Our Game

"He says you are welcome," said Checheyev without his customary cynicism. "He says he's greatly honoured by your presence here and that you should sit beside him. We can fight our wars for ourselves, he says. We don't need outside help. But when the English lend us their support, we are grateful and we thank God. He means every word, so smile and look like an English king. He's a Sufi, so we don't question his authority."

I sat beside him. The older men took their places at the table, while the young remained standing and the women served pita loaves, fried beef in garlic, tea. A photograph of Bashir Haji hung on the wall. It was the photograph from Cambridge Street, except that it had no inked inscription across the corner.

"The village was attacked at night," Checheyev said, translating our host's words while the young men listened in respectful silence. "The village has been deserted for years, ever since the Russians knocked down the houses and drove the inhabitants into the valley. In the old days we could always take refuge in the mountains, but today they have technology. They fired rockets, then they landed helicopters. Russians or Ossetians, probably both." He added his own aside: "Ossetians are bastards, but they're our bastards. We'll deal with them in our own way." He resumed his translation. "People in nearby villages say they heard sounds like thunder and saw flashes in the sky. Silent helicopters, he says. That's just peasant talk. Anyone who could invent a silent helicopter would own the world." Hardly a change to his voice, or to the pace of his delivery, but the words became an aside of his own: "The Sufis are the only outfit round here that're capable of taking up the Russian challenge. They're the keepers of the local conscience. But when it comes to guns and training, they're turtles on their backs. That's why they need Issa, and me and Larry." He resumed his taste of translation: "A woman was attending the funeral of her mother ten kilometres away. When she got home she found everybody dead, so she turned round and walked back to the village where she'd buried her mother. Next day a group of men set out. They washed whatever they could find of the bodies, said the words over them, and buried them, which is our custom. Bashir had been tortured with knives, but they recognised him. Our host says we were betrayed."

"Who by?"

"He says a traitor. An Ossetian spy. That's all he knows.”

“What do you think?"

"With satellites? Spook cameras? Spook listeners? I think the whole trash of modern technology has betrayed us." I had opened my mouth to ask him but he anticipated my question. "No other identifications have been made. It's not polite to grill him."

"But surely ... a European man ..."

But as I said this I remembered Larry's wayward black forelock, no different from the forelocks round me, and his skin that went brown in the sun where mine went pink.

Magomed was saying a prayer to take to bed. " 'We shall kill every one of them,' " Checheyev translated, while our host led a soft chorus of approval. " 'We shall find out the names of the helicopter pilots, and of the men who planned the operation, and of the man who commanded it, and of the men who took part in it, and with God's help we shall kill them all. We shall go on killing Russians till they do what Yeltsin said they would do: take their tanks and guns and helicopters and rockets and soldiers and officials and spies to the other side of the Terek River and leave us to settle our differences and govern ourselves in peace. That is God's will.' You know something?"

"Nothing."

"I believe him. I was an idiot. I took a holiday from who I was. It lasted twenty years. Now I've come home and I wish I'd never been away."

* * *

Our guest room was the House sick bay in a measles epidemic at Winchester: beds pushed against the walls, mattresses on the floor, and a bucket to pee in. A Murid stood at the window, watching the road while his comrade slept. One by one my companions dropped off to sleep around me. Sometimes Larry spoke to me, but I preferred not to hear his words because I knew them too well. Just you stay alive for me, I warned my agent. Just damn well stay alive, that's an order. You're alive for as long as I don't know you're dead. You've survived death once. Now do it again, and keep your big mouth shut.

Hours passed, I heard cockerels and the bleating of sheep as a faltering muezzin sang over a loudspeaker. I heard the shuffle of cattle. I got up and, standing beside the Murid at the window, saw the mountains again, and the mountains above the mountains, and I remembered how Larry in a letter to Emma had sworn to throw down his bourka and fight his ground here on the road to Vladikavkaz. I watched women driving buffaloes through the courtyard in the darkness before dawn. We breakfasted quickly, and on Checheyev's insistence I gave ten dollars to each child, remembering the black boy who had followed me in Cambridge Street.