Mikhail Evstafiev. Two Steps From Heaven
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© Copyright Mikhail Evstafiev
© Translated by Mikhail Evstafiev and Alyona Kozhevnikova
Email: photoobraz@hotmail.com
WWW: http://artofwar.ru/e/ewstafxew_mihail_aleksandrowich/ ? http://artofwar.ru/e/ewstafxew_mihail_aleksandrowich/
Date: 22 Feb 2002
Author's guestbook ? http://artofwar.ru/comment/e/ewstafxew_mihail_aleksandrowich/ensglishtraslation
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About the author
Mikhail Evstafiev graduated from the Moscow State University in 1985 with a
Master's degree in International Journalism, worked for two years as a
reporter for a news agency before volunteering to serve in Afghanistan.
During his two-year tour of duty in Afghanistan=he took part in combat
operations, worked as editor of a joint Soviet-Afghan radio station and
wrote for various Soviet magazines. He=spent as much time amongst the
'grunts' of war, out in the firing line, as with the generals. Besides
Afghanistan, he worked in different war zones including Bosnia, Tajikistan,
Nagorny-Karabakh, Georgia, Trans-Dniestria and Chechnya, covered the
break-up of he Soviet Union and two coup attempts in Moscow.
His work has been published in several books.
x x x
Because sentence against an evil work is not executed
speedily, therefor the heart of the sons of men is fully
set in them to do evil.
Ecclesiastes, 8:11
For God shall bring every work into judgment, with
every secret thing, whether it be good or it be evil.
Ecclesiastes, 12:14
Head muffled in a blanket, Sayeed Mohammed shivered in the snow,
touched his frostbitten feet with frozen fingers and whined like a forlorn
pup. It had been several days since he left the bomb-devastated village. It
was amazing that he was still alive, that he had not frozen to death during
the past night, which had been a particularly cold one. It must be the will
of Allah!
His cracked lips whispered: "In the name of Allah the merciful and
charitable. The "Lion of Panjsher", the wise Ahmad Shah Massoud has been
right, you should never believe the shuravi. The Russians had promised to
leave Afghanistan for good. Ahmad Shah opened the road to the north, go
ahead, "buru bahai!" Go back to where you came from! The mujaheddin won't
fire a single shot! Not touch a single infidel. Then why had the Russians
proceeded to bomb and shell poor Afghanistan after that? Why had they killed
so many people for nothing?
Sayeed had been caught by the air strike, too, he had not stayed with
his unit but headed for his native village to visit his family.
Finally he saw two kerosene lamps. Two specks of light. The one to the
left shone through the window of their house. The other one was their
neighbor's. Other families did not waste money on kerosene. He had lain
unconscious the whole night. And just as well that he did not regain his
senses earlier. If he had, he would have heard the cries and moans under the
ruined houses, including the voice of his youngest sister, crushed by clay
and rocks. When he came to, a noise like a roaring mountain torrent filled
his ears and its icy water crackled and rang, drowning out weak, dying human
voices. Semi-conscious and slightly disoriented, he remained alone with the
mountains and clouds that flowed across the sky like that phantom river, not
knowing what had happened to the village.
By evening, the moans ceased. There was no need to bury anyone. The
Russians had buried them all. Alive. Unsteady on his legs, Sayeed wandered
around the village which had been transformed into a large graveyard, hoping
at first to find at least someone alive, to dig them out, save them.
Useless. He recalled whose house had stood where, then sat for a long time
by the spot where his family had lived, crying beside the smoldering
timbers, which looked like small islands in the surrounding snow. There was
no sense in staying in the ruined village any longer.
Sayeed picked up a frozen flatcake, bit off a piece leaving the rest
for later, and hobbled down the beaten path, which led to the road. He
turned around and looked. The first time he had left here, people had stood
outside houses which were built in ascending tiers on the mountain slope,
children were on the flat roofs, all of them watching him, seeing him off to
war. Nobody would come looking for him. Nobody would even remember him. In
any case, who would believe that anybody could have survived such a terrible
scourging? Even the mountains and cliffs of Afghanistan cannot always
withstand such onslaught but crumble, fall, and shudder from the bombs
raining from the skies! What chance for mere mortals? And who would think
that the air strike would catch Sayeed Mohammed on the approach to the
village, that the shockwave would hurl the youth back some twenty meters and
that he would fall into a deep snowdrift, missing the sharp rocks? The
Kalashnikov and a full magazine were undamaged, Allah be praised. But Sayeed
did not dare to shoot himself. He hoped for a miracle. He hoped to encounter
some mujaheddin, get to a village or, should the worst come to the worst,
find some shuravi and attack them in order to avenge his family. But where
were they now, those Russians? His feet would not obey him, Sayeed fell many
times, crawled in the snow. He would freeze to death in the mountains and
his clan would come to an end, unavenged. What a stupid death. Why had he
not fallen in the last battle, why had he not gone straight to Paradise?
Sayeed Mohammed is an upstanding Muslim, he obeys the Koran, he prays five
times a day, he fights against the infidels, he knows that a mujahideen has
nothing to fear, that the holy war - jihad - is a direct road to Paradise.
That is what his older brother Ali had always said.
Ali had come back from Pakistan a completely different person. No
longer an impoverished, cowering village lad in galoshes, but confident,
wearing leather shoes with laces, in new clothes, with a submachine gun, a
wad of afghanis and a string of lazuli worry-beads in his hands. Oh, those
beads! It seemed as though the smoothly polished mineral absorbed all the
blueness of the Afghan skies. Ali nibbled a sugar cube, sipped tea and
clicking the beads spoke about Pakistan, about the jihad, about Ahmad Shah
Massoud, about the bloody regime in Kabul, about the hated shuravi who
wanted to enslave Afghanistan.
In time, Ali headed a whole unit, he was respected and somewhat feared.
Ali had made a lot of trouble for the infidel before being killed, sent many
Russian soldiers to their death. Ali had died like a real hero, in battle.
He slipped away from the Russians, brought his squad out of encirclement and
even managed to send the Russians a last greeting from Allah by cutting off
a whole group and giving them one hell of a pounding. He would have killed
them all if Russian reinforcements had not arrived. Ali became a martyr, and
that meant his soul went straight to Paradise, easily and painlessly, not
like those of other people, it just broke away from his body and flew off,
and now he was there, above the leaden sky, where it is always warm, where
it never snows, where there is a bounty of fruits and flowers, where
everyone drinks wine and loves beautiful women. In Paradise, a Muslim is
allowed all that was forbidden on earth. And Sayeed Mohammed would follow
Ali, he would not live to see his fifteenth birthday.
War is good. What would life be without war? He would never see
anything except his native village, toil all day, be hungry and sick. The
war had brought Afghanistan much grief, but it also made Sayeed one of the
mujaheddin, a warrior of Allah! Now all that was in the past. ....
The submachine gun pained his shoulder. How can a child's hands manage
it! It is not easy to compete with adults. His bullets did not reach the
mark, fell into the dust. Shame! Shameful enough to bring tears. They would
all laugh at him. Was it possible that this time, too, he would not kill
anyone? There they are, Russian soldiers, so close! They aren't shooting
back any more. They're out of ammunition. They're retreating from the
village. The mujaheddin are shooting accurately from all sides. One down,
now another. The third would be dead any moment now, and that would be all,
the fun would be over. He must hurry! Sayeed Mohammed braced himself,
targeted the third shuravi, pulled the trigger and wounded him in the left
leg. Finally! Yes, it was his bullet that found the soldier. No doubt about
it! The soldier fell, looked back, got up and lurched away. At Ali's command
the mujaheddin ceased fire, leaving the soldier to Sayeed Mohammed. He's
your game! He won't get far. Finish him off! The mujaheddin rose to their
feet from concealment, squealing with delight like children. Isn't it fun to
shoot at a moving target! To kill one of the infidels is a sacred task
"Aim at his back," advised Ali. "Got him! Good lad!" It looked as
though the fleeing soldier had received an invisible whiplash across his
back. The next shot made the soldier clasp his right arm against his body,
the bullet must have gone clean through. Sayeed Mohammed aimed again and
again, firing one shot after another, the shuravi was a tough one, he simply
wouldn't die. Fell, got up, went on. Another bullet struck, the soldier kept
crawling, they'd got him, he was squirming in agony. The final shot, and it
was over, the soldier lay motionless. "Let's go!" cried Sayeed Mohammed,
eyes shining with elation, slung the rifle over his shoulder proudly and
marched obediently after his brother. The soldier lay on his stomach. Blood
flowed from his nostrils. His face, his curly black hair, his tanned skin
and blood-spattered sweatshirt were powdered with dust.
"You shot well," praised his brother and took the dead man's submachine
gun. Sayeed Mohammed saw the approving glances of the other mujaheddin. "Cut
off a finger," said his brother, handing him a big knife. "He's your first
shuravi."
Sayeed Mohammed walked around the dead soldier, squatted by his head,
lifted the limp left hand, spread out the fingers, chose the index as the
easiest to cut off, laid the knife against the center, pressed down and
sliced through skin. The tip of the knife sank into the ground. He didn't
have enough strength. Sayeed Mohammed pressed down again, harder, a bone
snapped ...
Fog descended on the mountain pass a blizzard began to blow. His
camel-hair hat and blanket were covered in snow. Snowflakes lay on his thick
dark brows and long eyelashes and on his barely visible first trace of a
mustache. In an hour or so the snow would bury him and he would have no
strength to withstand the cold. He would never get up again, he would soon
freeze completely, fall asleep, stop thinking and hoping for rescue, he was
already no longer remembering his family, his older brother. No, Ali would
always be beside him, he would wait for him, take him by the hand and lead
him into Paradise. He had always followed his older brother.
Another sound joined the wailing of the snowstorm. Fear held Sayeed
Mohammed rigid more than the cold and snow. A helicopter! Was it possible
that the Russians had returned to finish off those who had remained alive
after the bombing? Could they possibly know that he was still alive? How?
Why did the shuravi hate the Afghans so much? Why had they come to
Afghanistan? Why had they been killing innocent Afghan people for so many
years? He would never surrender, he knew what the Russians do with
prisoners!
...A few years ago Sayeed Mohammed had pulled his head between his
shoulders, like now, closed his eyes and shuddered at the growing sound of
approaching choppers. From a distance they had looked like a flock of black
birds, noisy, frightening and merciless to the mujaheddin. He prepared to
run and save himself, hide, dig in, disappear. Ali had taken his hand and
they hid in a dry watercourse. Peering out at the terrifying choppers that
filled the sky they saw, through a pair of binoculars, how the shuravi
landed behind the village, how they ran out and took up defensive positions.
