“My friend Margarita fortunately told me that you would be giving a concert here,” Islikhanov says. “So of course I came. I think you have met Margarita?”
“Yes,” she says, “I think she mentioned … Do you live in Sofia, then?”
“No, no,” he says, and makes a self-deprecating gesture with his hands, as if to say it is of no interest where he lives, and it’s difficult to explain. “I am here in transit.”
The ambassadress excuses herself. Islikhanov pauses, as if uncertain whether to go on, whether more information from him would be welcome. “I travel a lot, you see,” he says.
She looks at him queryingly. “It’s because of my job,” he clarifies. “As a representative of the Chechen government.”
She must look baffled, because he adds, “I thought perhaps Margarita told you. Or perhaps Mr. McElvoy.”
“No,” she says, trying to recall whether anything had been said about Chechnya. “They didn’t.”
She sees a quaver of surprise, or annoyance on his face, but it disappears quickly. “No reason they should have,” he says urbanely. “No reason why it should be of interest. It is just one of those … trouble spots. You may know that my country has a lot of problems.”
She nods, uncertainly. She’s seen images of a ruined city on television, and refugees moving among the rubble of buildings and abandoned streets. She has a sense it has been going on for a long time, whatever it is. A war against the Russians, but she doesn’t know why or for what. One of the remote, blurry horrors.
Islikhanov is watching her closely. “No reason you should know very much,” he repeats. “It’s not as though Chechnya is of any … importance. Except of course to us. To us, it is of the greatest importance. But to the rest of the world, if I may say so, we’re just one of those … hellish places.” His voice has migrated from polite irony to a darker sarcasm. Then he spreads his palms again, in a gesture of humorous resignation. She notices that his hands are surprisingly long-fingered and delicate. He has a narrow, olive-skinned face. He speaks very good, British-accented English. She wonders why.
“But you don’t live in Chechnya?” she begins, and doesn’t know how to complete the sentence.
“No, no,” he leaps in quickly as if to reassure her. “That is out of the question. To tell you the truth, I hardly live anywhere.”
“But …” she begins.
“The only way I can help my country is from here,” he explains. “You may not know that the government of Chechnya doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, the legitimate government, of which I am a representative. So I must represent it from abroad. It is a kind of … virtual situation.”
“And where do you live?”
“Not anywhere, really,” he says urbanely. “I am a sort of non-person. Or an itinerant person. Isn’t that what it is called?”
“Yes,” she says. “Itinerant. That’s how I think of myself … sometimes. Although, of course—” She stops herself short. Her condition undoubtedly cannot be compared to his. Or vice versa. Though he doesn’t look … like anything she’d expect. Not, in any way, a personification of calamity.
“So it is perhaps right that our paths should cross,” he says with emphasis. She half wishes she could end the conversation right there, get away from the peculiar pressure of his attention. Still: she is intrigued. Here is an actual person who has stepped out from behind the news images, from that other, impossible
reality, and he is talking to her in this rather normal way. She is curious, and in some odd way, flattered.
“Is there … fighting going on right now in Chechnya?” she asks, but he waves the question away. “No, I should not bother you with such gloomy matters,” he says. “I should tell you instead what the Chopin Ballade meant to me. In Paris. And the Scherzo this evening.” Someone passes by with refreshments, and Islikhanov indicates he wants his wine glass refilled, with a graceful, surprisingly authoritative gesture. She follows the movement with interest, and he catches her gaze; and pauses on it.
“Do you particularly love Chopin?” she begins, but the ambassadress is again at her side, wanting to introduce her to someone, and Anzor Islikhanov, making his courteous bow, moves off.
He keeps her in his sight lines, though, she’s sure of it. She can sense it out of the corner of her eye, is half expecting him to rejoin her and resume their conversation. He comes up as the party is thinning out, and says he would like to show her something of interest while she’s here; to give her something in return for what she’s given him; all of them. Would she like to see one of Bulgaria’s old monasteries tomorrow? The drive is not too long, and he thinks she would find it worth a visit. She calculates whether she needs to practice before the following day’s concert, and decides it is not strictly necessary. Surely, she can break her regimen once in a while. She says yes, she would like to go.
