The Zone (4 page)

“Life, Comrade Lieutenant, races ahead of the ideal,” Fidel said.

The political instructor had a proud, handsome face and broad shoulders. In the army barracks he wasn’t much liked.

“Comrades,” Khuriyev said, “a great honour has befallen us. In these days, we guard the peace of Soviet citizens. For example, you there, Lopatin—”

“And why Lopatin? Why Lopatin? Always Lopatin, Lopatin. All right, so I’m Lopatin,” Andrei Lopatin said in a bass voice.

“What is the reason that you, Lopatin, stand at your post? So that the kolkhoz* workers in your native village, Bezhany, may sleep peacefully.”

“Political work ought to be concrete.” This had been explained to Khuriyev during courses in Syktyvkar.

“Did you understand, Lopatin?”

Lopatin thought a moment and said loudly, “I’d like to burn down that native village and the kolkhoz with it.”

Alikhanov did not join in the drinking. He went to the soldiers’ quarters, crowded with bunks. Then he pulled off his felt snow boots and climbed onto a top bunk.

In the neighbouring bunk, wrapped in a blanket, lay Fidel. Suddenly he sat up in bed and started talking. “Know what I was just doing? Praying to God. I thought up the prayer myself. Wanna hear?”

“Well, go on.”

Fidel lifted his eyes and began, “Dear Lord! You see this whorehouse, I hope? You understand what guard duty means, I hope? If so, let it be that I get transferred to aviation. Or else, if worse comes to worst, to a construction battalion. And also, see to it that I don’t drink myself to death. For as it is, the trusties have vats of moonshine, and everything goes against the Moral Codex for Building Communism.

“Dear Lord! What do You hate me for? Even though I’m a no-good shit, I’m clean before the law. After all, I’ve never stolen anything. I just drink. And even that not every day.

“Dear Lord! Do You have a conscience, or not? If You’re not a phoney, let it be that Captain Prishchepa kicks the bucket as soon as possible. But the main thing, get rid of this melancholy… What do you think, is there a God?”

“Unlikely,” Alikhanov said.

“And I think that while everything is
okay
, maybe He really doesn’t exist. But when your back’s against the wall, maybe He does exist. So maybe it’s better to establish contact with Him ahead of time.”

Fidel leant over to Alikhanov and said softly, “I would like to get into paradise. Since Constitution Day I’ve set that goal for myself.”

“You’ll get in,” Alikhanov assured him. “You don’t have much competition in the guard section.”

“That’s just what I think,” Fidel agreed. “Our crowd here is hard to beat. Thieves and thugs. No paradise for them. They couldn’t get into a disciplinary battalion. So maybe with them for a backdrop I could just squeeze in, as a non-Party member.”

Towards ten o’clock, the whole company was completely drunk. The next guard shift was chosen from among those who could still walk. Sergeant Major Yevchenko assured them that the cold would sober them.

Security men wandered through the barracks, dragging machine guns and guitars behind them.

Two soldiers had already been tied up with telephone wire. They were carried to the drying room and set down on a pile of sheepskin jackets.

The guards in the Lenin Room were playing a game called “The tiger’s coming”. Everyone sat down at the table. Drank down a glass of vodka. Then Lance Corporal Kunin would say, “The tiger’s coming!”

The players slid under the table.

“As you were!” Kunin commanded.

Then the players would crawl out from under the table. Again drink vodka. After which Lance Corporal Kunin said, “The tiger’s coming!” And everyone again crawled under the table.

“As you were!” Kunin commanded.

This time, someone stayed under the table. Then a second and a third. Then Kunin himself keeled over. He could no longer say, “The tiger’s coming!” He dozed, resting his head on the red calico tablecloth.

Around twelve, Instructor Volikov ran in, shouting, “Guard section, to your weapons!”

Soldiers gathered around him.

“There’s a drunken female somewhere in the kennels,” the instructor explained. “Maybe she wandered in from the deportee settlement.”

The settlement of Chir was located a few kilometres away from the Sixth Camp Subdivision. Deported “social parasites” lived there, mainly prostitutes and black-marketeers. In exile they continued not to work. Many of them were convinced they were political prisoners.

The boys crowded around the instructor.

