Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall. Andrew Meier

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.

      The courtyard, the summer living room of houses across Chechnya, was clean and quiet. Here the routine of the day unfolded. In the morning the sisters washed clothes in metal basins. In the afternoon their mother fried potatoes and boiled lamb. And in the evening Shvedov lounged on a faded threadbare couch that sat in the middle of the narrow porch. Above the porch, in the corners of its slanting roof, swallows nested.

      “Our mama’s life has been a hard one,” Zura said.

      “Mama,” Issa commanded, “tell him about the deportation.”

      There was no need, and he knew that. The deportation was not history. It informed the daily conversation in Chechnya. Issa’s mother had been twenty-two in 1944. She remembered clearly how the NKVD soldiers had herded them into the freight cars – in all, more than fourteen thousand cars were needed – and sent them off to the remote Soviet republics of Central Asia. Along with hundreds of thousands of Chechens and Ingush, Sabiat survived thirteen years in Central Asia. Exile was hard, of course, she said. But it was better, much better, than this war. “They gave us a small plot of land and a little house. We could grow a garden.”

      Tired of talk, Sabiat went back to her chores. In her slippers and a flowered cotton dress, she reached for a short brush, a dozen switches tied to a stick. She was intent on sweeping the dirt from the concrete of her courtyard. She stooped low and, despite the heat, worked the brush with purpose and without pause.

      “Every night and every morning our mama cleans,” Zulei said. “Only the water from the well will she let us get ourselves.”

      She had survived Central Asia, the road back to Grozny in 1957, and the loss of her husband, to a car accident years ago that came on the Prophet’s birthday. “She must work or else …” said her daughter Zura.

      As Issa’s mother swept, Shvedov stubbed out another papirosa in the tin coffee can on the sofa. After he got up slowly from the old couch and disappeared into the coolness of the house, Sabrat continued to sweep. A month later Issa would call and tell me that his mother’s heart had at last given out.

       ELEVEN

      ILYAS CAME TO SEE me after dark. Darkness unnerved the Russian soldiers in Chechnya but liberated the locals.

      “Why do they say,” he asked, “that every journalist who comes here now is a spy?” Ilyas was a fighter and not afraid to probe. Chechens are, without effort, obsessed with spies. Cultural legends and historical mythologizing were one thing but in Chechnya there was a veritable industry in conspiracy theories. The war was not Moscow’s fault alone. Washington, Wall Street, world Zionism had also colluded against the Chechens. Intelligence agencies – the CIA, Mossad, MI6–loomed large everywhere. The plots and subplots were infinite but followed one story line. “They have hijacked our fight for freedom,” Ilyas said, “in a global geostrategic fight for our oil.”

      The worst culprits of course were the journalists. In the Zone every reporter was a fifth columnist in poor disguise. Sitting with Ilyas, I was not in a particularly comfortable position. (At the time Issa had announced with unsettling confidence that he thought I was the only foreign correspondent in Chechnya.) I had never worked with Fred Cuny, the Texan genius of emergency relief, who had been killed in Chechnya in 1996. But I knew well several people who had. They remained convinced Cuny had been killed by Chechens acting at the behest of the Russian security service. Moreover, every day I was made amply aware of the price tag on any foreigner’s head in these parts.

      Ilyas lived in Urus-Martan, the third-largest town in Chechnya and a place known as a center of the new Wahhabism. He agreed to meet in Gudermes, in an apartment with little furniture and less light, one short block from the Russian military headquarters. Although he moved about the city freely and was unafraid to meet a foreign correspondent, Ilyas said it was better to meet at night.

      At first we sat in silence. I tried a few entreaties without luck. Ilyas was short and stocky, with wavy hair that curled long behind his ears. A reddish brown beard was coming onto his square cheeks. Failing to engage him in small talk – where he was from (“here and there”), what he did (“this and that”)–I decided to up the ante.

      “Why do they call you an amir?” I asked.

      “Because I lead a group, a group of fighters.”

      I had heard the term amir before. In Afghanistan, in the summer of 1996, weeks before the Taliban took Kabul, their leaders in Kandahar spoke reverently of their amir, their leader, the one-eyed mullah Muhammad Omar who had taken to calling himself the Amir ul Momineen, Commander of the Faithful. When I met Ahmed Shah Massoud, the military genius who stood behind the Afghan government then clinging to Kabul, Massoud spit the term out.

      “No one can call himself the amir,” Massoud said. “It is sacrilege to all Muslims.”

      In Chechnya being an amir meant Ilyas had gone Wahhabi. “Wahhabism, ” at least in Chechnya, is an imprecise term. Religiously, it could mean nearly anything. Yet militarily, its meaning was clear: It meant Ilyas had joined Jama’at, the fighting arm of the would-be Islamic fundamentalists who were now claiming recruits across Chechnya – even in Gudermes, the Russians’ administrative center. Being an amir meant that Ilyas, though scarcely twenty years old, controlled six fighters, who, as he put it, “would do anything I ask.”

      “The Wahhabis,” Ilyas explained, “are anyone who believes in the need to cleanse our nation and who will sacrifice himself in the jihad against Russia,” and, he politely added, “against the United States and its allies as well.”

      In Kandahar that summer of 1996 the Taliban had convened a gathering of mullahs, one of the largest ever. In the dark of night, their high-pitched prayers woke me. I had never heard a more terrifying sound. To me, their cries did not ring of piety, but of a dark passion laced with bloodlust. Later I told a UN worker, a gentle Somalian who had survived the worst of Mogadishu, what I had heard. The Somalian pulled me