Our Game (41 page)

"We don't know," he repeated. "It was a village high up. First they say twenty dead, now they say two hundred. The tragedy is becoming a statistic. The Russians are using stuff we've never seen before. It's like air guns against stealth bombers. You don't even get the bullet in the air before they've fried you. The people around are so scared they don't know how to count anymore. Want some?"

He was offering me the flask. I took a long pull.

Somehow it was dusk and we were seated round a table, waiting to go on a journey. Checheyev sat at the head, I sat beside him, mystified by my feelings.

"And all those fine subsources he had," he was saying. "You invented them?"

"Yes."

"You personally? Your own professional ingenuity?”

“Yes," I said.

"Not bad. For a middle-class destiny, not bad. Maybe you're more of an artist than you know."

I had a sudden sense of Larry's proximity.

Magomed was squatting to an army radio set. It spoke only occasionally, in a furtive staccato. Issa had his hands folded over his Kalashnikov. Checheyev sat with his head in his hands, peering into the gloom with eyes half closed or half open.

"You'll find no Islamic demons here," he said in English, as much to himself as to me. "If that's what they've sent you for, forget it. No fundamentalists, no crazies, no bomb throwers, no dreamers of the great Islamic superstate. Ask Larry."

"What's Larry doing for you?"

"Knitting socks."

He seemed to drop off for a while.

"You know another joke? We're peaceful people."

"The casual observer could be excused for not noticing this, however."

"We had Jews among us for hundreds of years. Ask Konstantin Abramovich. They were welcome. Just another tribe. Another sect. I don't mean that we should be thanked for not persecuting them. I'm telling you we are peaceful people with a lot of peaceful history that we don't get any marks for."

We enjoyed an agreed respite, like two tired boxers.

"Did you ever suspect Larry," I asked him, "deep down?"

"I was a bureaucrat. Larry was prime beef. Half the stupid Praesidium was reading his reports. You think I wanted to be the first to go in there and tell them, He's bad, and he's been bad for twenty years—me, a blackarse, on sufferance?"

He resumed his meandering. "Okay, we're a pugnacious lot of savages. Not as bad as Cossacks. Cossacks are the pits. Not as bad as Georgians. Georgians are worse than Cossacks. Not as bad as Russians, for sure. Let's say the Ingush have a selective approach to right and wrong. We're religious—but not so religious we aren't secular." His head fell forward, and he lifted it sharply. "And if some crazy policeman ever tried to enforce the criminal code among us, half of us would be in gaol, and the other half would be standing in the street with Kalashnikovs, getting us out." He drank. "We're a bunch of unruly mountaineers who love God, drink, fight, boast, steal, forge a little money, push a little gold, wage blood feuds, and can't be organised into groups of more than one. Want some more?"

I again took the flask from him.

"Alliances and politics, forget them. You can make us any promise you like, break it, and we'll believe you again tomorrow. We've got a diaspora no one's heard of and suffering you can't get on television even with a special aerial. We don't like bullies, we don't have hereditary peerages, and we haven't produced a despot in a thousand years. Here's to Konstantin."

He drank to Konstantin, and for a while I thought he was asleep, until his head lifted and he stabbed his finger at me.

"And when you Western whitearses decide it's time for us to be crushed—which you will, Mr. Timothy, you will, because no compromise is beyond your English grasp—part of you will die. Because what we have is what you used to fight for when you were men. Ask Larry."

The radio gave a shrill yell. Magomed sprang to his feet; Issa spoke an order to the boys at the windows. Checheyev walked me towards the door.

"Larry knows everything. Or he did."

A bus conveyed us: Magomed, Issa, two Murids, Checheyev, and myself. An army bus with small steel windows, and kit bags that weren't ours on the roof. And a shield at the front and back that said it was bus 964. A fat man in army uniform drove us, the Murids sat behind him in their flak jackets, their Kalashnikovs held low in the aisle. A few rows back from them sat Magomed and Issa, whispering like thieves. The fat man drove fast and seemed to take pleasure in edging cars off the icy country road.

"I was a clever boy for a blackarse," Checheyev confided to me, half-heartedly pushing his battered flask at me and taking it away again. We were sitting on the bench seat at the back. We were speaking English and nothing but English. I had a feeling that as far as Checheyev was concerned, Russian was the language of the enemy. "And you were a clever boy for a whitearse."

