Beslan Grieves On as Period of Mourning Ends

Under a low overhang of drizzling clouds, hundreds of mourners filed past long rows of achingly fresh graves Tuesday in a ritual ending to 40 days of mourning for the more than 330 students, teachers and parents killed when guerrillas seized a crowded middle school here on the first day of classes.

The sound of weeping was punctuated occasionally by shrieks as desperate mothers, grandmothers and sisters dug their fingers into the soil of small graves and stashed cookies, candy bars and fruit into the wreaths of flowers. Men stood silently watching in the background, their faces a mixture of uncertainty and fury.

More than a month after the worst instance of political violence in Russia since the beginning of Moscow’s war with separatists in Chechnya, this small town in the neighboring republic of North Ossetia is still reeling from the loss.

“We went to one of the cemeteries today. We saw the people at the gravesites howling and crying, or patiently just standing there, and I realized this town is a town of psychological cripples,” said Rimma Gumetsova, who is still trying to find out what happened to her 11-year-old daughter, Aza.

“We will never be able to recover from this,” she said. “Look at how many children were killed. And those children could have had their own kids; look at the loss of life. It’s like an entire generation was wiped out.”

Authorities fear that the end of the Orthodox Church mourning period, which officially concludes today for most families, could inspire new violence against Chechen and Ingush Muslims living in the predominantly Christian North Ossetian region.

“We are not expecting anything serious,” said Magomed Plyiev, a regional official in North Ossetia. “People know who is really to blame for this tragedy, and we believe that reason will prevail over emotions.”

Authorities have closed the borders around North Ossetia, and church leaders urged their followers to avoid the impulse to seek revenge. In a church in Beslan, Orthodox leaders from St. Petersburg presented an icon depicting the babies killed by Herod in Bethlehem after the birth of Jesus as a symbol of the slain children of Beslan.

“Looking at this icon, we see the spiritual sense of what happened in Beslan,” said Gennady Belovolov, a priest at St. John’s Church in St. Petersburg, whose young parishioners raised money for the icon. “For the church, our children killed in Beslan are sainted martyrs.”

In the neighborhoods around the school hit hardest by the violence, long tables were set up under tarpaulins for the feasts that Orthodox tradition calls for at the close of mourning. Men stood watch over mutton boiling in giant caldrons on open fires.

The school itself, a hulk of broken brick, smashed glass and muddy ashes, is slated to be torn down and turned into a memorial. Its student population -- those psychologically able to return to classes -- have been dispersed among other schools in Beslan and surrounding towns.

Inside the gaping gymnasium where the majority of the hostages died in an explosive inferno, hundreds of people filed around a makeshift memorial of water bottles, candles and flowers -- some growing moldy after 40 days of sorrow. Some mourners wept quietly; most stood silently, apparently trying to imagine the three days when the gym held the majority of the 1,000-plus hostages, most of the time without food and water.

Ludmila Tseboyeva, an unemployed economist who was a hostage with her 12-year-old daughter, entered the gymnasium Tuesday for the first time since the attack.

“I’m still shivering,” she said outside the building. “It’s horrible. Something has clogged up my chest, and it’s like I can’t breathe.”

Her daughter refused to come with her to the school, she said, and even now jumps when there is a sudden movement or a knock at the door.

“She used to be calm and easy-tempered, and now she’s constantly afraid,” Tseboyeva said. “She sleeps with me. She sleeps under me, actually. She tries to crawl under me. She can’t even enter her own room alone.”

Arita Dudayeva, who lost her 9-year-old daughter, had to be supported as she walked out of the gym sobbing.

“We will believe there is a God when the people who did this are punished,” she said. “It’s only when I see the bodies of these people torn apart, only then will I believe there is a God on Earth.”

As the afternoon wore on, a traffic jam formed on the road to the cemetery as crowds made their way past the graves, some dug as recently as Monday to accept newly identified bodies. A dozen women shared a lime soda over twin mounds, covering an 11-year-old girl and her 14-year-old brother.

Their mother, Nadezhda Guriyeva, 44, was in the school with her children but escaped alive. She doesn’t know how.

“They were sitting right next to me. Everything happened in front of my eyes. Boris stood up, and then he was dead. And at that point, I ceased to realize what was happening,” she said dully. “If you want to know why I escaped and they didn’t, you’ll have to ask God.”