A Bundle of Hope Amid the Cries of Despair on Beslan Anniversary

Madinat Kargiyeva has two daughters. One of them was dressed Saturday in pink Baby Gap socks and a velveteen hat, an infant giggling and squirming in her mother’s arms. The other one lay on the farthest end of the more than 300 graves here, an 11-year-old victim of the hostage siege a year ago at Middle School No. 1.

Zarina, whose pretty, serious face is etched in the granite above her remains, is the reason Kargiyeva almost lost her mind. Fariza, barely 6 months old, is the reason she didn’t.

As the by-now-familiar sound of wailing and sobbing rose above the rain-splashed cemetery Saturday on the first anniversary of the fatal explosions and shootout at the school, Kargiyeva stood quietly over her first daughter’s grave, embracing well-wishers without expression and staring at the frenzied mourners on all sides.

“She never leaves my mind. She’s constantly there,” Kargiyeva said of Zarina, who had sat beside her for three days as a hostage in the school gym, then died in the explosion while Kargiyeva and her 9-year-old son Alan survived. “The last time I saw her, when I looked at her, she looked so tired, as if she had lost all hope. And her eyes were so, so big. Day and night, that’s what I see.”

But now there are diapers to change, formula to prepare, pretty new dresses to buy. Her new daughter, whom she adopted in May, doesn’t have time for a mother’s lingering tears.

To mark the anniversary, Kargiyeva and thousands of other Beslan residents flocked to the cemetery for a ceremonial reading of the names of the dead and the unveiling of a new memorial. Earlier in the day, thousands more walked through the blackened ruins of the school gym and stood in the schoolyard as Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor floated from hidden speakers out of the broken windows and open rafters.

Women shrieking with despair and raising their hands to the sky had to be helped along by friends and family. “My dear little girl, why did you abandon me?” screamed Marina Pukhayeva, whose 13-year-old died in the siege. “Who killed you? Who tore you to pieces?”

Her wails pierced the courtyard, and a priest who was leading a procession of black-robed clerics singing the liturgy of the dead walked up to her and pulled her into his arms. “Keep quiet, child,” he murmured.

Several mothers had kept vigil for three days and nights in the gymnasium, sitting without food or water, as the hostages had been forced to endure, from the hour when a reported 32 militants calling for Russian withdrawal from the neighboring republic of Chechnya captured the school at 9 a.m. on Sept. 1. More than 300 hostages and police officers died two days later in explosions and a firefight.

The crowd diminished and the school grew silent in the midnight hours Saturday. “We tried to imagine what our children were doing on a night like this,” said Zalina Guburova, 42, who lost her 67-year-old mother and her 8-year-old son.

“Of course, we will never feel the pain our relatives and our children felt here, no matter how much time we spend here,” she said. “But we decided to try.”

Kargiyeva, a 44-year-old music teacher, had not joined them, nor those mothers who have spent some of the last few nights in the cemetery. “I think it’s bordering on lunacy,” she said. “But maybe that’s how they find their comfort.

“For me,” she said, “I’m finding comfort in this baby.”

Alan, who will turn 10 this month, was struck by a bullet that lodged in his lung as he fled the school during the shootout. But Kargiyeva couldn’t go to Rostov, where he was undergoing surgery, because she was still looking for Zarina, who had not been seen after the first explosion in the gym.

The girl’s badly mangled body was finally identified by DNA, and Kargiyeva and Alan were left alone -- Kargiyeva’s husband had been electrocuted a few years earlier when he climbed a power pole outside their house to hang a yard light.

Alan was so fearful he refused to sleep alone and didn’t want to be in a room by himself even in broad daylight. Kargiyeva would also have nightmares, dreaming that a terrorist was peering in the window, or that a truckload of gunmen had pulled into the courtyard of her house. Or that Zarina was lying on a bed, staring at her with those big eyes like in the gym, and telling her, “Mama, I want to be with you.”

She noticed that Alan never mentioned his older sister, whom the family had affectionately called “Zaika,” or “Rabbit.”

“I asked him, ‘Alan, do you remember Zaika?’ He says, ‘Of course I do.’ I ask, ‘Why do you never talk about her? Why do you never mention her name?’ He said, ‘Mom, I never mention her name, because when I do, you cry.’ And when we switch on the TV, there are always reports on Beslan, and when those reports come on, he looks at me, to see my reaction.”

Kargiyeva knew she had to do something. What she needed was simple: She needed a daughter.

“I don’t know how it started. No one gave me this advice. No one told me I should adopt a child. It was all a blur. It’s just that I’ve lived my life with my daughter, and I simply couldn’t live without a daughter. She was part of my life. I had to have a daughter.”

She found Fariza at a children’s hospital in May, and was warned by doctors that the infant had been deprived of oxygen in the womb and might have suffered brain damage. They were concerned, Kargiyeva said, that the baby was already nearly 3 months old and hadn’t smiled.

Kargiyeva visited her at the hospital and thought for hours, wondering what would be the right thing to do.

On the one hand, she feared, taking home a new baby might be a betrayal of Zarina. But somehow, it just didn’t seem that way.

“Maybe God pushed me. But I got to thinking, if I adopted, it would be better for an unfortunate child. I would make this unfortunate child happy -- and maybe make myself happy.”

Once Fariza came home, she began smiling almost immediately. Her new mother hardly ever puts her down. Alan grins shyly and struggles to hold the baby’s squiggling frame for new family pictures.

“She is surrounded by love, and not only mine, but everyone in my family, and all my neighbors,” Kargiyeva said.

“Now I think back, and I wonder, what would have happened if I hadn’t adopted her? I would have gone mad,” she said. “This was the option I found for myself. Those women who organize rallies and meetings and vigils, they found their option too. But this is mine.”