Our Game

"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.

* * *