31_days | [March 12] [Кавказкий Пленик (Prisoner of the Mountains)] [A Chance to Live]

Title: A Chance to Live
Day/Theme: March 12: Eternity's a five year plan
Series: Кавказкий Пленик (Prisoner of the Mountains)
Character/Pairing: Dina, mentions of like, everyone else in the movie and a few who aren't :P
Rating: PG

Author's Note: Um, yeah, I'm writing fanfiction for the first time in a million years. I hope you enjoy. The movie is really good so go watch. :) For those of you unfamiliar with the film, it takes place in modern (or late-Soviet era...) Chechnya. I think I wound up summarizing the movie in large part in here so it should be pretty self-explanatory as a story. Umm, for a disclaimer, I don't know who it belongs to exactly. The film itself is probably copyright, but as the story was written originally by both Tolstoy and Pushkin, I'd assume it's more or less public domain! LOL. Well, go read. :) Enjoy!

Dina could not remember a time when she did not know about death.

Her mother had died when she was still very young. Dina was her parents’ third child, but she did not know either of her siblings very well. For as long as she could remember, her brother had been in jail in the village. Dina’s sister, Aisha, died when she was only about four or five. Hasan, her husband, had caught her with a lover and had killed her. Hasan had been taken off to prison for that, but after a time he had come back. He’d lived with them for a while, with Dina and her father. She couldn’t remember him before he’d been arrested, but in prison the Russians had cut out his tongue. Now he did menial labor for her father.

Aside from these deaths, events which Dina didn’t spend much time contemplating, the undeclared war was always causing casualties. There were always clashes with Russian soldiers, battles begun by who could remember? Sometimes the Russians lost men, sometimes her village did. This, combined with the already short life expectancy one had in a village where life was so hard, meant that, though Dina was not constantly losing friends or people she knew, had she stopped to think about it, she would have realized that everyone she knew had lost someone in recent years, mostly not due to natural causes.

Still, Dina grew up, learning the ways of the other women in the town. There was a woman who came to the house sometimes; she cleaned up and taught Dina the things a girl ought to know. Things could have progressed this way forever and Dina would never had questioned the life she was born to. The summer before she turned fourteen, though, was when no fewer than six people she knew died and, though she could not know it then, her dreams would irreversibly change.

Abdul-Murat, her father, brought them in one day, filthy, covered with dirt and caked blood, slung over the backs of horses as though they were slaughtered animals. They were alive, though,… barely. He put them in the stable and bade Dina get water. She watched as the old woman gave them some to drink, sat staring at the faces of two Russian soldiers, survivors of some alcetration. One was so young, only a few years older than herself. This one opened his eyes as the old woman gave him water. He saw Dina, of this she was sure. She didn’t wait to see what happened next, though. As soon as his eyes opened, she ran away.

The other villagers all clamored for Abdul to kill them. Nobody wants Russians in the village, they told him. Dina listened, from the other side of the room, as they debated. Abdul, though, would not kill them, not yet, anyway. He hoped to trade them for his son, Dina’s older brother, who was languishing in prison in town.

Dina hardly remembered her brother, either. His name was Dzarahmat and he was a teacher. Unlike Hasan, he had probably not been imprisoned for doing something wrong; more likely, it was his opinions that the authorities took issue with. She didn’t know what opinions these would be, but as a teacher, perhaps he’d been spreading sedition amongst his students. Who knew? After so long, it hardly mattered.

The other children teased her, mocking her for serving the Russians. She tried to tell them that she only did as her father asked her, as should any daughter, and if that included bringing food and water to the captives, so be it. They didn’t listen, though. She’d never really felt one of them and now she was almost completely shunned. If the other children ignored her, though, the Russians did not. The young one, Vanya, at least, went out of his way to be kind to her. One day, he gave her a wooden bird that he had made. It was like a puppet; it would flap its wings if you held the top a certain way. Often, glancing at him, she saw that his eyes were on her. This didn’t bother her, for she liked him well. She was surprised that he did not seem angry. His comrade, Sasha, certainly did.

One time, the soldiers had been taken out with Hasan to collect rocks and one man from the village had tried to shoot at them. Dina knew him, though not well, knew that he’d lost two sons to the Russians and his third son, Mamed, worked for the Russian police down in the town. When Dina arrived with their lunch, Sasha had been shouting for a while. “Why did he do that? What did he think he was doing?”

They’d probably had their first real conversation then. Sasha had asked why Hasan was mute and somehow Dina wound up telling the story of her sister’s death. Sasha had taunted Hasan, then; Dina had told him that Hasan had loved to sing and Sasha urged him to try, even offering to sing along. Dina wasn’t particularly interested in Sasha. If you listened to the stories they told about Russians in the village, that was what Sasha was like. It was Vanya who was different. Dina was shocked, that day, to realize that, in all likelihood, Vanya would not survive, and this would make her sad.

