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Authors: Svetlana Alexievich

Zinky Boys (21 page)

BOOK: Zinky Boys
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The way I was recruited was quite incredible. In 1982 I was in my third year of a correspondence course in the university philology faculty. I was summoned to the enlistment office:

‘We need nurses in Afghanistan. How do you feel about volunteering? You'd get one and a half times your normal salary, plus foreign currency vouchers.'

‘But I'm a student now.' After my training I'd worked as a nurse while studying to become a teacher, which was what I discovered I really wanted to be.

‘You're a member of the Komsomol,
*
aren't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Think it over.'

‘I don't need to. I want to go on studying.'

‘I advise you to think it over a bit longer than that. If you don't, we'll give the university a call and tell them what kind of Komsomolka you really are. The Motherland demands … '

My neighbour on the flight from Tashkent to Kabul was a girl returning from leave. ‘Have you brought an iron and a hot-plate with you?' she asked.

‘I thought I was going to a war … '

Oh God! Another romantic idiot! I suppose you like reading war-stories?'

‘I hate them.'

‘Why are you here, then?'

That bloody ‘Why?' followed me for my whole two years out there.

The clearing-centre was a long row of tents. In the canteen tent they served buckwheat porridge and handed out vitamin tablets you couldn't buy for love or money in the Soviet Union.

‘You're a pretty little thing. What are you doing here?' a middle-aged officer asked me.

I burst into tears.

‘Who's been upsetting you?'

‘You!'

‘Me?'

‘You're the fourth person today to ask me what I'm doing here.'

I flew from Kabul to Kunduz by plane, and from Kunduz to Faizabad by helicopter. Whenever I mentioned Faizabad the reaction was, ‘What? It's all shooting and killing there — you're a dead duck!' I saw Afghanistan from the air. It's a big and beautiful country, with mountains, and mountain rivers, which reminded me of the Caucasus, and vast open spaces like so much of our own country. I fell in love with it.

In Faizabad I was the theatre sister and also put in charge of the surgical ward. The field-hospital consisted entirely of tents. My very first operation there was on an old Afghan woman with a damaged subclavian artery. When I looked for surgical clamps I discovered there weren't any, so we had to hold the wound together with our fingers. When you touched the surgical thread it crumbled into dust — it hadn't been replaced since the end of the last war hi 1945.

All the same, we saved the old woman. That evening I looked into the post-op ward with the surgeon to find out how she was feeling. She was lying there with her eyes open, and when she saw us her lips started moving. I thought she was trying to say something — until she spat a gob of phlegm at us. I couldn't understand what right she had to hate us. I went rigid with shock: we'd saved her life and she …

The wounded were brought in by helicopter. You heard it and started running.

The temperature in the operating theatre rose to 40° Celsius. It was so hot you could hardly breathe; the cloth you wiped away the surgeons' sweat with was itself dripping into the open wound. A non-sterile orderly gave them drinks through a straw inserted
through the mask. There was a shortage of plasma, so a soldier was called to donate some. He lay down right there in the theatre and gave blood. The medical orderlies knew nothing about sterile conditions. Once I was racing back and forth between two tables when the lamp over one of them suddenly flickered off. An orderly changed the bulb with his sterile gloves and started to put his hands back into the wound.

‘Get out!'

‘What's the problem?'

Out! This patient has an open rib-cage! Out!'

Sometimes we were operating for 24 or even 48 hours at a stretch. If it wasn't the war-wounded, it was the self-mutilators, soldiers who shot themselves in the knee or fingers. A sea of blood and a shortage of cotton-wool …

Such men were generally despised, even by us medics. ‘There are lads getting killed out there, and you want to go home to Mummy? You think you'll be sent back home? Why didn't you shoot yourself in the head? I would, if I were you!' That was the sort of thing I used to say, I promise you. At the time they seemed the most contemptible of cowards; now I'm beginning to realise that perhaps it was a protest as well, and an unwillingness to kill other people.

I came home in 1984.

‘Do you think we should be out there?' I was asked, rather hesitantly, by a boy I knew.

