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Authors: Svetlana Alexievich

Zinky Boys (24 page)

BOOK: Zinky Boys
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But this friend of mine picks up the paper. ‘They have returned from captivity,' he reads, and starts swearing.

‘What's up with you?' I ask.

‘I'd put 'em all up against the wall and shoot them myself!'

‘Haven't you seen enough blood already?'

‘They make me sick, those traitors. We were getting our arms and legs blown off while they were going round New York looking at skyscrapers.'
¶

Over there we were so close I never wanted to be away from him. Now I'd rather be alone. Loneliness is my salvation. I enjoy talking to myself.

‘I hate that man. I hate him.'

‘Who?'

‘Me!'

I'm scared to go out of the house. I'm scared to touch a woman. I'd be better off dead, then they'd have put up a memorial plaque at my old school and make a hero out of me …

How we do go on about heroes and heroism! Everyone wants to be a hero. Well, I didn't. I didn't even know there
were
Soviet forces in Afghanistan. I wasn't interested — I was in love for the first time. Now I'm scared to touch a woman, even when I'm
jammed against one in a crowded trolley-bus. I've never admitted that to anyone. I can't relate to women now. My wife left me. It was strange, the way that happened. I burnt the kettle. It was smouldering away on the gas and I sat and watched it getting blacker and blacker. My wife came home from work.

‘What have you burnt this time?' she asked.

‘The kettle.'

‘That's the third one … '

‘I like the smell of burning.'

She slammed the door and left, two years ago now, which is when I started being afraid of women. A man should never let a woman know too much about him. They'll listen kindly to what you have to say and condemn you later, behind your back …

‘What a night! You were shouting again, killing someone all night long.' That's what my wife used to say.

I never got round to telling her about the sheer joy of our helicopter pilots when they were dropping their bombs. It was ecstasy in the presence of death.

‘What a night! You were shouting again … '

I never told her how our lieutenant was killed. On patrol one day we came to a stretch of water and stopped the vehicles.

‘Halt!' he shouted and pointed to a dirty bundle lying near the water-line. ‘Is it a mine?'

The sappers came and picked it up: the ‘mine' began to cry. It was a baby.

What to do with it? Leave it? Take it with us? ‘We can't abandon him,' the lieutenant decided. ‘He'll die of cold. I'll take him to the village. It's just nearby.'

We waited an hour. The village was 20 minutes away there and back.

We found them lying in the village square. The lieutenant and his driver. The women had killed them with their hoes …

‘What a night! You were shouting and killing someone all night long!'

Sometimes I even forget my name and address, or what I'm meant to be doing. You pull yourself together, try and start living again …

I leave home and immediately start worrying. Have I locked
the door or haven't I? Did I turn the gas off? I go to sleep and wake up wondering if I set the alarm-clock. When I go to work in the morning and meet my neighbour, I can't remember if I've said Good Morning to him or not?

As Kipling said:

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!'

When she married me my wife said: ‘You've come back from Hell, from Purgatory, I shall save you.' In fact I'd crawled out of a dung-heap. And now I'm afraid to touch a woman. When I went to Afghanistan the girls here were in long dresses — now they're all in short ones. I can't get used to it. I asked her to wear a long dress, but first she laughed, then she got angry. That's when I began hating myself.

What was I talking about? Oh yes. About my wife's long dresses. They're still hanging in the cupboard. She never bothered to come and fetch them.

And I still haven't told her about …

Major, Battalion Commander

I've been an army man all my life. True soldiers think in a particular way, which doesn't include asking questions like whether this or that war is just or unjust. If we were sent to fight, that in itself meant it was both just and necessary. I always made a point of personally explaining to my men how important the defence of our southern borders was. I gave them my own ideological grounding, you could say, in addition to their twice-weekly political education lectures. How could I admit to doubts? The
army won't tolerate free-thinking; once you're in harness you live by command. From morning to night.