The village elders approached the senior shuravi, a tall, heavily-built
and not very young general in camouflage uniform, which looked like the
green and brown patterns on the choppers. The elders behaved as if the
general were a king or God, bowing and scraping before him and, after
parlaying, surrendered the bodies of three Soviet advisors and the
mujaheddin who had killed them into the bargain. Everything had turned out
just as Ali predicted. Yet what else could they do? The shuravi had
threatened a storming bomb attack on the entire district otherwise.
"Look!" commanded Ali, and said the word that made all the mujaheddin
shudder: "Spetsnaz." Sayeed stared through the binoculars. The soldiers
looked like any other soldiers? Perhaps a bit more lithe and agile.
Certainly nothing ferocious. They had same assault rifles, the same light
brown hair. Why do the mujaheddin fear and hate this "Spetsnaz" so much?
While they waited for the general, the soldiers unbound the hands of one of
the mujaheddin and laid a loaded submachine gun before him.
"Pick it up, you bastard!"
Sayeed and his brother were too far away to hear what the Spetsnaz guy
was saying, and they would not have understood his foreign tongue even if
they had been closer. They saw only the officer's contemptuously twisted
mouth. He was lean, wearing sneakers, beige trousers and beige battle jacket
with sleeves rolled up and with tattoos on his forearms. He stepped back,
pointing at the submachine gun.
"I've only got a knife, and even that's not real." The Spetsnaz man
flexed his muscles, showing a Bowie knife tattooed on his skin. "Take it!"
He shoved the gun closer to the prisoner with his foot. "Shit yourself, eh?"
The Afghan crouched, his eyes fixed on the Kalashnikov. A last chance, he
had been given a last chance to fight back. He looked sideways at the
shuravi, baring uneven yellow teeth in a grin and then, when the officer
turned away casually, as though he had forgotten all about the weapon
offered to the prisoner and seemed to be more interested in the chopper
patrolling in circles overhead, the prisoner made his decision. But the men
in Spetsnaz are not stupid enough to let themselves be tricked by some dumb
Afghan peasant! The officer gave a satisfied snort when a soldier standing
ready at the Afghan's back brought his rifle butt down on the head of the
prisoner as he lunged forward.
"Thought you could escape, spook?" The officer flung himself toward the
Afghan who was struggling to his feet and knocked him out.
"Stop that!"
"He was trying to escape, comrade major," said the tattooed Russian,
justifying himself before a senior officer in dark glasses.
"Move out!"
The blades of the choppers sliced through the hot air, the choppers
rose one after another and flew off. Sayeed Mohammed and Ali got up, shook
themselves and, without a word, startled in unison when a figure of a man
detached itself from the chopper flying a little to the right, and fell to
earth like a stone...
A helicopter circled beside Sayeed Mohammed, frighteningly close. He
flung the blanket away, snapped off the safety catch. "There is no God but
Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet!" Here it was, the heaven-sent trial! A
chance to avenge his brother, his relatives, himself. The roar increased. It
seemed to him that everything around him shook, as though there were an
earthquake. The chopper had clearly gone off course, gotten lost, and was
searching and circling in the growing darkness. Obviously, the chopper
wanted to be saved, just like Sayeed Mohammed. The chopper flew toward him,
above him, to his right and to his left. If only it would come closer!
Sayeed Mohammed prayed that Allah should send the helicopter right at him!
Then he would not die alone, for nothing! He was ready for battle! He had a
trusty friend - the Kalashnikov. He would avenge his brother! Sayeed
Mohammed laid a frozen finger, like a hook, around the trigger, raised
himself a little and when something dark seemed to appear very close, and
that dark blob started to crawl over him like a monster wanting to swallow
the pitiful, freezing victim and he could see the blur of the pilot's face
through the glass canopy, he shuddered as the Kalashnikov released a string
of bullets and cried: "Allah akbar!!" rejoicing at his victory over the
Russians in the moment before death....
Chapter One. The Paras
Planes appeared out of nowhere. They simply swelled like white drops in
the sky and slid down, like oblique streaks of rain on a window; and
probably because these planes were hurrying to land, afraid of being shot
down by an invisible but omnipresent enemy, in their haste they scattered
gleaming flares that sparkled like Bengal lights and burned out quickly,
leaving a brief reminder of themselves as white trails of smoke above Kabul.
The soldiers messing around in the repair park, and those who were
cleaning their weapons and enjoying the warm sun bared to the waist or in
undershirts, and those who were drilling in the square, and those who were
washing down military vehicles looked up from time to time, expecting to see
these heavy transport planes, nicknamed "cattle carriers"; they waited for
them the way people wait for a ship from the mainland, which they are
unlikely to board this time, but catch at least a distant glimpse of the
ship docking, and indulge in unlimited dreams.
The early morning arrival of the IL-76s had become a daily routine. The
passage of these airborne mediators between the USSR and Afghanistan could
be seen from practically every Soviet garrison and, if the flights were
canceled for some reason , everyone felt sad and deprived, as though maybe,
back there in the Motherland, the "limited contingent" sent to Afghanistan
had been forgotten.
Those who had carried out a long tour of duty watched the planes in
anticipation of their imminent demobilization, and dreamed up sweet
fantasies of civilian life. Those only half way through their service would
sigh, all they could hope for was a letter from home. Those who were new in
the service still had vivid memories of the flight in the belly of such a
transport aircraft and that awful feeling of impending doom when the plane,
packed with people like brainless cattle, exhausted by the night-time
flight, indefinite lengthy delays, customs control and border crossing had
just begun to catnap when they were snapped back into awareness, barely an
hour after takeoff, by the steep plunge of the plane from a height of some
seven thousand or more meters, as if it had hit a sudden air-pocket or had
been struck by an enemy rocket, a "Stinger" missile or some such. In fact
the plane, shooting out dozens of heat emanating decoy targets, was making a
steep, spiraling descent in order to land.
When the plane taxied down the landing strip, the ramp would open,
letting in a rush of unfamiliar Afghan mountain air and the sight of an
alien, and therefore alarming, mountainous landscape. From this moment on,
the countdown began, measuring the fated time in Afghanistan for the new
arrivals, a time which, for some, meant the last months of their life.
The newly-arrived soldiers, officers and non-coms, including women,
obviously felt awkward, and stared around in barely concealed curiosity and
unease, squinting in the strong mountain sunshine. Those who were returning
from leave, or military business, or medical treatment could be spotted
immediately: they knew why they had come here and which way to head from the
landing strip. They were returning to a place that had become familiar,
home. The soldiers arriving at the Kabul airdrome had identical haircuts,
were equally puzzled, equally without rights, wearing identical uniforms,
and depersonalized by this sameness; in long, often badly fitting
greatcoats, heavy, uncomfortable "shit-squasher" boots" and similar
kit-bags, they all looked the same from a distance. They were delivered here
like ammunition: like little missiles in the guise of soldiers if you did
not look too closely, expendable material, which differed only in size and
caliber.
Hardly anyone throughout the breadth of the great and mighty Soviet
Union took the lives of the soldiers, officers, non-coms, lieutenants, first
lieutenants and captains seriously. Insignificant units of humanity, of whom
there was still an endless supply! So there was nothing to feel sorry about.
The soldiers arriving in Kabul were faceless, just like thousands of
other young men dragged in for two years, torn out of their usual lives in
order to learn suffering, patience and survival until such time as the
Motherland would consider that they had paid in full for the care and happy
childhood she had lavished on them, and sent them replacements which had
grown up in the meantime.
x x x
"They're flying, comrade senior lieutenant. Two flights have landed,"
reported junior sergeant Titov to the officer who lay on his bunk in
hopeless and dreary anticipation of his replacement's arrival. Dressed
correctly in uniform, he was watching the progress of the flies crawling on
the ceiling and turned an irritated eye on his junior.
"So what, Titov?"
"I wouldn't know, comrade senior lieutenant..."
"I said, so what that they're flying?"
"...you told me to report when any planes land ... So I'm reporting..."
"What does that tone of voice mean? Hey? Bloody homo stallion! " The
officer turned his head and stared Titov in the face. "Who the hell do you
think you're talking to? Dismissed, Titov! Close the door!"
"What?"
"Close the door on your way out! And don't bother me again! Straighten
up, you lump! Wake me only for two reasons: when my replacement arrives, or
if the Soviet forces pull out of Afghanistan! Got that?"
"Yessir."
"Get lost!"
Titov, a hulk far superior in strength and size than the officer, bent
obediently, like a lackey reprimanded by a demanding master and backed out
of the room. Knowing the senior lieutenant's fiery temper, and having had
his liver and kidneys bashed, like all the other soldiers, when the
lieutenant was in a bad mood for some reason or no reason at all, he decided
that discretion was better than pre-demobilization impudence. He closed the
door quietly behind him, straightened his shoulders and, like a werewolf
under a full moon, immediately became a merciless "grandpa" the severe boss
of the barracks.
Venting his spleen for the humiliation he had just endured - the
offensive words had carried clearly to the young soldiers on duty, Titov
kicked the slow and inefficient private Myshkovsky, who was swabbing the
floor with a mop:
"You fucking leaky rubber! When were you supposed to finish cleaning?!"
The pail fell over with a clatter and murky water spread in a pool on
the plywood floor of the barracks.
"I'll make you lick the latrines clean with your tongue, Myshara!
Useless turd!" yelled Titov at the top of his voice, so that everyone would
hear.
"Junior sergeant Titov!" The commander's voice cut across Titov's
railing.
"Do you understand, worm?" continued Titov regardless. "Down on the
ground and do ten pushups! Fast! Fast! I'm warning you, Myshara!" He pressed
the soldier's head down with his boot, and added in a slightly lower voice:
"I'll finish you off!"
"!" came the commander's voice again..
"What's the MPF, Myshara?" Titov pressed own even harder with his boot.
"The Military Paratroop Forces ..."
"The MPF are the shield of the Motherland, greenhorn! And you don't
deserve to be a rivet in that shield! "
Myshkovsky continued to lie prone in fear. The boots of the
all-powerful "grandpa" stamped off in the direction of the common room.
"Junior sergeant Titov reporting as ordered" he stated with barely
concealed insolence, addressing lieutenant Sharagin, who was having his head
shaved bald. Legs crossed, he sat immobile on a small bedside chest. His
shoulders were draped with a bedsheet bearing the stamp of the Ministry of
Defense - a purple star. A uniform with the red armband of the officer
responsible for the company lay on a nearby shelf.
