But could I kill?
I replayed the plan in my head over and over. It seemed so real. I could knock on the door and kill the person who opened it, right from the distance of my arm’s length.
Doubts plagued me.
It was against my instincts – to kill another person. It was against human biology itself. But no, wasn’t violence part of human nature, especially in a situation like mine?
I was alone, and there might be more than two of them. They would kill me before I could kill them. Then they would kill my mother and all my family and relatives. I was paralyzed by fear – I could not foresee how events would play out.
I wanted to save my life by taking away other people’s lives. I had planned the murder and escape in my imagination, relying on the movies I had watched and books that I had read. But my reality was far from a movie. It would be much easier to commit an unplanned, accidental murder. Having the plan to murder someone, and then sticking to the plan – it was impossible for me.
I could not change myself. I could not kill.
To continue living in captivity was not an option for me – it was beyond my fading strength. Every day, every hour, every minute of time that dripped by, I could feel myself fading – the life force that had long nourished me was fading, drying up, growing brittle and weak. It could crumble to dust and be blown away by a stiff breeze. With a gun in hand, though, I could put an abrupt end to my long downward spiral. I could decide my own fate, if no one else’s. All I needed to do was pull the trigger. One bullet – and I could, once and for all, end my suffering.
I squeezed the pistol grip, and pulled the trigger…
BANG!
I fired a shot into the wall and threw the gun on the floor.
The sound was loud. It started a commotion in the apartment. Someone ran to the door and opened it quickly. I recognized the silhouette of Aslan, followed by two other men. There was a complete silence for a few seconds. I was nailed to the edge of the bed.
“I could have killed you all, but I didn’t. Go and live.”
I could not find anything else to say. My hands were shaking, I was trembling like a leaf in overwhelming unpleasant excitement.
Aslan picked up the gun and stared at me in the dim light for a long time – his foxy animal grin was gone. Then he left the room.
I cried all night, hating my weakness and regretting my failed chance. Maybe it was my last and only chance for salvation.
Time passed – there was no salvation.
My senseless existence was hard to call a life. The days passed. The bleak light in the room was different in the morning from the afternoon, so I could tell that time was lapsing. Then the long night would come, followed again by the day. It seemed that a hundred hours could march by, slowly, like mourners at a funeral, and besides the idea of escape and the image of my mother’s face, I might not have a single cogent thought. Each day was an eternity. I was in deep space now, where time no longer existed. These men had broken me away from the world. They had broken me from my friends and family, and even from myself. I couldn’t imagine a person more fractured and splintered than I was.
The military action changed the gang’s plans. The war was coming – the front kept moving closer to the place where I was kept. Now I could understand why the area around the apartment building was deserted. The men had left their homes and joined the rebel forces. Before the war started, the women and the young children had moved to the homes of relatives in the remote villages. I was almost at the epicenter of the fighting. Terrible echoes of war – ground-thumping explosions, gunfire - could be heard sometimes, even through the glorious sound of the Gipsy Kings.
The militants went to war every day – they lived each day as their last. Aslan came to see me pretty often, making a short visit before he went to fight. I was begging him to bring me to the post office again and let me talk to my mom. Even if they took a pity on me and allow me to do so, it was not possible any more. After the storming of Grozny, the phone connection with Russia and the rest of the world was cut. The main post office building was bombed. Communications were down.
My presence there had come to a standstill – it seemed that I was being held in reserve. I still had value because they hoped to get the money after the war ended. But what if they lost their patience? What if the war never ended? I was afraid their plans could change at any moment. They would like me to forever disappear.
Real life was happening in the world outside – the thought of it constantly weighed on me. Here in the room, time had stopped. Life had stopped.
One day, the Gipsy Kings were forever silenced. The electricity was completely cut off. Loneliness, longing and emptiness filled my tiny world. I was alone, and all of the things that made up my past life were gone – now I had lost it all. My last link to it had been that cassette tape. I was untethered and alone.
I was sure that only one other person on Earth – my mom – shared the same feelings. There was no one to help me. I had to look inside myself for support, and for strength. I had to resist the forces around me and not let myself shatter like glass.
With the electricity gone, the nights were now black. The day would fade slowly into a darkness so deep, and so profound, that it made a mockery of my previous conceptions of what the word meant, or what the night was like. I was linked now to the pre-modern peoples, who huddled in fear of the darkness, and invented stories of monsters and demons who ruled the time between dusk and dawn.
At night, I peered into an existential nothingness. I felt like an insect, caught and placed in a dark box. These feelings of abandonment and the world’s indifference to me were so strong that it seemed like I wasn’t a person at all, but a phantom, and I simply did not exist.
I hated the gang and everyone in it.
Slowly, I came to understand that Aslan was the only one who might help me. His humanity towards me raised my hopes. There was a tiny invisible bond between us, and I was hoping that with time I could convince him to help me. I felt that he was enjoying our conversations, and he was interested in my personality. We had short meetings, just a few minutes a day, but I sensed that deep inside, he took pity on me. He was adamant about achieving their criminal purpose and getting the money, but he was also kind to me in his own way. After I fired the gun at the wall, the next day, he came into my room in a flurry. His eyes shone.
