One hour after Alexander Khramtsov’s damning speech, Judge Gorbacheva rattled off her verdict, finding in favor of the government of Moscow. The courtroom emptied, leaving behind only the victors: Yuri Bulgakov, a lawyer in the city’s Revenue Department, and Andrey Rastorguev and Marat Gafurov, advisers in the legal department of the metropolitan authority.
“Well, are you celebrating?” I couldn’t help asking.
“No,” all three replied sadly. “We are human, after all. We can see what is going on. It is a disgrace that our state is treating these people in this way.”
“Well, why don’t you stop doing this disgraceful work?”
They were silent. We went out into the dark Moscow evening, some to warm homes filled with the laughter of their families, others to echoing flats left empty forever on October 23. The last to leave was a stooping, gray-haired man with expressive eyes. Throughout the hearing he had sat with quiet dignity in the corner.
“What is your name?” I called after him.
“Tukai Khaziev.”
“Were you a hostage yourself?”
“No. My son died there.”
“Can we meet?”
Tukai Khaziev reluctantly gave me his telephone number.
“I don’t know what my wife will make of this. You must understand, it is not something she has any wish to talk about. But you may call in a week’s time. I will talk to her.”
The Khazievs, a Moscow family, have been through a specifically Russian hell. They have not only lost their twenty-seven-year-old son, Timur, a musician in the orchestra of Nord-Ost. They have been on the receiving end of the very ideology that is now so widespread and that, without exaggeration, was Timur’s real killer.
“Would it have been so difficult for Putin to find at least some sort of a compromise with the Chechens, the terrorists?” Tukai Khaziev keeps repeating. “Who needed that ‘indomitability’ of his? Not us, that’s for sure….”
Tukai is the one person in this house on Volgograd Prospekt in Moscow who can talk about the subject without crying. His wife, Roza; Tanya, Timur’s young widow; and the eighty-seven-year-old grandmother cannot control their grief. Timur’s three-year-old daughter, fair-haired Sonechka, ricochets around the grown-ups. Her daddy was not there to celebrate her third birthday because it came after Nord-Ost.
They set the table, and Sonechka climbs up on a chair. She takes the biggest cup. “This is for Daddy. It’s Daddy’s cup. You mustn’t use it!” she warns in tones that brook no contradiction. Grandmother Roza has explained to her that Daddy is in heaven now, just like Roza’s own daddy, and that he can’t come back anymore. But the small girl cannot see why he can’t come back when she, his beloved Sonechka, so much wants him to.
“I believed in the state,” Tukai Khaziev says. “Almost to the very end of the siege I believed in it. I thought the intelligence services would think of something, would come to an agreement, make some promises, fudge some issues and everything would work out. What I really did not expect was that they would do as Zhirinovsky suggested a day before the assault. I remember him saying that what we should do was gas everybody. Everybody would sleep for a couple of hours; then they would wake up and just walk away. Only they didn’t wake up, and they didn’t just walk away.”
All of Timur Khaziev’s life revolved around music and the House of Culture at No. 1 Dubrovskaya Street. From childhood he had attended the Lyre Music Studio there, and there he had signed up for the orchestra of Nord-Ost, which rented the premises of the House of Culture. And there he had died.
His parents, Tukai and Roza, used to have a room in a communal apartment near the House of Culture, and both their sons, Eldar, the eldest, and Timur, learned to play the accordion there. The teachers recommended that Timur continue. He was a talented boy, and when, after tenth grade, it was time for him to choose a career, he completed the examination course for percussion instruments in a single year with help only from his accordion teacher. He entered a wind-instrument college, which he finished in three years instead of four, and then the prestigious Gnesins Academy of Music, as he had long dreamed of doing.
His teacher called him Rafinad, “Sugar Lump,” after the refined way he held the drumsticks. He was a subtle, intelligent, even suave percussionist.
Timur combined his studies at the Gnesins Academy with playing in wind and symphony orchestras of the Ministry of Defense. He toured Norway with a military orchestra, and a tour of Spain had beckoned after October 23.
“There, I had his uniform all ready, and his morning dress for concerts,” Roza says firmly, in order not to be overcome by emotion as she opens the cupboard. “They just won’t come and take it back, the Ministry of Defense.”
Sonechka, whizzing past us, promptly grabs the cap with its shiny rosette, plonks it on her head and gallops around the room: “Daddy’s hat! Daddy’s hat!” Tanya breaks down and leaves the room.
When he graduated from the Gnesins Academy, Timur was invited to play in the Nord-Ost orchestra. This was a third job, but he took it on. He was married, and had a growing daughter. Tanya, who had graduated from the Academy of Eurhythmic Art and was an actress and producer, was working as a kindergarten teacher at a low salary.
It is unfashionable to believe in mysticism or presentiments, but a month before the siege at the theater, Timur had trouble sleeping. “I would wake up toward morning,” Tanya tells me, “and he would be sitting up. I would ask him what he was doing, ask him to come back to bed, but he would say, ‘Something is making me feel anxious.”’
His family supposed that Timur was just very tired. His day began early, when he drove Sonechka and Tanya to the kindergarten. From there he immediately went to his parents’ apartment, where he kept his instruments, to practice. Recently he had been working on improving his left hand and was pleased when he got his technique sorted out. In another couple of years, he told Tanya, he would be a really good percussionist. When he had finished practicing, he would jump into the car and drive off to rehearsals with the military orchestra. From there he would give his wife and daughter a lift home from the kindergarten and go on to the Nord-Ost performance. He would get home close to midnight, and the cycle started again early the next morning. He seemed to be in a great hurry to live his life. Why? He was only twenty-seven, after all. Nobody has an answer to that question, or knows why, on October 23, Timur was even at the performance of Nord-Ost.
“It was a Wednesday,” Tanya tells me. “We had a rule that Wednesday was our free evening for being together as a family. A different percussionist played on Wednesdays, but on this particular day he asked Timur to swap because his girlfriend was insisting that he spend the evening with her. That girl saved her boyfriend’s life, but at the cost of the life of my husband. He was never any good at saying no, and because of that he died.”
“You don’t want the belongings of someone close to you just left lying around, do you?” Roza asks rhetorically. “So we went there [to the theater]. Of course there was no sign of his mobile phone. Timur had just started having a bit of money and had bought one. No sign of any of his new clothes, either.”
In the theater Roza had broken down when she saw his belongings. The only items returned to Timur’s parents were his old jacket, with an army bootprint on the back, and his shirt. That was it.
We seem to have become very primitive in the last few years, even rather ignoble. The change in moral values is increasingly noticeable as the war in the Caucasus continues and broken taboos increasingly become familiar facts of life. Killing? Happens every day. Robbery? What of it? Looting? Perfectly legal in a war. It is not only the courts that fail to condemn crimes, but society as well. What was regarded in the past with repugnance is now simply accepted.