by Oleg Pavlov
They had already driven many times around the grounds, which stretched over a good five kilometres of steppe. The firing range began right at the foot of the watchtower. It was empty and desolate, and the whole neatly manicured battlefield looked like a giant open-air replica. A couple of kilometres away, crumbly russet hills obscured the horizon. Every point in this sweeping arena was intended to be pelted with gunfire. It was entangled in a web of communication routes: the slender, sinuous lines of trenches. And in the distance, emerging like a mirage in the bleak steppe, was a toy-like mock town, made up of four prefab cubes and something resembling a town square. All the buildings were three storeys high. The window casements stood gaping like gouged eye sockets. Each pockmark in the walls was charred. The smell of soot hung in the air, although there was nothing flammable in sight. People must have come here to burn things they wanted to destroy, converting them into smoke and ashes.
The firing zones were like pedestrian play areas for children, complete with asphalt tracks and markings that might lead you to mistake it for a complex for learner drivers. Each site had been built to stand alone, like freestanding apparatus scattered around a gym, and they were linked together by still more tarmac tracks.
The thought and attention that had gone into arranging everything against the sterile Martian backdrop was eerily mesmerising. Given the absence of people, it was hard to take in that human beings had created all this – rather it felt as if all the humans here had been carefully wiped out by some alien consciousness with the power not only to destroy but to delete for good while imposing its deadly order. It was as though life existed here much in the way it did in the sands, if indeed that sandy powder was the dust of something living. At the firing ground, only the sand snaked its way across the asphalt paths, slithering right before your eyes the moment the slightest breeze blew in from the steppes. Whereupon your spine would tingle with the realisation that, all around, the sand grains were swarming and hovering over the roads: the vast desert earth was alive. Yet, trained by Abdulka to run things with devotion, Kholmogorov increasingly saw it all in terms of management. On a typical day, he had to sweep clean the tarmac paths on the shooting range and make the rounds of all the facilities. On the eve of target practice, he had to check the equipment and get it ready. And on the days when the soldiers arrived for practice, he would crawl through the trenches on his belly, his face damp with sweat, giving a good bang to any machinery that had seized up; oh, and the three rusting steel dummies that served as bobbing targets couldn’t function without him. With his help, the dummies leapt up from the trenches like corpses from the grave, and, if need be, they’d even begin to wiggle on their hinges. At the right moment, the pyrotechnics would erupt and the explosions thunder menacingly.
Immersed in this fun and forbidding world, Kholmogorov felt at times like a phantom. And so indeed he was; only deaf old Abdulka was aware of his existence here. The soldiers in the firing line were oblivious to his presence: little did they know that concealed in the trench beneath the target dummies they were peppering with fire was a living person. Abdulka would tighten up Alyosha’s bulletproof vest, put his helmet on him and with a sigh send him off into sheer hell. The moment Alyosha heard the first shots, his heart turned to ice. He heard what the men standing a kilometre away couldn’t hear: bullets thrashing into the dummies, crumpling and plopping to the ground like droppings, clinking and hissing. He heard the whizzing as the hail of bullets shot through the air, and his hearing would start to fade out. His soul would sink into the infernal music, shivering in the womb-like emptiness; when an electric humming suddenly ran through a jammed cable, Alyosha’s soul would emerge into the world and freeze in terror.
Whenever the machine seized up or the cable lost the traction needed to lift a dummy, Alyosha had to crawl over to his steel friend and use all his might to get it moving again. The firing would cease as the soldiers waited for the targets to pop back up. Alyosha felt as if he had known that pacific silence all his life, with its promise of respite for the nerves, and indeed of a break for the soldiers doing the shooting. The silence was in his power, he was the one who bestowed it minute by minute. But while he worked, his hands continued to convulse as if zapped with electricity, and with each movement his body would writhe in agony: during those minutes, in that silent space, for some reason he was overcome by a fear of death. The men in the firing line held their peace. From their end the soldiers couldn’t make out any living soul at the distant targets: when the dummies silently appeared from nowhere it always shook them and stirred the blood. Though the targets would be standing motionless, waiting to be shot, a small flurry of panic would momentarily sweep over the soldiers, and those whose turn it was to fire would be rooted to the spot. From Alyosha’s end, things looked quite different. He would be scuttling along the trench on his hands and knees like a hardy little cockroach – and into his bolthole.
