Zinky Boys

by Svetlana Alexievich

  There was a lot of opium and marijuana smoked, and whatever else they could get hold of. It made you feel strong and free of everything, especially of your own body, as if you were walking on tip-toe. Every cell in your body felt light, and you could sense each individual muscle. You wanted to fly and you were irrepressibly happy. You liked everything and would giggle at any old nonsense. You discovered new sights and sounds and smells. For a moment you could believe that the nation loves its heroes! In that kind of mood it was easy to kill — you were anaesthetised and had no pity. And it was easy to die, too. Fear disappeared and you felt you had a magical flak-jacket that would protect you …

  So they’d smoke themselves into a stupor and go into action. I tried it a couple of times myself, when I was at the end of my tether but I just had to carry on. I was working in the infectious department, which was intended for thirty beds but instead held 300, mainly typhoid and malaria cases. Each patient was given a bed and blankets but we often found them lying on their army coats or even just in their underpants on the bare ground, with their heads shaven but still crawling all over with lice.

  In the village nearby the Afghans were walking around in our hospital pyjamas and with our blankets over their heads instead of turbans. Yes, that’s right, our boys had sold them. And I couldn’t really blame them. They were dying for three roubles a month — that was a private’s pay. Three roubles, meat crawling with worms, and scraps of rotten fish. We all had scurvy, I lost all my front teeth. So they sold their blankets and bought opium, or something sweet to eat, or some foreign gimmicks. The little shops there were very colourful and seductive. We’d seen nothing like it before. The boys sold their own weapons and ammunition knowing they’d be used to kill them.

  After all that — well, I saw my own country with different eyes. Coming home was terribly difficult and very strange. I felt I’d had my skin ripped off. I couldn’t stop crying, I could bear to be only with people who’d been there themselves. I spent my days — and nights — with them. Talking to anybody else seemed a futile waste of time. That phase lasted six months. Now I have rows in the meat queue like everybody else.

  You try and live a normal life, the way you lived before. But you can’t. I didn’t give a damn about myself or life in general. I just felt my life was over. And this whole process was much worse for the men. A woman can forget herself in her child — the men had nothing to lose themselves in. They came home, fell in love, had kids — but none of it really helped, Afghanistan was more important than anything else. I too wish I could understand what it was all about, and what it was all for. Over there we had to force such questions back inside us, but at home they just come out and have to be answered.

  We must show understanding for the kids who went through all that. I was a grown woman of thirty and it was devastating enough for me, but they were just boys, they didn’t understand a thing. They were taken from their homes, had a gun stuck in their hands and were taught to kill. They were told they were on a holy mission and that their country would remember them. Now people turn away and try to forget the war, especially those who sent us there in the first place. Nowadays even we vets talk about it less and less when we meet up. No one likes this war. And yet I still cry when I hear the Afghan national anthem. I got to like all Afghan music over there. I still listen to it, it’s like a drug.

  Recently in a bus I met a soldier who’d been in our hospital. He’d lost his right arm. I remembered him well because he was from Leningrad like me. ‘Can I help you in any way, Seryozha?’ I asked him, but he was so angry: ‘Just leave me alone!’ he hissed at me.

  I know he’ll come to me and apologise. But who’ll apologise to him, and to everyone else who was broken over there? And I’m not just talking about the cripples. Nowadays I don’t just hate war. I can’t even stand seeing a couple of boys having a scrap in the park. And please, don’t tell me the war’s over now. In summer, when I breathe in the hot dusty air, or see a pool of stagnant water, or smell the dry flowers in the fields, it’s like a punch in the head. I’ll be haunted by Afghanistan for the rest of my life …

  Private, Driver

  I’ve been back from the war a long time now, and it may be hard for me to convey my fury at what happened to us. Before I was called up† I’d done a two-year course at an autotransport technical college, so my first job was driving the battalion commander. That was fine, but then they began to harangue us about the ‘small Soviet contingent in Afghanistan’. Not a single political instruction period went by without them telling us that ‘our forces were bravely protecting the frontiers of the Fatherland and providing assistance to a friend and ally’. That was when we started worrying that we might be sent over there; which is exactly why the authorities decided to lie to us.

