want to tread on the Kremlin's toes. Accordingly, sitting up there in the presidium, they quash “excessive” criticism of Putin, with the result that, by the end of the sessions, almost nobody is left in the hall. When Garry Kasparov, one opposition leader who actually is beginning to make a mark, came to the rostrum, people shouted, “Kasparov for president!” The organizers were so put out by this that they sidelined Kasparov for the rest of the congress.

Center stage was taken by the same old dears, and they reduced everything to a talking shop, shaping a congress in their own image.

The question is: can an extraparliamentary democratic opposition exist at all at present? If it should come into being, will it be able to keep its head above water in a corrupt society where only those who can lobby the authorities can raise funds from “sponsors”?

Who could sponsor it anyway? Only oligarchs, and given that it is open season for hunting oligarchs there are no takers, apart from Berezovsky. A financial link with him would send voters fleeing in the opposite direction.

There is another problem. Hatred does not work as a platform for parliamentary elections and political struggle in Russia. The democrats cannot build their campaigning on hatred.

What can they build it on, if they have no positive ideas? Well, they damned well should have positive ideas! The average life expectancy in Russia is fifty-eight years and six months. Why not make the main plank in your election platform a demand to let people live at least to seventy!

The liberals and democrats are approaching the New Year of 2005 as
political sleepwalkers. In the year since they were trounced in the parliamentary elections they haven't even managed a realistic assessment of why they were defeated.

The dissidents and the democrats both tried to fool the people for too long into believing that Yeltsin, of all people, was a real democrat. There came a time when that fairy tale became unsustainable and “democrat” became literally a dirty word: people changed the word
“demokrat”
to
“dermokrat”
(shitocrat). It became current not only among fanatical Communists and Stalinists but among the majority of the population. The “dermocrats” had given Russia hyperinflation, made them lose the savings they had carried forward from Soviet times, started the war in Chechnya, and presided over the Russian government's currency default.

People didn't elect Yeltsin in 1996 because they believed in him, but simply as the lesser of two evils; not because they believed in his prescription for taking the country forward, but because they feared what might happen if the Communists got back in. Government resources were shamelessly exploited; national television stations broadcast only in favour of Yeltsin and were in effect his campaign cheerleaders. People turned away in disgust when they saw how the democratic parties kept silent about this travesty of democracy. A number of democrats even stated openly that it was reasonable to sacrifice the truth in order to save democracy.

This enthusiasm for sacrificing the truth caught on, and became the main force propelling Putin to power after Yeltsin proclaimed him his successor. The Kremlin took control of all television news coverage, with independent stations allowed only to provide entertainment, even when hundreds were being killed in Chechnya.

And that was the end of that. The election was based on trickery, fraudulence, and state coercion. The democrats kept mum, trying to cling to their vestiges of power in the Duma and locally. They forfeited whatever was left of their authority, and the Russian people are now profoundly indifferent to all things political. That is the terrible legacy of thirteen years of Russian democracy.