I never once saw a portrait of Tsiolkovsky [a Russian philosopher, scientist, and pioneer of the Soviet space programme], for example, or Tolstoy, on the barracks walls. What you'd find were pictures of people like Nikolai Gastrello and Alexandr Matrosov, heroes of our Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. Once, when I was a young lieutenant I hung up a picture of Romain Rolland in my room — I'd cut it out of some magazine or other. The CO came round.

‘Who's that?' he said.

‘Romain Rolland, a French writer, Comrade Colonel.'

‘Well, take your Frenchman down, and be quick about it! Haven't we got enough heroes of our own?'

‘But Comrade Colonel … '

‘Dismiss! You'll go straight to the depot and come back with Karl Marx.'

‘But he was a German.'

‘Silence! 48 hours' arrest!'

Who cares about Marx? I myself used to point out to my men how useless foreign machinery was. ‘What good is this foreign car? It'll fall to bits on our roads!
Our
industry and
our
cars and
our
people are the best!' It's only now — and I'm in my fifties — I'm beginning to realise that Japan might make a higher-quality machine-tool, the French might be better at producing nylon stockings, and Taiwan has the prettiest girls.

I dream I've killed a man. He's down on all fours, he won't lift his head. I can't see his face (and yet, however often I have this dream he always has the same face). Calmly I shoot him. I see his blood. I shout out, wake up and remember the dream …

The war is now being described as a ‘political mistake', a ‘crime', and ‘Brezhnevite adventurism'. That doesn't alter the fact that we had to fight, kill and be killed.
‘Judge not, that ye be not judged!'
What were we there to defend? Was it the April Revolution? No, even at the time I didn't think so, although I was terribly torn inside. So I tried to convince myself we were defending our garrisons and our own people there.

I remember paddy-fields on fire — war is the ally of fire — and
peasants running away. You never see Afghan children crying. They're skinny and small and you can never guess how old they are, with their little legs sticking out of those wide trousers they wear.

You always had the feeling that someone was trying to kill you. It's something you never get used to like the melons and watermelons, which are enormous there, and so ripe they burst if you poke them with a bayonet. Dying is simple, killing is much harder. We never spoke of our dead. That was one of the rules of the game, if I can put it like that.

I always put a letter to my wife in my pocket before I went into action. A goodbye letter. ‘Drill a hole in my revolver and give it to our son,' I wrote. And I had to take letters out of the pockets of my lads, and photos: Tanya from Chernigov, or Mashenka from Pskov, taken in provincial studios, all very similar, with those well-worn phrases painstakingly written on them: ‘Write soon, my love, to your waiting dove', or ‘Sent with a kiss for the darling I miss'. Sometimes they lay on my desk like playing-cards, the faces of those simple Russian girls …

I can't adjust to this world. I tried, but it didn't work. My blood pressure shot up — I need the stress, the edge, that contempt for life which sends the adrenalin racing round my veins. I need that fast pace, the excitement of going into attack … The doctors diagnosed clogged-up arteries.

I'd like to go back there, but I don't know how I'd feel about it all now. The broken-down and burnt-out old tanks and APCs — is that really all that's left of us there now?

I went to the cemetery, to walk round the Afgantsi graves. I met one of the mothers there.

Go away, major! You're old and grey. You're alive. My son's lying here, he died too young to shave.'

A friend of mine died not long ago. He'd served in Ethiopia and the heat ruined his kidneys. All his experiences over there died with him, but another friend told me what went on in Vietnam, and I knew others who served in Angola, Egypt, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968. Now we go fishing, look after our gardens and live comfortably on our pensions …

I had one lung removed in Kabul. Near Khmelnitsky, though,
there's a hospital for long-term casualties who've been rejected by their families or who just can't face going home. One of them still writes to me. I had a letter from him not long ago. ‘I'm lying here with my arms and legs gone. When I wake up in the morning I don't know if I'm a man or an animal. Sometimes I want to mew or bark. I have to bite my tongue.'

