Our Game

"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.

* * *

Our safe house was two houses inside a white-walled courtyard. There were two gateways—one to the road, one to open pasture. Beyond the pasture, foothills patched with shadow by the moon lifted into a star-filled sky. Above the hills rose mountains and more mountains. The lights of distant villages twinkled among the foothills.

* * *

We were in a living room with mattresses on the floor and a plastic-topped table at the centre. Two women in head scarves were setting out food, I guessed a mother and her daughter. Our host was a stocky man in his sixties, who spoke gravely while he grasped my hand.