Lieutenant Sharagin was studying his new appearance in a small, cracked
mirror. The mirror reflected gray-blue eyes, a clean-shaven chin with a
fresh razor nick, a straight nose, a thick mustache. There were only a few
patches of hair remaining on his head to be scraped off by the barber's
blade wielded by sergeant Panasyuk. The white skin exposed was in sharp
contrast with the deep mountain tan and seemed to be stretched tightly over
his cranium, like the skin of a drum.
That was exactly how Sharagin wanted to see himself - with a shaved
head.
Mother Nature had slacked a little when working on the lieutenant's
face, giving him unremarkable, standard features, devoid of any
individuality, a kind of Russian universality.
Still watching his own reflection, Sharagin maintained a theatrical
pause before asking casually:
"What's with senior lieutenant Chistyakov?"
Titov stood behind him, leaning against the door frame and twirling a
bunch of keys on a chain:
"The comrade senior lieutenant ordered that nobody should wake him."
"We're just about done," said the sergeant who was carrying out the
responsible duty of barber.
"What a waste of talent!" said Titov, poking fun at his comrade.
"Instead of exposing your ass to enemy fire, you would have been better off
as company barber, eh Panas?"
"Fuck off, Tit! I apologize for the bad language, comrade lieutenant,
but Tit doesn't understand anything else, otherwise he'll fucking drive you
into the ground, the way Pol Pot did with Kampuchea. Ha, ha, ha!..."
"Pay attention, comrade sergeant," snapped lieutenant Sharagin, "Be
careful when you're shaving your commanding officer!"
Unlike the large, dull and brutish junior sergeant Titov, Sharagin
detected traces of humanity in Panasyuk, which had not all faded during his
term of service. Panasyuk was from the Altai region, skinny as a Belorussian
peasant , tall as a flagpole, wiry and hardy. Panasyuk liked to joke, smoked
like a chimney, suffered paroxysms of smoker's cough, swore after every
second word, and when he laughed, deep and untimely wrinkles appeared on his
forehead and under his eyes. He usually spoke in a long, drawling voice,
like a Catholic priest's intonation: "Whatcha worrying for, comrade
lieutenant? Leave it to me - everything'll be hunky-dory."
"Somebody cleaned out the food store last night," said Sharagin,
catching Titov's shifty eyes in the mirror. "It better not be anyone from
our company - I'll beat their brains out!"
"Everyone was asleep last night, comrade lieutenant, Titov responded
earnestly.
Sergeant Panasyuk confirmed that it wasn't anyone from their company,
and wiped Sharagin's neck with a thin cotton towel:
"Done!"
Another thing lieutenant Sharagin appreciated in Panasyuk was that
although the sergeant was hard on the men, he never mocked them
deliberately, did not turn their service into a nightmare and, most
importantly, restrained the other "grandpas" to the best of his ability.
... especially louts like Titov...
thought Sharagin. "Initiation" rites such as, for instance,
"registration" during which the new recruits were beaten on their bare
backsides with leather slippers so hard that the next day they were unable
to sit down and only rub their black-and-blue buttocks, were held in deepest
secrecy. This was part of the unspoken soldiers' ritual, and with all the
will in the world the commanding officers would not be able to spot or
prevent it. So Sharagin did not waste any regrets on that score. It was
beyond his power to break the long-standing
"youth-"finch"-"dipper"-"grandpa" tradition of relations in the ranks. There
was no changing the unchangeable.
Unreasoning impulsive cruelty, anger alongside a childish naivete,
sentimentality, unexpected kindness, pity, valor, sympathy which turns
easily into hatred (though not for long) - all these traits existed side by
side, from times immemorial, in officers and soldiers of the Russian army
and, probably, any Russian man.
"Mother fuckers!" cried lieutenant Chistyakov suddenly in ringing
tones.
This cry of the officer's heart had resounded regularly over the past
few weeks, a heart that was longing for home, and was addressed to everyone
at large: the army, Afghanistan, and soldiers on duty.
Junior sergeant Titov went off and hid in the store-room just in case.
Titov knew that if Chistyakov had left his room and was in a foul mood, it
was better to stay out of his way.
"Shaved your head, eh? Good for you!" Chistyakov ran a hand over his
friend's smooth skull.
"Well, what do you think?" asked Sharagin, pleased with his new look.
"Fine, we've been through that. Get the fuck out of here!" he yelled at
a soldier who had looked into the room. "Can't stand the sight of their
stupid mugs! I don't envy you! Our "graduates" are real tigers, of course,
but when they're gone, who'll we have left to fight with? Am I right,
Panasyuk?" asked the senior lieutenant turning suddenly and for no real
reason , but just (as he liked to say) to keep everyone on their toes,
punched Panasyuk hard in the stomach.
Panasyuk doubled over, gasping with pain:
"Y...y...you're right about them being tigers, comrade senior
lieutenant," he squeezed out after a moment's pause while his head cleared.
He smiled waveringly at Chistyakov, appreciating the compliment.
The silence of the barracks was shattered by the arrival of a horde of
the men, who filled the air with stamping, swearing, laughter and threats:
"Where d'you think you're putting that rifle, asshole!"
"What are you standing there for, move over!"
"...so what, a rifle..."
"Here, take mine and put it there too, I'm off to wash..."
"Put it there, stupid! Won't you morons ever learn!..."
"Sych! Look how you've made up my bunk!"
"......"
"Cat got your tongue?"
"I'll remake it..."
"Lazy sonofabitch! See my fist? What's it smell of? Your death, that's
what..."
"....."
"Company ten-hut!" yelled the soldier on barracks duty, saluting the
company captain, who had just entered. "Ready to report!"
"At ease," responded the lanky captain leisurely and sniffed loudly.
"Thirty degrees outside, and I've caught a cold! Who'd believe it?"
"It's the air-conditioning, captain," interjected senior warrant
officer Pashkov. He walked behind captain Morgultsev.
"What's that got to do with it?" retorted Morgultsev, pulling out a
handkerchief and blowing his nose loudly.
"Those air conditioners can kill you. They'll give you pneumonia before
you know it. What's so funny? Nothing. Air conditioners are death to your
lungs."
"You'd die even faster here without the conditioners!" argued
Chistyakov.
"My God!" exclaimed Morgultsev, spotting the clean-shaven head of the
platoon leader. "The appearance of Taras Bulba to the people! No other way
to describe it."
"Yakshi Montana!" cried Pashkov, flinging up his arms.
Sharagin was somewhat embarrassed, scratched his bald pate, donned his
cap and reported with all due ceremony:
"Comrade captain! Nothing to report in your absence!"
"Shitheads! Hell!" growled the captain, and pronounced one of his
carefully thought out in advance quips: "The human body needs a good
shake-up sometimes. On that day, I don't drink..."
"Don't worry," Chistyakov winked at Sharagin. "He's been to HQ.
Bogdanov probably tore a strip off him."
Senior lieutenant Nemilov had no gift for retelling political studies
materials in his own words. He droned out passages he had underlined in
various pamphlets or the "Armed Forces Communist" magazine. He was easily
distracted if, for example, he noticed that someone was not wearing a
Komsomol badge. It would have been naive to expect that any of the men would
remember anything out of what they heard during political studies, so
Nemilov made them write out certain sentences he dictated. Should there be a
sudden inspection, every soldier had a notebook with suitable entries.
"Now! Write this down: the democratic Republic of Afghanistan."
"Sounds familiar," sniggered PFC Prokhorov. "I'm sure I've heard that
somewhere before."
"Never mind clowning! You don't know the history of the country you're
in. Right! The official languages are Pashtu and Dari. The population
numbers ...who the hell knows what their population is now? Don't write that
down!!! And now - a bit of history. Write this: Britain's attempts to
subjugate Afghanistan in the 19th century failed. Due to the support granted
by Soviet Russia, the next Anglo-Afghan war in May-June 1919 ended with
victory for Afghanistan. In 1919..."
"What year?"
"For the benefits of the morons in this room, I repeat: in 1919,
Afghanistan declared independence. Now...no, you don't need this..." Nemilov
turned a page. "Here we are: the USSR and Afghanistan have been bound by
ties of friendship for a very long time. After the April 1978 revolution,
these ties have become truly fraternal and an example of revolutionary
solidarity. On the basis of the Agreement of Friendship, Good-neighborliness
and Co-operation, the government of Afghanistan has addressed numerous
appeals for military aid to the USSR. The government of the USSR decided to
offer such assistance and sent the "Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces" to
help the fledgling republic defend itself against the forces of global
imperialism and domestic reactionary circles. New paragraph! Soviet soldiers
have proved themselves true friends of the Afghan people and carry out their
international duty in Afghanistan with honor. New paragraph! The April
revolution was a turning point in Afghanistan's development, the outcome of
many centuries of struggle against ignorance, poverty, repression and for
the triumph of justice. Panasyuk, why aren't you writing?"
In fact, the sergeant had started on a letter home, but after the first
two sentences ("How are you all? I'm fine") had run out of ideas and sat
staring at a Lenin quote on the wall which asserted that a revolution is
worthy only if it can defend itself. Even an idiot knows that, thought
Panasyuk and cast an oblique glance at the "iconostasis" of the Politburo
members. The Lenin Room, existed in every subdivision and its walls were
covered, church-like, with images of the most celebrated party-angels beside
the "holy trinity" of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The men were supposed to come
here in their free time - to play chess, write home, watch television, all
under the vigilant gaze of the leaders of the world's proletariat.
"Panasyuk!"
"I'm thinking, comrade senior lieutenant."
"You're not here to think, Panasyuk! You're here to listen and write
down!"
"Yessir!" Inspiration visited the sergeant briefly once more and he
added another two lines to his missive: "It's very warm here. Summer will be
coming soon."
"Experience has shown - don't write this down! - " continued Nemilov,
"that Afghan citizens often ask Soviet soldiers to tell them about the USSR,
how Soviet people live, the history of the revolutionary struggle of the
USSR. Sychev! I said don't write this down! Are you deaf?"
Private Sychev, looking hunted, pulled his head into his shoulders.
"Nobody's ever asked me," drawled Prokhorov provocatively.
"They will, Prokhorov, they will!"
"So how the hell will I know what they want if I don't understand their
lingo?"
"You will! Through an interpreter..." Nemilov broke off. There was no
point in responding to stupid questions. They were just playing for time.
"You must always be prepared to converse with our Afghan comrades."
"They should all be shot, that's what! They're all spooks!" burst out
Panasyuk. What the shit do we need to talk to them for?!"
"As you were! Resume writing! Without Soviet aid, the forces of
imperialism and internal counter-revolution would have stifled the April
revolution..."
