Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Read online

  MY LIFE IN PAGANS

  ~ OSSETIA ~

  JAMES MEEK

  AT A DINNER IN KIEV I HEARD THERE WERE PAGANS IN EUROPEAN Russia. The Soviet Union had just died. After four score years and ten it had gone suddenly, like an old man with heart failure. Without realizing it I was imbibing the nostalgia of the people around me for the safe old broken-down Soviet world, the nostalgia that choked the Russian-speaking lands in the years I lived there. Now I’m nostalgic. I was younger then, but my nostalgia is also nostalgia for nostalgia itself. Ranshe bylo luchshe was the refrain in those days: “it used to be better.” Though I doubt it did, I miss the regrets of others for the loss of a past I didn’t experience, as if fragments of their rosy Soviet memories crept into me and now pretend to be my own.

  The host and guests were fastidious intellectuals—academics, I think, or doctors, or engineers, people who drank but abhorred drunkenness, although they might find it amusing in a foreign visitor. There were jackets but no ties. Smart dresses. The women cooked and served. The most farsighted of them would already have spent every ruble they had on goods and property. The others would lose their savings in the great inflation that was about to hit Kiev like war, like a plague. Hyperinflation and disillusionment would later crush the sort of hospitality I was used to, but then, Westerners were still honored curiosities. We had the aura of little Marco Polos, and nothing was our fault, and we took advantage.

  It was a dinner in a Soviet flat, the living room made into a dining room, sofa on one side of the table, chairs on the other, the table covered in cold dishes—a plate of smoked meat; a plate of smoked fish; a salad of diced potato, diced carrot, tinned peas, and mayonnaise; a salad of grated beetroot; a salad of diced vegetables covering an almost raw herring; slippery marinated mushrooms; white bread and butter dotted with orange pearls of salmon roe; pickled cucumbers; pickled wild garlic stalks. There would have been a bottle of vodka, a bottle of sweet red wine, and a bottle of cognac, to be drunk out of dainty cut-glass goblets from the glass-doored cupboard, the stenka, that covered one wall. When I was stuffed like a goose the second course would have been brought, pork cutlets or fried chicken with potatoes. Then cake. In Britain and America at this time, the newspapers, one of which I wrote for, were warning of famine in Russia and Ukraine. So were the Russian and Ukrainian papers. The famine was always somewhere the reporter wasn’t.

  One of the guests began talking about a place in the south, Ossetia, where the people were nominally Christian and actually pagan. They worshipped multiple deities in mountain ceremonies. It was in the Caucasus Mountains. I wanted to go. The mystery of a secret space on the map drew me into the Soviet Union just before it ceased to exist, but Kiev and Ukraine were only partly hidden. I’d had an idea of them before I went. The real lure was the mysteries that didn’t advertise themselves until you entered the first mystery, the hidden within the hidden.

  I visited North Ossetia, the part of Ossetia that’s in Russia, several times after that. It wasn’t until my third trip, one and a half years later, that I took part in a pagan rite.

  I drove out of Vladikavkaz, capital of North Ossetia, toward the mountains on a bright, hot midsummer’s day. Vladikavkaz isn’t an Ossetian word. It’s Russian, a garrison coinage from the eighteenth century meaning “Rule the Caucasus,” and now it’s an industrial city with some pretty czarist quarters, pleasant parks, and swaths of Soviet modernity, a modernity that looks botched and worn-out from the day it is built, yet lasts forever. It seems a regular south Russian or Ukrainian city, that sort of communist-Christian Europeanness, but it isn’t. It was the day of the feast of Watsilla, the Ossetian god of the harvest, and the streets were full of portly men in short-sleeved shirts butchering sheep.

  The road heads for Kazbek, the dormant volcano that looms over Vladikavkaz. After hundreds of miles of flat Russian steppe the blue rock wall and white peaks of the mountains leap out of the plain with great suddenness. Kazbek is more than fifteen thousand feet high. After an hour of twisting roads we were three thousand feet up, in the steep green alpine meadows of the Karmadon valley. We drove on to Dargavs, location of the holiest shrine to Watsilla, on Mount Tbau. I was to be a guest at the ceremony of the Three Holy Pies, which to the uninitiated would look like a group of men getting drunk and maudlin, making extravagant toasts, and overeating. As for the women, their job was to bake the pies. According to tradition, on this holiday the women had to bake in complete silence. They were supposed to veil their mouths and noses with towels, too, so that even their breath wouldn’t hex the pastry; or perhaps it was to stop them spitting in our pies.

