Into the Zone: Part II

An open-back military truck pulls up. At first the Figaro and the Sunday Times think the people onboard are refugees. A short brown man in a t-shirt jumps off. “Who are you, what you want?” He’s shouting. “You’re journalists? Get on the truck and I’ll show you the destroyed villages and take you to Ossetia.” I don’t have a moment to wonder what the fuck is going on. Five minutes later I’m in the open-back of a truck filled with the big-player journalists hitting 60 km/h on the dust track to the mountains.

The guy in charge is following us in a mini-man. Déjà vu. I’ve seen him before. Just from where. I can’t be. In April I was sitting in a bar overlooking the Lubyanka, the orange- stoned Stalinist baroque headquarters of the FSB. Opposite me a Russian petrol-princess is earnestly deciding if she wants to have coffee or a drink. She decides she wants two coffees. This makes us dizzy. I can see her smiling and a slick little man bending over-and monologing at us about the Model United Nations. I desperately wanted him to piss off – but remember remarking how bright he was and how I thought he was probably Jewish. Now I know who he is. Putin’s chief aide and first spokesman. He screams at the Colonel driving the truck to speed up.

The New York Times has the eyes of a drug-addict. They’ve seen more than you can imagine. We are chatting about Putin when he notices the boss is shouting to speed-up. “This you first war…rookie?” I nod politely. I travelled around Iraqi Kurdistan, but it wasn’t like this. “You smell that?” A deep rot fills my nostrils as we enter a village. “That’s dead.” Somebody whistles in the truck. All the journalist have smelt it. Cameramen rush to the side of the truck trying to snap. The Russian Colonel standing in the back with us starts shouting something incompressible. We swerve round another corner. And grind to a halt.

The boss shouts at us to jump out of the truck and we clamber out. “This is a damaged Georgian village. We want to explain that the damages was caused gas-leaks, accidents, criminals, and some cases of arson.” The Guardian looks at him. “Sacha are you telling me that thinking I’ll believe it.” He snaps something in Russian to the Colonel. “Sacha I speak Russian. You can’t throw me off the truck and leave me here.” He screws up his face. “You have twenty minutes. Watch out for bombs. You know what your doing.”

I follow six camera men as they rush into a burnt-out building. Devastation is in the details. It’s the shards of glass, the burnt documents, the smashed plates, the torched items of daily life. We hear wailing from the top floor. The camera men rush up the stair. “Watch out for cluster bombs” shouts Getty Images. I follow in his footsteps. An elderly women in simple peasant clothes is shrieking. It’s clear there wasn’t a gas-leak here. As the camera-men snap she screams louder in terror and begins to panic. The Italian shouts, “she’s useless, too much screaming.” They rush off – there is a crying grandmother outside. I stand there watching these men. Aghast. Like wasps to honey, they rush to death. My eyes are glued to the howling women. I step back slowly, then dash down the stairs.

Outside I follow the Figaro into a shelled house. Imagine you put a building through a blender. All your possessions shredded and crushed up under a pile of rubble. I stand there picking up pieces of a plate in what used to be a kitchen. The Figaro finds something. “Oh, look a bullet casing.” He chucks it away nonchalantly.

Sacha the boss is screaming. “Your time is up. Your time is up.” In front of the truck an old women is being literally pursued by eight flash-photographers. She is trying to get away. Back on the truck the guys show off pictures of her terrorised face. “Make a great front page…this one.” The truck bobs along the valley, spraying a trail of dust behind us onto the mini-van behind. Le Monde is smoking a cigarette and puts on his Raybans. “Beautiful day…look that’s a rocket launch.” A trail of smoke lights a distant corner of the valley. “Ah…there’s something missing in this war. I’m not enjoying so much.” He flicks the Marlboro out onto an abandoned field. The tools are still left where the people dropped them as they ran away.

Rising peaks of the Caucasus mountains are up in front. I start to feel like a tourist and a rising enjoyment. I feel the grin of Le Monde pulling across my face. There are some sand-bags ahead and another group of tanks. The excitement in the truck is palpable. The photographers jump, jostle and swear at each other as they try and snap a picture. This is border of the enclave. Welcome to South Ossetia.

