Zinky Boys (16 page)

The girls I lived with were young waitresses and cooks, whose sole subject of conversation seemed to be roubles, foreign currency vouchers, and how to steal meat, smoked sausage or Bulgarian biscuits from the hospital kitchens. Before I arrived I imagined an elevating and inspiring atmosphere of self-sacrifice, with the womenfolk fulfilling their role of protecting and caring for our boys. If men were spilling their blood for the cause I would give my blood too! I realised just how wrong I was even before I left the clearing-centre in Tashkent. I sat in the plane and burst into tears. Life here was exactly the same as everything I was running away from at home. Vodka flowed like water at the centre. You know that song:

‘We dream of the grass at the cosmodrome

The green green grass that means we're home!'

Well, I felt as though I were flying into outer space. Back home everyone at least has their own home they can make into their little fortress, but we slept four to a room. The girl who worked as a hospital cook used to bring meat she'd stolen from the canteen and hide it under the bed.

‘Wash the floor!' she orders me.

‘I washed it yesterday, it's your turn today.'

‘I'll give you a hundred roubles to wash that floor.' I say nothing.

‘I'll give you some meat.'

I say nothing. Then she takes a bucket of water and empties it over my bed. They all burst into laughter.

Another girl was a waitress. Her speech consisted entirely of foul language but she loved the poet Marina Tsvetayeva [1892–1941, one of the three or four greatest Russian poets of the century]. When she came back from her shift she'd sit down and play patience: ‘Will I, won't I, will I, won't I?'

‘Will I won't I what?'

‘Fall in love, of course.'

There were real weddings out there, and love too, though not
much of it. Love usually stopped at Tashkent — after that it was ‘him to the left, her to the right'.

Tanya the Tank, as we called her on account of her build, liked to sit and talk into the early hours. She drank only pure alcohol.

‘How can you take it?' I asked her.

‘Vodka's just too weak, love! It doesn't do a thing for me.' When she went home she took five or six hundred postcards of movie stars she'd bought in the bazaars, where they were expensive. ‘Money spent on art is never wasted,' she told us proudly.

I remember another girl, Verochka Kharkov, sitting in front of the mirror with her tongue stuck out. She was worried about typhoid and somebody had told her that one of the symptoms was toothmarks on the tongue!

They hardly even acknowledged my existence. For them I was some idiot who carried test-tubes full of germs about. I was the chief bacteriologist at the infectious diseases hospital, and all I ever talked about was typhoid, paratyphoid, hepatitis and the like. Casualties didn't arrive at hospital straightaway — they might have been lying for up to ten hours, or even a day or two, in the mountain sand before they were located, with the result that open wounds became breeding-grounds for every kind of infection. I'd examine a patient in reanimation, for example, and find he had typhoid on top of everything else.

They died quietly. Only once did I see an officer crying. He was a Moldavian and the surgeon, who was also Moldavian, talked to him in their own language.

‘What's the problem, my friend? Where's the pain?'

That was when he began to weep. ‘Save me!' he begged. ‘I must live. I have a sweet wife and lovely daughter. I must get back to them … ' He would have died quietly too, if he hadn't heard his mother tongue.

I hated going to the morgue, where human flesh still mixed with earth was regularly brought in. I'd think of that meat hidden under the girls' beds … They'd put the frying-pan on the table shouting ‘
Ruba, Ruba!'
which means ‘Let's go!' in Afghan. It was so hot their sweat dripped into the pan.

I was seeing wounded soldiers and their microbes all day long — and you can't sell microbes, can you? At the army store you
could buy toffees, which I adored, for foreign currency vouchers. Once, I remember, someone gave me two raw eggs from the hospital kitchen, because we doctors went around half-starved (we survived on reconstituted potato and frozen meat which was tough, tasteless and colourless). I grabbed the eggs and wrapped them in a handkerchief to take them back to my room to make an onion omelette. I looked forward to that omelette all day. Then I saw a young lad on a stretcher in a corridor, waiting to be evacuated to Tashkent. I couldn't see what there was under the blanket, only his handsome face on the pillow. He looked up at me. ‘I'm starving,' he said. It was just before lunch and I realised he'd be taken away before they brought the big tubs of food up from the kitchens. ‘OK,' I said, and gave him the two eggs. I turned and left, not thinking to find out if he still had his arms and legs. I'd put the eggs on his pillow without breaking them or feeding him. What if he had no arms?

