Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev

  Shershnev categorically rejected the idea that he had something to be ashamed of. He considered his conscience clear.

  Yet he returned dozens of times to that night, to that shipping container in the back of the military base that served as a cell and interrogation room. He remembered the smell of blood and vomit; one of his colleagues joked that the enemy’s vomit and shit smelled different. Dim light, a naked man in a gas mask handcuffed to the wall.

  Repeated questions: who, when, where. Screams, whispers, curses, cries, moans.

  Lieutenant Evstifeyev, squeezing the air hose leading to the mask.

  The familiar feeling of power: turning the prisoner into a nameless dummy with a faceless rubber head, forcing the naked body, open to suffering, to respond to the rhythmic and inexorable language of pain: who, where, when? The freedom of not hiding their faces, multiplying the power, making it profoundly personal and thus particularly intense and intoxicating.

  Now Shershnev searched his memory for another exit from the container, from its four metal walls. He was not repenting, he didn’t care about the torture, the squashed fingers, broken ribs, and eyes bulging from suffocation behind the murky glass of the gas mask.

  But he should have guessed, was obligated to guess right away that the agent was merely using them to do his dirty work. Shershnev had spent a long time looking for the field commander he was ordered to destroy. One of the agents pointed to the commander’s alleged messenger. In fact, he gave Shershnev a nobody, a teenager who knew nothing, drunk on hatred for the soldiers; he was the last male in a clan that was feuding with the agent’s clan.

  But Shershnev fell for it, impermissibly caught up in the heat of the hunt, and believed, he believed that the prisoner, just a kid, knew where the commander was.

  It was all in vain. Their stubborn torture. His adolescent, ritual pride that would not let him admit he was not the one.

  Their meager inventiveness.

  His patience with being a victim.

  When he finally broke and spoke freely, Shershnev instantly understood whom he had allowed to fool him.

  They could have tried to save the kid. Given or sold him to the relatives who stood at the gates of the base day and night, handing over worn lists, compiled by unknown people. This was a procedure with secondary prisoners—they gave a lot more money for a live one than a corpse.

  But Shershnev ordered them to kill the boy and bury him in the secret pit behind the cement plant. The mistake was much too shameful.

  It was a good thing that Evstifeyev was a dull and obedient chump; he didn’t seem to have understood a thing. If the boy had talked, both the locals and his colleagues would have heard. Rumors spread quickly here.

  The military could arrest anyone and beat a confession out of them; that was in the nature of things. But an officer who fell as stupidly as Shershnev had for the agent’s trick would have turned into a jerk for his men and a laughingstock for others; his authority would vanish in the blink of an eye.

  Shershnev did not wait for the execution of his order. He left. When he returned in a week’s time, he asked Sergeant Mishustin, drunkard, fornicator, executioner, and trader in prisoners—Is it done?—and received the expected answer, Yeah, it’s done, it’s done, cap.

  Mishustin could permit himself to be offhand with senior officers. He handled financial affairs of generals, whose multitude of stars made the four Shershnev had earned as a captain seem pale by comparison.

  Shershnev could not punish the agent who had set him up. He did not work just for Shershnev. And he wasn’t merely an informant, he was the product of a lengthy period of time spent in the limbo of war, where he had fought for both sides, and he had set up an illicit business—and there could be no other—with the army; and now a good position, albeit not in the top ranks, was in the offing for him in Chechnya’s new administration. The agent naturally said nothing about how he had tricked the captain; he did not want the boy’s family to learn who had turned him in to the federal troops.

  So Shershnev was left with blood shed in vain. With fanaticism that had served nothing. With the feeling that he had been stupid in the heat of the hunt, taken down a puppy instead of a wolf, shamed himself before the whole world. He had carried out a heavy and expensive fatal torture on a youth who was worth a kopeck.