“I like your character, and you’re beautiful. You’re a warrior. True Vainakh”
He saw a fearless warrior in me, such as he was himself – someone for whom the war is an exciting game, tickling the nerves and chilling the spine. But he was wrong. I wasn’t like that – I was trying to just survive. I did not want to play the fearless fighter. I wanted to go home.
He had been enthusiastically telling me stories about an elusive detachment of women snipers, the so-called “White Tights.” They fought on the side of anti-Russian forces in war zones. In Chechnya, they were legends. No one knew who they were. Some people thought they were biathletes from the Baltic states - Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia - three former Russian republics.
Female snipers, mercenaries – never seen, the sound of the kill shot the first hint of their presence - who had claimed the lives of many Russian troops. They were ruthless ghosts who never missed. They were hated, and they were feared. The only ones who ever saw their faces were the ones who killed them.
They refused to be caught alive. Faced with capture, they would shoot themselves in the head, believing that to die instantly was the greatest mercy. The White Tights left no clues behind them, no hint of who they really were. And nobody knew if they were reality or just a myth.
I could tell: Aslan wanted to believe they were real. And he wanted to believe that I was like them.
Once, they took me to shoot.
I was confused by such an attention, but endlessly happy to finally breathe the long-awaited fresh air. It was winter and a warm gray day – there was no sun at all. A large group came outside into
the deserted and gloomy courtyard. There were eight men with me – all the familiar faces from inside the apartment. The winter chill went straight to my head like a drug, the oxygen saturating my pores. Despite the absence of sunlight, the gray and gloomy day brought me amazing pleasure – it made me want to run, far away from this terrible place, without looking back.
Everyone climbed into two cars parked at the entrance of the building. I watched in silence and listened to their conversations, trying to recognize familiar words in their bizarre language. We were in a suburb of Grozny with a few five story apartment buildings around. The trip was very short. Five minutes later, the car stopped, right at the side of the road. There was an uninhabited open landscape on both sides of the road, covered with dry and frozen ground, and the remnants of dry vegetation. On the horizon, I could see a forest belt consisting of gray leafless trees, naked for winter.
The militants unloaded the car, carrying weapons and boxes of targets out. They were cheerful. I watched this gang of heavily armed and laughing men under the low leaden sky and I could not understand how it happened that I was among them, helpless to change anything.
Suddenly there was deafening gunfire. One of the men tossed a glass bottle in the air, and several others volleyed at it with their machine guns. When the roar quieted down, the militant set a row of the green glass bottles on a small hill a few yards away. Aslan approached, with a pistol in his hand. He cocked the gun and gave it to me - it was large, black and heavy. I wished he had given me a machine gun. The weapon in my hand made me excited, the blood pumping in my veins.
My mom and dad were avid fishermen, mushroom pickers, and hunters. They both shared these hobbies with a passion. Each year, they would eagerly await the arrival of spring and summer to begin the season’s outings into nature. Of course they took me with them. I didn’t particularly enjoy these trips – the mushroom picking and fishing, and then spending the night in a tent – no thank you. I did not share their love of the “wild” weekends. I’m a city girl – I’ve always loved the comfort of the stone jungle.
The only part I enjoyed was the hunting. If my parents took me to hunt wild birds, I was endlessly happy. I have always loved to shoot. A weapon in my hand always evoked a sense of awe and euphoria in me.
Aslan indicated the glass bottles a few yards ahead of me.
“Can you shoot any of them?”
Holding the gun with both hands, I took aim and fired. The shots were loud and the gun had a strong recoil I didn’t expect – I shuddered and cringed. My second shot obliterated one of the bottles, shrapnel spraying in all directions. In my excitement, I shot the rest of the bullets. Aslan reloaded the gun and gave it to me again. Calmer now, I took aim and fired more carefully.
BLAM! A bottle shattered.
BLAM! Another.
Within a few minutes, I had destroyed most of the bottles. I felt strong. I felt powerful.
When you hold a loaded gun in your hands, there is a special feeling. You know that the weapon is a powerful force, and its main purpose is to kill – an animal, another person, the gun doesn’t care. And there is the concept of “self-defense,” when you have the right to kill if your own life is in danger. I was in just such a situation, where I could have easily shot the men around me, and called it self-defense. How many of them would I be able to shoot before the survivors tore my body to pieces with machine gun fire? Maybe I could kill every one of them, turning eight people into a bloody mess, and then jump in the car, take a few pistols and rifles with me, and leave this terrible place forever. It would be carnage, like a scene from an action movie.
I glanced at the men around me. Real life doesn’t work like a movie script. If this was my chance to escape, it wasn’t a very convincing one.
It occurred to me that because of weakness or fear, I was not able to read the signs given to me from above. I did not use either chance sent to me so far. Were they really chances to escape, or were they tests?