“Dzavashvili has a condom,” Matytsyn said. “I saw.”

“One?” Fidel asked.

“Oh look, a scholar!” Volikov said, getting angry. “This one needs his own private condom! You’ll wait your turn.”

“A lowly condom won’t help,” Matytsyn assured them. “I know these floozies. They’ve got as many gonococci down there as dogs. Now, if it were made of stainless steel…”

Alikhanov lay there thinking how vile were the faces of his fellow servicemen. “God, where have I landed?” he thought.

“Brothers, follow me!” Volikov yelled.

“Are you men or animals?” Alikhanov said. He had jumped down from his bunk. “You’re rushing out in one platoon to some dirty broad?”

“We don’t lap up politics!” Fidel said, stopping him. He had managed to change into a khaki fatigue shirt.

“I thought you wanted to get into Paradise.”

“Hell is all right with me too,” Fidel said.

Alikhanov stood in the doorway. “We stand guard over every sort of carrion. And you’re all worse than the zeks! What, it’s not true?”

“Don’t start,” said Fidel, “Why all the noise? Just remember, people call me courageous.”

“Quit jabbering,” said the towering Gerasimchuk. And he walked out, bumping against Alikhanov with his shoulder. The remaining soldiers followed him.

Alikhanov cursed, crawled under the blanket, and opened a book by Miroshnichenko called
Clouds over Bryansk
.

Balodis the Latvian was sitting on an overturned cooking pot taking off his shoes. He monotonously tugged at his leg. And each time he did this, he hit his head on the corner of the iron bed.

Balodis served as cook. His chief concern was the larder. Fat, jam and flour were stored in it. Balodis carried the keys on him all day, and when he went to sleep he tied them with a string to his genitals. This did not help. The night shift had twice managed to untie the keys and raid the larder. Even the flour had been eaten up.

“But I, I did not go,” Balodis said proudly.

“Why not?” Alikhanov slammed the book shut.

“I have a sweetheart near Riga. You don’t believe me? Her name is Anelle. She’s crazy about me something awful.”

“And you?”

“And I respect her.”

“What do you respect her for?” Alikhanov asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What attracts you to her? I mean, what made you fall in love with her specifically, this Anelle?”

Balodis thought awhile and said, “I could hardly love every broad near Riga…”

Reading was out of the question for Alikhanov. He didn’t manage to fall asleep. He thought about the soldiers who had gone to the kennel, imagined the vile details of their bacchanalia, and couldn’t fall asleep.

Twelve o’clock struck, people were already asleep in the barracks. This was how the New Year began.

Alikhanov got up and switched off the loudspeaker.

The soldiers returned one by one. Alikhanov was sure they would start sharing their impressions, but they each went silently to bed.

Alikhanov’s eyes got accustomed to the dark. The surrounding world was familiar and disgusting. The dark, hanging blankets. The rows of boots wound with foot cloths. Slogans and posters on the walls.

Suddenly Alikhanov understood that he was thinking about the exiled woman. More exactly, that he was trying not to think about that woman.

Without asking himself questions, Boris got dressed. He pulled on some pants and a fatigue shirt. Grabbed a sheepskin jacket from the drying room. Then, lighting a cigarette by the sentry, he went out onto the porch.

The night had come down heavily, right down to the ground. In the cold gloom, one could barely make out the road and the outlines of the forest that narrowed to the horizon.

Alikhanov crossed the snowy parade ground. Beyond it, the kennel compound began. The hoarse barking of dogs on chains came from behind the fence.

Boris cut across an abandoned railroad branch line and headed for the commissary. The store was closed, but the saleswoman, Tonechka, lived next door with her husband, an electrician. There was also a daughter, who came to visit only during holidays.

Alikhanov walked towards the light of a window half-covered by snowdrifts.

Then he knocked, and the door opened. From the drunken haze of the narrow room, the sounds of an old-fashioned tango could be heard. Squinting from the light, Alikhanov walked in. In the corner was a Christmas tree, leaning to one side and decorated with tangerines and food labels.

“Drink!” said the electrician.

He pushed a wine glass and a plate of wobbling aspic across the table to him.

“Drink, marauder! Eat, you son of a bitch!”

