Chechnya by Andrew Meier

Author:Andrew Meier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

THE CREEK WAS DARK green and cloudy. As Issa and I bathed in it, resting our hands on the sludgy rocks below, our feet and arms stirred the water the color of burned sugar. Issa was telling me tales of the glory of his youth in Grozny, but I was preoccupied. I was wondering what else lay in the mucky creek of Shali.

We walked here together, through the nettles of the overgrown orchard that was the backyard of the small house where Issa’s mother and two sisters lived. His mother was eighty; his sisters were in their fifties. Throughout the years of war, Shali, lying in the plains just south of Grozny, had been spared the wholesale destruction of the capital and nearly every other town and village in Chechnya. Issa’s mother and sisters lived here throughout the shelling, the bombings, and the military sweeps.

Inside the house it was dark and cool. There were two rooms and a kitchen. Issa did not say it, but the house was all he had in Chechnya now. Once he had a comfortable apartment in Grozny, but it was lost to the first war. He managed to save some of the furniture—a gold-rimmed mirror, a lacquered table, a velvety divan—vestiges of the Chechen elite of the Soviet era that now sat like islands in the biggest room of the house. Except for the salvaged treasures, the house was empty. The second room was filled with rolled-up carpets and chairs stacked against a wall, more remnants of a lost life.

The creek, no matter what toxins of war lay in its waters, was cooling. Like the children who jumped into it, we were naked to our underwear. Our shirts and trousers, stiffened with dirt and road dust, hung from a low cherry tree that twisted above the muddy bank. One side of the creek was lined by the overgrown yards. The other was a steep bank the children used as a diving platform. Behind them were only empty fields. The children leaped in, hands over knees, shouting as they fell through the air.

In the evening, after we dried ourselves with worn hand towels and dressed again in the same clothes, Issa’s mother, Sabiat, took me on a tour. She was so thin and her back so bent that it was remarkable she could walk, let alone cook and clean. “We have everything here,” she said, pointing to the trees that stood amid the weeds: “Apricot, pear, apple, cherry.” The heat of the afternoon brought the smell of the fruit close. Sabiat squinted at the cloudless sky. “Why?” she asked. She needed no more words; she meant the war. “Somebody must want it,” she said.

Everywhere there was greenery. Vines climbed high along the back wall. On a tall wooden fence, roses, pink and red, bloomed. The garden, Issa’s mother said, was all she needed now. Nothing more. “But the fruit of the trees,” said Issa’s younger sister, “is not as good since the war.” She was called Zulei, and her elder sister Zura.

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