Girl, Taken - A True Story of Abduction, Captivity, and Survival

by Elena Nikitina

  I listened to that tape over and over – very low in volume, bringing the speaker close to my ear. I would listen to one side, flip the tape, listen to the other side, flip it again and keep going. Late at night, in the total darkness, when the apartment was silent, the Gipsy Kings’ beautiful and melodic songs played in my room, reminding me of my happy times while I cried quietly for hours.

  * * *

  As weeks passed, during my short outings to the bathroom I observed the environment and the people. In my own mental notebook, I classified the gang and assigned a nickname to every member I saw. There were about ten men who were often in the apartment. They rotated in and out. The man with the fox face – who I started to think of as Foxy – and the man I called Shorty, were the only ones who spoke to me. Maybe they were the only ones who could speak Russian.

  The men were calm, and treated me well enough, as if they had been ordered not to damage the goods. All except for Shorty. He seemed like he could barely restrain himself from violence. He made mean-spirited comments about me, my mother and my boyfriend. He made comments about Russians in general. Sometimes he wrapped them all into one.

  “You dumb bitch,” he said, lingering at my door, a vicious smile on his ugly face. “Where is your boyfriend? He hasn’t come to save you yet? Don’t you know? He’s off with another Russian slut by now – you’re all the same anyway. And what about your mama? A dumb old sow, she does not care about you. She is happy that you don’t bother her anymore. All you Russians… it makes me sick to think of you.”

  Sometimes he spoke in Chechen, causing wild laughter among the gangsters present in the apartment. I did not respond to anything he said. In my imagination, I saw him burning in hell.

  I will go home soon.

  I would sit silently all day, trying to delay my bathroom visits until the least amount of gunmen remained in the apartment.

  Gradually, I lost track of the amount of time I was there. Besides the fear and the other emotional hardship, the shortage of simple things like water took its toll on me. I felt disgusting. I tried to keep myself clean as possible by bathing in the sink, but it was no good. I needed to take a shower.

  Shorty’s cruelty meant that I could not overcome my fear and speak seriously with him. I was sure that after learning about my desire to take a shower, he would scoff at this and not allow me to do it. He would take pleasure in my discomfort. He would destroy me with brutal jokes.

  The other guards seemed too scary to talk to, or clearly did not speak Russian. The only candidate was Foxy. He appeared in the apartment mostly in the evenings.

  My desire to get home was overwhelming. I missed my mom so much, and I missed my life. I dreamed that when I got home, I would take a long shower, enjoying every second under the warm and clean water. In the mornings, I would cuddle up in a plush towel afterward my shower and drink hot delicious coffee.

  The ordinary things that we barely notice in the course of our daily hassles – I missed them so much. My hair was turning into straw, and my body had forgotten what soap was. The bathtub in this apartment was not suitable for using. The shower head was missing, and there was no shower curtain. No one had taken a shower here for years. But the bathtub itself still had a rusty faucet. I did not feel aversion anymore – I just wanted to bathe. I had to talk to someone. I could no longer do otherwise.

  I waited for the evening. Standing at the door, I listened to the voices behind it. When at last I heard a whistling voice – the speech impediment of the Foxy man – I knocked. It was late now and the lonely dim bulb burned from the ceiling, dimly lighting my wretched home.

  Foxy opened the door and looked at me with a question in his dark eyes.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Listen, I realize that I’m a prisoner here, but I’m also a human being. I haven’t taken a shower in weeks. Do you mind if I take a shower? I could use a bottle instead of the shower. All I need is a little bit more time in the bathroom, the towel, and shampoo.”

  I blurted it all very quickly and in one breath – I was afraid that he would not listen until the end and just slam the door in my face. After I spoke, there was a long moment of silence between us. I waited for his response.

  “We’ll see,” he said finally, then shut the door in my face.

  He did not say no – that was good.

  The next day, as usual, one of the men brought me food. Along with the pita bread, I found a plastic bag that contained a clean towel and a half bottle of shampoo. I took this as an approval to use the bathtub. Foxy had taken pity on me. I waited impatiently all day for nighttime to arrive.

  In the evening, he turned up himself. His head popped inside the door,

  “You can take a shower right now.”

  I grabbed my simple belongings and went to the bathroom. Foxy escorted me. There were other people in the apartment. I didn’t worry about them – my thoughts were filled with a rusty bathroom.

  I held my breath as I opened the hot tap, hoping that this one time, something warm would flow from it instead of the icy cold stream I was used to. It was a privilege here. In all my days there so far, I had gotten lucky just a few times – taking my sink shower and washing my dress under a stream of warm water. None of this really surprised me. In Russia – a country with gigantic amounts of resources, a place with endless natural gas reserves – there were always problems with the hot water, and shutdowns of all supplies were not uncommon. It was akin to the Brazilians or the Colombians having a coffee shortage.

  I unscrewed the faucet all the way. Apparently, the Hot Water God had mercy on me, because a lukewarm trickle flowed from the tap. That was more than enough for me. I had brought an empty bottle with me. The shower head might be missing, but the bottle was suitable for the task.

