Zinky Boys (14 page)

On the 30th I took off my ear-rings and ring before I went to work. For some reason I just couldn't bear to wear them.

That was the day he was killed.

I only went on living after his death thanks to my brother. For a whole week he slept by my bed like a dog, watching over me, because all I wanted to do was run to the balcony and throw
myself out of our seventh-floor window. When the coffin was brought into the sitting-room I lay on it, measuring it with my arms over and over again. Three foot, six foot, six and a half, because that's how tall he was. Was it long enough for him? I talked to the coffin like a madwoman: ‘Who's there? Is it you, my love? Who's there? Is it you, my love? Who's there? Is it you, my love?' The coffin was already sealed when they brought it so I couldn't kiss him goodbye, or stroke him one last time. I don't even know what he's wearing.

I told them I'd choose a place for him in the cemetery myself. They gave me a couple of injections and I went with my brother. There were already some ‘Afghan' graves in the central alley.

‘That's where I want my son to be — he'll be happier with his friends.'

The man who was with us, some boss or other, shook his head. ‘It's forbidden for them to be buried together. They have to be spread about the rest of the cemetery.'

That was when I exploded! ‘Don't get so angry, Sonya, don't get so angry,' my brother tried to calm me down. But how can I not be angry?

When I saw their Kabul on TV I wanted to get a machine-gun and shoot the lot of them. I'd sit there ‘shooting' until, one day, it showed one of their old women, an Afghan mother, I suppose. ‘She's probably lost a son, too,' I thought. After that I stopped ‘shooting'.

I'm thinking of adopting a boy from the children's home, a little blond chap like Sasha. No, I'd be frightened for a boy, he'd only get killed, a girl would be better. The two of us'll wait for Sasha together … I'm not mad, but I am waiting for him. I've heard of cases where they've sent the mother the coffin and she's buried it, and a year later he's home, alive, wounded but alive. The mother had a heart attack. I'm still waiting. I never saw him dead so I'm still waiting … '

Major, Propaganda Section of an Artillery Regiment

I won't begin at the beginning. I'll begin from when everything started to collapse.

We were on the road to Jalalabad. A little girl, about seven, was standing by the side of the road. She had a broken arm hanging down, like the arm of an old rag doll dangling by a bit of thread. Her olive eyes stared and stared at me. I jumped out of the car to pick her up and take her to our hospital but she was in a state of sheer terror, like a little wild animal. She leapt away from me screaming, with her little arm still dangling, looking as though it would drop off at any moment. I ran after her, I was shouting too. I caught up with her and clutched her to me, stroked her. She started biting and scratching, then shaking, as though some other wild animal had caught her. I suddenly realised she thought I was going to kill her.

A stretcher went past with an old Afghan woman lying on it, smiling.

‘Where's she been wounded?' someone asked.

‘In the heart,' the nurse answered.

I went to Afghanistan full of enthusiasm. I thought I could do something useful out there. I expected to be needed by the people. Now all I remember is how the little girl ran away from me, trembling, how frightened she was of me. It's something I'll never forget.

I never dreamt about the war while I was there. Now I'm scared to go to sleep at night. I keep chasing that little girl with her olive eyes and her dangling arm …

‘Do you think I ought to see the shrink?' I asked some of the lads.

‘What for?'

‘About being afraid to go to sleep.'

‘We're all afraid to go to sleep.'

I don't want you to think we were supermen, with cigarettes clenched between our teeth, opening cans of bully beef over the bodies of the enemy and carelessly eating water-melons after battle. That image is utter rubbish. We were ordinary boys and
any other boys could have taken our place. When I hear people accusing us of ‘killing people over there' I could smash their faces in. If you weren't there and didn't live through it you can't know what it was like and you have no right to judge us. The only exception was Sakharov. I would have listened to him.

No one can understand that war. We were left to sort the whole thing out on our own. Now we're expected to feel guilty and justify ourselves. To whom? may I ask. We were sent by our leaders and we trusted in them.
Don't confuse those who sent us with those who were sent.
A friend of mine, Major Sasha Krivets, was killed. Go and tell his mother, or his wife, or his children, that he's guilty. ‘You're in good condition,' the doctor told me. How can we be in good condition after what we've been through?

