Zinky Boys (11 page)

The door slammed and my husband came in. I was sitting with my daughter on the sofa. He walked across the room towards us in his boots, overcoat and cap, a thing he'd never done before — he's a tidy, orderly man who's spent his whole life in the army. He knelt in front of us: ‘My little ones, I have tragic news … '

Then I noticed people in the hall, a nurse, the CO, a teacher from my school, friends of my husband …

That was three years ago, and we still can't bring ourselves to open the suitcase full of his things that they brought with the coffin. They seem to have his smell about them, even now.

He died almost immediately from fifty shrapnel wounds. His last words were, ‘It hurts, Mama.'

What did he die for? Why him? He was so affectionate, so kind. These thoughts are slowly killing me. I know that I'm dying — there's no sense in going on. I force myself to be with people, I take Sasha with me, I talk about him. Once I gave a talk at the Polytechnic and afterwards a student came up to me. ‘If you'd stuffed less patriotism into him he'd be alive today,' she told me. When I heard that I felt ill and fainted.

I gave that talk for Sasha's sake. He can't be allowed to just disappear like that …

Now they say it was all a dreadful mistake — for us and for the Afghan people. I used to hate Sasha's killers … now I hate the State which sent him there. Don't mention my son's name. He belongs to us now. I won't give him, even his name, to anyone.

Helicopter Pilot, Captain

A flash, a fountain of light, then night. Darkness. I open one eye and crawl along a wall. Where am I? In hospital. I check — are
my arms there? Yes. Further down I touch myself, I'm too short. I realise I've lost both legs … Hysteria. Desperate thoughts: death would be a better hiding-place than this ward. Death straightaway and then nothing. I wouldn't have to look at myself, or the rest of the world. Then I black out. I forgot all my previous life. Acute amnesia. I opened my passport and read my surname, place of birth and age: thirty. I read that I was married, with two boys. I try to remember their faces, but can't.

Mother was my first visitor. ‘I'm your Mama … ' she said. She told me about my childhood and schooldays, details like the overcoat she bought me when I was fourteen, the marks I got in class, how I loved her pea-soup. I listened to her and seemed to see myself from a distance, like an objective observer.

One day in the canteen the nurse called me. ‘Into your wheelchair! Your wife's come to see you!' I noticed a beautiful woman standing by the ward, but where's my wife? She
is
my wife.

She told me about our love for each other, how we met, how I kissed her the first time, our wedding, the birth of the boys. I listened and couldn't remember, but then it began to come back, faintly. When I tried to recall things I got terrible headaches …

I tried to remember the boys from photographs, but when they came they were so different, mine yet not mine. The fair one had got darker, the toddler was quite grown up. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw they were like me.

I've completely forgotten the war, all two years of it. The only thing is, I hate winter now. Mother tells me that when I was a boy I loved wintertime and snow more than anything else …

The lads talk about the war, and I watch films. ‘What was I doing there?' I wonder. They sent young kids out there, but I was an officer, a professional, I volunteered.

The doctors say that my memory may come back. When that happens I'll have two lives — the one they've told me about, and the one I know myself.

*
About one month's pay for a medium-grade civil servant.

†
All Soviet males are in principle liable to two years' compulsory conscription at the age of eighteen (three in the navy).

‡
The virgin lands of Kazakhstan and Western Siberia which have been intensively cultivated only since 1954.

§
Celebrated figures in the Soviet pantheon: Pavel Korchagin is the protagonist of
Hardened Steel
, a novel about Soviet industrialisation; Oleg Koshevoi and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, heroes of the war-time Resistance, were murdered by the Nazis.

¶
Korchagin: see p. 29 above. Vassily Chapayev was a hero of the civil war who died in action.

#
Ivan Krylov: early nineteenth-century writer, the ‘Russian Aesop'.

**
A popular novel on the school syllabus.

††
‘Radio Armenia', a fictional station, is the source of hundreds of such bitter, absurd or paradoxical social and political jokes.