"Not particularly."

By the blue light inside the bus, his haggard face was a death mask. His cavernous eyes, fixed upon me, had a violent dependence.

"You ever suspend your intellect?" he enquired.

I didn't answer. He drank. I changed my mind and drank too, suspending my intellect.

"You know what I said to him when I got over the shock? Larry? After he told me, 'I'm Cranmer's child, not yours'?”

“No."

"Why I started laughing?"

He laughed now, a choking, and laugh.

" 'Listen,' I told him. 'Until October '92, I forgot how much I hated Russians. Today, anybody who spied on Moscow is my friend.' "

Larry's dead, I thought. Killed with Bashir Haji. Shot while escaping his middle-class destiny.

He's lying in the water, faceup or facedown, it doesn't matter anymore which.

He's a tragedy, not a statistic. He's found his Byronic death.

Checheyev was delivering another mordant monologue. He had drawn his collar high around his face and was talking at the seat in front of him.

"When I came home to my village, my friends and relations still liked me. Okay, I was KGB. But I wasn't KGB back home in Ingushetia. My brothers and sisters were proud of me. For my sake, they forgot they hated the Russians." He made a grim show of enthusiasm. " 'Maybe it wasn't the Russians who deported us to Kazakhstan,' they said. 'Maybe they never shot our father. And look here, didn't they educate our great brother, turn him into a Westerner?' I hate that kind of sweetness. Why don't they listen to the damn radio, read the damn papers, grow up? Why didn't they throw rocks at me, shoot me, put a knife in me—why didn't they scream damn traitor at me? Who wants to be loved when he's betraying his own people? You got an idea on that? Who did you betray? Everyone. But you're English. It's okay."

He was excited: "And when the great Soviet Empire fell on its white arse, you know what they did, my friends and relations? They comforted me! They told me don't worry! `This Yeltsin, he's a good fellow, you'll see. Now that we haven't got Communism, Yeltsin will give us justice.' " He drank again, whispering some insult at himself as he did so. "You know what? I'd told them the same stupid story when Khrushchev came to power. How many times can you be that kind of idiot? You want to hear them. Zorin. All the Zorins. Sitting in the canteen. Dropping their voices when the white nigger comes too close. The Soviet Empire not even dead in its grave, and the Russian Empire already climbing out. 'Our precious Ukraine, gone! Our precious Transcaucasia, gone! Our beloved Baltics, gone! Look, look, the virus is moving south! Our Georgia, going! Nagorno Karabakh, going! Armenia, Azerbaijan, going! Chechenia, gone! The whole Caucasus, going! Our gateway to the Middle East, going! Our route to the Indian Ocean, going! Our naked southern flank exposed to Turkey! Everybody raping Mother Russia!' " The bus slowed down. "Pretend you're asleep. Put your head forward, close your eyes. Show them your nice fur hat."

The bus stopped. A draught of icy air ripped through it as the driver's door slammed open and Checheyev pushed past me. From beneath lowered lids I saw a figure in a long grey overcoat step aboard and grasp Checheyev in a swift embrace. I heard confidential murmurs and saw a fat envelope change hands. The overcoat departed, the door slammed shut, the bus eased forward. Checheyev remained standing at the driver's side. We passed a barracks and a floodlit football field. Men in tracksuits were playing six-a-side in the snow. We passed a canteen and saw Russian soldiers eating under fluorescent lighting. They were enemy to me in a way they had never been before. Our driver advanced at a leisurely pace, nothing guilty, nothing rushed. Checheyev remained at his side, one hand in his pocket. A checkpoint came towards us. A red-and-white boom blocked our path. The two Murids laid their Kalashnikovs across their knees. The boom rose.

Suddenly we were careering towards the dark side of the airfield, following black tyre tracks in the snow. Any moment, I was certain, we would feel the wincing of the bus as bullets began to strike it. A battered twin-engined transport plane appeared suddenly in our headlights, doors open, gangway in place. Our bus skidded to a sideways halt, and we jumped into the freezing night, no bullets pursuing us. The plane's props were turning, its landing lights switched on. In the cockpit, three white faces were yelling at us to get a move on. I scurried up the rickety steps and from old habit memorised the registration number on the fin, then thought myself a bloody fool. The belly of the plane was bare except for a stack of brown cardboard boxes strapped with webbing, and steel crates for seats lashed to the side bars. We taxied a few yards, climbed, the engine cut and we sank again, and I saw by a stray shaft of moonlight three onion domes of a church rising at me from a hillside, the largest gilded, the other two encased in scaffolding. We climbed again and banked so steeply that I wondered whether we were upside down.

