I needed to go again. I could hear the men behind the door, and I was terrified to leave the room. My mind invented horrible possibilities. I would be tortured to death. I would be dismembered, my organs cut from my body.
My heart nearly burst out of my chest, fear filling me inside. I was like a hunted animal, caught in a trap. Every sound – a creaking floorboard, a burst of laughter, something being dropped – made my body twitch and vibrate in terror.
I was paralyzed by fear of the unknown. I did not understand why I was there, why I was deprived of my own home, why I was deprived of my freedom. The helplessness and uncertainty burned me from the inside.
I knocked, and a moment later, the door was opened.
I was prepared to see the same tall man that was there in the morning. But a completely different person answered – a small man with an average build, a repulsively ugly man. He had closely-cropped dark blonde hair, and a beard. More precisely, his beard was just a thin hairline growing along the edge of his face. His eyes sparkled with cruelty. He looked like a serial killer, a very short one. Under his arm there was a holster hanging with a gun tucked inside.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
He grinned at me, and after letting the moment drag on several seconds, barely jerked his head toward the bathroom. His cruel eyes were like gun sights, and I felt them targeted on me. I tried not to look up, but I noticed a sleeping man on the red sofa. A machine gun lay by his side on the floor.
The light was on. The curtains were tightly drawn. Without raising my eyes, I slipped towards the bathroom. There were people in the kitchen – a few of them were talking and the door was ajar. Shorty followed very close behind me. For a second, I even thought he would follow me into the bathroom.
The toilet paper was still missing. I went out and asked to wash my hands. He grinned at me – there was something evil about his smile – and nodded toward the door. I went inside of the tiny bathroom. There was still no hot water – only cold.
I washed my hands with a dirty, disgusting piece of soap remnant that I found on the sink. Then I drank water right from the faucet – it tasted like rust. Again, I noticed that strange vessel with a narrow and long spout at the side – like those that I have seen on display in the Museum of East. It was almost like a teapot.
At that moment, from the depths of my memory, a piece of information emerged, a little fact that I had once read somewhere: Muslims do not use toilet paper when they go to the bathroom. They wash themselves with water. That’s what the pitcher was for. It also explained why the toilet paper was missing.
I stared at the vessel. I would never ask these men about it. I would never say a word – it would be easier on my dignity to sneak a bottle of drinking water into the bathroom under my robe.
Something about the walk to the bathroom, and back to the room, under the supervision of the armed man, was hard for me. It was too humiliating to handle. I did not want to be a prisoner. I did not want everyone to know about my body habits. I wanted my freedom.
I do not know how it happened, but right before Shorty shut the door and locked it behind me again, I broke my silence. In fact, I almost screamed at him.
“Why am I here, you can answer me?”
Then:
“Can I speak to your boss?”
It was the wrong question to ask. I tried to say it politely, but instantly I realized my mistake. I should never have said a word. I did not believe he was the man in charge, and I had demonstrated this to him.
He froze, and then incinerated me with his eyes. The words flew from his mouth like the bullets:
“Shut your mouth and sit quietly if you don’t want me to shoot your head off.”
He said it in perfect Russian with a slight accent. He was so angry that suddenly I was shaking like a leaf in the wind. I did exactly as he ordered – I went inside and sat on the bed. The door closed and the key turned in the lock.
Dizzy from hunger, I looked down at the piece of delicious bread and did not know what to do. I needed food. I needed it to stay strong.
I ate it.
The bread was soft and delicious. I enjoyed every single crumb. It seemed like I had not eaten for ages.
The day faded, and the room sank into total darkness. I closed my eyes as I lay down in this strange bed, wrapped in a quilt blanket, thinking about tomorrow. What would it bring for me? Would I still be alive at the end of the day?
Sleep took me by surprise.
I slept the whole night, dreamless. I opened my eyes and the same dark confines of the room appeared. I was still in prison. The nightmare would never end! My throat was tight – it felt like I would choke from the terror and the sadness. Tears streamed down my face. I could not stand it anymore – to die would be better than to face another day in this room. I was lonely. I was miserable.
Why was I there? They hadn’t explained anything.
What were they waiting for?
What was happening?
I waited, putting off the moment when I had to knock again and go to the bathroom under supervision. I did not have a toothbrush. I had no comb, no other clothing or underwear. My little black dress was a mockery now.
From the corner of my eye, I caught a movement in the dark window. Startled, I glanced that way, but it was my own reflection that I saw – I looked like a ghost in a long black cloak.
October 11th , 1994
Astrakhan, Russia
It was not like sleep at all. Every night, the woman fell into a trance, a spell, a stupor, where she went numb, then drifted off, carried away by her terror.
Somewhere between asleep and awake, in a fitful doze, a dream came to her – a blurry picture – in which it was impossible to see anything but the face of her daughter. The woman spotted her in the gray distance, framed by blond hair blown by the wind. The girl’s face was obscured by the blowing hair – the woman could not make out her daughter’s eyes.
She woke with a start, her breath caught in her throat.
