In those terrible October days when the hostages were seized, the whole country seemed to have united in a surge of concern, wondering how to help, praying, hoping, and waiting. But there was nothing we could do. The intelligence services let no one near, assuring us that they had everything under control. How can we reconcile ourselves to the fact that among the few allowed special access were people who took the opportunity to do a bit of looting? Whatever was nice and new. Whatever fit. There is no other explanation for the disappearance of the hostages’ clothing and possessions. The families of those who died can never be free of what they felt in those days. Even if the government suddenly decided to give them all a million dollars in compensation, those memories would still remain.
Judging by the shirt that was returned, Timur had been lying outside in the open. Roza couldn’t wash our famous Moscow street muck out of it, a mixture of gasoline and oil.
When Timur went to work for the last time, he had in his pockets some ten different forms of ID with his photographs, testifying to the fact that he was a musician in the Nord-Ost orchestra and in the orchestra of the Ministry of Defense. There were his passport, his driver’s license, and an address book with the telephone numbers of his friends and relatives.
Nevertheless, on October 28 his body was returned to his family with a tag attached to the wrist by a rubber band that read: “No. 2551 Khamiev Unknown.”
“How could that happen?” Roza Abdulovna asks.
“Why ‘Khamiev’ instead of ‘Khaziev’?” In Russian the word has an insulting ring to it: to call someone a kham is to call him a rat. “And even if they were going to give his name as ‘Khamiev,’ what was the meaning of ‘Unknown’? And why did we have to go to such lengths to find him? They had only to open his address book, call any number in it, and ask the person who answered if they knew Timur Khaziev. They would immediately have been given our telephone number.”
Timur’s mother is talking about the day after the assault, the long day of October 26, which the Khaziev family will never forget.
“From the morning until four in the afternoon there was no mention of his name anywhere, not in any of the lists of hostages given out by the authorities,” Tukai Khaziev relates. “When we had already done the rounds of all the mortuaries and hospitals, it suddenly appeared. There was a short list, just some twenty people, and Timur was on it. It said there that he was alive and in No. Hospital. I phoned my wife and told her that everything was fine. We wept with joy. Our friends congratulated us. Tanya and I went around to the hospital as fast as we could.”
At the gate, however, a posted sentry would not let anyone in. He said the prosecutors office had forbidden it. Tanya began to cry, and the guard, taking pity, whispered to Tukai that it was bad news that “your one” was in there. It meant there was no hope. Tanya heard and started begging to be let inside. The guard opened the gate.
The hospital corridors appeared to be deserted until a police officer came at them with an assault rifle cradled against his fat belly.
“You know, he was just someone without a heart. No word of warning. No ‘Brace yourself for bad news.’ He just said, straight in my face, ‘He’s dead. Go away.’ Of course I was in hysterics for twenty minutes, and that brought some doctors running. ‘Who let you in here?’ they demanded.”
When Tanya recovered her composure a bit and asked to be allowed to see Timur’s body before the autopsy, she was refused. She begged and begged, but the policeman just said, “Go and ask Putin for permission.” Three officials from the prosecutor’s office turned up. “Why are you in such a rush?” they asked. “You’ll have time to nail down his coffin lid.” Then they said, “Surname? Khaziev? A Chechen?”
That turned out to have been Timur Khaziev’s undoing. Once the forces of law and order had taken his Tatar surname to be Chechen, everything had automatically followed in accordance with the prevailing ideology.
The family is now convinced that Timur died because, having been taken for a Chechen, he was deliberately denied medical treatment. When the men of the Khaziev family collected his body from the mortuary, written on his chest, in large letters, was “9:30,” the time of his death in No. 7 Hospital. There were no marks on his body from a IV drip feed, an injection, or the use of a ventilator. Instructions had been issued from above to wipe out all the Chechens, and Timur, mistaken for one, was not entitled to resuscitation. For four hours and more after the assault, he just lay there dying. Timur was killed by ideology.
“We have no rights in our own country. We are just human trash. That is why all this happened to my Timurka” are Tanya’s parting words to me.
While Tanya and Tukai were standing outside the hospital gate on October 26, about twenty people tried to enter the flat where the young Khazievs lived, some in uniform and some in plainclothes. Their neighbor quickly intervened and just managed to head them off. Tanya was told they had been acting on a tip-off from the hospital that a Chechen lived there.
What should the Khaziev family do now? Accept the humiliations and keep their heads down?
“When we spoke as plaintiffs about all this in the Tverskoy court,” Tukai recalls, “Gorbacheva pretended not to understand what we were talking about. She was certain that everybody, without exception, had received medical attention.”
Naturally, the Khazievs have a death certificate, but it contains no mention of the cause of death. The space has been left blank. No hint that there had ever been a terrorist act. In addition to the state ideology that killed him, Timur and his family have, working against them, a system that avoids providing documentary evidence.
“I imagine you asked the officials at the prosecutor’s office why the cause of death had been left blank.”
“Of course, on October 28. They assured us this was simply a formality so that we could get on with preparations for the funeral. After the results of the postmortem were known, they said, they would be sure to make the appropriate entry.”
“Did they?”
“No, of course not.”
This is an illuminating answer. Nobody expects fair dealings from the government. The authorities are, at best, a source of trouble, despite all their popularity ratings, which are officially so high. Recently the president’s office set up a special department to engineer a “correct” perception of the country and the president abroad. The idea is to reduce the spread of negative information, to make Russia look better in the eyes of foreigners. It would be even better, of course, if the government set up another special department to improve the image of the country and the president in the eyes of its own citizens.
“Could Putin really not have backed down? Could he not just have said, ‘I am bringing this war to an end’? Our loved ones would still be alive today,” Tukai keeps repeating. “All I want to know is, who is responsible for our tragedy? No more than that.”
TANYA RECENTLY BOUGHT Kiryusha and Frosya, a tortoise and a cat, so as to have some company to come home to. Sonechka is still too little to understand what happened to her daddy, but she doesn’t like coming back after kindergarten to a home without him. Recently the family was phoned by the producers of the revived Nord-Ost musical and offered free tickets. The family declined but were told that anytime… We really seem to have lost all sense of propriety.