Saturday, May 26, 2001 | 2:31 a.m.
Shortly after tripping over a rock and plunging onto the sidewalk, skinning her knee and watching lipstick and coins roll from her purse toward a crowd of feet at a bus stop, Irina, a Russian refugee from the Chechnya war, decided: I am happy here.
A black man helped her up. It was a simple thing, really: He reached out to give her a hand and helped her collect her coins. But later when she made her regular phone call to her 12-year-old son, Sasha, who is still in Russia, and he asked, "What are black people like?" because he has never seen one, because everyone around him is milky white, she would tell him the story.
Now she is telling it again in this immigration attorney's office, to someone who has asked, "What do you think of Las Vegas?"
"Everyone helps me here. Everyone is very nice to me here," Irina, 44, says. What seems like a pleasant exaggeration is more likely a commentary on her outlook, on her mettle. Irina is small and engaging, full of eye contact and emotion, pretty and meticulously groomed in a blue floral dress.
She doesn't look like she once spent a month in a Las Vegas jail. She doesn't look like she once crawled under the fence between Tijuana, Mexico, and California. She doesn't look like she lost her husband to bombs near Grozny, bombs that chased her out of her middle-class home, sent her off on a complicated escape from a refugee camp and somehow, unexpectedly, landed her in Las Vegas.
One week before Irina came to this office to update the story of her life after Chechnya, her one-time friend Aniska came to the same office to tell what started out as the same story: The two knew each other in Grozny, and through the circumstances of war, became partners in escape.
Irina is Russian; Aniska is Chechen. Neither was politically active, but technically, they should have been enemies.
Their common desire to escape the war made them allies.
The two rode in a bus caravan out of the embattled region together, were separated from their families and sent to a Russian refugee camp together, and learned of their husbands' deaths together.
But today they don't speak to each other. They won't meet with their lawyer together. They won't be in photos together.
This is the story of how Las Vegans reached out to two war-traumatized women and of the refugees' determination to survive. But it also is the story of two women whose painful memories grew as a ghost between them.
War made them allies; peace has made them enemies.
Their last names have been dropped for publication because they fear retaliation against their relatives still living in Chechnya.
War
After slipping out of the refugee camp, Irina and Aniska walked four hours to a train station, rode to Moscow, and with visas secured by a relative, stowed away with a tourist group on a flight to Mexico City. From there, they traveled by bus to Tijuana, heading toward the United States for help.
"We crawled under the fence to U.S. Police everywhere. Airplane above," Irina says. "We waved to them, 'Police, police!' because we wanted help, but they walked right by."
Finally police arrested the illegal aliens, and Immigration and Naturalization Services shipped them to Las Vegas where more detention space was available.
After spending two weeks in jail, local attorney Julia Osborne took their case pro bono.
"I couldn't believe what they had been through," Osborne said, sitting in her modest downtown office. "I just felt I had to do something."
When they were granted asylum and freed, they were penniless, sick and traumatized. They knew no one but each other.
Osborne introduced them to Sister Klaryta Antoszewska, a spry 69-year-old Russian-speaking nun who has worked with immigrants of all backgrounds in Las Vegas.
"These two will make it. They are strong women," Sister Antoszewska said 17 months ago, having known them less than a week. She took them into her two-bedroom home in the northwest part of the valley where she lives with another Catholic nun, Sister Rosemary Lynch, 84. The nuns gave them clothes and food, enrolled them in English classes and helped them apply for work permits.
"We stayed up at night a lot. They cried a lot at first," Sister Antoszewska said. "But when they finally emptied the bucket, there was nothing more to talk about, and there was life to live."
Peace
And so, having survived war but lost all stability, the two fought -- with each other.
They fought about the past, about politics, about loyalty. They fought about new friends, about tasks, about sharing their one copy of the Russian-English dictionary. Insults were hurled, objects were thrown, riffs of obscene Russian language filled the nuns' house.
"There is so much between them. A lot of feelings," Sister Antoszewska said. "They are good people who went through something terrible, but I tell you I have never had such a hard time with anyone I have helped before. I tried talking to them, but they had nothing good to say about one another.
"I love them both, but separately. I don't like them together in my house, acting like that."
Did they see the war in each other? The loss of their loved ones? Does the one person who shares your worst pain pose a threat for that very reason?
"They needed each other mentally and emotionally. And they could not stand that," Sister Antoszewska said.
History
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechnya declared independence from Russia. Three years later, Russia tried to regain control of the region -- a mountainous 6,000-square-mile, mostly Muslim republic that is wedged between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The war resulted in more than 70,000 deaths, but ended in 1996 on uncertain terms. Chechnya considered itself independent and held democratic elections in 1997. But Russia feared that losing control of Chechnya might bring widespread challenge to its control of the larger territory -- a region that holds a lucrative pipeline and innumerable trade routes.
Feuding between Russia and Chechnya continued.
Russian troops moved into Chechnya in fall 1999, after Islamic Chechen rebels raided a neighboring Russian region and mysterious apartment explosions killed about 300 Russians.
Irina and Aniska, related by a distant marriage, lived in the suburbs and ignored -- as much as possible -- the political upheaval in the 1990s until the war moved into their community in 1999.
At first, they tried to carry on with normal life as violence moved closer; then they hid in their basements when the bombing started. They saw their neighbors killed, the blood of their friends spilled in their once-simple streets. Finally, they fled.