  There were men in his unit who would not have understood Shershnev’s worries; they would have said, one more, one less, who cares. Shershnev would have forgiven himself for missing the mark. But knowing how to aim, yet not knowing how to distinguish targets, was inexcusable.

  Evstifeyev died six months later. He was hit by machine gun fire from a cellar during a search. Mishustin was killed by outsiders or friends when he took a batch of corpses to the cement factory. Shershnev didn’t consider this particularly coincidental. War is war. He did feel a secret relief when he learned from his colleagues that the unwitting witnesses to his mistake were dead—Mishustin was a busybody, he knew everything and everyone, and he must have realized how cleverly the agent had screwed the captain.

  A month after his return home, Marina told him she was pregnant.

  Shershnev had known various nights with her. He could tell, it seemed to him, what was happening during sex beyond the sex itself, what other meanings carnal love could have.

  He especially remembered one night, actually a late summer evening. They had gone mushroom picking in the countryside that morning; people were selling baskets of young agaric by the metro entrance. They found very few, the locals who got up early had cut them all down. Ferns were bruised and trampled around tree stumps and the cut mushroom stems showed white in the moss.

  They did have the river, the swaying rope bridge, swimming in the rushing water, unexpectedly warm and silvered from surface to bottom with the flickering schools of fish. The day was bigger, more expansive, more important than other days. When they made love that evening, he sensed that on such days, under a special sign, beloved God-sent children were conceived.

  Then Marina skipped a period, a bodily echo, a light flutter of the universe. But the test was negative. Soon after he left on his first mission, which made him forget the bridge and the river and the embrace.

  The night of his return was poisoned by the pathetic, sexless nakedness that Shershnev had seen in the container. Without caresses or tenderness. He was desperate to come, as if to pour out into his wife everything that had happened to him; he did not notice that Marina was moaning with pain, not pleasure.

  Then Shershnev once again started getting used to his wife’s vulnerable body, given in to his power; they made love over and over, finding themselves as they had been. But he knew that Maxim had been conceived that very first, very dark night.

  Yesterday Maxim had turned sixteen. Shershnev offered to take him and his friends to the country, to roast shashlik over a campfire, hoping that Maxim would appreciate it. But his son asked for a paintball match in a location he had selected.

  Shershnev said yes and rented a bus. Marina and her new husband were against it, worrying about injuries. That was the only reason why he had agreed. He didn’t like the idea much. Maxim knew that his father was in the army, that he had been in real wars. But they never talked about it; not even the little that Shershnev had the right to tell.

  He did not tie his son’s fate with the fate of that now nameless man tossed into the pit at the cement plant. However, the coincidence—one man died and Maxim was called into life—seemed too obvious to be ignored.

  And now Maxim wanted to play at war. Why? What for? Shershnev sensed in this request a bad convergence of two worlds that he superstitiously preferred to keep apart. Even if the bullets in the paintball guns were toys. His colleagues, who knew a thing or two about his family problems, were pleased: at last the boy is showing guts, the father’s genes dominating. You’ll play together. But Shershnev was certain that Maxim would ask him to play for the other side.

  He had explained everything he had done as being done f
or Maxim: for the sake of his peaceful life. Shershnev could not admit that his son was important and necessary to him only as a justification. Now he was expecting some vengeful trick, a ricochet from the past.

  But he could not refuse.

  Seeing the billboard—Territory X, Paintball—Shershnev turned off the highway. He did not have time before the trip to study where exactly they were going. Probably an abandoned warehouse or an old sanatorium turned into the stage set of a battlefield (ridiculous to those who know) or a postnuclear apocalypse world.

  Shershnev had seen Grozny after two army attacks. The suburbs of Damascus bombed into rubble. Burned villages. He had the arrogant superiority of a man whose entire biography from school to military service had trained him to see violence as the source of experience, to respect its authenticity, its true and indelible traces.

