word written out in a young girl’s loopy scrawl. Aleksander.
As a child, as he moved like a ghost through the Soviet-run orphanages, he was considered unmanageable, and therefore passed from one home to another. He learned many things. He learned how to hoard and ration his food. He learned how to lie, to steal. He learned to fight.
Often he was discovered in the small schoolrooms, the sparse libraries, reading the books of older children by candlelight. He was beaten many times for this, deprived of supper, but he never learned the lesson. He did not want to learn the lesson. For it was in these worn, leather-bound volumes that he found the world outside the stone walls, where he learned the history of his country, his people, where he learned of Estonia’s much conquered shores by the Danes, the Norse, the Russians. He would study the photographs of these men, then study his own in the mirror. From whom had he descended? What blood coursed through his veins? He did not know. At the age of eight he decided it did not matter, he would learn to be unconquerable, a nation of one.
At ten, a visiting teacher named Mr Oskar showed him how to play the flute. It was the first kindness ever shown him. He taught Aleks the basics, and every Sunday afternoon for two years gave him lessons. Aleks learned not only the Estonian composers – Eller, Oja, Part, Magi – but many of the Russian and German composers as well. When Mr Oskar died from a massive stroke, the elders saw no worth in the battered old flute. They let Aleks keep it. He had never been given anything.
At eighteen, Aleks joined the federal army. Over six-feet tall and powerfully built, he was immediately deployed to Chechnya.
Soon after completing his basic training he was recruited and trained by the FSK in interrogation techniques. He did not take the lead so much as provide a presence, a phantom that haunted prisoners by night, and shadowed them by day. He learned to sleep soundly as men around him pierced the night with their screams.
Within six months he was deemed ready for the front. They sent him first to the border city of Molkov, but that would prove to be only a stopover. Three weeks later they sent him to place called Grozny.
They sent him to Hell.
The siege of Grozny began on New Year’s Eve 1994, and was a disaster for the Russian forces. At first, the one thousand men of the mighty Maikop 131st Battalion, amassed just north of the city, met with little resistance. They took the airport north of Grozny with few casualties.
But their gains were short-lived. Ill-trained, poorly supplied, the Russian soldiers were not ready for what awaited them in the city. Some commanders were as young as nineteen.
The Chechens, in contrast, were fierce and determined warriors. They were, by and large, trained and highly experienced marksmen, having learned to shoot and handle weapons since they were children. After picking off fleeing and confused soldiers, they would come down from the hills and grab weapons from the dead Russians, bolstering their meager armories. Some managed to steal machine guns from the armored vehicles, turning them on the doomed men inside.
As the day wore on, the Chechen separatists fought back, using everything they could: Russian-made, rocket-propelled grenades, fired from rooftops; Russian grenades thrown into tanks; even the deadly kinzbal, the prized Caucasian heirloom daggers. The number of dismembered and decapitated Russian soldiers all over the city were testament to the effectiveness of these comparatively primitive weapons. It was estimated that in the Battle of Grozny, Russians lost more tanks then they did in the battle for Berlin in 1945.
Over the month of January, federal forces would suffer even greater humiliations and defeat.
In each ill-conceived and executed battle, against clearly underestimated Chechen separatist forces, the bodies fell. All around Aleks, Russian soldiers and Chechen rebels were dead or dying. Yet, many times, while the blood of his fellow soldiers, his enemies, drained into the fields, mingling with the bones of centuries below, only Aleks was left standing.
Three times that January, in three fierce firefights, he emerged with little more than a scratch. His legend began to grow. The Estonian who could not be killed.
Then came January 15, 1995. One hundred and twenty federal soldiers were hunkered down in the marshes, outlying buildings, and silos just south of the Sunzha River. Intel, or what little they could gather with their primitive radios, told them that there were one hundred rebels holed up in the village. Their orders were to wait them out. For three days, with few rations, and even less sleep, they waited. Then the order came to advance.
At just before dawn Aleks’s unit of twenty began to make their way slowly across the frozen marsh. Some marched with newspaper stuffed into their boots for warmth. They did not make it far.
First came the mortar fire, huge 150-millimeter shells. The outbuildings and silos exploded on impact, killing all inside. Red rain fell. The shelling went on for more than six hours, the incessant roar of the explosions was deadening.
When the quiet came, Aleks dared to take a look. Body parts were scattered up the hillside. The armored cars were destroyed. The sounds of moaning could be heard beneath the staccato of automatic-weapons fire near the river.
Nothing stirred.
Then came the helicopters and their NURS mini-rockets.
In all, one hundred and nineteen Russian soldiers were killed. Most of the village was burned to the ground. Livestock were slaughtered and the streets ran crimson.
Only Aleks lived.
When the smoke cleared, and the screaming stopped, Aleks prepared to return to his base. He walked through the deserted village, now little more than blackened rubble. The smell of death was overpowering. At the end of the main street was a rise. In the near distance was a farmhouse, mostly intact.
As he strode up the hill, on alert, he began to feel something, something that had been growing within him for years. He stood tall, threw his rifle sling over his shoulder. He felt strong, the numbing fatigue and fear sliding away.
He looked through the doorway of the farmhouse, saw a Chechen woman, perhaps in her seventies, standing at her small kitchen table. On the table was an old leather-bound book. The walls were pitted clay, the floor dirt.
It was clear that the woman had seen the firefight, the grenades, the torn flesh and rivers of blood. She had seen it all. When it was over, she was not afraid of the Chechen rebels, or the Russian soldiers. She was not afraid of the war itself, or even of dying. She had met many devils.
She was afraid of Aleks.
He put down his weapon, and approached her, hands out to his sides. He was starving, and preferred to sit at a table. He meant her no harm. As he neared the woman, her eyes grew wide with horror.
“You,” she said, her hands beginning to tremble. “You!”
Aleks stepped into the house. It smelled of fresh bread. His stomach lurched in hunger.
“You know me?” he asked in halting Chechen.
The woman nodded. She touched the weathered book on the table. Next to the book was a loaf of black bread, a stone-sharpened carving knife.
“Koschei,” she said, her voice quivering. “Koschei Bessmertny!”
Aleks did not know these words. He asked her to repeat them. She did, then crossed herself three times.
In a flash she lifted the razor-sharp knife from the table, brought it to her throat, and slashed her jugular vein. Bright blood burst across the room. Her body slumped to the cold floor, quaking in its death throes. Aleks looked at the table. The loaf of bread was splattered with deep carmine.
Aleks fell upon the blood-soaked bread, wolfing it down, the taste of the old woman’s blood, along with the yeast and flour, an intoxicating mixture that both sickened and exhilarated him.
It was not the last time he would taste it.
In the dying light he read the book, a book of folk legends. He read the fable of Koschei the Deathless. There were many tales, but the one that moved him was the tale of the immortal Koschei – a man who could not die because his soul was kept elsewhere – and Prince Ivan’s sisters: Anna, Marya, and Olga.
He wept.
After his discharge, Aleks returned to Estonia, where he took odd jobs – carpentry, plumbing, fixing fifty years of shoddy Russian construction. He worked the slaughterhouses in the south, the mines in central Estonia, anything to get by. But he always new he was destined for something else, something greater.
