Bondings copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2005

Mary and Marina will be friends forever, Mary says, God willing.  But they met each other for the first time today.  And they can’t understand a word each other says.  Sometimes you don’t need words, Mary says.  Sometimes feelings are enough.  This is the story of an extraordinary friendship, a friendship that transcends the boundaries of language and culture and the normal ways in which people meet each other.  Mary Healy is from Cork and Marina Farniyeva is from Beslan.  The two women met as a result of a horrific terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, last September.  Sometimes, even the most terrible circumstances can have positive outcomes, the women believe.
          It all started on September 1, 2004.  Mary was on holidays with her family in Spain, when news of the Beslan siege broke on television.  Terrorists had taken twelve hundred people hostage in a school and forced them at gunpoint into the gymnasium, where they had tied bombs to the ceiling.  For three days they were held without food or water until one of the bombs accidentally exploded and snipers took the opportunity to open fire on the terrorists.  Three hundred and thirty eight people were killed, many of them children and seven hundred people were injured.  Luckily, Marina’s son Georgy survived.  It was Jorge that captured Mary’s attention.
          ‘I saw Georgy on a video which was shown on the news, and he reminded me of my son,’ she tells me, wiping away the tears, as we sit down together, Mary, Marina and me, and their Russian interpreter.  We are in a room at the Clontarf Castle hotel where Debbie Deegan from ‘To Russia With Love’ has engineered this first meeting.  There is a camera crew filming the event and we are surrounded by lights.  It is the most extraordinary interview I have ever done, as not only is the whole thing being captured on film, but all of my questions to Marina have to be translated, and even though she addresses herself to me, as she pours forth a torrent of emotions, all I can do is nod sympathetically, for I don’t understand a word she is saying.  After the photographs have been taken, our interpreter tells us that Marina wants to know what she looks like.  ‘Do I look like a supermodel?’ she wants to know.          Marina is small, with dark eyes and dark hair and she is giggling and hugging Mary, who is blonde and blue eyed.  They show me pictures of their sons, who look surprisingly alike.  They could be brothers.
Mary tells her story first.  She sends a shiver down my spine with the very depth of emotion that she reveals, when she talks.
‘Georgy was roughly the same age as my son Ben,’ she says.  ‘And I assumed that he was dead, when I first saw him on television.  But on the Thursday, the news announced that the young boy from the video had been found alive.  I couldn’t believe it.  I tried to contact him through the reporter and I went on the internet, to no avail.  Trying to find him had taken over my life, because every time I looked at my son, I would think of Georgy.  From a mother’s point of view, I agonised for days, hoping that he hadn’t suffered.  To be honest, I don’t know how he survived.  I haven’t asked Marina, I feel it would be too painful.  But he said in the newspaper that he had kept telling himself to stay as quiet as a mouse.  And I thought to myself this child is meant for better things.’
‘What did you intend to do with him, if you found him?’  I ask.
‘I don’t know, all I wanted to do was to help him some way.  You can give money, but to me that wasn’t enough.  I wanted to make a connection and my son felt the same way.’
 A friend told Mary about Debbie Deegan’s charity, ‘To Russia With Love’.  Mary called Debbie and she called back to say that she was going to Beslan. 
‘I gave her a card to pass on and a gift for Marina and her son.  I was out on the morning that she rang from Russia, to say that she had found them, but I cried when I heard!  She brought back photos.  And I was able to send a parcel.  Marina sent a parcel back, and Georgy wrote a beautiful letter to my son.  The paper had run a photograph of Marina with Georgy, and I just felt that she must be very special, to have raised such a brave child.’
It is the beginning of a very long friendship, she hopes.
‘Because of that tragedy, I just felt so guilty.  Even when I park outside my own local school, I think about how you would deal with something like that, if it happened to you.’
At this stage, the two women know very little about each other.
‘All I know is that I wanted to do something,’ Mary says.  ‘We all want to do something about everything, but you can’t.  I just felt that if every family in Ireland helped a family, that would be a lot of people.  And part of it was to let them know that not everything is bad.  That there are people out there that are good.  And I wanted my son to learn that he is lucky in his life, but that he must also help other people.  I wanted these people to know that there is more good than evil in the world.’
I ask Marina to tell her story, the story of the three day siege.  At first, she cannot.  She asks for a break, and is clearly overcome with emotion.  When she returns, she speaks, but occasionally breaks down.  She tells me that she would have been with her son in the school, but she hadn’t been feeling well that day.  And Georgy was unhappy about her staying at home.  She had had a bad feeling about the day.  Twenty minutes later, the first shots were fired.  Immediately, all of the neighbourhood had rushed to the school and for the duration of the siege, nobody went home.  People offered to sell their houses, to pay whatever ransom was being demanded.  When it was all over, Marina had to search hospitals and morgues, but she found Georgy miraculously alive, despite having been next to the bomb when it exploded. 
‘When I actually saw Debbie for the first time and when she told me that somebody in Ireland is looking for me, somebody who is very concerned about the health and well being of my son, I was amazed and surprised and touched and shocked,’ she tells me, in Russian.  ‘I couldn’t imagine that this woman so far away could care about us.  And now that we have met, it’s just even more wonderful.  She is just like my sister now!’
www.torussiawithlove.ie