"Did Magomed give you that crap about the English prophecy?" Checheyev yelled as he flopped beside me and handed me the flask.

"Yes."

"Those chickenheads will believe anything."

Larry, I thought. Your kind of journey. Fly to Baku, sneak up the coast a bit, turn left, piece of cake. The danger consoled me. If Larry survived this journey, he survived everything.

Crouched on his steel crate, Checheyev was talking about the autumn of two years ago.

"We thought the Russians wouldn't shoot. This isn't happening to us. Yeltsin's not Stalin. Sure he isn't. He's Yeltsin. The Ossetians had tanks and helicopters, but the Russians came along all the same, to make sure no Ossetians got hurt. Their propaganda machine was great. Ingush were bloodthirsty savages, the Russians and Ossetians were good cops. I really felt I knew the great scholars who were writing it. The Ossetians shot the daylights out of us, and the Russians stood around and laughed while sixty thousand Ingush ran for their lives. Most of the Russians were Terek Cossacks, so they knew a good joke when they saw one. The Russians had brought up extra Ossetians from the south who'd already been ethnically cleansed by the Georgians, so they knew how to do it. The Russians sealed off the region with tanks and declared military rule in Ingushetia. Not in Ossetia, because Ossetians are civilised guys, old Kremlin clients, Christians." He drank and again handed me the flask. I waved it away, but he didn't notice.

"That was when you reconverted," I suggested. "Came home."

"The Ingush appealed to the world, and the world was too damn busy," he went on, as if he hadn't heard me. He recited the world's reasons for being busy: " 'Who the hell are the Ingush? Hey, that's the Russians' backyard, isn't it? Hey, listen, all this fragmentation's going too far. While we're pulling down the economic borders, these ethnic crazies are putting up national borders. They're dissidents, aren't they? They're Muslims, aren't they? And criminals. I mean forget Russian criminals, these blackarses are the real thing. Don't they know that justice is for big guys? Best let Boris handle it.' "

The plane's engines faltered and resumed on a lower note. We were losing height.

"We could solve it," he said. "Six months. A year. No problem. There'd be fighting. A few heads would end up a little bit further from their bodies. Some old scores would be settled. Without the Russians round our necks we'd solve it."

"Are we landing or crashing?" I asked.

I have a recurrent nightmare of being in a plane at night, hurtling between buildings down a road that gets narrower and narrower. I was having it now, except that this time we were hurtling between light towers towards a black hillside. The hillside opened, we shot into a tunnel lit by cat's-eyes, and the cat's-eyes were above us. To either side of us ran red and green lights. Beyond them lay a sallow concrete playground with parked fighter planes, fire engines, and fuel lorries behind high wire netting.

Checheyev's reflective mood had left him. Even before we came sidewinding to a halt, he sobered. He opened the fuselage door and peered out, while the two Murids stood behind him. Magomed pressed an automatic pistol into my hand. I entrusted it to my waistband. The secular Issa took the other side of me. The crew were staring tightly ahead of them. The plane's engines roared impatiently. From the misty recesses of the bunker a pair of headlights flashed twice. Checheyev dropped to the tarmac, we followed, fanned out, and formed an arrowhead, of which the Murids made the wings and Checheyev the point. We trotted forward, the Murids sashaying with their Kalashnikovs. Two grimy jeeps were waiting for us at the foot of a long ramp. As Magomed and Issa grabbed an elbow each and spirited me over the tailboard of the second jeep, I saw our bloated little transport plane taxiing for takeoff. The jeeps cleared the ramp and raced down a tarmac road past an unmanned checkpoint. We reached a roundabout, bumped across a beaten down traffic island, and keeled left onto what in these parts I took to be a main road. A sign in Russian said Vladikavkaz 45 kilometres, Nazran 20. The air smelled of dung and hay and Honeybrook. I remembered Larry in his strat and peasant's smock, picking grapes and singing "Greensleeves" to the delight of the Toiler girls and Emma. I remembered him belly up or belly down. And thought of him alive again after I had killed him.