There were nocturnal firing sessions too, when the darkness made shooting the targets seem more like hunting. The searchlight beam would roam over the tin dummies, jerking them out of the gloom, and they would flail about as if in a boiling cauldron, bashing to and fro. Bursts of incandescent white tracers from the assault rifles would cleave the blood-tinged amber air of the night. Alyosha would spend three or four hours entombed in his bolthole. It felt as though the entire pack were chasing after him, as if each shot was intended for him – but they couldn’t quite make the kill.
After the session, the firing ground would be plunged into emptiness and sleep. The wind blew in fitful gusts, strewing the steppes with a carpet of dust. Alyosha would gather up the empty cartridges – the non-ferrous metal would be melted down and most likely turned back into ammunition – and he’d sink into the silence, like a wild animal. It seemed as if he was walking through the sky as he wandered for days on end across the steppe. He would lie down on the ground – and he’d stay there for as long as he could. He’d get up and push himself to walk on further until he could walk no more. To make the time pass more quickly, he’d make himself food: cook up some soup out of tinned beef and barley, or boil it down into a thickened mass.
When he grew tired of forcing himself to think and colliding with each moment of silence and solitude, Alyosha quickly and freely fell to dreaming, and then he’d roam about the steppes in oblivion. Mostly he dreamed of performing heroic deeds, which always involved offering up his life. He also dreamed of being needed by somebody, or of saving someone. Or he’d imagine it was wartime and he was fighting in a battle, and in this dream he would die saving his imaginary comrades. Engrossed in his dreams, he could skip eating for a day or two, as if he were sacrificing his portions for somebody, and he wouldn’t be tormented by hunger. He felt enlightenment and serenity inside, and even Abdulka slipped from memory – food, meanwhile, turned into something intolerable, a reminder of life.
Whenever Abdulka turned up unexpectedly, nothing would change. He would bring some home-cooked provisions, some old newspapers to use as toilet paper, and Alyosha would learn from them of bygone news. The deaf man might have got hold of a radio for him, as Alyosha had once requested, but on every visit he’d rant, ‘Oh forget about your crummy old radio, there’s nothing worth listening to. Don’t go filling your head with all that knowledge, you silly billy! You’ll make yourself ill, and that’ll be the end of you. You think a bird stuffs its head with knowledge? No, it goes flying on its way, high up in the skies!’
Paternal old Abdulka was aghast that the boy lived without letters. Alyosha never wrote to his family, nor did he get any news from them. Back in the summer, the deaf man had asked, ‘Why don’t you send your family a letter?’ Alyosha replied, ‘But there’s no point writing, Abdulla Ibrahimovich. It’s summer – they’ll all be out in the vegetable patch. They wouldn’t last long without their vegetable patch.’ Come autumn, when Abdulka again suggested writing, he was told, ‘But there’s no point writing. They’re digging up potatoes. They wouldn’t last long without thei
r potatoes.’ When winter was upon them, he refused to take no for an answer and he sat Alyosha down with a sheet of paper, ordering him as his commanding officer to write to his apparently long-forgotten parents. Alyosha spent a long while gazing at the blank sheet – then he wrote: ‘Dear Mama and Papa, I’m serving the motherland, like you told me to, doing my very best. Mama, do take care. Papa, you take care too. I’ll look after myself. Bye bye, Your son Aleksei.’ Just before New Year, as the holiday was approaching, a parcel arrived from his home region. Abdulka collected it and brought it to the firing ground. The parcel contained sweets, biscuits, jars of jam – all manner of sugary treats. And there was a letter:
Hello Son,
Here’s some goodies for you and your friends. Have the jam first or it’ll go off, then eat the sweets and biscuits afterwards. We’re taking care of ourselves. We’ve been busy plucking the goats. Looks like we’ll get a couple of shawls and about ten pairs of socks. We’ll sell them in the winter and that will see us through. We wouldn’t last long otherwise. Carry on serving the motherland like we told you to. We’re looking forward to you coming home. Eat the jam first or it will go bad.
