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September 14, 2004
Grieving in Beslan
By Anastasiya Lebedev

Residents of Beslan walk around town in their house slippers. Shaggy cows graze alongside the highway. When they leisurely cross the road, drivers don’t honk or yell in frustration, but brake and wait for the herd to pass. Not a week has gone by since the hostage-taking next door, yet a stranger arriving late at night will find a warm welcome.

When someone dies, everyone chips in for the bereaved family; except what’s there to do when so many families are grieving. “I’ve gone to three families and gave them 100 rubles each,” Fatima sighs, “but I can’t afford to give more.” For reference, a difference of 3 rubles (approx. $0.10) is significant enough for Fatima to walk an extra block or two to get a better price on food.

Children are beautiful in Beslan, all with big dark eyes shining with intelligence. Pictures of smiling, big-eyed children are plastered all over the entrance to the town’s culture center, signed “Missing,” “Help us find her,” “Last seen”… Some locals take comfort in having one of family’s three children survive, others have at least found the bodies they could give a proper burial to. Those who haven’t been able to find the bodies have nothing but the incredible rumors to ease their pain ­ there’s been word that the children aren’t missing or lost in the rubble, they’ve been taken away and will be offered up for a ransom.

Rumors abound in the town. They say that the girls were raped and their nipples were cut off, and that it was even filmed on video, but the authorities won’t show that footage. They say that children’s bodies were found on the road to the Ingush border. They say that little Madina had a dream on the night of August 31, where her mother came to her and told her she’d be taking her to school and teaching her herself, all of Beslan knows this story. Madina’s mother, a teacher, had died two years ago. The dates on the simple wooden post marking Madina’s grave are the same ­ September 3, 1993 and September 3, 2004.

The first thought that comes to mind when you look at Beslan School #1 is, this is war. The way to the school is strewn with empty cartridges. The walls are riddled with bullets and shells. In each classroom, there are round holes in the floor, from hand grenades: that’s how the school was de-mined: the bomb squad threw a grenade in each room to avoid stepping on a trip wire. They did it at night, and windows went on clattering throughout the town long after the shoot-out was over.

Inside, the walls look even worse, shattered glass crumbles underfoot. “The floor was covered with blood here,” says a grey-haired man with red eyes. “But dust got all over it.” He says his name is Oleg. Oleg has buried his daughter a couple of days ago, but still can’t find his niece’s body. Chris, the British journalist who’s brought me here as his translator, starts digging through the dust with his foot, trying to find a trace of the pool of blood. I’m not so eager ­ I’ve had my fill of blood spots on the walls, radiators, doors, and a spray all over the notebooks.

In one place, the hallway’s really smeared with soot and crusted blood ­ there was obviously an explosion here. Chris looks up to examine the black goo on the ceiling. “I think that’s pieces of person,” he says. The odor is nasty. There are quite a few nasty odors at the school, and I’d rather not ponder their origins.

Two women are walking toward the room where the men got shot. One of them, her mad green eyes wide open, moans, “Do you know where they shot them? Where is it?” She gets out two photos of a handsome young man. “I had one son…I have no one left…” She walks off with a howl, her companion, also sobbing, follows her.

An old woman is bawling, her hands wrapped around a worn man’s shoe. Her friend explains to a journalist, “Aza’s found her son’s shoe.”

Boots, sandals, sneakers. Jackets, IDs, notebooks, drawings, photographs, purses. All of this is heaped on the window sills, on the desks, on the chairs, mixed up with flowers. Every day the piles grow smaller as friends and relatives retrieve items worn by their loved ones.

All around the school, there are two-liter bottles of water, soda, and juice. The children begged for water as they died; they’ll drink their fill in the netherworld. According to ancient Ossetian custom, the living say good-bye to the dead by bringing the things they liked or missed. Cookies, chocolates, fruit are placed next to the flowers, for the children who died famished. In one room, there is a little pyre of cigarettes ­ people walk in, light a cigarette and place it down in a stack. A tall guy showing his friends “where Shurik got shot” patiently explains, “This is for the smokers. So they can have one after death.”

It’s the same at the cemetery ­ bottles of water, fruit, and candy. For several hundred meters, there are fresh graves, bouquets, wreaths, wooden posts and crosses, all marked with the same date. Crowds of people wearing black file in after 2 pm, the time when the dead traditionally leave their homes forever. Women are wailing, it’s hard to tell if they’re crying or singing. “How shall we leave our little one here!” A strange sound comes from the men, a sort of a stifled cackle. They don’t know how to cry, men don’t cry here. But they can’t help it.

A man in a black suit comes up to us and introduces himself as Ruslan. “I’m a Muslim,” he says, “but after this,” he points at the week-old annex to the cemetery, “I’ve started wavering in my faith.”

There are Muslims, Christians, and pagans in Beslan. There has been no religious conflict in the town since the massacre ­ any residents will eagerly blame the Ossetians’ next-door neighbors, the Ingush, rather than their faith. “This is not a religious problem, it’s national,” says Ruslan, relating a story about the Ingush slitting the throat of a party boss in the 1930s when the man tried to encourage pig farming in the republic. “I’m a Muslim, too. Where I live, they had a pig farm also. So we, the Muslims, simply didn’t work there. There’s an Ingush solution and an Ossetian solution for you.”

One of our cabdrivers tells us, “All of this happened because those bandits were Ingush. If it was only Chechens there, they wouldn’t kill our children.” The city is convinced that the official story about an “international” band of hostage-takers is an attempt by the authorities to prevent anti-Ingush sentiment.

The saddest thing is talking to people in the street. It’s clear enough that any woman wearing black is grieving, but the men are harder to pin down. In a regular conversation any one of them might mention casually that his wife, a teacher, had tried to drag his wounded son’s body out of the melee, but did not succeed. Or that his family had just come to Beslan from Uzbekistan three weeks ago to live closer to their relatives and that one of the children was just starting first grade ­ only to be killed, along with her three-year-old brother.

The women of Beslan will be wearing black for the next year. People will be coming to the cemetery for years. People here will not forget ­ as they have not forgotten past hurts, which they eagerly recollect when asked. But will people remember the victims elsewhere?

Irina, 24, watches the news channel, where Beslan is still in the headlines. She is bitter and skeptical. “You’ll see, in a month no one will remember this. No one.”