I broke the story about the Xodjali massacre with a February 27, world exclusive on an inside page in the Washington Post. This was followed with a 'European' front page of the London Sunday Times. By then, the international hack-pack had started parachuting in to count the bodies and confirm that something very awful had happened. The first western reporter to actually get out into the killing fields and perform the grisly task of checking documents on the dead was Anatol Lieven of the London Times. His companion in the task was the late Rory Peck of Frontline News, another cool professional and dear friend. Others performed less well. One best nameless reporter from Ajans France Press arrived in Agdam the night we left and found the city 'quiet,' apparently having confused the silence that followed the missile-induced exodus of 50,000 people with peacefulness. Still another, while a guest at my house, abused the confidence of Vafa Gulizade by grossly misquoting him. At the height of the crisis, Douglas Kennedy, son of Robert, showed up with a KGB-minder/translator from St. Petersburg, and thought he might do a little poking around the Front for amusement. After convincing him that his translator would probably get killed by a mob, Kennedy took my advice and hired two local lads, and then refused to pay them.

The government of Azerbaijan, meanwhile, had performed a complete about-face on the issue. The same people who had remained unavailable during the early days of the crisis were suddenly asking me to provide numbers of foreign correspondents in Moscow whom they could invite down, at government expense, to report on the massacre.

I did not react very well. I almost physically assaulted the presidential press secretary, Rasim Agaev, and publicly accused him of lying. The spokesman was not pleased and began a rumor that I was an Armenian spy sent to Xodjali to ferret out 'military secrets' during my January visit to the doomed town. I was temporally detained thanks to that charge, and started to slid into a very bad mood. When I was released I went downtown and found myself sitting around a commercial shop with a bunch of black marketeers, vaguely waiting for rubles to arrive in exchange for my dollars, when the whole thing hit me and hit me hard. The evening streets were still filled with smiling shoppers, apparently oblivious or even indifferent to the fate of the citizens of Xodjali. It was the same men in leather jackets and the same women with far too much rouge on their cheeks and they were all smiling and laughing and parading and I have to say I hated them all. Maybe they didn't know what I did. Maybe they knew but didn't care lest it drive them insane. It was not clear and neither was my brain.

I canceled the dollar deal, walked out of the shop and wandered the streets. I think it rained, but I cannot be sure. I wandered and wandered, unable to stop anywhere or see or talk to anyone for hours and hours. "Ha ha," someone cackled, as they leaned toward their gal, or turned on the key to their car.

"Ho ho," someone else chortled as they lurched out of a Komisyon shop, bottle of Finnish vodka under the arm.

I wanted to slash their tires, smash their noses, burn their houses-do something, and violently.

I did nothing but wander the streets and avoid humanity. It was better like that. Then I got home I sat down and poured myself a long drink and drank it and Hicran asked me where I'd been.

"Xodjali," someone said in a voice I didn't know. I was there with the ghosts in a dumpy town with no food to speak of or water to wash and all the people I knew or had known there were dead dead dead and I just started to cry and cry and cry.

***

There weren't too many bodies. Most were still in the hills, waiting for the higher temperatures of spring for rot to set. Some, the few, were being spaded into the shallow ground of the growing Martyrs' Cemetery across from the parliament building in Baku. One of those was Alef Khadjiev. I liked to think of him as a friend because we had consumed a few drinks together. A jocular cop with a big swagger and smile, Alef had managed to galvanize the Xodjali community around him in the belief that despite the odds and an almost total lack of support from Baku they could hang on and survive. But now Alef Khadjiev was dead. He had bought a bullet through the brain and after rotting for a week in the mountains of the Black Garden his body was bought for 100 liters of gasoline and then brought back to Baku to be buried with military honors.

Despite the proximity of the parliament across the street no-one from the government came to the funeral and maybe that was out of good taste because had they been there, whispering eulogies about courage and fortitude, Alef, the hero and then martyr of Xodjali, might have broken free of the bonds of death and climbed out of his grave and strangled the hypocrites with his own cold hands. He was that sort of guy.

But they weren't there and the funeral procession was small because Alef was a native of Xodjali and all or at least most of the would-be mourners were either dead or had become refugees, and had to be brought to Baku by truck or bus or train for the last rites.

The exception was Alef's widow, Gala, a chubby Russian girl with a hint of a mustache who lived in Baku. We had met in Agdam in the aftermath of the massacre and she refused to believe that her husband was dead. Aside from an overwhelming sense of grief she was frightened out of her wits, wondering how she could live without him.

"I'm just a Russian, a Russian!" she cried. "And now everyone looks at me with hatred in their eyes!" That was in Agdam when anyone who wasn't speaking Azeri was indeed being looked at through the evil eye. I gave her my telephone number in Baku and told her to call if there was anything I could do. She called a few days later, babbling into the phone.

"Tomas," she wailed. "Alef is here."