The drive toward the monastery takes them up a steep mountainous road. Anzor Islikhanov navigates his tiny Fiat smoothly over the winding ascent, slim hand turning the wheel with a steady sureness. Not a pianist’s hand, it is too narrow for that; but the fingers are long and mobile. Not the hands of hardship either, or of violent wreckage. He seems less intent on engaging
her attention than yesterday, or perhaps more comfortably in charge; and she feels herself relaxing into the snug capsule, into a suspended mood. She gazes at the landscape, and gives herself over to the sheer interest of the unexpected, of not knowing what will happen next. Is it her illusion that the landscape here has a freshness and craggy vigor that is also expressed in the robust yet elegant silhouettes she has seen all around her, in the lively Bulgarian faces? Some morphology of the place, reiterated in its human inhabitants. The deep evergreens mass into a dense forest. Anzor tells her he loves this mountainous country because it reminds him of his childhood. He grew up in Grozny, the now ruined city; but his grandparents lived in a mountain village, and he visited them there often—a landscape like this, except more vast, more austere.
“We used to play games of calling out echoes when we were kids,” he says, and briefly turns to her. “I really felt sometimes I heard spirits speak. I thought the mountains were inhabited by strange creatures—everywhere, just out of sight. Now there’s literally almost no one there. Now the villages really are inhabited by ghosts.”
The car swerves round a sharp turn and jolts her forward; but Anzor regains control almost instantly. He puts a protective arm against her, and his hand grips the wheel more tightly. They stay silent for a while.
“Do you miss Chechnya very much?” she asks, once her balance is recovered. She doesn’t know how to talk about such things, doesn’t want to commit an indelicacy. What does the remote country mean to the man next to her …? She ponders his face, as if she could penetrate to the landscape through him. The mountains of the Caucasus, high ridges; eagles; a sparse population. And now the ruins, the refugees, the rubble …
“One always misses a country which has been … wounded,”
Anzor says. “And my country has been very hurt. Very damaged.” An odd expression crosses his face, a setting of the jaw, a hooding of the eyes, as if to fend off vulnerability, or a private anger. She feels as if in the very hooding of his eyes, something has been unmasked.
“Not that I didn’t want to leave when I was young,” he resumes. “Or at least to travel. I felt so … restricted. To tell you the truth, I was almost excited when I was forced to leave. I was going to see the world.”
“And now?” she asks.
“Now I’ve seen it,” he says tersely. “Now I only think about my country. My mission.”
She is taken aback by the unadorned earnestness of his tone. “And what is that? I mean, your … mission?” She hesitates before the word. She’s afraid it will sound unnatural in her mouth; she doesn’t really have the right to it.
“It is to help my people in their struggle,” he answers reluctantly, almost churlishly. Perhaps he has sensed her hesitation. “I am called upon to do … what I can. As the situation arises.”
She isn’t sure whether the occasional oddities of his syntax have to do with his English, or some unfamiliar angle of vision. She looks at him questioningly; but he is turned away from her, and his eyes are hooded again. She stays on his face, wanting to know more. Something about this stranger has adhered to her imagination, like an overheard motif that bores itself into the mind and keeps turning itself over … She wants to ask him more about what he does, but they’ve reached the monastery. It sits atop a flat ridge, a long wooden and stone structure that has elements of a rustic country house, and a fortress. Inside, there’s a small jewel of a chapel, its walls entirely covered with visages of saints, gleaming, in their golds and red and blues, with a rich, dark light. Two-dimensional faces, uncompromisingly flat,
except for the eyes, which emit deep, solemn zeal. In a wooden, high-backed pew a solitary priest sits very still in his black robe with a tasseled belt. His face is a perfect icon too, with its long beard and black eyes. The eyes should be burning as in the images around him, but instead, they are staring vacantly into space. He sits, immobile and seemingly unexpectant; as though he intends to remain in his pose for a long time. But perhaps as he feels her eyes on him, he gets up and shuffles toward the altar as slowly as if movement were a reluctant variation on stillness; as if time did not exist. She notices that his hair at the back of the neck is matted, and his collar dirty. “He is probably only a deacon,” Anzor says, and turns her gently toward a famous icon. But her attention is drawn back to the priest, who, in another almost imperceptible variation, comes to a standstill. She follows the line of his lethargic vision, and sees a figure—a woman’s figure, dressed in black—prostrate on the stone floor. She makes an instinctive gesture of recoil, and Anzor puts a staying hand on her shoulder. “But …” Isabel says, and then sees that the figure is beginning to move, levering herself along the stone mosaic with her arms, toward the priest. It is moving laboriously, the black-clad prostrate body, head facing the stone floor in consummate abnegation. The priest waits till it comes close, and the supplicant, reaching out to lift the hem of his robe, kisses it reverently. He makes the sign of the cross over her; then returns to his imperturbable posture.