I need that pace, the excitement of going into battle. But who's the enemy now? I couldn't stand up in front of my lads nowadays and lecture them about how we're the finest and fairest in the world. But I still maintain that that was what we were aiming at. We failed. But why?

Private, Artillery Regiment

We didn't betray our Motherland. I did my duty as a soldier as honestly as I could. Nowadays it's called a ‘dirty war', but how does that fit in with ideas like Patriotism, the People and Duty? Is the word ‘Motherland' just a meaningless term to you? We did what the Motherland asked of us.

Nowadays they say we were an occupying force. But what did we take away with us, except for our comrades' coffins? What did we get out of it, apart from hepatitis and cholera, injuries and lives crippled in all senses of the word? I've got nothing to apologise for: I came to the aid of our brothers, the Afghan people. And I mean that. The lads out there with me were sincere and honest. They believed they'd gone to do good — they didn't see themselves as ‘misguided fighters in a misguided war', as I saw it described recently. And what good does it do, trying to make out we were simply naïve idiots and cannon-fodder? Who does that help? The so-called ‘truth-seekers'? Well, remember what Jesus said when he was examined by Pontius Pilate:

‘“To this end was I born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.'”

‘Pilate asked, “What is truth?'”

A question which is still waiting for an answer.

I have my own truth and it's this: that we were innocent, however naïve our faith may have been. We thought the new
government would give the land they had taken from the old feudal barons to the peasants, and the peasants would accept it with joy — but they never did accept it! We thought the tractors, combines and mowers we gave them would change their lives, but they destroyed the lot! We thought that in the space age it was absurd to think about God — we even sent an Afghan lad into space: ‘Look, there he is, up there where your Allah lives!' we said.

But Islam was totally unshaken by our modem civilisation. It was all illusion, but that's the way it was, and it was a special part of our lives which I treasure and don't want destroyed or tarnished.

We protected each other in battle, threw ourselves between our friend and the mortar coming straight at him. You don't forget something like that.

I wanted my homecoming to be a ‘surprise' but worried about the shock to my mother, so I phoned: ‘Mum, I'm alive, I'm at the airport!', and heard the receiver crash to the ground.

Who says we lost the war? Here's where we lost it, here, back home, in our own country. We could have won a great victory here too. We came back as strong as steel forged in the fire, but we weren't given the chance — or the power. Every day someone or other scrawls the same protest over the war memorial: ‘Put it in your Army HQ where it belongs!' And my eighteen-year-old cousin doesn't want to go into the army ‘to obey a lot of stupid or criminal orders'.

What is truth?

There's an old woman doctor living in our block of flats. She's seventy. As a result of all these articles nowadays, the revelations, exposes, speeches, the avalanche of truth crashing down on us, she's gone mad. She opens her ground-floor window and shouts: ‘Long live Stalin! Long live communism — the glorious future of all Mankind!' I see her every morning, no one bothers her because she's quite harmless, but sometimes I'm terrified.

Still, we didn't betray the Motherland …

A Mother

The door-bell rings. I rush to open it but there's no one there, I'd thought it might be my son, home unexpectedly …

Two days later there's a knock at the door. Two soldiers.

‘Is my son with you?'

‘Well, no … '

It got very quiet. I fell to my knees in the hall, by the mirror. ‘My God! My God! Oh my God!' I cried.

There was an unfinished letter on the table:

‘My dearest son, I read your last letter and was very pleased with it. There's not a single grammatical error, but two punctuation mistakes, like last time. “I think” and “I did” are subsidiary clauses which are not followed by a comma. You should have written: “I think you'll be proud of me” and “I did what Dad told me”. Now, don't be cross with your old Mum!

‘It's hot in Afghanistan, dear, so do be careful. You catch cold so easily.'

BOOK: Zinky Boys
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