The truck pulls into a village-town. Tskhinvali - the ‘capital.’ It’s wretched. Sacha is shouting. ‘Out, out.’ My feet land on a street that simply isn’t there anymore. Buildings have been punched open. Walls have collapsed. Le Monde gestures to me. “Let’s not listen to Sasha’s bullshit. Follow me.” We wander down a side-street. The roofs of the Ossetian hovels have all been ripped off. A man with a massive gash across his skull wanders up to us. He doesn’t even speak Russian. He points to his head and then to a wreck. We follow him. I have seen countless pictures of charred teddy-bears but when picks one off the ruin of his house and thrusts it into my hands, I felt like I had never understood what they actually mean. The he points at the fruit he was saving for the summer in large glass jars. Rotten. Fly ridden and starts to shout incomprehensibly. “Enough of him,” goes Le Monde.

We enter into a shack. A short Ossetian women shows us her ‘home.’ Tin-roofing. I am inside a photo of a favela, and she tries to explain what ruined even this. Her Russian breaks down after the word - “they did it…” The tin-roofing is gone and scorch marks are in the middle of the dust floor. Her husband sleeps on a filthy bed in the corner. She doesn’t wake him up. A little child wanders in. His arm is bandaged. I am feeling a little bored. Yet another one. I catch myself. Shake my head a little.

“Your time is up. Get out. We need to leave.” Sasha is pacing around frantically shouting at a General down the Nokia. “Just do it…We’ll be there in twenty minutes.” He clears his throat and spits into the shards of glass beneath his feet.

We swerve out of Tskhinvali onto the road further up the mountains. Jerkily the trucks bounces along. A few burnt out tanks are permanently parked under some plane trees. It stinks. I swallow but it stays in my mouth. The Sunday Times notices and passes me a bottle of water. “You get used to it.” The clouds have merged and the afternoon has turned into a dense gloom. The Colonel shouts – “This Khetagurovo.”

I am still bad at climbing off the truck. Maybe I’m too short but when I land on the floor I slip on some bullet casings and whack my head into the dust-track. No time to do anything but get up. There are barely any houses but they are all pock-marked and some windows are blackened. There’s been fire. Sacha is explaining how ‘Russia’ sees what happened here. The New York Times bends over. “Ak-74s…interesting. Let’s go check out the post-office.” We push open the door of the shattered bureau. The safe was blown open and the floor is covered in piles of Soviet era postcards. Happy Revolution Day. Pictures of Red Flags. Old Soviet pension books are ripped up and in every corner. This is the ruins of the Empire personified in a single six by ten metre space. It stinks. I push behind the desk. There is a sheet of glass that people who work in offices in any country place pictures under. I push off bits of burnt wood to look at the photos. The faces are staring at me. A faded colour picture of a goggle eyed baby-girl. A black and white passport photo of a young man. A school photo from the ‘50s. I don’t know why. I just pushed off the side covering and shoved them into my computer bag. I haven’t looked at them since.

I rush with the Figaro into a dilapidated old school. There are the Ossetian paramilitaries. They don’t bother to acknowledge us. They are crowded around a lap-top. You can tell paramilitaries because they are clownishly dressed troops. The wrong khaki trousers with cammo-tops. Pixelated green jackets clashing with old fashioned urban combat pattern pants. I asked them what happened. If I said the leader was a ‘mean looking mother-fucker’ it doesn’t capture just how threatening this twenty-five year old man was. “They did this. And we took vengeance. Krov za Korv. Blood for blood.” On my way out an old man is lying in the dirt sucking a plastic Kvass bottle.

“Are you OK?”

He raises what appears to be his only arm and shouts. “To the great Russian people. You saved us. Saved us.” He spills the brown fluid over-himself. Le Figaro looks him up and down.

“He’z di-zgust-ing.”

I follow the New York Times. A brown-skinned man has latched onto him. He’s speaking slowly.

“What are their names? Where are they buried.”

I suppose this is what Poland must have looked like in the late summer of ’45.

“Can you show us? Great. Is it far?”

We trudge across a field and come to an earth pile. It was just an fresh-earth mound. I didn’t see anything. It just stunk.