The electrician then put his head down on the oilcloth, obviously completely exhausted.

“Much obliged,” Alikhanov said.

Five minutes later, Tonechka handed him a bottle of wine wrapped in a poster from the local social club.

He left. The door crashed behind his back. Instantly, his long, awkward shadow disappeared from the fence. And again darkness fell under his feet.

He put the bottle in his pocket. The poster he crumpled up and threw away. He could hear it turning over and opening.

When Boris got back to the wire fences of the kennel, the dogs again began snarling.

The kennel grounds housed a lot of people. The dog-trainers lived in the first room, which was hung with diagrams, work rosters, lesson plans, a shortwave radio band decorated with a sketch of the Kremlin tower. Beside these, photographs of film stars from
Soviet Screen
had been tacked up. The film stars smiled, their lips slightly parted.

Boris stopped on the threshold of the second room. There, on a pile of dog-trainers’ uniforms, lay a woman. Her violet dress was entirely buttoned up. For all that, the dress had been yanked up to her ribs, while her stockings had fallen around her knees. Her hair, recently bleached with peroxide, was dark at the roots. Alikhanov came closer, bent down.

“Miss,” he said.

A bottle of Pinot Gris stuck out of his pocket.

“Ugh, just you go away,” the woman said, tossing uneasily in a half-sleep.

“Right away, right away, everything will be all right,” Alikhanov whispered, “everything will be
okay
.”

Boris covered the table lamp with a sheet of official instructions. He remembered that both instructors were away. One was spending the night in the barracks. The second had gone on skis to the railway crossing to visit a telephone-operator girl he knew.

With trembling hands, he pulled out the red stopper and started to drink right from the bottle. Then turned suddenly – the wine was spilling down the front of his shirt. The woman was lying with her eyes open. Her face expressed extraordinary concentration. For a few seconds both were silent.

“What’s that?” the woman asked. There were coquettish notes in her voice, garbled by drunken drowsiness.

“Pinot Gris,” Alikhanov said.

“Come again?” the woman said, startled.

“Pinot Gris, rosé, strong,” he answered conscientiously, reading the label.

“One of them here said, ‘I’ll bring some grub…’”

“I don’t have anything with me,” Alikhanov said, flustered. “But I’ll find something. What may I call you?”

“Whatever. My mama called me Lyalya.”

The woman pulled down her dress. “My stockings are always getting unDONE. I DO them up and they keep getting unDONE… Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

Alikhanov had taken a step forward, bent down, and shuddered from the smell of wet rags, vodka and hair tonic.

“Everything’s fine,” he said.

An enormous amber brooch scratched his face.

“Oh, you swine!” was the last thing he heard.

He sat in the office without turning on the lamp. Then he straightened up, his arms hanging limp. The buttons of his shirt cuffs clicked.

“Lord, where have I landed?” Alikhanov murmured. “Where have I landed? And how will it all end?”

Indistinct, fleeting memories came to him.

…A square in winter, tall rectangular buildings. A few schoolboys surround Vova Mashbits, the class telltale. Vova’s expression is frightened, he wears a foolish hat, woollen drawers… Koka Dementiyev tears a grey sack out of his hand. Shakes a pair of galoshes out onto the snow. After which, faint with laughter, he urinates into the sack. The schoolboys grab Vova, hold him by the shoulders, shove his head into the darkened sack. The boy stops trying to break loose. It’s not actually painful…

The schoolboys roar with laughter. Among the others is Borya Alikhanov, Pioneer* section leader and straight-A student.

The galoshes lie there on the snow, black and shiny. But now he also sees the multicoloured tents of a sports camp on the outskirts of Koktebel. Blue jeans hanging out to dry on a clothesline. A few couples dancing in the twilight. A small and shiny transistor radio standing on the sand.

Boris draws Galya Vodyanitskaya close. The girl is wearing a wet bathing suit. Her skin is hot and a little rough from sunburn. Galya’s husband, a graduate student, sits on the edge of the volleyball court, in the judging stand. In his hand, a rolled-up newspaper shows white.

Galya is a university student in the Indonesian Department. She speaks words in a whisper that Alikhanov doesn’t understand. He repeats after her, also in a whisper, “
Kerom dash akhnan… kerom lanav…
”