  He looked in the rearview mirror at his son and his son’s friends. Fledglings. Small fry. Tadpoles. He felt the urge to rub their noses in real ash and mud, to turn off the road to find not a suburban, well-trodden park, but an eviscerated village with no life, no transparent neighborly secrets, because all the doors were smashed, curtains torn down, closets emptied, and every crack checked by the eyes of soldiers.

  The hassle of the depopulated village elicited, dragged into the light, the mean and persistent feeling of a well-planned raid. How many times had they driven up like this, in the early years only in armored cars and later in buses, checking their weapons, preparing to surround and break in! He had felt the essence, the rhythm of that feeling in a poem that a dedicated old man read to them in their military English classes—a teacher who had known the legendary era of the Cambridge Five. Poetry usually did not interest Shershnev. Poetry had been punishment in school, collapsing in his memory like mush; he couldn’t understand why people wrote it, why they had this bizarre fancy. But this poem—the only one in his life—he memorized without repetition, for it fell so perfectly on the contours of his soul. And now he muttered it, glad that he could find his own feelings in the sounds of a foreign tongue:

  O what is that sound which so thrills the ear

  Down in the valley drumming, drumming?

  Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,

  The soldiers coming.

  O what is that light I see flashing so clear

  Over the distance brightly, brightly?

  Only the sun on their weapons, dear,

  As they step lightly.

  He wanted to continue, but stopped. They had arrived.

  The paintball grounds were in a former Pioneer camp.

  Shershnev hoped that they would not be playing among shipping containers. One time he and his colleagues had gone there to relax and found the paintball grounds had been set up in imitation of a battle in a port. Cheap and easy, you just collect a lot of old containers for the price of scrap metal, set them up in an empty field, and you have your labyrinth. The owners told them that lots of people do this, it’s the cheapest way—the main expense is renting the land. His colleagues, who had been in that war, laughed, banging their rifle butts against the ribbed sides—the containers were hollow, empty; Shershnev enjoyed that feeling of common experience that should not be spoken aloud. But he did not want to play with Maxim in that setting.

  He arranged for a different paintball battlefield.

  A Pioneer camp. Recognizable, typical. Shershnev was in one like that as a child—on the territory of his father’s garrison. A booth at the gate. One-story buildings for units, painted with yellow whitewash that could be scraped off, dissolved in water, and turned into a spotting liquid to splash one another from old food cans. A parade ground, overgrown with grass, and flagpoles. A bust of Lenin, covered in silver caustic paint. A low brick bath-house. Flower beds made of tires in front of the administration building. Loudspeakers on poles . . .

  He smelled smoke—there were campfires in the distance, to create a battle atmosphere. Maxim went to the office, because he wanted to pay for the match himself, albeit with his father’s money. His friends waited by the bus. Shershnev thought that they would light up, but no one smoked. He was the only one with a cigarette, he took a drag and exhaled, chasing away a bad premonition as he looked at two layers, two periods in his memory.

  Here he is, commander of the Pioneer squad. They were playing Lightning Strike, which they waited for all day; they were crawling under cover of the crookedly shorn shrubs toward the headquarters of the “Blues” in building 12, and they could hear their general, Pioneer commander Venya Valkov, giving orders. Shershnev’s team was anticipating running inside, pulling off the blue scraps sewn onto the enemy’s shirts, and the opponents would have to sit on the floor, seething with anger, right where they were “killed.”

  And here—overwhelming—were the same asphalt paths, neglected shrubs, yellow buildings, and redbrick steam bath. The stands with red-and-white slogans were riddled with bullets and burned. A homemade banner with a snarling wolf hung on the flagpole. The same camp, the same sign in a tight arc over the gate: YOUNG LENINIST. The woodland was different, not sparse pine but thickly planted deciduous trees, distorted, twisted by the inner gravitation of the mountains. Nearby flowed a turbulent mountain river, and its noise was akin to the voices of the people who had taken over the camp: as if someone had gathered the most alien, piercing sounds and fused them into one.