Junior sergeant Titov rapped on the glass door.
"Comrade senior lieutenant?"
"What?"
"Two men needed for kitchen duty..."
"Take them and get out! ...Now, where were we? " Nemilov opened the
'Memorandum for the Soviet Soldier-Internationalist.' Write this down! The
Afghan people are naturally trusting, receptive of new information, have a
fine sense of good and evil." A wave of laughter rolled through the room.
"That's enough of that! In particular, the Afghans appreciate courtesy
toward children, women and old people. That's very important! While in the
DRA, observe all customary Soviet moral values, manners and laws, show
tolerance of the customs and mores of the Afghans. Write it down! Write it
down!!! Always be friendly, humane fair and honorable in your dealings with
the workers of Afghanistan."
The men wrote laboriously, with numerous spelling mistakes, missing out
entire sentences. The "grandpas" only pretended to write.
"Chirikov, I want all that in my notebook by tomorrow morning," said
PFC Prokhorov, busily ruling up a sheet of paper to play "Battleships."
"Don't write just yet! I'll tell you when to write! You all have to be
able to give specific examples to illustrate the honorable behavior of
Soviet soldiers towards the local population. Who can name a few examples?
Nobody! Wonderful! You should read the newspapers. Why do we keep files of
them in this room? So that brainless idiots like you should read them,
that's why! Everyone's got to know at least two examples for next time. I'll
be testing you!"
"He who eats meat, suffers frequent colds," pronounced warrant officer
Pashkov with a sly look in Sharagin's direction. "If a man eats meat, then
something starts to stir during the night, rises up and lifts the blanket,
bares his legs, and all the time the air conditioner is pumping out cold air
- that's where colds come from."
Sharagin laughed good-naturedly.
Senior Lieutenant Chistyakov grabbed a parachute canopy out of the
cupboard in the officers' room and shoved it into a bag. He had taken to
warming himself in the sun at this time of day behind the huts, well out of
sight of the senior staff.
"Line up!" hollered the soldier on duty, for all the world like a
village rooster.
"Listen up, rooster face!" Chistyakov dragged the soldier off his stool
and clamped a hand around his throat: "Why are you yelling in my ear?! I'm
enjoying my well-earned rest. Got that? Don't bother me with trifles.
Anything important happens, lieutenant Sharagin will know where to find me."
Chapter Two. Disease
With the coming of the hot weather, the company was hit by diarrhea,
everyone running to the can day and night. The path leading from the camp to
the latrines was trodden hard as asphalt. Every half hour or less, someone
would race from the command barracks to the latrine like a bat out of hell.
The rookies, more seasoned soldiers and the grandpas were reduced to a
common level by their plight as they sat side by side in the latrine.
There were not enough newspapers. The bound volume of "Red Star"
disappeared from the Lenin Room. Nemilov was furious, branding the unknown
thieves saboteurs, threatened an investigation by the Third Section but
removed the bound volume of "Pravda" just in case. The Political Officer was
known for his fastidiousness, washed his hands about seventeen and a half
times a day, tried not to touch anything. His thin, pale lips twisted in
disgust at the sight of the diarrhea-drained soldiers, his face mirrored
distaste toward the illnesses which broke out in the company, his
evenly-parted hair, clean fingernails and flawlessly white collars spoke
eloquently of his disapproval of the common soldiers and certain
non-too-clean officers.
Formerly tanned lads, bursting with rude health would quickly become
listless, thin, their faces a greenish hue when they succumbed to amebic
dysentery or some other local bug. They lost weight visibly, dehydrated by
the dysentery.
Reveille-toilet-physical
exercises-toilet-breakfast-toilet-lineup-toilet-political
studies-toilet-weapons
cleaning-toilet-lunch-toilet-duties-toilet-dinner-toilet-lights out - toilet
round the clock kept everyone chained to the vicinity of the latrine, even
the sick did not venture from this vital object to a distance from which it
would not be possible to reach the latrine faster than a spook's bullet.
The troops forgot everything on earth, took no pleasure in anything.
Even the grandpas were so exhausted by constant "shit hemorrhages" that they
stopped harassing the rookies. Junior sergeant Titov, who liked to pump
lead, flexing his ready for demobilization biceps and triceps, and
gunlayer-operator PFC Prokhorov - a bark and troublemaker, and sergeant
Panasyuk, spent their days sitting glumly in the smoking room, because it
was closest to the latrine. All in all, though, suffering diarrhea was
preferable to turning yellow and being shunted off to hospital with
hepatitis.
The only officers in the company who did not catch the bug were
Chistyakov and Morgultsev. Zhenka was certain that God was looking after him
and keeping him safe from illness and death in battle, because he had been
carrying a small icon in his pocket for two years now. His mother had
sneaked the icon into his case just before he left home. Zhenka discovered
the icon en route, did not throw it away but secreted it just in case, with
his documents, and thus managed to carry it through customs and across the
border unnoticed. Nemilov once caught Zhenka with the icon, read him a
homily, but refrained from reporting him. Actually, the God who was
supposedly looking after Zhenka slipped up once; Zhenka ate a jar of
home-made jam, sharing the same spoon with a KGB officer who hailed from the
same parts as he. The KGB man succumbed first, went all yellow, the
hepatitis gathered strength, and a week later Zhenka followed him into the
infectious diseases hospital. In fact, Zhenka was a dyed-in-the wool
atheist, and cursed by God and His Mother so frequently, that the ears of
the Holy Family must have burned so much it was a miracle that the wrath of
God did not descend on the senior lieutenant's unit.
Morgultsev, company captain, considered himself a total unbeliever. He
had never stepped across the threshold of a church and did not believe in
miracles. He kept himself safe with garlic. He would eat a whole head of
garlic before lunch. Zhenka had nothing against a bit of insurance on the
side through garlic, but that made forays into the goods depot a problem.
Zhenka went there whenever he could in order to entertain members of the
female sex in the Soviet Army. He would play the guitar and sing. Amorous
interludes would follow later. He would swear that this was true love, but
that he could not stay behind even for her, beautiful though she was. Before
going to sleep he would sigh: "A blonde....and not for money, but for real
love, with me..."
They never did find out who brought the infection into the company.
"The fuck you'll sort it out," said captain Morgultsev dourly,
sweepingly classifying the drooping "elephants" as malingerers.
Any commanding officer would be at his wits' end in such a situation.
Is this a company, or what? Are these paratroopers, or what? The troops were
issued tablets, some were packed off to hospital.
The strange appellation "elephants" caught on among the troops long ago
and for a rather unusual reason. It arose from their training in case of
chemical warfare, before Afghanistan. The officer would shout: "Masks!" and
the men would drag gas masks out of the green bags on their backs, shove
them over shaven and unshaven heads: their eyes would stare out from behind
the glass, which would soon mist over, and long tubes extended like trunks
from the masks to the filter in the bag. Very soon, a joke started doing the
rounds about a commander of unit X whose small, capricious daughter demanded
that Daddy show her some elephants running around outside, otherwise she
won't go to sleep, or eat, and stood there stamping her tiny feet angrily.
Anything for peace! So Daddy issued an order: "Company, ten-hut! Gas masks!
On the double!" And the "elephants" had to run around and work up a sweat,
choking and cursing everything on earth until ordered to stand down.
Maybe someone picked up the bug in the mess hall, or drank unboiled
water, or ate an unwashed fruit from the town. Or maybe the disease had come
from the nearby village, brought in by flies, or a cloud of dust, which
would hang in the air for a long time after the passage of any vehicle.
The regiment had long shielded itself from the Afghans and anything
connected with them. Fenced itself off with barbed wire, minefields,
trip-wires, flares, machine gun nests, trenches, parapets, watchtowers, tank
armor, mortar and artillery positions. Sentries kept a sharp lookout to
ensure that the enemy or some Afghan from the neighboring village could not
come close. But the enemy did not come, made no move to attack the regiment.
Dysentery, hepatitis, amebic dysentery and typhoid struck instead.
"Go take a rope and hang yourself!" joked the company commander
watching senior warrant officer Pashkov's diarrhea-induced sufferings. "At
least you'll die like a man and not a shit fountain!"
Pashkov was the first to fall ill, and for some time it was suspected
that he had been the vector. However, it turned out that three soldiers from
the last contingent of newcomers had been afflicted for several days now.
Rookies Myshkovsky, Sychev and Chirikov had simply kept their mouths shut
out of military stupidity and ignorance of local diseases.
From their arrival in Fergana, efforts were made to instill elementary
rules of basic personal hygiene into the thick workers-and-peasant skulls of
the recruits but as a rule, with meager results. Only after having gone
through the furnace of hepatitis, typhoid and dysentery does the rookie
understand that hands must be washed with soap, and not just once a day,
that only boiled water should be drunk - and if that's not available, it is
better to remain thirsty. That it is not advisable to use someone else's
spoon, that mess tins should be scrubbed until they shine, that if an Afghan
fly settles on your miserable portion of yellow, runny butter, you should
think a dozen times before sticking it down your throat, that you should not
eat anything that comes to hand however hungry you might be. Young soldiers
are always hungry. They will gape at the fruits and vegetables displayed on
Afghan stalls, they will pick up a fallen unripe tomato from a puddle and
eat it after a cursory wipe against their sleeve, eat their fill of free
water-melon, they will drink from a mountain stream without a second thought
if they're thirsty.
PFC Prokhorov saw private Chirikov hanging around near the latrine, and
called him over:
"Hey! 'Buchenwald strongman'! Come here!"
"What?" asked Chirikov listlessly.
"Not 'what', but report properly!"
"Comrade PFC, private Chirikov reporting as ordered."
"Go get me a bottle of soda."
"What about money?"
"Don't you have any of your own?! What are you gaping at?! I'll square
up with you later." Prokhorov was a small man, but very agile. He took up a
karate stance and landed Chirikov a shrewd blow on the neck with the edge of
his palm. Chirikov yelped and shuffled off in the direction of the store.
Junior sergeant Titov gave a snort of laughter.
"Think you're a regular Bruce Lee, don't you?"
"If I wasn't sick, I'd show you the meaning of sparring!"
"You already have." Titov waved dismissively. "While you're flinging
your fucking feet around in the air, I'll give you such a whack on the head
you won't know what hit you."
Myshkovsky and Sychev emerged from the latrine. Myshkovsky had been
nicknamed "Virgin" because his parents had conceived him somewhere in the
steppes of Kazakhstan, while they were turning up its virgin soil. They must
have been overcome with joy at their own inhuman efforts. The mother died
soon after giving birth, and the father took to drink. So Myshkovsky had
been called "the orphan" in his time, but eventually "Myshara" was the
nickname that stuck. The other one, Sychev, freckle-faced and with prominent
ears, gloried in the nickname "Odessa" in honor of the fine Black Sea city
in which he was born.