Isabel feels she’s watching the scene through a long, distorting funnel which turns nearby reality surreal. She is slightly dizzy, as if she’s been swung around too abruptly. She has wandered into some strange dimension, which yet has about it something ambiguously, distantly familiar. The prostrate figure of the unseen woman, now lying utterly still, as if in mimicry of death … It is disturbing in a way she cannot identify, as if it
posed some personal danger. Anzor puts his hand lightly on the small of her back, steering her toward the exit.
She wants to ask him about what they have witnessed, but restrains the question; she realizes she has no idea how he might react to such a scene.
But as soon as they step out on a stone patio, he says, “It’s an old tradition. You mustn’t think she finds it humiliating.” He is speaking carefully, as if wanting to soften the shock, for Isabel, of what they’d seen. “She probably finds a kind of … satisfaction in it. A release.”
“Release from what?”
“From her problems. Her burdens. She probably has a hard life. This lifts her up. Takes her out of herself. It’s a kind of … trance.”
Again, a twist of dizziness, of fascination. Of curiosity. She’s wandered into a strange dimension, and feels all of her usual judgments giving way. Anzor asks her if she’d like to stroll around the monastery grounds. There’s a wind, and she feels the bounce of her own mussed hair with sensuous relief, as if it had been released from the prostrate figure’s black scarf. Anzor tells her that the mountainous fortresses were centers of resistance against the Turks, when the region was governed by the Ottomans. The monks here fired cannon balls at Turkish armies, and gave refuge to peasant partisans. “These holy men were resistance fighters,” he says. “But you know, mountains are always places of resistance. Mountain people love freedom. They do not give it up … ever.”
The fresh lawn elides into a wilder mountain brush, leading out to the edge of a narrow ravine, a foaming river running deep below, its ceaseless whoosh reaching them as an echo of watery turbulence. They listen to the sound quietly for a while; then Anzor, as if looking at a different landscape in his mind’s eye, tells her about the austere beauty of the gray stone towers, built
as strategic lookouts in Chechnya’s mountains. And about his parents and grandparents, who had to leave their village during the great deportation, when the entire population of Chechnya was stuffed into cattle cars, or if they were lucky and in favor with the regime, into passenger trains, and herded off, like a population of cows or elks, into refugee camps in Central Asia.
“All of them?” Isabel asks incredulously.
Anzor confirms, his eyes clouding. “Actually, I was born there … although I hardly remember anything of it, except the red earth, and the horsemen.” But the Chechens came back in the great, sad return, when the Soviets finally allowed it, and the grandparents rebuilt their house exactly on the same spot where it had been before. “That was the one spot on earth which meant something to them. Which they understood and loved,” Anzor says. “To them, everything else was alien. Unimportant. Godless land. The light was wrong everywhere else, the air was wrong. They were still like that, you see. There was only one place which was real to them. Where they could truly live. And now the village is gone.”
His eyes become remote again, his mouth set. He turns away from her, and picks up a jagged stone and throws it, with surprising force, down into the small ravine. A faint sound reaches them, mixed with the unvarying, gurgling water. She follows the movement of his torso, as he turns effortlessly with the extension of the throwing arm. Line of beauty, she thinks, line of grace … The casual arc of the throwing arm seems to slow into a timelessness; and suddenly, as if in concert with the elongated curve, she feels a surge of longing so sudden and powerful that she’s afraid she’ll fall from it; that her chest will cave in as from a blow.