by Karim Talbi
BESLAN, Russia, Sept 2 (AFP) - The school where their children are held hostage is just 150 metres (yards) away, surrounded by soldiers and police, but the women in a state of shock gathered in the brand-new community centre do not look, preferring to bury their faces in their hands.
Lyuda, a 53-year-old widow whose 15-year-old daughter Zarema and 12-year-old son Amir are in the hands of the guerrillas, finds it hard to speak.
After arriving at 8 pm, she collapsed onto a bench where she has remained for five hours surrounded by neighbours who came to give her moral support.
In the morning she had taken her children to school shortly after classes were due to resume before going to the little shop where she works. There, a neighbour told her about the hostage-taking. She ran to the school but the area was already cordoned off by police after an initial shootout which claimed several lives.
Her family surrounded her -- her brother-in-law, her cousin, Now she waits, her hands clenched, head lowered, gaunt.
In the big room with cream-coloured walls and grey and white tiled floor, the families observe a Caucasian-style divide: the men, huddled around the bar, sip their tea in silence while the red-eyed women sit on chairs and benches around the central water feature, many of them hiding their faces in their hands.
Beside the cloakroom a doctor takes the blood pressure of men and women who form a little queue in front of him.
Further on, the cinema hall is three-quarters full of people, families of the hostages, friends or neighbours, sleeping or just sitting motionless with their eyes closed. A small television set on the stage is turned off, waiting for news programmes to resume. The only noise from outside is that of the television trucks and generators.
Lyudmila, who is Russian, waits for news of her son Anton, 9. "I'm tired, I don't want to talk," she says, lying flat out. "He's down there, we've got to wait."
An elderly man, Ilan, seems particularly overwhelmed. The grandfather of a little girl aged two-and-a-half, he saw her leaving for school with a neighbour who wanted to show her the start-of-term festivities. When the heavily-armed extremists arrived, the pair were ushered inside.
In the evening his son, father of little Regina, tried to approach the school but had to give up. The hostage-takers are vigilant and shoot at anyone who tries to get near them.
A few dozen metres away, an armoured personnel carrier blocks access to the school, which cannot be seen in the dark, as the street is not lit. Under the trees, other people wait on the rain-drenched ground, mute, huddled together. Among them soldiers, wearing long weatherproof coats, pass in silence.
Some 300 hostages, including 132 children, have been held in the school since Wednesday morning by a group of at least 17 armed extremists calling for the release of certain people held in Ingushetia -- a demand well-nigh impossible for the Russian authorities to agree to.
A guerrilla reached on the telephone by a journalist said the group belonged to a radical Chechen organization led by warlord Shamil Basayev.