  Before there could be pies, there had to be a sacrifice. Igor, a vet, took me to a small field around the back of his family’s country house. In the pen at the bottom of the field, I saw the holy portion, or rather I saw him seeing us. His eyes reflected a moment beyond fear. Fear implies hope. Here was no hope; here was certainty that the bipeds wanted to kill him. He tried to bolt. Igor seized him by the horns and dragged him up the field to where a table and a basin were set up. The sheep had a brown fleece and a fat tail. Igor threw him on his side on the ground and bound three of his legs with white tape. He hoisted him onto the table with his head hanging over the end, over the basin, and pinned the animal with his right leg, clenching his knee over the sacrifice’s stomach. He held the head by the horns, lifted his eyes to heaven, uttered a short prayer, and cut the sheep’s throat. Two pints of crimson blood fell into the basin.

  Igor let him bleed dry. It took three or four minutes, the sheep twitching all the while. Toward the end he twitched more violently, his legs kicking out.

  “If he takes a long time to die, it means the slaughterer has a light hand, and the meat will taste good,” said Igor. “If the slaughterer is clumsy, he’ll die straight away and the blood won’t come out.”

  Igor untied the legs, cut off the sheep’s head, and laid it on the grass. He laid the dead beast on its back and began to gut him, with me holding the carcass to help him. He severed the legs at the knee and placed them with the head. He slit the skin down each leg as far as the main part of the body, then made cuts across the sheep’s belly, between the legs, and a lengthwise cut connecting the cuts. He cut delicately around the neck and rump to separate skin and flesh, not getting flesh stuck to the skin and not piercing the fleece. Once the preliminary cuts were made, the flaying was finished by plunging the hand through the sticky filament holding skin to flesh. When the fleece was separate, the sheep’s carcass lay on top of it while the butchering was done. Even skinned and headless, the sheep’s muscles went on twitching as if it was still alive.

  Igor made a careful cut down the belly of the beast, exposing the guts. He tied a knot in the gullet, took out the windpipe, and began to remove the kidney, liver, and heart of the sacrifice.

  We did this in the bare mountain light of late morning. No shadow crossed the sun. The Ossetians had a lovely day for their festival, and the mood was joyful. None of them spoke about what had happened in their county-size corner of Russia seven months earlier, in the winter of 1992, after a minority people living within their borders, the Ingush, began agitating for a change of status. Small groups of Ingush men armed with hunting rifles went up against an Ossetian national guard armed, equipped, and backed by Moscow. When the fighting ended, 844 people were dead or missing, most of them Ingush; 64,000 Ingush had been driven from their homes; and thirteen out of fifteen Ingush villages had been destroyed.

  There was no fuel at Kiev airport the week of the uprising, and at midnight I bribed my way onto a train to the Caucasus spa town of Kislovodsk, not far from Vladikavkaz. By the time the train had pierced the blizzards in eastern Ukraine and I reached Ossetia, the fighting was over, but the emptied Ingush villages were still burning. I drank tea with happy Ossetians in a row of unscathed one-story Ossetian cottages in a village where, on the other side of the street, the two-story villas of their former Ingush neighbors—fled or dead—were fire-blackened
ruins. The Ossetians speak an Indo-European language related to Persian and claim descent from an offshoot of the Scythians, the Alans; Alan is a common first name. I hired a young Alan to help me out. He insisted that he wasn’t prejudiced against the Ingush. Some of his best friends were Ingush, he said. It was just that he’d heard they used to be cannibals, and had a genetic predilection for stabbing people in the back. I took him with me to meet some of the Ingush who had been forced to seek refuge among their kin in the eponymous territory of Ingushetia, next door to Ossetia. A Russian federal armored car escorted us across this supposedly internal border. Alan was sure that if the Ingush knew I had an Ossetian with me, he’d be killed. “Don’t call me Alan,” he said.

