A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,91
small, unassuming collective farm, known locally as the Miracle Fields, Ramzan worked as a petrol farmer for the insurgents, or the Feds, or more likely both. The pipeline running through the untended pear orchard conveyed oil from local wells to a regional refinery, but the pipe was riddled with so many bullet holes that the refinery had long since ceased operations. The reek of rotting, unpicked pears filled the air as Ramzan dug pits, called barns, alongside the pipe. Dark fountains of oil filled the barns, which fed into a system of irrigation channels that, in earlier times, had been used to water the pear trees. Perhaps as much as half of the oil seeped into the soil, into the groundwater below, but the oil spouted from the pipe in such abundance that no one ever thought to seal the barns with concrete or plastic. Twice a day, a tanker truck arrived to siphon the oil through a long rubber hose and distribute it to covert factories, where the crude oil was refined into a highly sulfuric diesel with eighty-year-obsolete machinery looted from the National Museum of Oil Production. The women who bottled the diesel in glass jars and sold it on street corners were the nearest entity to a working gas station for several hundred kilometers. Sometimes the moonshine diesel worked, and sometimes it caused the cars to explode, but it always filled the coffers of the insurgents, or the Feds, or more likely both. Ramzan, for his part, was well paid, and he used his earnings to buy insulin and syringes on the black market. Due to regular territorial disputes along the pipeline, the work was more dangerous than the war itself, and Ramzan was sustained not by love for his father but by the fear of failing him.
In 2001, when a band of wounded rebels briefly occupied the village, Ramzan recognized the welder among their ranks. They embraced as brothers, as though bonded in a crucible more dramatic than an industrial park. The welder introduced him to the field commander, a man with very bad teeth and dental-floss stitches in his chest. Impressed by Ramzan’s familiarity with the mountains and eager to set up supply routes for the coming winter, the field commander referred Ramzan to a Saudi sheikh who had come to Chechnya to support the holy warriors in their ghazawat against the infidel oppressor.
The sheikh wasn’t the first foreign Wahhabi Ramzan had seen break sharia law, but he was the first to break it in the name of Internet poker. “The Qur’an specifically says, ‘He who plays with dice is like the one who handles the flesh and blood of swine,’ but makes no mention of playing cards,” the sheikh explained at their initial meeting, conducted between bets in the midst of the quarter-final round of one of his tournaments. The sheikh had perhaps the only working computer in Volchansk, and connected to the Internet—a technology that surely allowed far too much freedom to be pious—via a portable satellite dish. The sheikh, a short, brimming, gourd-like man, smiled at the computer screen. “I play in the morning,” he said, “when it is still late night in Western Europe and America, and the judgment of the other players is clouded by whiskey. All my winnings, of course, go entirely to jihad.”
No fundamentalist undercurrent ran through the national culture before the first war. Sufism had always been the predominant Muslim sect, and Wahhabism was a foreign, wartime import. A few times a year, Arab Wahhabis came through the village in search of recruits. They promised rations, shelter, an eternity in Paradise, and, until that day of glorious martyrdom, a monthly salary of two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars. Few young men followed the monochromatic Wahhabi faith, but many were quite willing to be radicalized for a monthly salary that eclipsed what they would otherwise earn in a year. The war of independence so quickly conflated with jihad because no one cared about the self-determination of a small landlocked republic. Arab states would gladly fund a war of religion, but not one of nationalism. And in this way it didn’t matter who won the war between the Feds and fundamentalists: the notion of a democratic and fully sovereign Chechnya would be crushed regardless. Martyrdom was the easiest way to make a living, but death didn’t appeal to Ramzan, and he was pleased when the sheikh, gleeful after winning the ten-thousand-dollar tournament, crossed his spindly legs and offered a