  I stepped over the bath rim, inside the tub. I poured the entire bottle of warm water over my body. The feeling put me in a state of complete delight. I emptied the bottle over and over again, refilling it from the flowing tap each time. I could not stop. My pores hungrily absorbed the long-awaited moisture.

  It takes so little to make a human being happy. A few weeks before, I couldn’t have imagined living a day without taking a shower. The thought alone would make me depressed. Then again, prior to this ordeal, I had no idea what real depression was.

  I spent an eternity in that rusty bathtub, pouring water and shampoo all over my body. No one disturbed me. I felt so refreshed – it brought me a sense of physiological cleansing. But nothing could cleanse the mess inside me. There was no balance, no peace. I was deprived of the most basic things in my life, but I was almost ready to accept that. I could live without them. But it was impossible to accept my lack of freedom; and to bear the separation from my loved ones was beyond my strength.

  November 1994

  Astrakhan, Russia

  For the mother, life had ceased to have meaning.

  After the first call, she had rushed to the police station with her story about the kidnappers and the ransom.

  She was a bookkeeper by profession. She remembered that day, three months ago, perfectly, to the smallest detail. The company where she worked as a lead accountant received notification from the Central Bank to cash out a sum of money for a client. The amount was colossal, and she had a very bad feeling about it. Fraud was widespread since the collapse of the Soviet Union. She’d heard rumors of a new scam – the Fake Avizo Fraud, or “air money” fraud.

  The scheme was simple – the Avizo was a bank transfer notice. The Central Bank would receive an Avizo declaring that in the next two weeks, they would be wired a certain amount of money from Chechnya or another far away region, to be transferred into the account of a particular company or enterprise. Although the money had not yet arrived, the banking system – still based on the old Soviet system – operated on trust. The accountant of the company receiving the funds in two weeks would have to cash out the money – and give it to the client – right away. But the reimbursement funds – supposedly t
raveling by the mail or by courier – would never come. Bank balances were only adjusted once a month or once a quarter, giving the crooks plenty of time to spend or hide the money.

  On that day, three months ago, the woman had gone to the Central Bank with her suspicions. She decided not to cash out the unconfirmed amount in her local bank right away, but wait until the money arrived from Chechnya to the Central Bank. Of course, it didn’t arrive.

  Now, she was positive that her daughter had been taken because of the failed scam. The bandits hadn’t gotten their money, and now they were demanding compensation for damages.

  The investigator pretended not to believe the grief-stricken woman, and tried to get rid of her. The cops did not want to deal with the terrorists in their jurisdiction. It was too difficult for them, this new type of crime.

  “Okay, ma’am. I promise you, we’re working on it. If your daughter is missing, we’ll find her.”

  The woman wanted to grab the cop by the shoulders and shake him. She wanted to shout in his face, if that’s what it took to reach him. She wanted to fall to her knees on the dirty floor in front of him and pray to God that this man understands her. Instead, she went home.

  She was not looking for sympathy from relatives and friends. She needed professional help in the investigation of the kidnapping – help from people who knew what they were doing. She spent several days going from one office to another, trying to find the support of the authorities and get them to help her.

  Russia has always been a bureaucratic meat-grinder that slowly but surely destroyed people’s lives. People were fed into one end relatively whole and sane, and eventually they were spit out the other side, brainwashed, their bones and souls crushed, their spines ripped out and cast aside.

  ***

  When you were happy, you always believed you were surrounded by a huge number of people who would stand up for you when needed. Once something terrible happened, the next moment the number of people around you was noticeably reduced. And, soon, you have no one and you are alone with your grief.

  All you have to do is believe. Faith in God becomes the only thing that you can hope for in a moment of total and all-embracing despair. The more hopeless the situation – the stronger the faith becomes. In everyday chaotic vanity, we rarely think about the soul and are closed from dialogue with God, without distinguishing the warnings sent from above. In a period of loss and emotional pain, the mental organization becomes so vulnerable and hypersensitive, which makes it possible to acutely sense messages and signs of blessing. Faith is justified, and it is strengthened. Although the depth of God's providence is incomprehensible to the human mind - we gratefully receive the rewards sent to us for support. We find them where we expect them the least.

  The woman was positive that the conscientious FSB officer, Vladimir, was sent to her from the above. She met him in an investigation arm of the state, what many people thought of as the secret police. Sincere and honest, the man understood the pain of a mother who had lost a child.

  He procured and installed a surveillance device on her telephone and assisted her to get help from authorities. They finally launched an investigation to catch the kidnappers.

  Vladimir took the woman to meet with an elder of the Chechen diaspora in the city – an old man from the one of the most respected clans in Chechnya, where family and clan ties are everything. The man listened to the woman’s story and slowly nodded.

  “It isn’t right,” he said. “They’re young and foolish, but they will listen to me. I will go to Chechnya and meet with them. They will release the girl.” The old man showed the confidence of someone who enjoys high esteem in his community.

  Taking advantage of his age and respect, he was sure that his admonitions will act on the bandits. He decided himself to negotiate with the kidnappers and rescue the girl from captivity.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  November 1994

  Grozny, Chechnya

  The war began November 26.