At first I thought a miracle of mistaken identity had occurred and that Alef was still alive. But Gala was only calling to tell me that Alef's remains had been recovered in an exchange with the Armenians for several dozen gallons of gasoline, and then been shipped to Baku for burial. It was tough for me to understand her Russian on the telephone and probably a lot tougher for her to have to pick up the phone at all. But she stayed coherent long enough to give me her address and the time of the funeral procession. I went, not knowing what to expect: A week old cadaver in the living room? Mutilated like others? Scalped like some? I got in a taxi and traveled through a wasteland of hissing, blue and pink stuff-belching pipes of the oil refining area of Baku, driving over streets that had seemingly never seen repair. We drove and drove and it was a drive though an utterly depressing landscape, the sort that no-one ever sees, or admits to having seen: broken, diseased and bad. It was as much a symbol of the rapacity and ugliness of the regime in Baku as the corpses in Agdam had been. How can you allow people to live and die like this?

Complicating my dark mood was the fact that the Azeri taxi driver only wanted to make jokes, and in Russian. I told him what I thought. I told him I was going to find the funeral of my friend, Alef Khadjiev, Martyr of Karabakh, and that all the people of Baku were greedy cowards and that only the good men died and the filth remained behind. He agreed, refusing to take any money for the ride. It was his contribution to national defense, or something.

I got out of the taxi in front of a series of high-rise Soviet-style buildings-the ones designed so that the toilet is in a separate room from the sink. Degrading, like everything else around what was the USSR. Walking through the mourners I saw people I knew or at least recognized and embraced them. Then I saw Gala. She was standing in back of a truck carrying the flag-draped coffin and holding the hand of her smiling child who was still oblivious to what had happened to her father. I said something stupid like 'be strong.' I tried to plant a hand-extended kiss on the coffin perched on the back of the truck but I couldn't reach it and decided against climbing up on the truck and just waited for the procession to proceed. There were plenty of people crying. Everyone but me. My eyes were dry; I don't know why. Then someone somewhere responsible for formalities gave the word and the column started out toward the Martyrs' Cemetery in the heights above Baku. The funeral train in was the same as my journey out, although the route was different: another broken road leading through another industrial wasteland. It was Alef's route to anywhere, nowhere, death. We arrived at the Shehidler Xiyabani, or Martyrs' Lane cemetery, the place where victims of the Soviet army crack-down on January 20th, 1990 were buried in a long line along a granite wall shaded by dwarf Cyprus trees and pine.

I had visited the cemetery before and I have visited it since but it was different this time. I wasn't there as a journalist covering the event or even a political/cultural tourist. I was there as a mourner, mourning Alef Khadjiev, the most recent addition to the second tier of graves, where the dates of death are different than in the first row. There was no third road, then. a place that would and will continue to grow. Alef's was the 127th grave then, a hole in the ground surrounded by freshly dug earth. His casket was lifted down from the truck and I joined the pall-bearers as they hoisted it on their shoulders and brought Alef's remains down the line as a local man of religion recited the 'Fatiha', or Muslim creed of faith. This was odd because I was not sure whether Alef was a Muslim except in the formal sense of the word. He never expressed anything approaching piety to me. When he was alive he was a drinking man, although he didn't smoke. This was really odd, because Azeris usually smoke all the time, even at funerals. And the strangest thing about Alef was that he certainly didn't like Turks. He once told me that he had found too many 'Made In Turkey' labels in the trash cans of Stepanakert to believe in any pan-Turkic ideal.

I was thinking thought like this because I was remembering, which is what you are supposed to do when you punch bodies in the ground. Alef Khadjiev was about to become the first of a whole string of people I knew who died violently over the next few years, so he got more thought than most. Alef's wife Gala and her Russian relatives were confused by the ritual placement of the body, the pious incantations and the fact that the week-old corpse had to be lifted out of the casket to be put in the hole dug in the muddy ground. They put the body in. An honor guard clicked their heels, slapped dummy slugs in their Kaleshnikovs, and let off three volleys. The empty shells fell clattering on the granite walkway. I picked up one and put it in my pocket. Then the family and intimate friends began covering the body with dirt and the wailing really began. Women ripped their cheeks with their nails and men sobbed last regards. I was invited to say something into the grave but declined. I had quite a bit to say but I didn't want to say it, even in a language no one would understand. Cultural differences and all. I would do it differently today.

Then another, larger funeral procession started moving down Martyrs' Row. They were heading for the shallow grave next to Alef's. It was the corner spot and the next corpse would start a new row, even then being dug among the dwarf Cyprus trees in anticipation for the next to die in the Black Garden, that horrible place called Karabakh. More young men would soon lie here and their numbers would soon exceed all those killed at Xodjali and the events of February 25th and 26th, 1992 would soon become just a detail, just another grim statistic in the on-going litany of death and destruction in Karabakh, the Black Garden. I swore I would remember Alef and all the others, whose names I never knew but whose faces were etched on my memory forever. Yes, I would remember Xodjali. It was a dump. But now it was dead.