‡‡
A pun: the Chekists were Lenin's forerunners of the KGB, who are also popularly called by this name.

§§
Three characters from Russian folklore: Zmei, a dragon, has many heads, Kashei is immortal (
Bessmertny
) and Baba Yaga is an old and ugly witch.

¶¶
Another figure from folklore: a beautiful young girl.

##
The
model Pioneer camp for gilded Soviet youth. The Pioneer movement is roughly equivalent to the Scouts and Guides, but far more politically inspired.

***
See p. 29 above.

†††
Until recently a compulsory subject at Soviet universities and indispensable for the acquisition of a degree.

‡‡‡
As part of the regime of military secrecy conscripts are generally sent to their units straight from training-camp.

§§§
Battles of the Russo-Japanese War. The war was subsequently seen as a cynical adventure initiated by the Tsar for his own political ends.

The Second Day

‘But another dies with a broken heart'

Author.
He phoned again today. From now on I'm going to call him my leading character.

Leading character.
I wasn't going to call you again, but I got on a bus and heard two women talking. ‘Fine heroes they were! Murdering women and children over there. They're sick. And just think, they get invited to speak at schools! They even get special privileges … ' I jumped off at the next stop and stood there crying. We were soldiers obeying orders. In wartime you can be shot for disobedience, and we
were
at war. Obviously it wasn't the generals themselves who killed women and children, but they gave the orders — and now they're blaming us. Now we're told that to obey a criminal command is itself a crime. But I trusted the people giving the orders. As far back as I can remember I've been taught to have faith in authority. No one ever told me to judge for myself whether or not to trust the authorities, whether or not to shoot. The message was hammered into us over and over again: have faith, trust us.

Author.
It was the same for all of us.

Leading character:
Yes, I was a killer and I'm covered in blood … But I saw him lying there, my friend who was like a brother to me, with his head cut off, and his arms, and his legs, and his flayed skin … I volunteered for the very next raid. I watched a funeral procession in a village, there were a lot of people there. The body was wrapped in white. I could see everything quite clearly through my field-glasses and I gave the order: ‘At the funeral — FIRE!'

Yes, I killed because I wanted to go on living and get home again. Why do you want to drag all this up again? I've only just begun to stop thinking about death night after night. For three years I spent my nights choosing between a bullet in the mouth and a noose made from my tie. Now I can smell that horrible stink of thorn bush again, it'll drive me mad eventually …
Author.
Why is it that, as he slams down the receiver again, I have the feeling that I've known him for a long, long time?

Sergeant, Infantry Platoon Leader

It's like in a dream, as if I've already seen this before in some film, and the feeling now is that I've never killed anyone …

I volunteered. I wanted to find out what I was capable of. I'm very ambitious. I went to university, but you can't show — or know what you're made of in a place like that. I dropped out in my second year. I wanted to be a hero and looked for a chance to be one. They say it was a man's war but the truth is, it was a boy's war. It was kids not long out of school who did the fighting. It was like a game for us. Self-esteem and pride were terribly important: can I do it or can't I?
He
can — can I? That's what we were worried about, not politics. I'd been preparing myself for a challenge of some kind since I was a young boy. My favourite author was Jack London. A real man had to be strong — and war makes you strong. My girlfriend tried to talk me out of it. ‘Do you really think writers like Bunin or Mandelstam thought that way?' she asked me. None of my friends understood me either. Some got married, others got involved in Zen or yoga and suchlike. I was the only one who went to the war.

The mountains above you, scorched by the sun, down below, a little girl calling her goat, and a woman hanging out her washing. Just like at home in the Caucasus … To tell the truth, I was a bit disappointed, until one night they shot at our camp-fire. I picked up the tea kettle and there was a bullet under it.