Abdulka judged how much work to set Alyosha according to the quantity of bread and water he was leaving him – and he would usually time his return on this basis. He would turn up with more water and bread, think up some new chores for Alyosha, unburden his soul in a good old moan about everything and be on his way. Alyosha knew the road that led to the village, but there was nothing he sought from the people there. Their life had become alien to him.
Once a week he had to visit the bathhouse. The 6th Guard Company patrolled the prison colony near the village. Their bath day was on Sunday. Alyosha would arrive early in the morning, walking straight there, and he’d huddle up on the bench near the bathhouse while the company had a nice long wash. They treated him as an outsider, and he suffered gibes and jabs but if he didn’t respond, it was because he felt nothing but bewilderment. The voices, the mass of soldiers, the whole hubbub – he found it perplexing, and he’d clam up and block it all out. Slowly the word got around that a deaf-mute was using the bathhouse, and they’d add with a sneer, as though talking about some half-wit, ‘He’s from the firing ground.’
Were it not for the firing practice, which brought him tumbling down from his celestial walks into the rock bottom of the trench, the peace and contentment might have driven him out of his mind. In the winter, life became harder. Darkness and loneliness were added to his lot. But the frost brought enlightenment, and in his soul arose a tranquillity more palpable than the hunger. Alyosha would clear the hills of snow in solitude, then he’d collapse from exhaustion and fall blissfully and soundly asleep in the warmth of the stove; during the night the snow would heap up again and the drifts grow back, in the same spots and to the same heights, with the same outlines, as though germinating from the same seeds. Inside the tower he would stoke up the stove, though he was sparing with the coal that was so essential to life. When he went out each day to clear the snow heaps from areas that were expected to glisten with a smooth, icy crust like a skating rink before the start of the shooting, he would suddenly feel that without this Sisyphean toil, life would be empty. He would begin slipping into the happy delusion that he was shovelling snow into a furnace in order to stay alive. A sparkling twilight-blue winter palace would suddenly envelop him in a great earthly warmth, to the point that Alyosha would throw off his stifling sheepskin coat, then his ushanka trooper hat, and he’d end up bare-chested, solemnly pacing up and down the clean, unburdened paths, believing that he’d warmed up the earth.
During the first winter, a miracle happened: on each new day, he would wake up and start living as if nothing had happened, completely oblivious to yesterday. Everything slid from his memory of its own accord, it burned out in his soul like an ember. He had survived another day, he’d warmed himself up – now all he needed was to keep on going.
A simple command was bestowed upon Alyosha as he was plodding with his sledge along the winter path to fetch bread and water. Fatherly old Abdulka, in his wisdom, had put his motorcycle in storage for the winter and entrusted Alyosha to supply himself with provisions. At the crack of dawn Alyosha would get himself ready for the expedition. By noon he’d arrive at the village. In the kitchen of the guards’ company he’d receive a sack of rye loaves and stock up on a full canister of drinking water. For all his other needs he melted down snow, but his drinking supply was always running low and there were no economies to be made. Sometimes he would be left with half a sack of bread but he’d be all out of water. He’d puzzle it over: so, plain old water could be more precious than bread, and it was a good deal heavier to haul – you really had to slog away. Harnessing himself to the sledge, Alyosha cursed at his heavy load, perhaps the way a horse might gently curse a laden cart. If only the horse could know that the cargo was hay, and the hay was to feed his very own self, then wrath would give way to joy. As for Alyosha, he could not rein in his fiery human resentment. It was as if the whole scheme had been specially dreamt up: we’ll make him drag his burden for a good fifteen miles, only to dispose of the whole heavy load into his stomach, turning the lot into nothing!