"Myshara! Odessa! Get your asses over here! Going to the can a bit too
often, aren't you?" Hounding the youngsters was a favorite pastime of
Prokhorov's. He used Chirikov as a target for his karate tricks, but did not
try that with Sychev, who was strongly built and quite up to taking on
Titov. However, there was nothing to stop Prokhorov from having his fun
verbally. "What the hell do you do in there? Read the papers?"
"What does everyone usually do there?" snarled Sychev.
"Jerking off?!"
"No!" chorused the recruits indignantly.
"Don't wait for policemen in the night!" quoted Prokhorov aggressively.
"How does the rest of the rhyme go?"
"Jerking off you'll feel all right," replied Myshkovsky and Sychev
obediently. "Dismissed!" Prokhorov ended the lesson - warrant officer
Pashkov was trotting purposefully toward the latrine.
Like any warrant officer, Pashkov was convinced that he was craftier
than everyone else. His craftiness was expressed in his refusal to accept
medical methods of treatment. Having done his share of dashes to the
latrine, Pashkov realized that the microbe would not just go away but had
taken up firm residence in his guts. So Pashkov acquired a three-litre jar
of pure alcohol, locked himself in the store-room and did not emerge for
three whole days. Drinking himself stupid, he would snore like a pig,
whistling, snorting and grunting.
Nobody dreamed of bothering him, simply every so often they would knock
on the door and offer to bring him some tea. True, some of the soldiers
maintained, and lieutenant Sharagin personally attested that, at night, when
everyone else was asleep, Pashkov would emerge from the seclusion of the
store-room and wander around the camp like the ghost from "Hamlet", heading
in the general direction of the latrine. He didn't recognize or even seem to
see anybody, did not react to human speech, and bore no resemblance to the
real senior warrant officer Pashkov, the terror of the troops.
Everybody felt sorry for Pashkov except the company commander.
Morgultsev knew Pashkov from service back home, so when lieutenant Sharagin,
suffering dysentery himself, remarked that it was a pity about poor old
Pashkov, looks as though the bug could kill him and wasn't it time for him
to be shipped off to hospital, Morgultsev snapped:
"The fuck he's sick! He's just gone on a bender with the booze! Happens
with him regularly, once every quarter! " Calming down, he added:
"Still, it happens even more frequently with some of the warrant
officers - just like women's monthlies..." Morgultsev left Pashkov alone -
he knew that he would come around and cure himself soon. Just like a wounded
animal going off alone to hide in the forest, Pashkov had hidden himself on
the store-room and closed himself off from anyone, fighting the illness or
depression.
On the third day, an explosion shook the store-room. The explosion was
not all that big, it sounded rather like the detonation of a fuse, but the
whole company took fright, thinking that maybe Pashkov had gone off his head
from too much drink and had decided to finish off not just the germs in his
intestines or the depression which tortured his mysterious Russian soul, but
himself as well.
The door was broken down. Inside they found the senior warrant officer
in the grip of dementia tremens and an empty three-litre jar.
Pashkov was half-sitting, half-lying on a pile of kit-bags and
greatcoats, whiskers quivering and his eyes rolling around madly. He was
pointing at a small crack in the floor from which, he maintained, scorpions,
phalanges and snakes were crawling out to get him, and that he had disposed
of some of them by throwing a lighted grenade fuse down the hole. Just in
case, he was gripping a Makarov pistol in his hands to shoot down any
"creeping bastards" that might venture near him.
"Take the gun away, and get him out of here! Cured himself, has, he,
stupid moron!" rapped out Morgultsev.
By some miraculous means the raw alcohol helped Pashkov get rid of the
Afghan bug and depression, so that a week later he was vainly trying to
convince his commanding officer that he had not been malingering, that he
really had been ill and -God forbid! - should comrade captain succumb to the
same curse he, Pashkov, bore no ill will and would help and explain, as a
specialist in the field, how and where to get a three-litre jar of the
necessary medicine. A smaller dose, according to him, was insufficient to
kill the offending microbes.
Unlike Pashkov, lieutenant Sharagin suffered longer, but resorted to
tablets instead of downing spirit. As an educated man, he did not believe
that the disease could be expunged by alcohol alone. Rising for the
umpteenth time in the middle of the night, sweating and sleepy, he hurried
outside.
Trying to breathe as infrequently as possible he studied a scrap of
"Red Star", then crushed it up in order to soften it a little. The central
Soviet press and the regional paper "Frunzevets" were frequently read in the
regiment, and not only during painful sessions in the latrine. They read
about events in the capitalist world, in countries where socialism reigned
triumphant, about Party and Komsomol congresses, laughed at the writers of
reports on Afghanistan. But should any outsider say the same, they would all
rise up as one in defense and swear that every word written about
international help was God's truth, and how, for example, that APC got blown
up because the lieutenant spared the Afghans' crops because he remembered
his own collective farm and the fields of home, the hard labor of the
peasants, how he had once dreamed of becoming a tractor driver but went to
military school instead, knowing that there is such a profession as the
defense of one's motherland: recalling all this, the lieutenant chose to
travel along the road rather than across fields, a road which the spooks had
mined, of course....
In any case, if you look at things squarely, it's not right to
criticize the Soviet Army; any story, any garbage in the press, any feat of
courage, be it true or invented, raises morale.
...let the inventions continue to appear in the press...let people
remember that there is a war on... thought Sharagin.
... one must pretend that the concoctions in the papers are true ...
reporters come here on tours of duty in order to make a name for themselves
... like that one, what's his name? Lobanov ... some writer! ... made up a
truckload of malarkey ... made himself famous but mentioned us paratroopers,
too...
The night, dressed in a myriad of spiky stars, unfolded itself above
the regiment. The paras slept quietly, if you did not count the humming of
the diesel generators located on the edge of the camp, and to which everyone
had grown accustomed.
Sharagin stopped to clear his lungs of the acrid smell of human
excrement and lit a cigarette, enjoying the silky moon and the scattered
multitude of stars. His insides squirmed, he felt like a limp dish rag which
had been thoroughly wrung, no strength at all, he felt weakness filling him.
From time to time, tracers would rise into the sky - one of the sentries
must be relieving the boredom of standing watch.
...like the overburdened souls of people who were sick of war, the
tracers shot silently skyward in order to lose themselves in the skies above
Kabul, hoping to flee this city and this country...
It also seemed as if
...the distant stars were fragments of broken souls, scattered
throughout the cosmos; winking in the moonlight, still hoping for
something...
Back in the command barracks, he spent a long time turning from side to
side, bed springs creaking. When drowsiness finally began to muddle his
thoughts about family and slide into sleep, a shot sounded practically under
the window and broken glass seemed to cry out.
Zhenka Chistyakov was off his bunk and on the floor even before the
bullet which smashed the window became embedded in the wall.
Guessing at once that this was no enemy shot and that there would be no
more, he raced outside as he was, in sateen drawers, hastily shoving his
feet into sneakers.
"Bastards!" he yelled. "They want to kill me!"
By the time Sharagin and the other officers emerged and a mob of
soldiers, also awakened by the shot gathered nearby, Zhenka had managed to
give the sentry a good thrashing. The unsuccessful suicide did nothing to
shield himself from the blows. Dressed in helmet and bullet-proof vest, he
tried to explain between punches that it had been an accident, he hadn't
been intending to fire, but simply tripped. He lied, sweated, and tried to
justify himself.
...probably decided to shoot himself in the hand, then got scared at
the last moment...
Muddled thought reflected on the army-tried features of the soldier.
"Far as I'm concerned, it would be better if you'd killed yourself!"
grated Chistyakov, continuing to beat up the soldier. "Only quietly and
further from the barracks. But no, you had to go and do it under my window,
you sonofabitch! `'
...the "grandpas" must have really gotten at him...or he doesn't want
to serve in Afghanistan...
thought Sharagin, yawning.
...hope they don't drive Myshkovsky over the line ... I'll have to
answer for him, after all...
whispered a voice in his head.
The sentry looked very much like Myshkovsky, and Sharagin experienced
an ambivalent feeling of pity and irritation. The soldier looked awkward,
was obviously not too bright and clumsy.
The helmet had fallen off his head, and his ears stuck out funnily -
like two halves of a broken plate, which someone had pasted to his head. He
wore his uniform badly, but then nothing would have looked a good fit on a
body like that.
...anger arises from a desire to gain revenge ... the weaker the man,
the more he is oppressed, and when one who has been slighted gets a chance
to rise, he takes his revenge on the new boys - a vicious circle...
... time to sleep ... let others sort out this mess... after all, he's
not from our company...
"Let's go back to bed, Zhenka," suggested Sharagin after they both
smoked a cigarette,
"How can anyone sleep after that?"
He could understand Chistyakov. Afghanistan has made him so harsh and
fiery.
... who can say what I'll be like at the end ...
Chistyakov had served twenty three months in Afghanistan and for the
past eight weeks had been hanging around waiting to be replaced.
He had stopped going to the mess hall and lived off canned food, bread
and tea. From time to time the girls in the goods depot would give him a
snack out of gratitude for his songs and attentions, especially the
mysterious blonde nobody had ever seen but who, according to Zhenka, was
crazy about him.
"She though I was going to marry her," confided Zhenka to his friends.
"How's that?" queried Sharagin. "You've already got a family,"
"That's right. That's what I told her, if I didn't have a family, I'd
take you to the ends of the earth.
"And what did she say?" chipped in Pashkov.
"She kept crying, damn it..."
"That's a bad sign," warned Morgultsev. "We'll be going into combat
soon, and women in war bring bad luck..."
Chistyakov spent the entire following day lying on his bunk. He even
refused to go into town when the opportunity came up, just lay there in
silence.
"Where's senior lieutenant Chistyakov?" demanded the commander, running
his eyes over the troops.
"His lordship's resting.." replied Pashkov, smoothing his luxuriant
whiskers.
I see, down for safe keeping..." The captain knew this mood well. This
was the state of many awaiting replacements. The Lord helps those who help
themselves . Should the spooks start shelling, even the most seasoned and
brave soldiers would race for cover without a second thought. Who wants to
be killed a few days before going back home?
"Fuck! Where the hell is he?" moaned Chistyakov. "Where is that fucking
son of a no-good bitch?"
"Enjoying his leave," replied Pashkov, fueling the flames. "Or maybe
he's drunk as a skunk in Tashkent. Putting down one beer after another..."