  The male Ingush refugees pressed in around us, layer on layer, with their stubbly sleepless faces, their gold teeth, and their sheepskin hats. The Ossetians slit open the bellies of pregnant women, they said. They had cut out an Ingush man’s heart and made it into an ashtray. They had raped women, raped men, cut off their heads and thrown them to the pigs.

  The hotel in Vladikavkaz had an enormous picture window on the stairs looking out over the river Terek toward the bulk of Kazbek. At dusk I saw a Russian helicopter gunship tilt and wheel across the purple face of the mountain. That night I asked the concierge for a glass of tea. She didn’t have any, but at the sound of my accented Russian a tall Ossetian guardsman in dark denims with a cut-off Kalashnikov came out from behind a curtain and invited me to his room. He made me tea and we watched a gory Russian film on TV about the seventeenth-century Time of Troubles. Onscreen, human heads and limbs flew from the sword blade and women were butchered. The guardsman was courteous and pleasant.

  There was a lot of talk from the impotent powers of Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin in the months that followed about enabling the return of the Ingush to their homes, but in the days leading up to the feast of Watsilla, when I talked to Ingush, Ossetians, and the local representatives of federal Russia, they told me that only a handful of Ingush had been able to go back. The Ossetians seemed to feel that the matter was closed. There had been a war—or, as they put it, an Ingush aggression—and they, the Ossetians, had won. Far from casting a dark mood over the holiday celebrations, it gave them more reason to thank their gods. It wasn’t about rain anymore. “The Ossetians who gather now don’t need a harvest,” one of them told me as we were getting ready to drive up to Dargavs. “They’re basically city people, so they pray out of respect for their ancestors, and pray for fortune. Health. Success.”

  At Ossetian feasts, there is a strict order of prayer. In the first prayer the eldest man at table raises his glass of araka, maize spirit (it tastes like rough grappa), and appeals to the “great god,” the head of the Ossetian pantheon, Khutsau. Each man makes his toast in turn, in descending age order, the youngest last. At my table in Dargavs, at the feast of Watsilla, I was the youngest. The scorched head of the sheep we had killed lay in the middle of the table, with its severed ears behind it, and as the most junior, I had to pick up the ear and bite into it to show that I was humble and listened to my elders. Then I had to make my toast. By this time, the youngest man is so hopelessly drunk that his humility can’t be in doubt. I think I managed to string a few words together; I don’t remember. The sheep’s ear tasted burned, hairy, cartilaginous.

  The three sacred pies represent the three essentials of life: sun, water, and earth. They are like flat calzones, some filled with meat, some filled with cheese and beetroot leaves, some filled with potato. The best Ossetian pie I tasted was filled with local white cheese, like a mild feta, with a hot, salty remnant whey trickling between beetroot leaves and pomegranate seeds.

  The men were dressed in their holiday best, in well-worn suits. I don’t recall what started it, but at a certain point it came out that they were all armed. They began to open their jackets and compare sidearms, boast. One took a big pistol out of his waistband and claimed that it was the only fully automatic pistol in the world, which is to say you could empty the whole clip with one squeeze of the trigger. The oldest man at the table, who was in his seventies, showed us his little gun, the black metal worn away to gray along the edges. Theirs is a martial, patriarchal culture. The commonest religious image in the territory is the god Wastirji, a conflation of a pre-Christian deity and St. George, portrayed as a muscular, bearded man in armor, red cape flowing behind him, on a white horse with a bouffant blond mane, flying out of the sun. Traditionally women wouldn’t say his name; they were to refer to him only as the “god of men.”

  Among the shrines to the Ossetian gods in the valley are shrines of a different kind. It would be wrong to say the Ossetians worship Josef Stalin literally, but they do him honor of a kind that would have been scandalous in other parts of Russia or in Ukraine at that time, in 1993. In Karmadon, there is a silver bust of the Soviet dictator in the public square. Stalin was Georgian, but the Ossetians claim he had Ossetian ancestry. And Stalin was good to the Ossetians.