  From my tiny prison, I could hear the far away echo of thunder-peal of shooting and the rattle of machine-gun fire. I did not know what it meant – I didn’t even know there was going to be a war. I realized something else was happening, something mysterious, something dangerous.

  I didn’t have to wait long to find out what it was. Suddenly my captors, a criminal gang, had turned into a squad of militants. The apartment became loud with their rejoicing.

  Just after dark, Shorty came to my door. He grinned at me, very pleased at my helplessness, and thrilled by something more.

  “Russian pigs invaded Chechnya today,” he announced. “They stormed Grozny, but their army was smashed by our men. Can you picture it? Hundreds of dead Russians, despicable cowards. They deserved to die. You were very unlucky to be born Russian, do you know that? Hardly a Chechen was killed.”

  It was impossible, too horrible to think about. Hundreds dead? I had become so isolated that the world outside my room had almost ceased to exist. My days were filled with loneliness and thoughts of my loved ones. I listened to music and cried quietly. I was hopeless, and useless, like a scrap of torn rag. All I wanted was to go home. Now this… news. The Russians had attacked Chechnya. Why would they do that? And they had been slaughtered. I could not picture what that would even look like. Somehow, it conjured an image of a medieval army on horseback, trying to storm a castle, arrows raining down from the walls. It sent a rude shiver through my body.

  Could Shorty be lying about this? I studied him closely. No. He was very pleased, with his people, with himself for choosing to be born a noble Chechen – I couldn’t tell. It seemed the violent death of hundreds of people was more than enough to make him happy. So it must be true – Russians had invaded and the Chechens had killed them. My face and body went numb as I absorbed the horror of it. Wars and battles had always seemed far away to me, abstract, something for other people to worry about. But I was here now, and somehow I was part of this, and it was part of me.

  “See?” he said, smiling broadly as if his favorite football team had won an important match. “It is a very good day.”

  From that moment on, there was no longer quiet in the apartment. When I knocked on the door, I came face to face not with silent armed guards, but with joyful and self-righteous freedom fighters. All of a sudden, the apartment was full of weapons.

  Shorty never let up – he tried to destroy my spirit whenever he saw me. He enjoyed humiliating the whole Russian nation and Christianity, trying to make me feel ashamed. I hurt so much inside but had to remain silent. How could I respond? I did not want to escalate the conflict with him – it couldn’t bring me anything good. I could not fight against this horde of armed bandits. After all, I was their prisoner, and unarmed. Those first days of the war were a scary time. I was a peaceful person and far from politics, but every child in Russia knew where the Chechen hatred was coming from.

  For two hundred years, Russia the powerful giant has dominated and controlled tiny Chechnya and its people. In the 1930s, Josef Stalin expelled the entire Chechen people from their lands and sent them to the gulag camps of Siberia. The ones who survived were allowed to return home in 1956, after Stalin’s death.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed, some Chechens decided they would be free from the Russians once and for all. A man named Dzhokar Dudayev became the Chechen leader, installed himself as President, and declared the independence of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, a country recognized by no one.

  In Chechnya, Dudayev's propaganda work was built upon the hatred of Russia and Russians among the inhabitants. The people craved revenge for their losses under Stalin, projecting the pain from the past into today’s world. Chechen men were shamed into fighting. Chechen propagandists poked their fingers from the TV screen, saying, “How long will you, a Chechen man, hide behind your mother’s skirt? Pick up your gun and take revenge for the hardships of the past century.” The insulted pride of Chechen men forced them to leave houses and they went to die for the fi
nancial interests of the leaders of Ichkeria.

  But I was not the cause of the discord between nations. I was there for a different reason. I hated politics. I felt equally sorry for the Russian and the Chechen. Astrakhan was home to many cultures, and I grew up among them all, never separating my friends into the Russian ones and the not Russian ones.

  There are enough bandits and crooks in any nation. So I just kept my silence. These men who held me were not political – they were criminals. I was almost grateful to them, because they treated me well. They gave me food and did not hurt me. It seemed like the most I could expect from them.

  Maybe they were good people, who had set foot on the criminal path because of circumstances, or because they were brainwashed by the propagandists. Or maybe they were simple beasts, subordinated to an invisible someone who was more influential, and smarter, and who had not yet given the order to hurt me. I didn’t know and I was afraid to look deeper. I was afraid to say anything in response to their celebrating. I was just afraid for my life and my well-being, especially because I would go home very soon. I did not want to make the situation any worse than it already was.

  Shorty’s favorite game was to humiliate me. He was a maniac.

  “I saw more dead Russians today. Shot to pieces and begging for their lives, but they find no sympathy here. Such sniveling cowards, can you imagine? Why don’t they send real men? Ah yes, I forgot. There are no real men in Russia.”

  The war had finally arrived. In fact, it had started weeks before – with little secret skirmishes - but no one had declared it yet. It had been a quiet little war, one which now would become much bigger and louder. Soon the entire world would hear of it and give a collective cry of horror.