"Just wait and see," prophesied the commander. "Right now Chistyakov's
cursing his replacement with every name he can think of, but the moment the
guy arrives he'll treat him like a china doll. We've been through all
that..."
Chistyakov did not go to dinner. He threw a tin can against the floor
with all his strength:
"... so the microbes inside will drop dead!" Then he polished off a
0.75 bottle of vodka and sat at the table, smoking, blowing smoke through
his nostrils and confiding bitterly to the sardines floating in the tin can.
Finally, after baring his soul, he declared: "... a cow stands on a bridge
and shits, and man lives and dies just like that..." When Sharagin turned up
Zhenka, quite drunk, said: "Look, you like writing down all sorts of crap.
So I'll tell you the paradox of the Russian soul: steal a crate of vodka,
sell it, and then spend the money on drink."
"Lay off." Sharagin stretched out on his bunk, thinking about writing a
few lines home.
"What's the date today, Zhenka?"
"The forty-fourth of April."
"There's no such thing."
"Yes there is."
"In April," retorted Sharagin who had not touched a drop of alcohol
either yesterday or today, "there are thirty days."
"I was supposed to be replaced in April. And until my replacement
arrives, it'll stay fucking April!"
Despite his bad mood and the vodka, despite his avoidance of duty and
short-distance sorties from the camp, Chistyakov was the first when it came
to combat duty, and infected others with his attitude. Ready for war.
"Now that everyone's run out of shit, it's time to get down to
business, " he barked at the "elephants." 'And I don't want to hear another
fucking word about someone not feeling well," he bellowed left and right.
Zhenka shone like a lamp in anticipation of battle, the risk, the fury
of combat. It's not frightening for an officer to die in battle. What is
frightening or, rather, it would be a shame, to catch a bullet or shell
fragment from some stupid act.
The soldiers' lot was no bowl of cherries, either. They waited to be
demobbed no less keenly, they'd spent a year and a half plugging away
without discharge or leave, but, unlike the officers, they had no choice and
could not show their displeasure. Chistyakov barked at everyone, testing the
livers of the "elephants" with his fist.
"A whack on the liver is as good as a mug of beer!"
Chistyakov was all afire to go to war, went around as if in a haze,
forgot all about his replacement, cleaned his rifle, got his gear together,
honed his combat knife.
"I sure don't envy the spooks," remarked Pashkov, shaking his head.
"Where'd he suddenly get all that energy?" He was checking out the fixings
of the machine gun on the turret of an armored vehicle.
"Why are you so glum, Sharagin?"
"I had a bad dream..."
Chapter Three. Panasyuk
Army service consists of discipline, petty tyrannies, humiliations,
details, eating, digesting, sleep and expectation -- expectation of orders,
expectation of leave, expectation of returning home, expectation of freedom
from the power of highly placed fools and scoundrels, expectation of the
decrees of Fate. If an army is at war, service also includes expectation of
death: be it in the name of obeying orders, serving the interests of the
Motherland, or simply because on that day, at that moment, a specific number
comes up, YOUR number. Someone must be sacrificed, after all.
Such choices of Fate are subsequently and most frequently described as
heroism and fulfillment of duty, less frequently as sheer bad luck, while
those who stood side by side with death, later find some explanation for
that particular stroke of fortune, even though everyone knows exactly why
and how it came to pass.
But people tied to the army conceal from each other that their survival
so far in this inscrutable lottery has been due to blind luck, no more; and
only in the deepest recesses of their minds, mostly subconsciously, do they
render thanks to that hand, which did not draw THEIR number...
Rebellious Afghan tribes that had refused to swear allegiance to the
new regime had taken refuge on the plain between high mountains. The troops
took up positions on the dominant heights above the plain, presiding above
villages and wooded patches -- "greenery" -- which lay below silently, like
a predator gone to earth. The troops knew that victory would be theirs, that
the greenery would fall before them, but they also knew the price they would
have to pay.
Those who had planned the battle and were ready to order its start had
already estimated the costs of the operation, because war is a science, and
science demands precision and calculation. War does not excuse weakness, war
knows no mercy, and therefore people who decide to make war never allow
themselves to be guided by such feelings. They deliberately distance
themselves from the epicenter of battle in order not to see the soldiers
they are sending off to be slaughtered, in order not to look into their
eyes. Instead, they content themselves with sending them rousing messages
and promising medals and titles. They are well aware that after victory the
number of the fallen will not be a determining factor, because those who
died will automatically become heroes, while the maimed and wounded shall be
whisked away from the theatre of war to specially devised hospitals and
military medical installations, so the sight of them will not upset their
former comrades in arms and newly arrived reinforcements.
Sharagin's platoon soon took possession of the hill overlooking the
road, making a nest for itself at the top. Like the company, the whole
battalion, and all the units assigned to this particular military operation,
the platoon lived in daily expectation of orders, meanwhile the soldiers
slept under canvas awnings erected on the slope and under armoured cars,
dreamt of home in the stillness of afternoons and nights, ate dry rations
and relieved themselves in the immediate vicinity.
Lieutenant Sharagin worried that this relaxed atmosphere could prove
fatal if it were to last a few more days, but there was little he could do
about it but hope for speedy orders to advance.
.... we're surrounded by mountains... when the sun goes down,
and darkness falls, and the first stars appear like sentinels in
the heavens, the sun still lights up the other side of the
mountain range, making it look as though it is still daylight
over there, and they look flat ... as though some giant has
made cardboard cutouts of ancient warriors, heads bent, and
tired horsemen, and the peaks and contours look like their
heads, lowered in exhaustion, who have struck camp, backs and
shoulders slumped, and their horses' heads ... the giant has glued
them carefully and disposed them like immense decorations,
gifting the sleeping valley with a certain coziness ... the
valley that we shall take soon...
The atmosphere of tedium and lyrical musing was heightened by the
effects of the dry, hot, all-pervasive and heavy wind known as the "afghan,"
which descended out of nowhere and blew unrelentingly all day.
The "afghan" was fierce, as though angered by the platoon and all the
troops that had come to the valley. It drove myriad grains of sand against
the canvas of the tents, stung faces, covered those who had taken refuge
behind rocks with sand and dust and harried the sentries who crouched in
dug-outs and waited to be replaced.
But the relief sentries never arrived punctually. The "grand-dads"
slept, unconcerned by the problems of the youngsters, and those who were
scheduled for duty strung out the time as long as possible to shorten their
own stint on guard.
The wind danced up and down the valley, blotting out the sky and
mountains with an impenetrable shroud of dust. Stubborn, capricious and
merciless, the "afghan" spun at liberty, feeling its power and impunity.
... what was that bit in the Bible? How apt it was!...
Sharagin racked his brains, trying to remember those words out of
Ecclesiastes, which he had read so long ago, before military school:
"The wind blows to the South and goes around to the North; round and
round goes the wind and on its circuits the wind returns."
... it was as if the prophet was talking about the "afghan"...
I'll have to read it again when I get back home....
It was easier to tolerate the "afghan" in company, but depression was
just as great, the desire to go home was always there, and because home was
far away, the next best thing was to get drunk.
The sand raised by the "afghan" penetrated everywhere, filtering
through every crack, every hole. People spat, rubbed their eyes and noses,
but the sand filled their hair and crept down their backs. The wind carried
a hidden premonition of disaster.
Toward evening the "afghan" finally tired of making mischief, and took
itself off. It had not exhausted itself, no, that was not why the wind died
down. Most likely it got bored with this place, and sped off to wreak havoc
and bother people elsewhere, after a few parting sand whirls.
It was completely quiet again, cold and distant stars filled the sky,
but in the morning torture by the sun resumed. The soldiers, usually so
talkative and noisy, were silent.
Sharagin inspected the positions once more. Two soldiers snored in the
shade of a canvas awning. One of them -- Savateyev -- was swiping at a fly
on his face in his sleep, frowning and scratching his cheeks. When his hand
brushed against the top of his head, the lice he dislodged leapt nimbly to
the head of the soldier sleeping next to him.
... I'll order their heads shaved, every last one of them!...
Sharagin saw junior sergeant Titov wandering around clad in nothing but
a pair of sateen drawers, rolled up to look like bathing trunks, absently
scratching his crotch. Sergeant Panasyuk, his face sunburnt a fiery red,
sprawled on a greatcoat on the ground. Nearby, private Sychev, in correct
uniform, was squeezing festering pimples on the back of a "grand-dad" of the
Soviet Army, Prokhorov.
... disgusting ...
By certain unwritten laws, only the so-called grand-dads had the right
to go around undressed. In principle, the grand-dads were not supposed to do
so either, but any officer in his right mind turned a blind eye to such
liberties, provided they remained within reason. The grand-dads knew what
they were about, they knew that they could allow themselves a measure of
insolence with any commanding officer, and if they did not go too far, if
they did not overdo things, no conflict would ensue. One only needed to know
exactly where to draw the line. Sharagin glanced sideways at Panasyuk, Titov
and Prokhorov, all in their satin underwear, threw a second glance on his
way to relieve himself, and when he passed by a third time, the grand-dads
were all getting dressed. They took the squad leader's hint. Once dressed,
they went off to harry the younger personnel, because there was nothing else
to do that day.
It did not take long for Panasyuk to adopt some of the squad leader's
mannerisms and expressions. Aping Sharagin, he took to addressing the lower
ranks with the polite "you" instead of the familiar "thou," but with an air
of paternal superiority; at combat training he would urge them on with one
of the new commanding officer's aphorisms: "At first, a soldier marches as
long as he can, and after that, as long as necessary." Panasyuk's
stubbornness and persistence earned him the nickname of "the mountain brake
of communism." Combat vehicles of the commando forces are all equipped with
a so-called mountain brake with a catch. Once this is engaged, the motor
will continue to roar and strain, but the vehicle will not budge an inch. It
was due to his unwillingness to give one iota that Panasyuk lost a front
tooth during his first months of service.
The people on the hilltop wilted from the burning sun and inactivity,
becoming dull and stupid. In this kind of heat, anybody's thoughts become
scattered. Even in the shade you toss around as in a fever, sweating out
every drop of moisture and waking up stupefied by the stifling heat, with
spittle on your lips, your head like a chunk of lead, sticky with sweat and
mind fogged with fragments of restless dreams.