‘If we weren't, the Americans would be!' I answered furiously. As if that proved anything!

At the time we thought about such questions amazingly little. We kept our eyes shut. Or rather, all we saw were our wounded, mutilated and horribly burnt patients, and we learnt how to hate, but not to think. I'd look out of the helicopter and see the mountain-sides covered with red poppies and other flowers whose names I never found out, and I realised I no longer loved all that beauty. In May, with its scorching heat, I'd look at the empty, dry earth with a kind of spiteful pleasure. ‘That's what you deserve! We're suffering and being killed because of you!' I thought I hated it.

Injuries from fire-arms, mines … The helicopters never stop
ped coming, or the boys being carried in on stretchers, some covered with a sheet.

‘Dead or wounded?'

‘Well, not wounded … '

‘What, then?' I turn down the edge of the sheet and see a skeleton held together by skin. We often had such cases from the remote outposts.

‘What happened to you?'

‘I gave him his tea and it had a fly in it.'

‘Who's “him”?'

‘I took a “grandad” his tea, and a fly flew out of it. They beat me up and didn't let me eat for a fortnight.'

Christ! So much blood being spilt, and they do this to a young soldier far from home.

In Kunduz two ‘grandads' forced a new recruit to dig a hole one night and stand in it. They buried him up to his neck, with only his head sticking out of the ground, and urinated over him all night long. When they dug him out in the morning he shot them both dead. The case was the subject of a special Order of the Day, which was published throughout the army.

Christ! So much blood, and they do this.

The things I'm telling you are all horrible, but I wonder why it's only the horror I seem to remember? There was a lot of friendship and mutual support out there, and heroism too. Do you think I was too prejudiced by that old Afghan woman who spat at us? There's more to that story, in fact … She was brought in from a village which our Spetsnaz had dealt with. She was the only one left alive. And if you want to go right back to the beginning, it all started when two of our helicopters were destroyed by machine-gunfire from that same village, and the pilots were finished off with pitch-forks. Who started it, and why, and when? We didn't try and work it all out, we were just so sorry for our own people.

One of our doctors was sent into action, to actually fight. The first time he came back he was crying. ‘All my life I've been trained to heal people, but today I killed them. How could I do that?' Within a month he was analysing his feelings quite calmly:
‘You start firing and suddenly it's exciting. Take that, and that, and that!'

Rats used to drop on to us at night, so we put muslin netting round our beds. The flies were as big as tea-spoons but we got used to them. Man is the most adaptable creature on earth.

The girls used to dry out scorpions and use them as jewellery. They chose big fat ones, and either stuck them on a pin or threaded them on to cotton. I spent my spare time ‘weaving', as I called it, unravelling the thread from parachute shroud-lines and sterilising it ready for stitching up wounds. When I came back from leave I brought with me a suitcase full of surgical needles, clamps and thread. Crazy! And this time I remembered to bring a hot-plate and my iron — so I wouldn't have to dry my wet gown with my body-heat.

At night we'd sit together, preparing cotton-wool balls and washing and drying the used gauze bandages. We were one big family and we guessed, even then, that when we got home we'd be a lost and unwanted generation. There was the eternal question, for example, of why so many women were drafted into Afghanistan for the duration? To begin with we were just a bit puzzled when dozens of ‘cleaners', ‘librarians' and ‘hotel workers' started arriving, often one cleaner for two or three prefabs, or one librarian for a few shelves of shabby old books? Well, why do you think? We professionals kept away from such women, although they didn't bother us personally.

I fell in love with a man there and we became lovers. He's still alive, although I've lied to my husband and told him he was killed.

‘Did you ever meet a live muj?' my younger brother asked me when I got home. ‘Did he look like a bandit and have a dagger between his teeth?'

‘I did. But he was a good-looking boy with a degree from Moscow University.' My brother imagined a mixture of a
basmach
and a mountain tribesman straight out of Tolstoy's ‘Hadji-Murat'.
†

Another question: ‘But why
did
you work two or three days and nights at a stretch? You were earning good pay for your eight hours' work. Why didn't you just go off duty?'

