Before the War I Had Toys
Before the War I Had Toys
Children of Grozny
Said-Khasan Daudov (6 years old)
Lives at: Kalinin poselok, Turgenyeva 4, Grozny
“I live in my house, but the house has been destroyed. A bomb fell on our neighbour’s house. I do not know who did it. I only know that it dropped from a plane. I didn’t see it myself, because during the big war I was in Nazran, Ingushetia. When we returned home to Grozny, our house was already destroyed. We have been repairing it for a long time, but the house is still in terrible shape. There is a check-post not far from our house. I hear shooting and explosions during the night. Everything trembles in the house. It is the Russian soldiers who shoot.
The person I love most in the world is my mother. And father too, but I have not seen him for a long time. He is in a village somewhere. My biggest wish is to have a toy car called a Kamaz. Now, I have no toys. They were here before the war, but the soldiers took them all.
When I am big, I will be a bodyguard and I will have a machine-gun. A machine-gun is very important for a bodyguard; people and soldiers steal everything, and if you don’t have a machine-gun they might kill you too… they even took the cast-iron bath from our house. There is no electricity in the town, because people took down the electrical wires and sold them. The only thing I’m afraid of is bears, but I have never seen one.”
Said-Khasan is the youngest of four children. He doesn’t know that their father was killed by a land mine when driving his car on March 3rd 2000. He had been on his way to a nearby natural gas line to see if he could repair it and reestablish gas for the district’s heaters and stoves.
Said-Khasan’s mother was sitting in the car too, but she survived. She has recurring, vivid nightmares of people looking through the wreckage for pieces of his body so as to bury them properly according to Muslim tradition. Said-Khasan has been told that his father is looking for a job elsewhere in the country. However, he does know that his grandfather was killed on July 12th, 1995 when a Russian armoured car crushed his Grandpa’s car.
Other stories:
|