But Aniska doesn't want to talk about all of that now. Looking every bit as together and well-groomed as Irina, she is sitting in Osborne's office speaking in broken English about her good fortune.
She's living alone in a three-bedroom house provided temporarily to her by First Presbyterian Church. She has a job. She has friends. She is learning the language. She has ideas about the future.
"It's all good. It's good. It's like a dream," Aniska, 44, says. She's wearing a crisp, black pantsuit and a rhinestone heart pendant. She has lost 60 pounds since she first met with the Las Vegas Sun in January 2000. She takes care to mention, several times and by name, each person and organization that has helped her: Osborne, the church, her employers and especially, the Catholic nuns.
"I am happy," she says. "I don't know about Irina."
Living
In the middle of Las Vegas is a home called The Bethany House, named after a place in Israel where Jesus was always welcome, according to Libby Law, board chairman of the First Presbyterian Church.
Neither Aniska, a Muslim who does not follow the faith dogmatically, nor Irina, an Orthodox Christian who is not a church-goer, knew the significance of the house's name when the church handed over the keys in June. First Presbyterian gave them the house for one year, rent free.
"We try to give it to a family, or someone who is in transition and will be able to get on their feet," said Michael Syverson, the church's liaison to the Bethany House residents.
"Aniska and Irina were a wonderful choice -- they are clean and hard-working, and we felt the house would help them," he said.
Syverson and his wife visited the two women periodically as the summer months turned to autumn. In time, Syverson said, he realized there was a growing divide.
There were awkward silences. There were tense expressions. There was a pot of soup thrown across the kitchen, noodles and broth running down the living room wall.
The bickering culminated when Irina brought her new Cuban boyfriend, Armando, to stay at the house, and Aniska called the church to complain.
"She never ask me if it was OK, you know? She did not care about me," Aniska said.
Syverson said the church could not support Irina's boyfriend.
"I didn't want to kick her out, but I'm bound by the rules of the church," Syverson said. "So we had to ask that she leave."
Irina shrugs when telling her side of the story. "I say, 'I need my freedom.' You know? I need be free. So I left."
And so, last winter, Irina moved into a small apartment behind a taco shop on Twain Street. She shares the home with Armando and two other Cubans.
"It's OK for now. But we're saving money for when my son comes," she says. "We will leave this place and go to new house."
Irina meets regularly with Osborne to push forward the attempt to bring her son to Las Vegas. She wants him to have a U.S. education, to grow up in America, where everyone "can have success no matter what color, where from, no matter."
He is expected to be granted entry this summer.
Working
Six days a week, Aniska gets up before the sun, eats oatmeal, showers, dresses and walks to the bus stop. She rides to the Mirage, where she enters through the employee entrance, and begins a day of cleaning hotel rooms.
This is not what she was educated to do. Aniska is a college graduate: She studied engineering in Moscow. At first when she began the job, she cried every day. She didn't know how to clean rooms in the manner expected. But she improved, and now she says she likes it.
"Nice people. Good money," she says. "Very nice to me."
But sometimes, she gets in the elevator and there is another maid standing inside, beside a housecleaning cart piled high with fresh towels, and Aniska turns her eyes away. Irina.
"Why don't we talk? Irina repeats the question back to the interviewer. She thinks. And then she shrugs. "We were good together in war. We are not good together now."
The two have worked at the Mirage, on the same schedule, for more than six months. They have asked to be assigned to separate floors.
The work is hard. But the union benefits are helpful. They have gotten medical care and begun to have a host of troubling dental problems fixed.
Although they spend their days on the Strip, neither woman gambles. Irina keeps her money for her son. Aniska has given money to people she met on the bus, people she said "needed it more" than she.
On their breaks from room cleaning, they practice English with their co-workers. But they do not chat with each other.
Freedom
On Valentine's Day, Sister Antoszewska invited guests to her home, including Irina and Aniska. "They fought in front of the other guests," Sister Antoszewska recalls. "I had had enough."
That night after the party, the nuns planned to sit down with Aniska and Irina and talk things through.
"We had reconciliation planned for that evening," Sister Antoszewska said. "We made tea, and we had a forgiveness ceremony."
As full of grace as she is, Sister Antoszewska still could not reunite them.
"I tried. But some things are not for me to control."
The two left the nuns' house separately, a war still raging.
Feud lingers
In February, acting Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the military operation in Grozny was over.
Thousands and thousands of soldiers, rebels and civilians had died. But still, violence occurs. The United Nations said last week that more than 320,000 Chechen refugees are still living in camps or with friends or relatives, unable to return to their homes because of unsafe conditions.
Irina and Aniska made it out alive, and ended up in a place they had scarcely heard of: the gambling capital of the world. A place where, Irina notes with some amazement when asked what she likes best about Las Vegas, "fruit is available in every market."
Neither had ever planned on leaving their comfortable homes, nor losing their husbands, nor becoming maids in America, nor loathing the one person who could understand her suffering.
"When people come out of so much trauma, it sometimes works itself out on another person," Lynch said.
Irina and Aniska have a history that unites them in lost dreams, in bloodshed, in death, in desperation. They have a relationship rooted in conflict and terror. They have a past.
And they have the freedom to hate it.
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