The idea of the Motherland seemed completely different over there. We didn't even use the term, we called it the ‘Union' instead. ‘Say hello to the Union,' we'd tell the boys going home.

We assumed there was something big and strong behind us which would always be there to defend us. Once, I remember, we'd returned to barracks after a battle, with many dead and wounded, and in the evening we switched on TV, just to relax and find out what was going on back home. A huge new factory was being built in Siberia; the Queen of Britain had given a luncheon for some VIP; a gang of teenagers had raped two schoolgirls in Voronezh, out of boredom. Some prince had been killed in Africa … We realised we weren't important and that life at home was going on as usual. Suddenly Sasha Kuchinski exploded. ‘Turn it off!' he shouted. ‘Or I'll blow the thing to bits!'

After battle you make a report by walkie-talkie: ‘6 three zero zeroes and and 4 zero twenty-ones,' or whatever. ‘Three zero zero' is the code for ‘wounded'; ‘zero twenty-one' means ‘fatality'. You look at a dead soldier and think of his mother. I know her son's dead, you think, and she doesn't — yet. Could she sense it? It was even worse if someone fell into the river or a ravine and the body wasn't found. The mother would be told he was ‘missing'.

This was the mothers' war, they were the ones who did the fighting. The Soviet people in general didn't suffer much. They were told we were fighting ‘bandits'. But why couldn't a regular
army, 100,000 strong, with all the latest equipment, defeat a few disorganised bandits after nine long years? You can't imagine the power and accuracy of our ‘Grad' and ‘Hurricane' jet-propelled rocket-launchers: they make telegraph poles fly about like matchsticks and all you want to do is crawl into the ground like a worm. All the so-called bandits had were those Maxim machine-guns, the sort you see only in old films. Later, I admit, they got Stinger missiles and Jap non-recoil automatics, but still …

We'd bring in POWs, skinny exhausted men with big peasant hands. They weren't bandits, just ordinary people.

It didn't take us long to understand they didn't want us there, so what was the point of our being there? You'd go past abandoned villages with smoke still curling over the log-fires, you could smell food cooking … Once I saw a camel dragging its insides after it, as though its humps were uncoiling. I should have finished it off, I know, but I couldn't, I have a natural dislike of violence. Someone else might well have shot a perfectly
healthy
camel, just for the hell of it. In the Soviet Union that kind of behaviour means gaol, but over there you'd be a hero for ‘punishing bandits'. Why is it that seventeenand eighteen-year-olds find it easier to kill than thirty-year-olds, for example? Because they have no pity, that's why. When the war was over I noticed how violent fairytales were. People are always killing each other, Baba Yaga even roasts them in her oven, but the children are never frightened. They hardly ever even cry!

We wanted to stay normal. I remember a singer who came to entertain us troops. She was a beautiful woman and her songs were very moving. We missed women so much — I was as excited to see her as if she were a member of my family. Eventually she came on stage. ‘When I was on my way here,' she announced, ‘i was allowed to use a machine-gun. I can't tell you how I enjoyed firing that thing.' She started singing, and when it came to the refrain she urged us to clap in time: ‘Come on boys, let's hear you now!' No one clapped. No one made a sound. She walked off stage and the show was abandoned. She thought she was some kind of supergirl come to visit superboys. But the fact was that there were ten or fifteen empty bunks in those boys' barracks every month, with the occupants lying in the morgue. The other
lads arranged letters from their mothers or girlfriends diagonally across the sheet — it was a kind of tradition.

The most important thing in that war was to survive — to avoid getting blown up by a mine, roasted in a tank or shot by a sniper. For some, the next most important thing was to take something back home, a TV or a sheepskin coat, for example. There was a joke that people back home got to know about the war through the commission shops, where things like that fetched a good price. In winter you see all the girls in their Afghan sheepskins — they're very trendy just now.