  We were summoned to battalion HQ and asked: ‘Now, lads, how would you like to work on the latest engines?’ Of course we all shouted ‘Yes please!’ with one voice. Next question: ‘First, you’ll have to spend some time helping with the harvest in the tselina.‡ Any objections?’ No objections.

  It was only in the plane, when we happened to find out from the crew that the flight was to Tashkent, that I began to wonder if we really were going to the tselina. At Tashkent we were lined up and marched to a barbed-wire compound a little way from the airport. We sat and waited. The officers were going around whispering, all excited. At lunch-time crates of vodka suddenly arrived. We were lined up in rows and informed that in a few hours’ time we would be flying to Afghanistan to do our duty as soldiers in accordance with our military oath.

  It was incredible! Fear and panic turned men into animals — some of us went very quiet, others got into an absolute frenzy, or wept with anger or fell into a kind of trance, numb from this unbelievably filthy trick that had been played on us. That was what the vodka was for, of course, to calm us down. After we’d drunk it and it had gone to our heads some of us tried to escape and others started to fight with our officers, but the compound was surrounded by troops from other units and they shoved us into the plane. We were just thrown into that great metal belly like so many crates being loaded.

  That’s how we got to Afghanistan. Next day we saw our first dead and wounded and heard phrases like ‘reconnaissance raid’, ‘battle’, and ‘operation’ for the first time. I was in shock from the whole thing — I suppose it took me several months to get back on an even keel.

  When my wife enquired why I was in Afghanistan she was told that I’d volunteered. All our mothers and wives were told the same. If I’d been asked to give my life for something worthwhile I’d have volunteered, but I was deceived in two ways: first, they lied to us; second, it took me eight years to find out the truth about the war itself. Many of my friends are dead and sometimes I envy them because they’ll never know they were lied to about this disgusting war — and because no one can ever lie to them again.

  A Mother

  My husband served in East Germany for many years and later in Mongolia. I spent twenty years of my life away from my country, which I loved and longed for with incredible passion. I even wrote a letter to General Staff HQ, in which I pointed out that I’d spent twenty years of my life abroad and warned them I couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Please help me to go home,’ I said.

  Even on the train I couldn’t believe it. ‘Are we really going home?’ I asked my husband, over and over again. ‘It’s not some joke of yours, is it?’ At the first stop on Soviet territory I picked up a handful of earth. I looked at it and smiled — yes, it really was our national soil. I ate it, truly I did. I ate it and rubbed it all over my face.

  Yura was my eldest son. A mother shouldn’t admit it, probably, but he was my favourite. I loved him more than my husband and my younger son. When he was little I slept with my hand on his little foot. I wouldn’t think of going to the cinema and leaving him with some baby-sitter, so when he was three months old I’d take him (together with a few bottles of milk) with me and off we’d go. I can honestly say he was my l
ife. I brought him up to model himself on figures like Pavka Korchagin, Oleg Koshevoi and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.§

  In his first year at school he knew whole pages of Hardened Steel by Nikolai Ostrovsky by heart, rather than fairy-tales or nursery rhymes like the other children.

  His teacher was delighted with him: ‘What does your Mama do, Yura? You’ve read such a lot already!’

  ‘My Mummy works in the library.’

  He understood ideals but not real life. And, after living for so many years away from the Fatherland, I too thought that life was a matter of ideals. Well, we went back to live in our old home town, Chernovtsi, and Yura attended Army College. At two o’clock one night the door-bell rang — and there was Yura on the door step.

  ‘Is it you, son? Do you know how late it is?’ He was standing there in the rain, wet through.