‘You don't understand a thing!' I'd say.

They didn't. But I know I'll never be needed the way I was needed there.

I saw the most incredible rainbows there, great high columns of colour all over the sky. I'll never see rainbows like those again, covering the whole sky.

A Mother

I was a happy young woman with two lovely boys. Yura was twelve years old when Sasha went into the army at eighteen.

‘I wonder where you'll be sent, Sasha?'

‘I'll go wherever the Motherland needs me.'

‘You see what a fine boy your brother is, Yura!' I said proudly. When Sasha's call-up papers came Yura ran to me:

‘Will Sasha be going to the war, Mum?'

‘Wars kill, my love,' I told him.

‘Just you see, Mum, he'll come back with a medal, the one “For Valour”,' and off he went to play with his friends, ‘fighting the mujahedin'. Rat-ta-ta-tat … Rat-ta-ta-tat … That evening he came home. ‘Do you think the war will be over before I'm eighteen, Mum?'

‘I hope so.'

Our Sasha's lucky — he'll be a hero. You should have had me first and then him.'

When we got Sasha's suitcase back all it had in it was a pair of blue underpants, a toothbrush, half a bar of soap and a soap dish. We were given a certificate of identification.

‘Your son died in hospital.'

One phrase goes round and round in my brain like a gramophone record: ‘I'll go wherever the Motherland needs me.'

They carried the coffin in and then out again as if it were empty.

When they were little, whether I called ‘Sasha!' or ‘Yura!' they'd
both come running. Now I called: ‘Sasha!', but the coffin was silent. ‘Where have you been, Yurochka?'

‘When you call him like that, Mum, I want to run to the other end of the world.'

He ran away from the cemetery, too, and we had a job finding him.

They sent us Sasha's four decorations, including his medal ‘For Valour'.

‘Look at this medal, Yura!'

‘I see it, Mum, but our Sasha can't.'

It's three years now since my son died and I haven't dreamt about him once. I go to sleep with his vest and trousers under my pillow. ‘Come to me in my dreams, Sasha. Come and see me!'

But he never does. I wonder what I've done to offend him.

I can see the school and the playground from my window, and Yura playing with his friends, fighting the mujahedin. But all I can hear is: Rat-ta-ta-tat … rat-ta-ta-tat …

1st Lieutenant, Interpreter

Two years were enough … I just want to forget the whole stupid nightmare. I never went there.

But the truth is, I did.

In 1986 I graduated from the military academy, took my accumulated leave and that summer went to Moscow to report for duty at the HQ of a certain important military organisation. It wasn't easy to locate. I eventually found the reception desk and dialled the three-figure number I'd been given.

‘Hello? Colonel Sazonov speaking.'

‘Good morning, Comrade Colonel! I am at your disposal. At the moment I'm down at reception.'

‘Ah, yes, I know … Do you know where you're being posted?'

‘To the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan]. Kabul.'

‘Didn't expect it, eh?'

On the contrary, Comrade Colonel!' And I was being completely honest, because for the previous five years it had been drummed into us that we
would
be going over there.

You know the movie image of an officer departing for war? The hurried preparations after an urgent phone call, the stiff-upper lip farewell to his wife and children before he strides to the waiting aeroplane, its engines roaring in the pre-dawn shadows? Well, it wasn't quite like that. My road to war was paved with bureaucratic documents. First I had to get my orders, my gun and my dry rations. Then, in addition to a certificate that said I had a ‘correct understanding of Party and Government policy', I required a service passport, visa, testimonials, instructions, vaccination certificates, customs declarations and ration cards. Eventually, however, I boarded my plane, settled down in my seat and heard a drunken major exclaim, ‘Forward! To the mines!'

The newspapers informed us that the ‘military and political situation in the DRA remains complex and contradictory'. Military opinion maintained that the withdrawal of the first six regiments was pure propaganda — there was no question of a total withdrawal of Soviet forces in the foreseeable future, and none of my fellow passengers doubted that the war would last out our tour of duty. ‘Forward! To the mines!' as the drunken major, already asleep, shouted again.

BOOK: Zinky Boys
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