Once I was in a van for two hours with four corpses beside me, lying there in track-suits …

When I got back home to the USSR I couldn't bear to listen to music or chat with people in the street and the bus queue. I'd have liked to shut myself into my room with just the TV for company. The day before I left, the medical director of our hospital, Yuri Yefimovich Zhibkov, shot himself. In Afghanistan some officer showed me this passage from the French writer, Fourrier, and I copied it down: ‘The foreigner who happens to find himself in Afghanistan may consider himself blessed by God if he leaves that country healthy, unharmed and with his head still on his shoulders … '

I keep away from other Afgantsi — I'm always nervous they'll put me down. I have a very gentle character but I sometimes think that even I have turned into a cruel and aggressive person. We had to prepare young soldiers for their discharge back into the army. They'd hide in the hospital attics and cellars and we'd have to catch them and drag them out.

At the clearing centre the girls told me to whom you had to give a bottle of vodka in order to get a comfortable job. Those seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds taught me all sorts of things like that — and I'm forty-five.

At the customs I was made to strip stark naked. ‘What's your job?'

‘I'm a doctor — a bacteriologist.'

‘Your papers!' Then: Open your cases. Let's have a poke around … ' All I was taking home with me was the same old overcoat, blanket, bed-cover, a few hair-pins and forks I'd come out with. They piled it all up on the table, looked at it and sneered, ‘She must be mad — or a poet of some kind.'

I can't stand it back home either. It's worse than over there. There, when anyone got or brought something from home we'd all sit round the table and share it. The third toast was always drunk in silence, to ‘absent friends'. We'd sit there with the mice playing round our feet and in our shoes. At four in the morning we'd hear a howling noise. The first time I heard it I jumped up and shouted, ‘Wolves! Wolves!'

‘It's only the mullahs saying their prayers,' the girls laughed, but for ages after that I always woke up at four in the morning.

So I want to move on again. I've applied to go to Nicaragua. Someplace where there's a war going on. I can't settle down to this life any more. War's better than this. It gives you a justification — or an excuse — for anything you do, good or bad. It's incredible, I know, but that's the way I catch myself feeling sometimes.

A Widow

The moment I saw him I knew he was the one for me. He was a tall, good-looking boy. ‘He's mine, girls!' I asked him to dance the ladies' waltz, the one when the girls invite the gentlemen, and my fate was sealed.

I very much wanted a son. We agreed that if it was a girl I'd choose the name — I liked Olechka — and if it was a boy he'd choose between Artem and Denis. So Olechka it was.

‘Will we have a boy?'

Of course, just let Olechka grow up a bit.' I wish I'd given him a son too.

‘Lyudochka!' he told me, ‘don't get upset now, or your milk will dry up (I was breast-feeding) but I'm being posted to Afghanistan.'

‘Why you? You've got a baby daughter.'

‘If I don't go, someone else will have to take my place. “The party's wish is the Komsomol's command,” as they say.'

He was a perfect army type. ‘You don't discuss orders!' he used to say. His mother is a very dominant character and he got used to being obedient and submissive when he was young. Army life was easy for him.

We threw a goodbye party. The men smoked, his mother sat silent and I cried. The baby slept in her cot.

I met a madwoman in the street, a kind of witch, really — she was always wandering round the compound or the market. People said she'd been raped as a young girl, gone crazy and couldn't even recognise her own mother afterwards. She stopped by me.

‘They'll send you your husband back in a zinky,' she said. Then she laughed and ran away.

After that, I knew something would happen. I didn't know what.