  ‘Mum, I just wanted to tell you — I’m finding life hard. All those high ideals you taught me, they just don’t exist. Where did you get them all from? How can I carry on living?’

  I sat with him all night in the kitchen. What could I tell him? I told him yet again that our Soviet life was wonderful and our people were good. I believed it. He listened to me in silence and in the morning went back to college.

  I often told him: ‘Yura, give up the army. Go to university. That’s where you belong. I don’t understand why you have to torture yourself like this.’

  He wasn’t happy with his choice of career, which had been a bit of an accident. He’d have made a good historian — he was a natural scholar and lived for his books. ‘What a wonderful country Ancient Greece must have been’, I remember him saying once. However, in his last year at school he went to Moscow for a few days in the winter holidays to stay with my brother, a retired colonel. Yura told him that he wanted to go to university to read philosophy. His uncle’s reaction was this: ‘You’re an honest lad, Yura. It’s hard to be a philosopher in Russia at this time. You’ll have to lie to yourself and to others. If you try to tell the truth you’ll end up behind bars or in a lunatic asylum.’

  The following spring Yura decided to become a soldier. ‘Mum, I’ve made up my mind so don’t try to change it, I’m going into the army,’ he said.

  I’d seen the zinc coffins in the army compound, but that was when Yura was thirteen and my other son, Gena, just a little boy. I hoped the war would be over by the time they were grown up. Could it possibly drag on that long? But, as someone said at Yura’s wake: ‘It lasted ten years, as long as his schooldays.’

  It seemed no time at all before it was the evening of the graduation ball, and my son was an officer. I still hadn’t taken it in that Yura would have to go away. I couldn’t imagine life without him. ‘Where will you be sent?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m putting in for Afghanistan.’

  ‘Yura! How could you?’

  ‘Mum, that’s the way you brought me up, so don’t try and rewrite history now. You were right: all these degenerates I’ve come across recently — they’re nothing to do with me or my country, I’m going to Afghanistan to show them that there are higher things in life than a fridge full of meat.’

  He wasn’t the only one. Many other boys applied to go to Afghanistan, all from the best families — their fathers were heads of collective farms, teachers and so on …

  What could I tell my own son? That the Fatherland didn’t need him? That those people he was trying to ‘show’ assumed, and would go on assuming, that he was going to Afghanistan because he was after imported goods, foreign currency, medals and promotion? For people like that Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was a fanatic rather than an ideal; they couldn’t conceive that a human being could be capable of such heroism.

  I can’t remember everything I said and did. I admitted what I’d been afraid to admit to myself; I don’t know whether to think of it as abject surrender or the beginning of wisdom.

  ‘Listen, Yurochka, life isn’t the way I’ve always told you it is. If you tell me you’re going to Afghanistan I’ll go to the middle of Red Square, pour petrol over myself and set myself on fire. You’ll die, not for your country but for God knows what. Can our Fatherland really send our finest sons to death for nothing? What kind of Fatherland is that?’

  Yura lied to me. He told me he’d been sent to Mongolia, but I knew: he was my son and he’d be in Afghanistan.

  While all this was going on my younger son, Gena, was called up. I didn’t worry about him — he’d grown up quite different from Yura. They quarrelled all the time. ‘Hey, Gena, you don’t read much. You never have a book in your hands, just that guitar of yours,’ Yura would say. ‘I don’t want to be like you. I want to be like everyone else,’ Gena would reply.

  They both left home and I moved into their bedroom. I lost interest in everything except their things, their books and their letters. Yura wrote about Mongolia but he muddled up his geography and I knew where he really was. Day after day, night after night, I brooded over the past, and cut myself into little pieces with the knowledge that I myself had sent him there. No words, no music can convey that agony to you.

  Then, one day, strangers came to the door and I knew from their faces that they were bringing bad news. I stepped back into the flat. There was one last, terrible, hope: ‘Is it Gena?’ They wouldn’t look at me but I was still prepared to give them one son to save the other. ‘Is it Gena?’