On route-marches the thirst was sheer torture and utterly humiliating. Your whole mouth dried up, it seemed to be full of dust and you couldn't work up enough saliva to swallow. We
licked up the dew and even our own sweat. I was determined to get through it. I caught a tortoise, slit its throat with a sharp stone, and drank its blood. No one else could face it. I was the only one.

I realised I was capable of killing. I had a gun in my hand. The first time we went into battle I noticed how some of the lads were in a state of shock. They fainted, or started vomiting when they realised they'd killed people or saw human brains or eyes being blown out. I could take it though. One of the lads was a hunter who bragged that before he joined the army he'd killed hares and wild boar, but he vomited with the rest of them. It's one thing to shoot animals, quite another to kill human beings. In battle you go as stiff as wood, cold reason takes over, you calculate … This is my gun and my life. The gun becomes part of your body, like a third arm …

It was a partisan war, and set-piece battles were rare. It was you against him. You grew as sharp as a lynx. You fire a burst — he stays still. You wait — what next? You feel the bullet whistle past you even before you hear the bang. You crawl from stone to stone, you hide, you race behind him like a hunter. Your body's like a coiled spring and you don't breathe until you pounce. If it comes to it you kill him with your gun-butt. You kill him and you sense you're alive! ‘I'M ALIVE!' But there's no joy in killing a man. You kill so you can get home safe.

No two dead bodies look the same. Water, for instance, does something to the human face that gives it a kind of smile. After rain they all look clean. Death in the dust, without water, is more honest, somehow. The uniform may be brand-new but there's a dry red leaf where the head should be, squashed flat like a lizard. You find bodies propped against the wall of a house: I saw one by a pile of nut-shells he must've just cracked, his eyes were open because there'd been no one to close them. You've only got 10–15 minutes to close the eyes after death — then it's too late … BUT I'M ALIVE! I saw another, curled up, with his flies undone, he was relieving himself. They lie there the way they were at the last moment of their lives … BUT I'M ALIVE! I need to touch myself to make sure …

Birds aren't scared of death, they sit and watch. Nor are
children, — they sit there too, and look on calmly, like the birds. They're curious.

Back in the canteen you eat your soup, look at your neighbour and imagine him dead. There was a time when I couldn't bear to look at photos of my family. When I got back from action I wouldn't look women and children in the face. Eventually you get used to it, go and work out next morning as usual — I was into weight-training. I was keen on fitness and wanted to be in good shape to go home. I admit I couldn't sleep, but that was because of the lice, especially in winter. We sprayed the mattresses with some kind of dust, but it didn't make much difference …

I only started to be afraid of dying when I was back home and my son was born. Then I was scared that if I died he'd grow up without me. I was hit seven times, I could easily have kicked the bucket, but I didn't. Sometimes I even have the feeling I didn't play the game to the end, or fight to the finish, rather …

I don't feel guilty and I don't get nightmares. I always chose honest combat — him against me. If I saw a couple of our lads beating up a POW with his hands tied behind his back, lying on the ground like a bundle of rags, I'd chase them away. I despised people like that. One chap started shooting eagles with his automatic and I socked his ugly mug for him. The birds hadn't done anything wrong, after all.

When my family asked what it was like over there I'd just say, ‘Look, I'm sorry, I'll tell you some other time.'

I graduated and now I'm an engineer. I just want to be an engineer, not a ‘veteran of the Afghan war'. I want to forget all that, although I don't know what will become of us, the generation that went through it.

This is the first time I've talked about it, talking like we're strangers in a train and getting off at different stops. Look, my hands are shaking, I'm upset for some reason. I thought I'd come out of it relatively unscathed. If you write about me don't mention my surname. I'm not afraid of anything, I just don't want to be involved again …

Civilian Employee

I was due to be married that December, but in November I went to Afghanistan. My fiancé laughed when I told him. ‘Doing your “solemn duty to defend the southern borders of our Socialist Motherland”, I suppose?' You know what he said when he realised I wasn't joking? ‘Aren't there enough boys for you to sleep with here?'