... Sharagin wove around in his half-dreams, and although his thoughts
remained perfectly clear and consistent, coordination disappeared: the men
would run out to line up, and all Oleg could do was mumble something,
drunkenly trying to pull on a pair of socks which, for some reason, were two
sizes too small, so the heel was too far down and the sock wouldn't fit; he
hopped around on one bare foot, lost balance and tumbled backwards, luckily
onto his bunk, avoiding injury ... Soldiers' voices reached his ears through
a thin, silken veil of slumber: "...took fright, that greenhorn!...shit
himself when the shooting started!...well, it's true, isn't it?", "a rocket
exploded just five meters off, and not a single splinter hit us, would you
believe?", "and fuck me dead if I didn't kill three spooks right then and
there," "I'd rather walk into someone else's shit instead of going up there
on the slope. We already had one stupid bastard who went out into the field
for a crap ... we found his arse about twenty meters away, ha, ha, ha..." ,
"remember that warrant officer, Kosyakevich, how he rolled around on the
ground when that, well, when them spooks had us holed up in a ravine and
opened up with a fucking heavy machine gun? Kosyakevich copped it in the
stomach... the first aid instructor bandaged him up, but we knew that it was
curtains for the poor sod!", "death's a bugger, always catches you
unawares..."; and in his dreams Oleg also heard the soldiers bitching about
their details, and the lousy rations, and that "you always have to put down
your own cash to get a decent bite of something," and the curses the
soldiers aimed at the merciless sun of Afghanistan.
Finally Sharagin could not stand this monotonous and stupid chatter,
which would not let him sleep properly, and barked: "Stop that fucking
noise!" to shut them up. Then he took a gulp of water from his canteen and
turned over, hoping to fall asleep until dinner time.
One lot of voices was replaced by another, distracting him from his
attempts to sleep, and, if truth be told, Sharagin didn't really want to
sleep, and all kinds of thoughts went round and round in the lieutenant's
head.
... when you get down to it, soldiers are nothing but rabble, the
dregs of our society, they're ... hell, how quickly they've become
an uncontrollable wave away from home! ... nothing but trivial,
idiotic thoughts in practically every head that's why they
talk such rubbish ... but if our soldier is so dumb and useless,
what about the "diesel-heads"? All the mototrised infantry are
Morons!...
"I tell you, those flies weren't fucking!" cried someone, as though in
confirmation of Sharagin's thoughts.
"Everyone's a psycho!" yelled someone else.
... grown-up idiots, the whole bleeding lot...
The lives of sons of bitches like Prokhorov, slobs and mean bastards
like Titov, hounded juniors like Myshkovsky, Sychev and Chirikov, clowns
like Panasyuk and similar typical and untypical persons and non-persons of
the latest and intervening call-ups belonged to Sharagin. Rather, he was
assigned to this motley crew known as a platoon, and it was up to him to
make the platoon combat-worthy, it was his job to think about the platoon,
these people, every hour, minute and second, to worry and make decisions as
a result of which the soldiers would return home alive from Afghanistan, or
not.
One could spend eternity cursing these young men, drafted from all ends
of the Land of the Soviets to active military service,
... brainless "elephants"...
but right now Sharagin cursed them to himself, just as he did aloud,
for errors and for trifles about which the soldiers didn't give a damn, but
which could prove fatal in war. He cursed them, but at the same time he
sympathised with each one individually, and was saddened each time when the
hardened youngsters left his squad, in the USSR or here in Afghanistan,
after their two-year stint. Sharagin truly valued that inexplicable and
unique phenomenon that is called a Soviet, Russian soldier.
... where does the Soviet soldier's frequent total disregard of death
arise, his endless courage and desperate feats? ... an Afghan soldier is
nothing like that, just try telling him that he has to go from Kabul to
Kandahar: he won't, not for any money, each one of those 'afghanoids' thinks
only of saving his own skin, while we guard their peace, do their dirty work
for them, slave our guts out ... because they're all cowards, and our lads
can't wait to get into battle ... what is it, excessive romanticism? no,
they've seen it all, and still strain at the leash ... are they stupid? but
they're not such fools as to throw life away needlessly ... duty? no, that's
for the newspapers, empty words ... Russian recklessness? partly ... nobody
can really understand it ... just as nobody can solve the riddle of the
Russian soul, nobody ... huge, deep, like our country ... untractable,
unpredictable ... only the Russian soul can encompass unbelievable breadth,
sincerity, openness and sentimentality alongside such traits as villainy,
boot-licking, baseness, servility, selfless love of others and total
disregard for human life ... especially for those on top, human life loses
all value, especially in Moscow, among those bastards who wear out the seats
of their pants in HQ offices ... they do not see us as individuals, but as
battalions, companies and divisions ...
... that's enough philosophizing, Sharagin, time to get back to
business, the war, and not sit around meditating ... what did I start with?
oh, yes - the boundless courage of Russian soldiers...
No matter how hard Sharagin tried to get away from philosophical
musings, he kept plunging back into thought. He turned over and started to
examine the peeling green paint of the APC, the dried mud plastering its
body, the thick layer of dust that covered it just as it lined his lungs.
Soviet people in Afghanistan choked on dust and spat it out in thick
gobs of yellow, pus-like spittle.
Unexpectedly it came to him that glorification of war, romantic
perception of battle begins in childhood, when a child encounters a
veritable landslide of literature on the subject, when his mind is barely
able to digest heroic films in which the soldier is always victorious, and
where death of the enemy is a great feat.
... kids barely out of the cradle run around with wooden machine guns:
bang-bang, you're dead! ... nobody ever told us what real war is like, not a
single book explained that by its nature, war is an abomination ... the
Great Patriotic War was idealized, made into a fetish ... yes, we won, but
at what price! ... I learnt a lot from my grandfather ... but this is
something that will never be published in a single book or newspaper! ... so
it looks as though the loss of ten million lives is justified, and instead
of condemning such monstrous losses, instead of condemning those who
couldn't give a damn whether thirty or forty millions perish in the name of
victory, we eulogise martial success and prepare another generation hooked
on self-sacrifice ... my generation was well prepared, that's why we're
here, that's why our Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan perform miracles of
heroism ....
Saturated with specious, sweet, superficial and erroneous images of
war, boys with wooden guns dream of battle, dream of going to war, no matter
where or what.
... sadly, most of them never shed these childish illusions as they
grow up ... stop! cancel that! it looks as though we can't live without
violent emotion, without heroics, we always need an enemy who must be
destroyed ... so were we all, our whole country, only waiting for yet
another war, like this one in Afghanistan? ...
As soon as the sun was past the zenith, the soldiers, who had quieted
down for a while, came back to life, rubbing their eyes, yawning, crawling
out of their holes. With returned vigour came jokes, laughter, swearing,
shouts.
The day before, when the squad was moving out to its assigned position,
the lads pulled a fast number to get additional food, which they hid from
their commander while they were digging in and sheltering from the "afghan."
The armoured military vehicles, BMPs, met a herd of goats on a narrow
mountain road. The older herdsman, a sturdy man who struck Sharagin as
highly suspicious,
... he's a "spook," for sure ... and he'll remain in our rear, the
bastard ...
and a young boy, were driving the herd toward them. The Afghans were
afraid that the shuravi would run down their goats and began to mill about
and fuss. Sharagin signalled a halt. At the same moment, lance-corporal
Prokhorov, the wiry and daring gunner in the first BMP, opened the rear
hatch and seized a young kid.
Sharagin didn't notice anything, all he heard was a dull thud as the
hatch slammed shut, and turned around in surprise to see a female goat
butting the BMP's armour:
... stupid animal ... what on earth possessed it? ...
The kid traveled on with the squad, quietly chewing into a sack of
potatoes. Halfway through, it almost started on some sticks of TNT that were
kept to help in digging trenches. Prokhorov and Panasyuk caught the kid
devouring the short-supply potatoes and dragged it out of the vehicle,
swearing profusely, to the encouraging shouts of their comrades.
The poor, frightened animal plunged wildly amid a forest of legs and
shadows cast by surrounding soldiery until Titov felled it to earth and slit
its throat with his bayonet.
Naturally, there was not enough fresh meat to go around. The younger
men had to make do with boiled pearl barley, but the youngsters devoured it
greedily, chomping and belching, licking their spoons and mess tins clean in
their hurry to fill their bellies before their older comrades could
intervene.
They watched from a respectful distance how the old hands savoured
their meat, sucking the bones clean and helping themselves to baked
potatoes: first they would poke around in the hot ashes with a twig, roll
out a potato, pull off the blackened peel, pop the white inside into their
mouths, and take another bite of goat meat.
"A drop of whaddya call it, port, would go down a treat now, eh Panas?"
Asked lance-corporal Prokhorov, licking his greasy fingers.
"Stop breaking my heart. When we get back to the Union, then we'll pull
out all the stops and celebrate! As much port and vodka as you can hold!"
"Shit yes, that'll be really something!"
"When we get back to the company, fuck me if I get up off my bunk for
anything. I won't move a finger until I'm demobbed!" Panansyuk took a bite
of potato. "If it wasn't for this assignment, we'd be getting ready to go
back right now..."
The youngsters chewed on dry crackers, listening enviously to the old
hands' fantasies.
"Hey, Chiri, why are you resting your balls by that fire? Where's the
tea, boy?" shouted Prokhorov. "Damn greenhorns! You'll be jerking off for a
long time yet before you can think of demob!" He laughed loudly. "But the
grand-daddies of the Soviet Army will be getting up to God knows what in a
month's time. Lock up your daughters, people! I told you, remember, how
we've got this whole female hostel right next door, a new slit every night,"
he went on, making things up on the spur of the moment, and believing his
own lies. "I remember Panas, see, how you'd come every night to a dance,
pick up a chick, and on the way back to the hostel, naturally, you'd get her
into a clinch somewhere in the bushes, then take her home, and another one
would be waving out the window at you, like, hell, come and hop into my cot,
soldier-boy! Just think, fuck it, what a life we had!"
"Who d'you think you're shitting, Prokhor?" jeered Titov. "One and a
half years I've known you, and all you've done is bullshit on about that
hostel, and I bet before that you hadn't so much as squeezed a tit!"
"Bullshit yourself, I didn't!" roared Prokhorov, though he clearly
realized that any moment now he'd be pinned down for outright lying.
"With a willy like yours, even if you got to climb up on a woman she
wouldn't feel a thing! It'd be like a pencil in a glass!" said Titov,
quashing his friend even further.
"How would you know?" challenged Prokhorov sourly.
"Well, it's no great military secret, is it? We've been in the
bath-house together, haven't we?"
"Chiri, you mother-fucker!" Shouted lance-corporal Prokhorov, glaring
at a soldier sitting nearby. "How long are we going to wait for that tea,
eh? It's ready? Well, bring it here, bugger it, before I have to get up!
I'll count to three ... fucking one ... fucking two ..."