Time passed and, for a while, things seemed like they might turn out well enough. They were taken away once and Dina was afraid that they would not return. They did, though, and Dina had dressed up to meet them, holding the wooden bird that Vanya had made for her. The events of only a few days though, three or four at the most, brought any progress to a crashing halt. Killing a shepherd as he tried to secure escape for himself and Vanya cost Sasha his life. Still, Vanya might have survived if Dina’s brother hadn’t died, if Mamed’s father hadn’t gone to the prison and shot his own son, and if her brother hadn’t tried to run, hadn’t sped off across the sand towards his home until the guards shot him down. As it was, Vanya’s fate was sealed.

Dina was the one who brought him the news, dressed in black, supposedly for her brother. Though by nature not demonstrative, Dina could hardly hold back tears as she told Vanya that he had one day left. Willing it could be any other way, she promised him a proper burial. She’d give him her necklace, her most prized possession, and with it he could find a bride in heaven. He would… he didn’t believe any of it, just sat there, pleading her to find the keys to his shackles. She was afraid; she’d never been so disobedient, but she ran to find the keys anyhow. She would never forget the smile he gave her when she threw them down to him. “Are you happy to see me?” she asked, then told him, “Don’t kill any more people.”

She’d never forget that smile, but even more striking than his smile was his expression once he’d pulled himself out of the pit they’d put him in. “Hurry, run,” she’d begged, but he’d sat down right at the edge of the pit. He grimaced and there was a sad look in his eyes.

“I can’t,” he said. “They’ll never forgive you for helping me.”

He sat there for only a few minutes, not chained to anything, free to run and to save himself, yet still there out of concern for Dina. He remembered perhaps what she’d told him about her sister. He knew what she had risked to bring him the key. She’d offered him his life and he’d refused it to save hers.

Abdul came back, his face grim, and Dina had tried to protest. He told her to go into the house and shouted at her for not crying for her brother. He took Vanya, marched him off into the distance. Dina ran after them as far as the edge of the cemetery, then waited, for what she did not know. She heard a gunshot not far away, though, and then her father came back alone.

She searched for Vanya’s body, to give him the burial she’d promised, but she found nothing. After a while, she gave up.

The years passed, both quickly and slowly at once, until it sometimes seemed as if there had never been Russian prisoners in her home. Life moved on; Dina was married before the end of the next year and was soon enough pregnant. Her son, though, was stillborn, and soon after she conceived again it was her husband who died, injured in an accident. Secrets were revealed upon his death; he was a gambler and owed so much money upon his death that the house had to be sold to pay them off. Dina moved back into her father’s house, now seventeen, with a young daughter whom she called Aisha.

When Dina was eighteen, her father fell ill, and after many weeks in which his condition was steadily worsening, all knew that he was dying. Dina took to tending for him at all hours, wiping his face with cloths and feeding him the simple things he could still eat. One night, as Dina was about to leave his room, he opened his eyes and called her name.

She came to sit by his side, saying nothing but meeting his eyes. For a long moment, he didn’t say anything either, and she was about to ask if he was hungry or needed more medicine when he murmured, “There’s something I must tell you. You aren’t happy here, I know, and when I die you will be alone. I’ve not done well by you, I…”

“You’ve done your best,” she insisted, not wanting him to become upset, knowing how fragile his health was. “That’s all I could ask…”

“Ivan Gilin is alive,” he cut in, stopping her short. “I didn’t shoot him. You freed him, didn’t you, and I realized… I fired my gun in the air and told him to run. There were helicopters flying overhead; I’m sure one of them must have seen him. If not, his mother was in the town, as were the many Russian soldiers stationed there.”

Dina couldn’t speak; the idea that Vanya was alive, had been alive all these years, was impossible! Her father would not lie to her, though, this she knew, and even if he would have, well, if one does not speak truth on one’s deathbed, when else will he? “I have his mother’s address, in Moscow,” Abdul continued. “I copied it when he wrote to her, telling her to come. Although I doubt he still lives with her, she must know where he is. You have never been like the other girls, Dina, and perhaps your happiness lies not here but there.”

He told her where he’d put the paper with Vanya’s address, instructing her to wait until he was dead to search for it.

A month after Abdul-Murat’s death, Dina, dressed in Western clothes, with the wooden bird Vanya had given her and her grandmother’s necklace carried in the suitcase that she held by her side, her little daughter in her arms, boarded a train for Moscow. She did not know what she would find there, but she knew what she hoped for.

Maybe, Dina reflected as she stroked her sleeping daughter’s hair, she would finally learn about life.

-END-