All us soldiers had amulets round our necks, charms our mothers had given us. When I got home my mother confessed, ‘I didn't tell you, Kolya, but I had a spell cast over you, that's why you've come home safe and sound.' She'd actually taken a lump of earth from our garden to the local witch!

When we went on a raid we'd pin a note to the upper part of our body and another to the lower part, so that if we were blown up by a mine one or the other would be found. Or else we wore bracelets with our name, number and blood group engraved on them. We never said Tm going … ' always ‘I've been sent … ' And we never said the word ‘last':

‘Let's go and have a last drink.'

‘Are you crazy? There's no such word! Final, ultimate, fourth, fifth, anything, but not that word!'

Superstition was rife. For example, if you shaved, or had your photo taken before going on an operation, you wouldn't come back alive. War has a strange logic of its own. The blue-eyed boys, determined to be heroes, were always the first to die. ‘I'm going to be a hero!' you'd hear someone say, and he'd be killed next time out. In action we relieved ourselves where we lay. There's a soldier's saying that goes, ‘It's better to roll in your own shit than to be blown into shit by a mine.' (Excuse my language.) Most fatalities occurred during the first or last month of a tour of duty. The early ones were due to curiosity, the late ones to a kind of blunting of the self-preservation instinct.

Joke: An officer in Afghanistan goes back home on army business. He goes to the hairdresser.

‘How are things in Afghanistan?' she asks him.

‘Getting better,' he replies.

A few minutes later she asks him again: ‘How are things in Afghanistan?'

‘Getting better.'

A little while later: ‘How are things in Afghanistan?'

‘Getting better.'

Eventually he pays and goes. ‘Why did you keep asking him the same question?' her colleagues ask her.

‘Whenever I mentioned Afghanistan his hair stood on end and it was easier to cut.'

I've been home three years and I still yearn to go back. Not to the war, or the place, but to the men I lived and worked with. When you're there you can't wait to get home, but when the day comes you're sorry and go around collecting your friends' addresses.

Valeri Shirokov, for example. He was a slim, delicate chap, but with a soul of iron. He never said an unnecessary word. At one time we had a real miser with us, who did nothing but hoard, buy, sell, and barter. One day Valeri went up to him, took 200 foreign currency vouchers out of his wallet, tore them up into little pieces before his very eyes, and then left the room without saying a word.

Or Sasha Rudik. I saw the New Year in with him on a raid. We made a Christmas tree out of guns stacked in a pyramid and hung grenades on them instead of presents. We wrote ‘Happy New Year!!!' in toothpaste on the rocket-launcher, with three exclamation marks for some reason. He was a good painter. I've still got a landscape of his, with a dog, a girl and maple trees, painted on a sheet. He never did mountains — they soon lost their charm for us. If you asked men there what they missed most they'd answer: ‘I'd like to walk in the woods, swim in the river, drink a whole jug of milk.'

Or Sashik Lashuk. He was a decent lad who wrote home often. ‘My parents are old,' he'd say. ‘They don't know I'm here. I've told them I was posted to Mongolia.' He arrived with his guitar and left with it, too.

No two of us were alike, so don't think we were all the same over there. To begin with the media kept quiet about us, then we
were all heroes for a time, and now we're being knocked off our pedestals again so we can be forgotten about. One chap might throw himself on a mine to save the lives of men he didn't even know, while another would come to you and say: ‘Look, I'll do your laundry for you if you want, but don't send me into action.'

Our KamaZ trucks would drive around with the names of cities written on them — ‘Odessa', ‘Smolensk', ‘Leningrad'. Others might say ‘I want to go home to Alma-Ata', etc. When an Odessan or Leningrader met someone from his home town they'd hug each other like brothers. And here, back home, we're like brothers too. After all, if you see a young man hopping down the road on crutches, wearing a nice shiny medal, he's obviously one of us. We might sit down on a bench and have a smoke, and chat all evening. We're all suffering from a wasting disease, you know. Over there it showed itself as a mismatch between our weight and our height, but here, back home, it's a mismatch between our feelings and our ability to express them in what we say and do.