As I entered the prison bus from sunlight I couldn’t see anything like in a hole. But… As usual men have already been driven in the next-door cage. I can’t see their faces but pass them letters through the bars as soon as possible. There are good guards, not Mordovian. They are smiling only and pushing me to the next cage. First it seems to me there is nobody there. But… My eyes get used to darkness and I see the following. A rather aged woman is lying on a bench, her white cheeks have sunk in, her nose is sharpened like a decedent’s. Somebody is fiddling around the half-dead woman’s bed-head – our acquaintance is not clear behind long hair hanging down her face, only gender and estimated age are evident. The girl raises the woman’s head, puts a sack under her neck. She searches over the bench, takes soda water from the darkness, pours to the sunken eyes, to the mouth outlined as a hole. The “dead woman” has snapped out at smiles wryly to the girl’s words “Granny, Granny”.
The girl strokes her hair up, sits down to the bench opposite the old woman next to me. Certainly we had never passed together. I introduce myself: I am Kip from the cell No.213. She answers: I am not from the 6th detention centre, I am from Lefortovo. My name is Zarema. The old lady has an attack, probably asthma.
I met Zarema Muzhakhoeva on passage twice only. Our talks were short either because of need to pass letters or flipping of cigarette smog and chafing of almost two dozens of women in the cage to each other. There was no mood for heart talks. That’s why my reminiscences wouldn’t add any sensational details to the only survived Chechen female suicide bomber’s story. This story is kicked about by all means by para-governmental journalists, sung lamentably by her female lawyer and even interviewed from Lefortovo stool pigeon. It is a short free life of a sentenced to 20 years imprisonment 24-year-old prisoner told by herself.
Zarema has spent several school years in Russia, studied as usual, kept company with boys as usual – quite unlike an obedient Muslim girl as “supposed” from one side and “proposed” from the other.
A beautiful and sociable girl spoke Russian fluently. To her full age she was “supposed” to return to Chechnya, to get married, to bear a child.
But all the inhabitants of Chechnya became “proposed” to be simple degenerates. But degenerates shouldn’t tread the globe, that is supposed. Zarema’s husband as well as many of her relatives were killed during one of federal troops’ mopping-up operations. At that time Zarema was pregnant. A destitute young mother without “hardball” relatives to stick up for her was deprived of her newborn daughter at once. The child was taken off by her late husband’s relatives – that is “supposed”.
Muzhakhoeva has left for mountains, for militants. She was the first and the only from all the alive and dead in her family to do it. She was preparing to become a die-hard.
She missed courage. In Mozdok Zarema braided with suicide bomber’s belt went into hysterics. In Moscow in July 2003 she watched two Chechen girls whom she had shared food and shelter with during the “preparations” to blow up with a dozen of Russian lives at the Tushino festival.
“I closed my eyes at the explosion… I think, I was frightened at that moment it was noticed in the crowd in Tushino” (Zarema).
Later Zarema and her Bomb were sitting for a long time in a café at 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya street. They went in and out the location, wandered among merry round-faced Moscow downtown ramblers unaware of War and Death. Then Muzhakhoeva flung off to an eatery guardian: “I have got a bomb”.
“Police has certainly succeeded to come in a movie-like manner” (Laertsky).
You have seen on TV some vigilant persons having revealed a terrorist who had come as a part of an organized group to destroy a half of Moscow to ruins. You have seen an explosive device taken off from an intoxicated and brainwashed fanatic and a professional Trofimov who died heroically while neutralizing it.
“I told the policemen, I convinced them that it was a real bomb, that it could come into action at any time. But they got into my bag at once. They were all drunken” (Zarema).
“Pictures of the late Trofimov and his family were shown to Muzhakhoeva – she returned to the cell weeping… Muzhakhoeva was subjected to analyses 28 times but substances die-hards were “proposed” to have been treated by militants were not found” (The Lefortovo Stool-Pigeon).
Muzhakhoeva had surrendered a base in Moscow region where the Federal Security Service officers discovered a large number of suicide bomber’s belts prepared for Muscovites. She couldn’t even realize completely what had been in the mountains – for this girl it was frightful of men, it was tremendous of bombardments, in general, nothing heroic at all.
Muzhakhoeva is passing for restraint measure prolongation and I am passing to the Moscow city court for judicial proceedings.
“My lawyer says I would be given leniency, I would get 7-8 years imprisonment. I’ll stay in Russia. I don’t know yet how to start all my life from the very beginning…” (Zarema)
“Zarema, as soon as you are free – wait for me, let’s begin our new life together” (A man from the next-door cage). Zarema smiles and makes acquaintance through the cage wall, and we disperse in the heavy smog…
According to mass media after the reading of her sentence of 20 years imprisonment Muzhakhoeva shouted to the jury: “I hate you all Russians, I will blow you up!” I don’t think journalists lie. But I remember another Chechen female suicide bomber resuscitating an old Russian prisoner in a malodorous prison bus.
My contact with Zarema was only a single episode of a casually passing-by somewhere civil war as well as the news of a fight of Russian and Chechen guys, mostly near twenty years old, who came to kill each other.
The Hatred soaked from the youth, the Hatred enrooted by life. Don’t be naïve, liberals – it won’t pass like “from white apple-trees”. But only one result of two peoples’ hatred on their common life could be just – the common Fury sweeping the villainous government which had unleashed the Russian-Chechen massacre to hell.