The phone was ringing.
It was still very early in the morning – outside the window, there was not yet light in the sky. For the past week, she had lived as if in a coma. She did not remember how she went to work, and how she came back from there. She no longer lived in her former reality – instead, she lived in a nightmare world, a place where her only task was to hope for a call from the police.
Just yesterday, the police had accepted the case – they would investigate the disappearance of her daughter. Nobody knew where she was. The woman called every single friend of her daughter. Last she was seen at the restaurant across the alley with her boyfriend. He did not know where she was. Since then, the woman was always near the telephone. Yesterday at work, she had not left her desk for a moment. At home, she picked up the phone every five minutes and checked to see if it was still working. Her sole reason for being, the very center of her existence, was to wait for the detective to contact her.
Now, the sharp and alarming shriek of the telephone cut the dead silence of her apartment. She moved quickly through the shadows and went to it. With trembling hands, she picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
A man’s voice:
“Your daughter is with us in Chechnya. So far she is alive and well. We will exchange her for 300 million rubles. Get the money. I’m giving you two weeks. When I call back in two weeks, the money must be ready.”
The woman nearly screamed it: “I don’t have that much money! I’ll sell everything I have and give it to you! Bring back my daughter! Please.”
The phone was already dead – there was no sound except the jarring beep of a line that had been cut off. They had hung up before she even finished her sentence.
She froze. She could not breathe; she could not think – her head felt like a helium balloon on the end of a string. It would float up to the ceiling, then out the window, and far away over the city. She could not feel her legs. Everything around her seemed to warp and change shap
e - the inside of her home had become vague and formless – it had lost any sense of solidness or dimension. She leaned back against the wall and slid slowly to the floor.
CHAPTER THREE
October 1994
Grozny, Chechnya
I heard loud voices outside my room. There was something going on in the world just beyond my door.
Someone knocked on that door sharply – RAP, RAP – and without waiting for my permission or even a word from me, turned the key, opened the door, and abruptly entered the room. He looked around but there was nowhere to sit other than the bed where I was with my knees drawn up to my chin, and my arms wrapped around them. I was leaning back against the thin carpet, which covered the cool wall.
I was wrapped in the oversized thick robe. Ever since I’d had this long robe, it served as my only protection from the outside world. I would hide in it, wrapping myself up, so they could only see my head poking out the top. I did not have anything else in this ugly world – only this robe – a piece of worn out fabric. And I used it as a shield.
I knew it was dumb – the robe couldn’t protect me from anything, not from bullets, not from the strong hands of the men if it came to that – but psychologically it helped. I felt safer wrapped inside it, like it could defend me from this armed mob of criminals.
The man sat on the floor and tucked his knees under as if he was kneeling to pray. He was stocky and short, with small jet black eyes, his movements were quick and sudden. His dark eyes drilled into mine. He looked sly and dangerous.
He had dark skin and the same closely-cropped haircut as the other men. Black hair framed a face with sharp features – his beard, trimmed to half a finger wide, connected with the hair at his temples. His nose was slightly long with a pointed tip. He reminded me of a fox – his eyes were not kind, but very, very tricky. He was dressed in jeans and a light camouflage military jacket, unbuttoned and draped over a dark t-shirt. He put both hands on his knees, then lifted a hand and stroked his beard quickly – everything he did was fast.
“What’s your name?”
He spoke perfect Russian, but with a slight Chechen accent and some sort of strange whistling sound. The man had a speech impediment.
His small black eyes were hard, and I felt the hatred in those eyes. I squeezed my arms around my knees even tighter. The blood in my veins froze. I did not want to speak to this man. Very quietly, I pronounced my name.
“Lena.”
He smiled a wicked smile, revealing small white teeth. It seemed that he was mocking me. It seemed that he would use those sharp teeth to eat me alive.
“Well Lena, are you scared?”
He looked at me like a wolf looking at its prey before ripping it into pieces. My heart stopped beating. I was not even sure if I was still alive at all.
“Don’t be scared!” he said. “You are in Grozny, in Chechnya. Your mother will give us the money we want, and then you will go home. Nobody here will hurt you.”
I stared at him. For a long moment, I could not understand what he was saying. Slowly, it dawned on me – they had abducted me for a ransom.
Oh my God.
He was still smiling, his eyes like lasers.
“Your mother has our money. When she returns it, you’ll go home. If she doesn’t return it, you’ll go home in pieces.”
I felt sick, and dizzy, like I would fall over sideways.
What kind of nonsense is this?
I was kidnapped, and they were demanding a ransom? And it was money my mother had taken? This couldn’t be right.
Of course, I had heard about all the horrible kidnapping cases that had happened lately. I had watched movies about the children of rich people being kidnapped. Recently, I had seen horror stories about cases of abduction on the TV news.
It was terrible, even more so because there must be some mistake. Kidnapping only happened to people who were associated with organized crime, or to people who had a lot of money. Worse, in all the stories I had seen, none of the abductees were ever returned home alive.