  He was the unit commander, a small group. His job now was to observe, because everything had already been predetermined; the treated prayer beads in a carved casket, the beads of roughly polished wood, for wood absorbed aromatic oils so well, covering up the faint scent of the special substance.

  Shershnev was surprised when they let him see the plan the higher-ups had developed. He said carefully that it would be easier to point a rocket or strike from helicopters. He did not want to risk his men on an operation for somebody’s scientific degrees, for the sake of field tests of a prehistoric weapon that smacked of theatrical farce—they might as well ask them to shoot arrows or use daggers. But now he literally sensed the movement of beads in the casket, anticipated someone’s hands opening the box and taking out the beads strung on rough thread, the false gift; they would be running the beads between their fingers, which would be followed by a shrill scream that did not know a man’s shame.

  When the man who had the same name as the boy he had tortured, his long-sought enemy, the field commander, and in the recent past, chairman of the Dawn Kolkhoz, Shershnev’s age, cried out his pain, the major raised a prayer, pagan, fierce, blasphemous, to the Maker—the maker of that imperceptible death imbued in the prayer beads.

  He was awarded an order and a promotion. But after that they did not so much hold him back as set him aside, like an instrument that justified its tricky shape but was rarely needed. Others were sent on ordinary assignments and there were no more operations in that special line. In any case, in their section.

  Other men slowly but surely passed him in rank, awards, and informal ratings of operatives. His career was marked by the mysterious substance about which he knew nothing, even though he had to sign a separate nondisclosure agreement along with the usual ones before the raid. Somewhere up high secret plans were conceived and orders given. Somewhere in the laboratories of their departments, thought Shershnev, chemists were still creating substances. The lieutenant colonel waited for the moment when they would be in sync: order and substance, he and the next target.

  Shershnev finished his smoke, stamped out the butt. The decision came on its own: today he would let his son shoot him. Not kill but wound. It was necessary. Let Maxim see the paint blood on his father’s body and feel joy and embarrassment. That red spot, that successful shot would be their first adult story that they would later recall—how skillfully I got you, oh, yes, how you did.

  Shershnev pulled on the game coveralls. The teams split up. One was to storm “base”—an old unit dorm—and the other defend it. Shershnev joined the attacking side. They would have more losses. He wanted to say somet
hing to his son, but while he was thinking of the right words, Maxim shut the visor of his helmet and gave him a two-fingered V for victory sign.

  Once again Shershnev lay behind trees, looking at yellow houses. He crawled, shot, commanded his subordinates—left, right, go around. Of course, he was playing at a third, a quarter of his strength, missing on purpose or even skipping a shot. He could have shot everyone here in ten minutes, even with the clumsy paintball rifle that did not shoot accurately or far. But he played around, trying to overcome the years of training and know-how, trying to force himself to make the wrong response. Shershnev looked for Maxim, he thought he might have seen him in the window, his helmet number 1. They all had the same uniform and helmets, and he worried he would make a mistake and let one of his players “kill” or “wound” his son; he stealthily steered the game in the direction he wanted.

  The defenders retreated into the building. Shershnev ran over and threw himself over a windowsill. He wanted to reach his son unharmed, reducing his team along the way, so that Maxim’s victory would be even more impressive.

  But it turned out that the narrow corridors were piled with metal beds, tables, and chairs. This was hard even for him. Without noticing, Shershnev had gotten into the rhythm and rage of action. He dropped one with a precise shot right in the visor, which was then covered with red. He got another with a round across the legs. The responding shot hit the wall by his head.

  As a distraction, Shershnev threw a desk into the corridor. Then he jumped out. In his peripheral vision, he saw motion in an empty room. He shot a round, at close range, knowing that the paintballs really hurt at that distance but unable to stop himself. He struck as he would in real combat, from below, vertically from groin to neck, then ran two steps to finish him off, pointed the barrel . . .