* * *
Aslan reveled in the war.
The war was his passion – he was an implacable fighter who would never lay his arms down and would fight to the end. The death of his enemies had become the focus of his life. He told me horror stories of the war, the battles he had seen, and off hand cruelties and atrocities that were everyday events.
During the taking of the Dudayev Palace in Grozny, the Chechens had hung the crucified and decapitated corpses of Russian soldiers from the windows. According to Aslan, the Chechens beat their Russian prisoners, tortured them, executed them in public, cut their heads off, scalped them and skinned them alive – but these were reasonable responses to the excesses of Russian soldiers against the peaceful Chechen people and Chechen prisoners of war. From both sides there was fantastic brutality - I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
The war had attracted mercenaries from around the world, who were now flooding into the country. Some were Islamic mujahideen – the so-called holy warriors, who came to help the Muslim Chechens fight the godless Russians. For them, to die in battle was their highest wish – they would be with Allah in paradise before their corpses were even cold. Other fighters came for the excitement of war and to make money.
I panicked now whenever I heard someone entering from outside. The apartment would fill with male voices. I was gripped by despair. It seemed senseless to even remain alive. The new arrivals were not concerned if they lived or died – no, it was better for them to die surrounded by the corpses of their enemies. And I was their enemy. They cared nothing for this life. Their days were numbered anyway. Why wouldn’t they use me as they wished, and then kill me?
“Don’t knock on the door when the mujahideen are here,” Aslan said, performing yet another kindness towards me, one that did not tally with the general concept of holding a hostage, or committing atrocities during a war. “They have their own rules about how to treat hostages.”
So I would sit there, afraid to move, the mercenaries right outside my door. For my own safety, I would not make a single sound. Sometimes it seemed to me that Aslan would change his mind and let me go – maybe even help me escape the country. I did not understand his duplicity, and never stopped trying to persuade him to help me.
“Aslan, let me go. The war is going to last a long time. My mom doesn’t have that kind of money. Your plan won’t work. Just let me go.”
He was silent. For a few seconds, he looked like he was about to agree, but the moment passed. Instead, he rubbed his beard and became the man with the sly fox face again. With a cruel smile, he said:
“You’re going to be here as long as necessary.”
I did not know how to convince him.
Yet friendship with Aslan brought me some advantages. I could wash my hair once a week and take a bottle-shower in the evenings, when he was one of the guards. The electricity and hot water were cut off, but there was still gas supplied to the apartment. Aslan would heat water on the stove for me, and I would mix it with cold water to wash my hair. I acquired a notebook and a pen from him – late at night, when I was unable to fall asleep, I drew by the light of a kerosene lamp.
One dark evening, Shorty opened the door and said with a sneer:
“Look who we have here!”
For a split second I assumed that they had finally come, and they were going to take me home. I nearly jumped when the next man appeared in the doorway. I was stunned. I was looking at the Italian.
“Do you remember your friend Italiano?”
He said the nickname with a disrespectful and mocking tone. I felt that Shorty was slightly humiliating him, and I was glad about that, even if it only seemed like it to me.
The return of the Italian called up unbearably painful emotions for me. The memories of that night surfaced in my mind as if they had happened the day before. It cut my heart open like a razor blade.
He was the only one of them I had known in my past life. In my happy life, when I was naïve and it seemed like the world was one big happy
family, where we all loved each other and enjoyed each other. The past few months, I had tried to drive away the memories of my former life, so I would not go insane from anguish. I locked those memories deep inside me, and did not give myself permission to let them out. I couldn’t handle it. And here was The Italian, the agent of my suffering - his presence made my heart shrink. I hated him.
I looked into his eyes in the dim light of the lamp.
“How much I hate you, Italian!”
He grinned. But it was not with the arrogance or confidence of previous days – he looked pathetic now. Now I was sure – the derogatory tone Shorty took with him was real, and there was some reason behind it.
The next day, when Aslan showed up, I tried to find out about the Italian. My feelings had not deceived me. The Italian was an absolute zero, a pawn in the game. During my kidnapping, his role was to follow me and find out the places I frequented.
No one respected him, and that made me glad in an evil and vindictive way. When the war started, he fled Chechnya and had been hiding somewhere outside the country. He was not considered Vainakh, and therefore everyone looked down on him. He had never even been to Europe – he simply created that illusion so people who didn’t know him would think he was successful. I gloated and rejoiced that he was not recognized among his friends. Compared to mine, his suffering was miniscule, but it still made me happy.
January 1995
Astrakhan, Russia
“In connection with the start of military operations, all search activities in the territory of Chechnya have been postponed.” – the words sounded like a verdict.
According to the federal officers, the war would end in a few weeks, and then the search would resume again.
The woman could not wait. The war was a bloodbath – that much was clear from the TV and the newspapers. They couldn’t know when it was going to end, or how. There was no time to waste. Waiting for the war to end was waiting too long.
Girl, Taken - A True Story of Abduction, Captivity, and Survival Page 9