I waited for him like the girl in that poem of Simonov's:

‘If you await me, I'll return … '

Sometimes I wrote and posted him three or four letters a day. I felt that I was protecting him by thinking about him and longing for him. He wrote back that army life in Afghanistan was the same as everywhere else. Trust in fate, he told me, don't worry and keep waiting.

When I went to visit his parents Afghanistan was never mentioned. Not a word about it from either his mother or his father. It was an unwritten rule. We were all too scared to say the word.

Then, one day, I was getting Olechka ready for nursery school. I'd just given her a kiss when I opened the door to two soldiers, one of them carrying my husband's small brown suitcase — I'd packed it myself. I had an urgent feeling that if I let them in they would bring something terrible into our home, but if I could keep them out everything would be as it had been before. They were pulling the door open and I was pushing it shut.

‘Is he wounded?' It was just a faint hope.

The military commissar came in: ‘Ludmilla Iosifovna, with the deepest sorrow we must inform you that your husband … '

I didn't cry – I screamed. I caught sight of my husband's friend,
Tolya, and threw myself at him. ‘Tolik, if you tell me it's true I'll believe it.'

He brought over the young cadet who was accompanying the coffin. ‘Tell her … ' But the boy was shaking so much he couldn't open his mouth.

Women came to kiss me. ‘Try to be calm. Give us your family's phone numbers.' I sat down and babbled out all the addresses and phone numbers, lots of them, all I could remember. Later, when they came across my address book, they found I'd got them all right.

We have a small, one-room flat, so the coffin was placed in the clubhouse. I threw myself over it. ‘Why? Why? What harm did you ever do anyone?' I cried and passed out. When I came to again I looked at that box and remembered the crazy woman's words: ‘They'll send him back in a zinky … ' I started shouting again. ‘I don't believe this is my husband. Prove it's him. There isn't even a little window for me to see him through. Who have you brought me? What have you brought me?'

His friend was fetched again. ‘Tolik,' I said, ‘swear that this is my husband.'

‘I swear on my daughter's life that this is your husband. He died immediately and without suffering. That's all I can say.'

I remembered something my husband had said: ‘If I have to die I hope I don't suffer.' It's us who are left who will suffer.

There's a big photograph of him hanging on the wall. ‘Take Daddy down for me,' my little girl asks, ‘I want to play with Daddy.' She puts her toys round his picture and talks to him. When I put her to bed at night she asks, ‘Who shot Daddy? Why did they just choose Daddy?' I take her to nursery school and when it's time to take her home she's in tears, ‘I'm not leaving school until Daddy comes to fetch me. Where's my Daddy?'

What can I tell her? How can I explain? I'm only twenty-one myself. This summer I took her to my mother in the country, hoping she'd forget him.

I'm not strong enough to go on crying day after day … I watch a man with his wife and child, three of them going somewhere together and my soul begins to scream … ‘If only you could get up for one single minute to see what a lovely daughter you've got.
This incomprehensible war is over for you, but not for me, and for our daughter it will never be over for she'll go on living after us. Our children are the unhappiest generation of all — they'll have to take responsibility for everything … Can you hear me?'

Who am I crying to … ?

A Mother

I always wanted a son. That way, I thought, I'll have a man of my own to love and be loved by. My husband and I got divorced — he left me for a young girl. I probably only fell in love with him in the first place because there was no one else.

My son grew up with my mother and me — we were two women and a little boy. I was always checking up to see who he was playing with. ‘I'm grown up now, Mum,' he'd complain when he came home, ‘and you're still treating me like a baby.'

He was as small as a girl, though, and skinny with it. He was a month premature and I couldn't breast-feed him. How could our generation be expected to produce healthy children? We grew up with air-raids, bombardments and starvation … He liked playing with girls — they accepted him the way he was and he didn't tease them. He liked cats, too, and used to tie ribbons to them.

‘Can I have a hamster, Mum? I love the feel of their soft damp fur,' he said one day.

I bought him a hamster, and an aquarium with lots of little fish. When we went to the market he started again, ‘Can we buy a day-old chick, Mum?'