The funerals: A piece of white gauze and a strap of lint ran over Alina Tetova's mouth, the 12-year old's head speckled with abrasions. Flowers covered her legs, and the white cotton of the coffin rested next to her skin. A light rain fell as around her tiny body men feverishly dug up the earth.
Next to her lay her sister, Ira, 15. Both sisters had died in the school gym. Half a metre away from her head lay the hole into which she would be buried, moments later. A relative carried a picture of one of the girls. Most were speechless. The women moaned.
The stench of decaying bodies hung over the field a couple of miles outside Beslan yesterday as the town that fell victim to Russia's worst terrorist disaster began to bury their dead. The field sat next to another graveyard, its territory marked out by a fence. But here the graves were being dug and laid as the coffins arrived.
Two horns were played by men in grubby military uniform from the back of another procession. A line of cars, buses, coaches, military vans and ambulances stretched back down the road to the field. Each moved with slow reverence, carrying a victim of Friday's bloody and chaotic end to the school siege.
One procession was led by a man shouldering a wooden cross. Another green military van bore a picture of the boy occupant of the coffin inside, pinned to the inside of the windscreen. Across the field, the holes opened up. The first were nearest the road, some were already filled in. Others had only just been dug, the walls of the grave being reinforced by bricks. In one hole, a carpet had been laid to cushion the coffin from the crude earth beneath it.
Nobody spoke. At one grave, where Kazbek Kovoyev, 43, a handsome man shown with a fearsome moustache by the photo near his grave, was being laid to rest, an elder gave a speech in Ossetian. Then the men came forwards.
They laid their hands on the roof of the coffin, applying light pressure to the carpet that sat on top of it, together with flowers and a man's cloth cap. The wailing of the women increased in volume, before they stepped forward to repeat the men's ritual.
White straps then slowly laid the coffin to rest in its grave.
Camera crews and journalists milled around. The private ritual of a Caucasus funeral had become part of a national tragedy. A mother sat on a plastic chair, some emergency workers stroking her face with a handkerchief, trying to calm her. The hole for Irina Atakhayeva, 37, was not deep enough when her body arrived. More men scrambled back in to throw out extra earth. It was a hurried process, the smell of the bodies and the enormity of grief speeding corpses into the earth.
Only 191 bodies had been identified by 5.30 p.m. yesterday, said an official at the main morgue in Vladikavkaz, where all the bodies from the siege were being taken. "If they are identified, they bury them," said one man in the field. "There are many adults here as they were fewer and easier to identify than the children, of whom there were many." But the children's bodies came in numbers all the same.
Two followed in swift succession. Alan Gaitov, a gentle-looking boy of about 12 being borne in an open coffin on five men's shoulders, his name etched on a wooden plaque. Immediately behind was Islan Khakidov, of a similar age, being laid to rest alongside a fine felt hat and a colourful book next to his head. A bizarre patina of open coffins, high-pitched wailing and quiet, thoughtful male contemplation filled the empty field. The road was littered with red roses, crushed beneath the wheels of the funeral processions.
Rossiya state television said 22 funerals were scheduled yesterday. Across the town, coffin lids leaned against the walls of houses. Men milled around, sitting on benches outside homes, participating in a seemingly universal wake. - (Guardian Service)