I was the only child in my family. My mother always worked hard as an accountant, and she was well paid. We lived an abundant life – in the sense that we lacked nothing – but we were not even close to rich. My mom and my dad had divorced when I was in the 4th grade. I did not see my dad very often after that. He started another family and was busy with his new children.
My mother remarried, and we had a very happy family. I accepted my step dad and considered him my father. We traveled, had a lot of friends – we were the typical happy family. We may have lived a little better than average, but only because of my mom's and my dad's hard work and education. After my father died some time ago, my mom and I were left alone.
* * *
Russia in the 1990s was wracked by monumental, earth-shattering change. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new history began. No part of life was unaffected by it. The decade was so turbulent, it became known as the Wild 90s.
For seventy years, the central government had controlled and watched over every aspect of life. In the late 1980s, this control started to weaken. Suddenly, in 1991, the government collapsed and absolute freedom came. The Soviet people gradually turned into a horde of alcoholics, drug addicts, thieves, rapists, murderers and maniacs. Until that time, all the vices and sins seemed to lurk behind the walls of a huge castle – imprisoned and held back by the all-powerful state. Once the state was gone, the ills of the world were set loose to run amok.
The criminal world took advantage of the USSR’s collapse, and the country spiraled downward into lawlessness and corruption. Wherever they could, criminal businesses drove out legitimate activities. Businessmen competed by killing each other. It was a terrible time, accompanied by a deep recession in the economy and a surge in inflation.
In the 1990s, abductions for ransom became an established business practice. Bandit groups from many parts of the country engaged in it, especially Chechens. You could watch this play out nightly on the television news.
Now, I no longer needed to watch it on TV. I was part of it.
I sat in shock as I perceived the terrible news the man with the fox face dropped on me. How could it be? I was being held for ransom? I couldn’t even imagine it. Even so, any hope that I had appeared here by accident collapsed. I was in captivity.
I sat huddled in a lump of fear and utter helplessness. I was in a panic – I wanted to cry. I wanted to beat my head against this gray alien wall. I did not want to believe this was happening. The most terrible thought, the worst-case scenario, which I was trying to erase from my head all these days, turned out to be the absolute reality. There was no misunderstanding – these people had kidnapped me on purpose. They even knew who I was. The terrible thought had now even gained flesh and blood in the form of the fox-faced man.
He had left the room as quickly as he entered it.
I was depressed and exhausted. Money… how much were they asking? Would my mom be able to find this amount? In any case, it didn’t matter – I would not survive. The hostages were never returned...
I covered my face with my hands, fell onto the flat and cold pillow, and burst into tears. I was utterly helpless – I had no influence on what was happening, and the recognition of this seemed to tear my very soul apart. I lay there, with my knees tucked under me and my face down, wrapped in the huge robe. My tears flowed like a river, like a torrent, like the raging waters that come when the dam bursts, blocking me from breathing. I gasped for air. I felt so alone in this strange world, torn out of the water like a helpless fish, and thrown ashore to die.
Behind the door, the voices kept talking in their strange language. I could only guess at what they were saying – I just assumed and prepared for the worst. What could I do? I was not taught to survive in these conditions. I grew up surrounded by love and care, and in the comfort of my sweet and warm home.
I prayed for rescue.
I knew that the work had already begun – my mom and
Sergey had gone to the police, and soon they would send a force necessary for my release. I should be ready for when they came.
Many times in the movies, I had seen how the commandos would use ropes to rappel down the sides of buildings, descending from the roof, smashing through the windows, saving the hostages and shooting or arresting the kidnappers. I decided that to avoid getting shot in the cross-fire, I could hide behind the bed, as long as I pushed it away from the wall a little bit in advance. Then, when the shooting stopped, I could quickly jump out the window into the waiting arms of the rescuers.
The window…
I had to explore the possibilities. In the dim light of the room, it was clearly visible what parts of the window were painted over less densely. To see through the gaps, I needed to get up onto the windowsill. I hoped that none of my abductors came into the room at that moment. I cautiously crept to the window and sat on the peeling window sill. It took me a few seconds to silently climb on it and start to explore the edges of the weird, dark glass.
Very quickly, my perfect plan for rescue, concocted entirely within my imagination, collapsed like a house of sand. Through a thin layer of black paint at the edge of the upper corner of the window, I could easily see the very recognizable landscape of a building courtyard. I had seen courtyards like this a thousand times, with another five story building just across the street.
In all of Russia, near the ground floor, the windows of buildings were grilled with iron bars to protect people’s homes from being robbed. Each year, the criminal situation in Russia had worsened, so that now the windows were barred all the way up to the third floor. Instantly I saw that the apartment where I was held was on the first floor. No commandos were going to be able to burst through that window, and there was no sense coming down from the roof. Anyone who was trying to rescue me would have to stand outside the building, and try to cut the bars with an electric or gas powered saw – a loud, time-consuming, and utterly ridiculous method for breaking in. No would-be rescuers were going to come crashing in that way.
Girl, Taken - A True Story of Abduction, Captivity, and Survival Page 4