Thin, fair-haired Chirikov grabbed up the hot mugs with his bare hands,
and just made it on the count of three.
"And where's the jam, worm?" Demanded Prokhorov, pinning the hapless
soldier with a merciless glare.
" ? "
"I'll count to one and a half! Starting now! One..."
"Come off it," interrupted Panasyuk. "Dismissed, Chiri!" After the
soldier retreated, he added: "You've driven the poor sod into the ground.
He's just come off duty. Give him a break. Otherwise, he'll goof off on
duty, fall asleep, and that will be that."
"Fuck the lot of you!" Retorted Prokhorov, offended, and stumped off
with his mug, muttering as he went: "Fine friends, bugger them! If I hadn't
swiped that fucking goat, you'd all be sitting around sucking your balls!"
"Hold it!" Shouted Panansyuk.
"Let him go," interposed Titov, waving dismissively. "Five minutes, and
he'll be back to normal."
They sat around, slurping thick black tea, which had been overboiled on
an improvised grill made out of a zinc cartridge box. The subject under
discussion was how to make a cake out of biscuits and condensed milk. It was
imperative to make their own demob cake. Tradition. Sweet dreams of
demobilisation reflected on the faces of Panasyuk and Titov, while
Prokhorov, miffed by his friends' digs, wandered around the post, sipping
his tea, burning his mouth on the hot aluminum mug, and shouting at the
younger soldiers.
Sharagin, relaxing with an after-dinner cigarette, heard a single shot.
"Find out who that was, and report back," he ordered private
Myshkovsky, who had jumped at the shot, and again at the harsh tone of his
commanding officer's voice.
... you'd swear someone dropped him flat on his face on some asphalt in
childhood ... he's put up with the grand-dads, month after month ... never
mind, Myshkovsky, we'll make a paratrooper out of you yet ...
"It was lance-corporal Prokhorov shooting, comrade lieutenant,"
reported Myshkovsky breathlessly when he got back. "He said it was so the
spooks in the village wouldn't stick their noses out. Remedial shot, he
said."
Prokhorov had taken up a position with a sniper's rifle, and turned to
the cowed sentry:
"Burkov, fuck you! Get over to the sergeant and tell him to come here."
"But I'm on duty, I can't leave my post ..."
"Whaaat? Lost your marbles in attack, or something? On your way -- one
foot here, the other one there!"
At first, they just fooled around to shape up, aiming at rocks and
bushes from the top of the hill. However, this pastime soon palled. Panasyuk
offered a bet to make things more interesting:
"For five chits, all right? Prokhor, let's see which one of us can hit
that donkey over there."
Prokhorov missed, which made him even more angry. Panasyuk got the
donkey with his first shot, leaned back against a rock and pulled out a
packet of cigarettes, while the unlucky grand-dad, boiling with frustration,
studied the village through the rifle sights, hoping that something live
would appear, a domestic animal, say, or an Afghan, so that he could renew
the bet and win back his five chits -- a whole FIVE -- from Panasyuk.
Sharagin went for a piss after his tea and saw the grand-dads messing
around with the rifle. He saw Prokhorov, pop-eyed and red-faced, pull money
out of his pocket and give it to the sergeant. Buttoning up his fly as he
went, Sharagin wandered over to the shooters. He wouldn't mind doing a bit
of shooting himself.
"Hey, Prokhor, look! An old woman's come out! No, no, a bit further to
the right," prompted the sergeant.
"Same conditions as before?" Asked Prokhorov, just to be sure.
"Yep. There's a war on, she's got no business roaming the streets.
Right, comrade lieutenant?"
"I guess so."
"One fucking spook about to bite the dust!" Cried Prokhorov gleefully.
The sun was already low, and the veiled woman cast a long shadow, which
dragged behind her along a wall, as if trying to hold her back from
inevitable disaster.
A 7.62 whooshed toward the village.
The old woman stopped, as if struck by a sudden thought, then slid
slowly to the ground, fell on her side and lay motionless.
"Never cross the road on a red light," quipped one of the men who had
gathered to watch the show.
"Want a go, comrade lieutenant?" Offered Panansyuk. "I'll load it up
with an exploding head, if you like." He retreated a few steps behind the
beaming Prokhorov and returned the five chits. They stood there watching as
their commanding officer settled down on a sleeping bag, and adjusted the
rifle sights.
"Look, look, comrade lieutenant, over on the left by the wall!"
Prompted Titov, eyes glued to a pair of binoculars. "There's a spook there,
see him?"
"Yes, I see him..."
He did not dampen the grand-dads' exhilaration, consenting silently
that the village belonged to the spooks and was thus doomed to destruction,
so there was no point in wasting pity on its inhabitants. He had agreed, so
he, too, was now part of this "game." He lay cradling the rifle and looking
through its sights at an old man who peered out from behind a wall from time
to time.
... Prokhorov's right: there's a war on, they've no business showing
themselves outside ... there's a war on, so it's either them or us ... all
these so-called peaceful civilians, old and young, hate our guts, and given
the chance, they'll wind our gizzards around a pitchfork and put them out
for all to see ... they help the spooks, the bastards, going back and forth
as if they're tending their fields, but at the same time, the sons of
bitches are setting out trip-wires ... "
Sharagin took aim, but at the same moment decided not to kill the old
man, just shoot over his head, and tightened his finger on the trigger. In
training, he had been the best shot in his group. It would be easy to hit
the target at this range -- too easy.
... live, old man ....
"Bet you he'll miss," came a whisper from behind.
" ....."
"No guts?"
"No ... Bet you ten chits." That was Panasyuk.
Sharagin aimed again. A drop of sweat trickled from his hairline past
his ear, down his cheek and fell on the rifle butt. He held his breath. He
couldn't understand why he had suddenly given way to doubts. His fingers
felt the stiffness of the trigger, as though it was resisting him.
"... taking too long to aim, fuck it, he'll miss for sure!" needled
Prokhorov's voice.
The shot boomed out. The old man fell away from the wall, staggered
forward a few steps and fell.
"Ha! Gotcha!" whooped Panasyuk.
"Class shot! Right in the brain box!" Confirmed Titov, still glued to
the binoculars. "Head's gone like it was never there. Just his jawbone
hanging on his neck!"
The armoured vehicles were like pincers around the village; moving
inward, the paratroopers began combing through the village. Groups of
soldiers dispersed along its dusty, crooked streets.
... the village is empty, definitely empty ... and the artillery
pounded the hell out of it ... everyone must be long gone ... but, then, who
knows? ...
A dead donkey lay beside the last hut, distended from the heat like a
barrel to which someone had tied four legs for fun. A suffocating stench of
decaying flesh hung in the air for several dozen meters around.
Suppressing the urge to vomit, the soldiers tried to keep as far away
from it as possible, as if fearing that the rock-hard hide of the dead
animal, bloated to its limits, might burst and douse them with stinking,
rotten matter.
Armed men filed through the winding streets, which were not wide enough
for their vehicles: a BMP was bound to get stuck and become a sitting
target.
The new boys gazed around fearfully, creeping sideways along the walls
in momentary expectation of attack, delaying the others as they pressed
their backs to the blind walls of houses. Lacking experience, borne along
only by the fear and excitement arising out of terror of the unknown, they
could only count on the speed of their reaction, the ability to fire at
once, emptying the entire magazine.
The more experienced soldiers were like predators: listening,
constantly evaluating their position in relation to a possible enemy,
estimating the best and closest cover to dive into at the first sound of a
shot. Intuitively, they sought the temper of the village, tried to catch its
breath, and moved confidently ever deeper, to complete the combing and get
out of this silent, malevolent and alien kingdom.
The men advanced quickly but quietly, fearful of mines and trip-wires.
Their eyes searched the ground. The labyrinths under the houses led to the
very heart of the village.
Part of the village was destroyed by artillery fire: some roofs and
grey mud walls had collapsed, shattered windows were black holes in the
walls of houses. Here and there, on houses that were still standing, there
were small Chinese-manufactured padlocks -- a sure sign that the inhabitants
had fled, expecting the worst, but hoped to return at some later time.
"Check 'em out!"
A door was rammed in.
"Sychev, follow me!" Ordered Sharagin. "Titov, Myshkovsky! Check
opposite, in the yard!"
"All clear!"
"The spooks have fucked off!..."
Captain Morgultsev took off his hat, wiped the sweat off his brow with
his sleeve, and unfolded a map on the armour.
"Combing through the "greenery" is like chasing lice out of your hair
with a bloody fine-tooth comb ... All right ...The Afghan units will move in
from here, and here. Our orders are to move along here." He poked a finger
at a green-shaded section on the map, criss-crossed by roads, like so many
veins.
"To hell and gone with that fucking greenery!" Chistyakov hawked and
spat through his teeth, then rubbed the spittle into the ground with the toe
of his boot. "Can't we do without those bloody Afghans? They'll scare off
the spooks for miles around!"
... wants to take a last drink of blood, and there aren't any spooks
about, nobody to kill ...
guessed Sharagin.
"Comrade senior lieutenant!" squeaked the political officer. "Enough of
your fu ... '' he cut himself off. ''Enough of these emotional outbursts!
They're our military allies!"
Chistyakov bit his lip, scowled at Nemilov and burst out:
"What do you fucking well want, more than anyone else?"
"Bloody hell, will you stop that?!" interrupted Morgultsev. He gave the
platoon leaders their instructions and ordered them to their vehicles.
"I won't leave it at that," fumed the political officer. "I don't care
if he's due for replacement! What kind of an example is he setting others?"
"Leave him alone," advised Morgultsev.
Sharagin's BMP bounced across a trench, the armour slicing through a
corner of a house, and raced away from the village.
They penetrated deeper into the valley and the "greenery", breathing in
the unhealthy, greasy dust of deserted houses, the treads of BMPs churning
up the spooks' former land holdings, driving them away and pursuing; their
advance drove the spooks back from their bolt-holes, squeezed them out of
the valley, pointing them toward other hunters, even though they knew that
once the operation was over and the companies went back to base, the spooks
who had managed to break through would return and bring others with them,
return and take up residence once more, and revolutionary power would never
be established in these parts.
Unruly and defiant, condemned as treacherous or subversive, at times
due to errors inevitable in war time, the villages were methodically pounded
by Soviet air power and artillery. Heavy arms fire felled and destroyed
Muslim gravestones, flags fluttering in the wind. Shells disemboweled
cemeteries and homes of the heathen, cleared Afghan mountains, plains and
deserts of the spooks, of the unclean, making way for the builders of a new,
bright future. The shuravi hoped the time would come when they would finally
wipe all treacherous villages from the f