It was here, on this winter road to nowhere, loaded with something destined to turn into nothing, that Alyosha discovered life’s simple command. On each journey, his human resentment had been losing its fire. He was beginning to forget that he had in fact been born a human, not a horse. And there came a day when he felt entirely horse, watered and fed for the single purpose of being harnessed to a cart: Ah, but the whole lot is mine, and it’s alive! It’s all going to turn into me! My dearest water, my dearest loaves – here they are, warming me and comforting me! The moment Alyosha halted from weariness to recover his breath, he caught on his numb lips a gentle gust in the piercingly cold air. Sweeping past like a shred of cloth, it instilled in him a hot, damp wooziness. Alyosha stood in the arctic expanse, piercing it like a pivot. Wanting to recover for a moment, he watched everything glitter with a million living snowflakes, while myriad new snowflakes kept on showering down from on high. The sky was frozen and distant: it seemed like a forest blanketed in snow that had been given a shake by something powerful and majestic. And here was a snowflake dissolving on his lips. Alyosha even fancied that he’d seen it whirling down, lonely and doomed, as though it were circling over him in the certain knowledge that it would melt.
An irrational mood came over him. He had spent so long tramping away that now, standing still in the freezing cold, he became drenched in sweat and worried he’d catch a chill. ‘If I come down with a cold, it’s going to kill me!’ Alyosha imagined himself thrashing about in his fever, begging for a drink, and then dying. But with the courage of a child he kept on standing in the frozen terrain, feeling sorry for the dead snowflake. Out of spite for his coming chill, he sat down on the sledge and decided to have a feast: he broke a hunk off the frozen bread and chewed on it, washing it down with icy water from the canister. After he had leisurely eaten his fill, he harnessed himself imperiously back to the sledge and continued on his journey, as though he were blessed with eternal life.
What happened to him that day left an almost physical trace. From that point on, Kholmogorov would often slip into oblivion with a spontaneous smile fixed upon his face. There was something freakish about this smile, like a laughing face slashed with scars. At first when Abdulka saw the smile, it just made him cross, for he thought Alyosha was somehow smiling and staying silent on purpose. Alyosha would come to his senses with Abdulka yelling at him – and he’d be utterly bewildered and confused. Abdulka thought his worker must be suffering from some kind of mental disorder. He decided the winter had affected him, and he calmed down in the belief it would pass in the spring. But the dreaminess did not pass, and the commander of the firing ground began to worry that Alyosha had somehow been concussed in the trench. For some time, fatherly old Abdulka was tortured with the fear that it might be something deadl
y. He worked himself into a panic: if it was fatal, they’d lose no time in pinning the blame on him; they’d say Abdullayev should have kept an eye on things. But the signs suggested it wasn’t fatal after all – and so he decided to keep quiet and pretend he’d seen nothing.
Occasionally, when he could no longer look at that painful smile, he would burst out abruptly: ‘Don’t be sad, my son!’
Alyosha, however, did not think he was moping.
‘Don’t worry, Abdulla Ibrahimovich, everything’s fine. I’m feeling really good.’
‘What do you mean, you’re feeling good? What’s there to be happy about?’ Abdulka asked, reading his lips.
‘Well, why not? Am I meant to be miserable? Look around – everything’s just great.’
‘Have you gone completely bonkers?’
‘Well, it’s just that I feel good… No special reason… Just everything’s fine…’
Once, at the end of summer, Abdulka hurried over to the firing ground during the night and surprised his soldier with the news: ‘War’s broken out. It’s brother against brother.’ The deaf man was shaken and frightened, he had rushed to the steppe to take cover, but Kholmogorov simply could not believe him. Abdulka did not sleep that night. Unnerved by the silence and the solitude, he kept on waking Alyosha.
‘They’ve gone berserk. Why can’t they just live in peace? What is it they’re after? Why do they need a war?’ he not so much asked as objected.