HEROIC WOMEN STAY TO TEND AND COMFORT HELPLESS

HEROIC WOMEN STAY TO TEND AND COMFORT HELPLESS PATIENTS
BY PATRICK E. TYLER
New York Times
GROZNY, Russia -- Every war has its angels, and some of them live here in the ruined capital of Chechnya.

``When the bombing would start and the fragments would come down like rain, we would gather the patients and run into the building,'' said Zina Tavgiyeva, chief nurse of the Katayama home for the aged and infirm. ``Everyone was crying, and I told them to pray to God and that he would save us.''

When the bombing stopped, as Russian troops tried to retake control of the breakaway region, ``we would go back to the bonfire'' in the courtyard to get warm. Patients cut one another's hair to combat the lice that spread without sanitation. Others swept up the glass from broken windows and carried buckets of water from a tank to put out fires in the building. The demented wandered about, but other patients looked out for them.

``Every time we covered the windows with something, the next day they would be blown out again,'' said Tamara Oibayeva, a staff nurse at the 35-year-old institution.

When Russia's military campaign against Chechen rebels intruded behind these walls in the fall of 1999, a handful of nurses and their supporters in Moscow rallied public concern for the fate of about 100 patients whose home had been this institution. Some were elderly, others severely disabled, demented or bedridden. Most were ethnic Russians -- and dozens had paired off like married couples over the years, as happens in such cloistered worlds.


Patients trapped

The Katayama patients suffered even more from the Russian military's assault on the Chechen capital than other residents because the patients were trapped here until December 1999. They witnessed -- often in a state of hysteria or tears -- three months of intense bombing that incinerated most of their institution, including the upper floor of the main dormitory, the administrative wing, the cafeteria and the medical clinic.

The four-acre compound took more than 10 direct hits from artillery, missiles and aerial bombs. Two missiles that need defusing are still sticking out of the ground in the apple orchard.

The nurses organized the patients to help cook and care for themselves as the bombardment thundered around them, and 12 of the 13 staff members eventually fled.

Oibayeva volunteered to stay. ``Someone had to stay,'' she said. ``Can you imagine all of these patients, most of them not mentally balanced, looking at me with those wide, open eyes -- crying eyes -- and asking, `What will happen to us if you leave?' and pleading, `Promise you won't go!'

``I have no children. My husband was here, and we live nearby. So I promised I would stay.''

When a rescue operation for the patients was finally mounted to carry them to neighboring Ingushetia, six died from cold and malnutrition on the way. But the worst thing this war brought to the residents of Katayama was a separation for which no one had prepared them.


Crushing separation

Early last year, Russia's Health and Social Welfare Ministries ordered that the ethnic Russians among the patients were to be reassigned to other institutions away from the conflict for their own safety. Only the Chechen patients were to be sent back to the war zone.

``We took out 100 and brought back 11,'' Oibayeva said.

That was crushing news for some of the couples, and also for old friends and soul mates. It was especially hard on a 68-year-old patient named Slavik, a one-legged former torpedo man with a vodka problem who was living with Natasha, a Russian pensioner. When he introduced himself during a reporter's visit here last October, Slavik was deeply distraught because he had been forced to return from Ingushetia without the woman he loved.

``I am dying without her,'' he said as he hobbled through the burned-out upper floor where he often repaired for solitude and a nip of vodka. ``I don't know how to live without Natasha -- I won't live without her,'' he said, his full beard catching the sunlight now and then. ``They don't make women like that anymore.''

Slavik may have meant what he said, because a few weeks later, he picked up pension payments that had been piling up and left this place, setting off on crutches through the bomb craters to find his Natasha. He was last seen wearing his coral-colored track suit, one leg pinned up.

``We heard that she was sent to Astrakhan,'' a town 250 miles north of Grozny, said Tavgiyeva, the nurse. ``He said he would go there and try to bring her here.''

The plight of this institution might never have been noticed had it not been for a local schoolteacher, Natalya Astamirova, who as the bombs began to fall in October 1999, made a videotape of the undernourished patients in shabby clothing, chopping wood and huddling around a bonfire.

Even then, it took a long time for help to come.

In her last journal entry before she fled with her family that fall, Tavgiyeva wrote on Oct. 31, 1999: ``The con***ion of the patients is bad, but so far they are surviving. We are cooking twice a day on the bonfire. Everyone is tired. There is nothing to smoke. A proposal to trade some flour for cabbages, potatoes, beets and cigarettes was approved.''

As the fate of the Katayama patients became known in Moscow, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist with Novaya Gazeta, organized a truckload of food for the patients while she pressed Russian officials to act.

But it was the bombing of Dec. 14, 1999 -- which shattered most of the buildings here while miraculously sparing the wing in which the patients were shivering -- that mobilized a rescue operation. Three buses arrived on the afternoon of Dec. 18, and 100 frightened souls boarded in freezing weather. But they had to sit there all night because the bus drivers refused to drive in the dark.

``We wrapped them in blankets,'' Oibayeva said, ``but it was cold and the engine heaters did not work. We had people who were very old and undernourished. Six of the patients did not survive the road trip.''

While the patients were living in temporary quarters in Ingushetia, news of the impending separation arrived.

``It was a cruel decision,'' Tavgiyeva said. ``These patients had lived together for many years.''


Tulips in rubble

Now the ethnic Chechen patients are back in Grozny, waiting for promised repairs to their institutional home. They have been joined by more than 40 new patients, mostly elderly Russians from Grozny, like Maria Chernyshova, 74, who survived the war living in a basement.

On a recent morning, she walked slowly through the tattered garden in a housecoat and a scarf and stood over some tulips that had forced their way through the rubble. ``I came here to see what they haven't managed to blow up,'' she said with a smile. ``I come here to talk to them.''

Some have found that life goes on.

One of Slavik's friends, Vladimir Amkhadov, who has two withered legs but gets around well on crutches, also lost a Russian ``wife'' in the war. Her name was Larisa, and she was sent to another institution, too. ``I lived with Larisa for two years,'' Amkhadov said. She was paralyzed. ``I bought her food, watermelons, everything that she needed.''

A few months ago, when it seemed that Larisa was never coming back, he went to nurse Tavgiyeva's office and asked if he could marry again. He had found a partner.

``Before, I looked after Larisa,'' he told her. ``Now, I want someone to look after me.''

Her name was Raisa Galayeva, and they were married on New Year's Day. The bride wore a white dress and shawl. The groom wore a jogging suit.

And still no word from Slavik.