  Beginning at 2:00 A.M. on February 23, 1944, and ending two weeks later, Stalin’s secret police rounded up every Ingush man, woman, and child, together with their ethnic kin, the Chechens, loaded them onto twelve thousand cattle wagons, and deported them to Soviet Central Asia. Between the two peoples the total number forced into exile was almost half a million. In the initial roundup 780 were killed; 1,300 died along the way; and, deprived of their livestock and their usual means of making a living, thrown into an unfamiliar environment in a country whose resources were directed toward war with Germany, as many as a fifth of the deportees—a hundred thousand people—died prematurely in the years that followed.

  Among the deportees were Ingush living in what is now part of North Ossetia. Once they’d gone, the Ossetians helped themselves to their land and property. When the Ingush were allowed to return, the two peoples found themselves coexisting in bitterness and mutual resentment only kept in check by the Soviet authorities’ rigid enforcement of the appearance of ethnic harmony. For the Ingush, the events of 1992 were a reenactment of the cruelty meted out to them in 1944, by a people who held holy the name of the tyrant who damned them to death on the freezing steppe of Kazakhstan. I talked to one Ingush man who remembered the deportation of ’44, when five of his brothers and sisters died of cold, hunger, and disease. He came back to his old village in 1984; now, a few years later, he was in exile again, his home burned, his possessions smashed and stolen.

  There was a clarity, at least, to the Ingush sense of injustice. The Ossetians’ psychic landscape made less sense. Victory seemed less important to the Ossetians than their ability to convince themselves that they deserved it. They presented the triumph of their armored cars and helicopter gunships over a few farmers with shotguns as a repetition of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. They claimed the Ingush set fire to their own houses before leaving. The Ingush deserved to be deported, they said, because they collaborated with the Nazis. (In fact, there’s no evidence that more Ingush were collaborators during World War II, proportionately, than Russians or Ukrainians.) There wasn’t much sympathy for Ingush refugees; wasn’t North Ossetia looking after tens of thousands of South Ossetian refugees who’d fled another war over the mountains in Georgia?

  When I rode up into the mountains with my hosts for the Watsilla holiday, my head was filled with the injustice the Ingush had experienced, the self-serving smugness of the Ossetian authorities, and the vacillation of the representatives of the Russian state of which both sides, in theory, were full-fledged citizens. But I was susceptible to the privilege of the uninvolved outsider, which is not only to accept the hospitality of those for whom conscience suggests hostility, but to accept it without froideur; to embrace it; to enjoy it, and be grateful.

  There is a point in the feast when whole Ossetian families, men, women, and children, are together, when the pies and a vast platter of boiled mutton are brought out, steaming fragrantly. A double-handled wooden cup of homemade Ossetian beer, tasting of smoke and honey, is passed
around and everyone drinks, the youngest male child first, even if he is a baby. Not long afterward I attended another ceremony at the other end of Europe, in Orkney, off the northern coast of Scotland, where wedding guests took it in turns to drink beer from an almost identical two-handled wooden cup. It was moments like these that made me share the Ossetians’ belief that they were a kind of living archaeology, culturally the closest surviving descendants of the horse people who burst out of the steppes of southern Siberia, Russia, and Ukraine to populate Europe in the foredawn of written history; and that the ebb and flow of subsequent invasions stripped them of their horses and squeezed them into one of the narrow valleys of the Caucasus, orphaned, delinquent, always trying to secure their toehold in the fertile flatlands against the competition of their neighbors.

  Soviet communism was an ally in that. And the early 1990s must have been terrifying times for the gun-toting old men around that feast table in Dargavs, when a system that had been so kind to them for so long suddenly warped and twisted, when that most delicate of all social relationships, the relationship between being and having, was torn asunder and remade.

  Close to where my head was spinning from araka, on a ridge near Dargavs hamlet, is the City of the Dead. Squat houses, solidly built of mortared white stone, are topped with beehive roofs made of layers of horizontal tiles, tapering as they rise, each layer separated by stone and cement. Archaeologists are unusually vague about the site, said to have been at the center of a local ancestor cult in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.