  ‘No, it’s Yura’, one of them said, very quietly.

  I can’t carry on any longer, I just can’t. I’ve been dying for two years now. I’m not ill, but I’m dying. My whole body is dead. I didn’t burn myself on Red Square and my husband didn’t tear up his party card and throw the bits in their faces. I suppose we’re already dead but nobody knows. Even we don’t know …

  A Military Adviser

  ‘I’ll forget it all … in time.’ That’s what I told myself. It’s a taboo subject in our family. My wife went grey at forty. My daughter used to have long hair but wears it short now. She used to be such a good sleeper we had to pull her pigtails to wake her up during the night bombardments in Kabul but not any more.

  Now, four years later, I’m desperate to talk. Yesterday evening, for example, some friends of ours dropped in, and I couldn’t stop talking. I got out the photo album and showed a few slides. Helicopters hovering over a village, a wounded man being laid on a stretcher, with his leg next to him, still in its trainer, POWs sentenced to death gazing innocently into the camera lens — they were dead ten minutes later … Allah Akbar — Allah is great!

  I looked round and realised the men were having a smoke on the balcony, the women had retreated to the kitchen, and only their children were sitting listening to me. Teenagers. They were interested. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I just want to talk. Why now, suddenly? So that I’ll never forget …

  I can’t describe how things were over there or what I felt about them at the time. Come back in another four years, perhaps I’ll be able to then. And ten years from now everything may look completely different, the picture may have shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.

  I remember a kind of anger. Resentment. Why should I have to go? Why is this happening to me? Still, I coped with the pressure, I didn’t break, and that was satisfying in itself. I remember getting ready to go, worrying about tiny details like what knife to take, which razor … Then I was impatient to be off, to meet the unknown while I was still on a high. I was shaking and sweating. Everybody feels that way, ask anyone who’s been through it. As the plane landed I was hit by a sense of relief and excitement at the same time: this was the real thing, we’d see and touch and live it.

  I recall three Afghans, chatting about something or other, laughing. A dirty little boy running through the market and diving into thick bundles of cloth on a barrow. A parrot fixing me with his green, unblinking eye. I look round and don’t understand what’s going on. They’re still chatting, then the one with his back to me turns round and I see the barrel of a pistol. It rises … rises, until I’m face to fa
ce with the muzzle and at the same instant I hear a sharp crack and I’m nothing. I hover between consciousness and oblivion, but I’m standing, not lying. I want to talk to them but I can’t.

  The world takes shape slowly, like a negative being developed … A window … a high window … Something white, and something else, big and heavy, framed by it. Spectacles obscure a face from which sweat drips, painfully, on to my own face. I raise my impossibly heavy eyelids and hear a sigh of relief.

  ‘Well, colonel, so you’re back from your travels!’ But if I try and lift my head, or even turn it, I feel my brain will fall out … Again the little boy dives into the thick bales of cloth on the barrow, the parrot’s unblinking green eye is fixed on me, and the three Afghans are standing there. The one with his back to me turns and I stare into the barrel of his pistol. I see the muzzle … But this time I don’t wait for the familiar bang, instead I scream ‘I’ve got to kill you, I’ve got to kill you!’

  What colour is a scream? What does it taste like? What is the colour of blood? Red in hospital, grey on dry sand and bright blue on stone, in the evening when it’s all dried out. Blood spills as quickly from a seriously injured person as liquid from a broken jar … his life flickers out, only the eyes shine bright and stare past you, stubbornly, until the very end.

  Everything’s been paid for. By us. And in full.

  You know how if you look up at mountains from below they seem endless and unattainable, but from the air they look like upturned sphinxes lying there? Do you have a clue what I’m on about? Time, that’s what. The distance between events. At the time even we who were part of it didn’t know what kind of war this was. Don’t confuse the man I am today with the man I was in 1979. Then I believed in it. But in 1983 I went to Moscow, where life seemed to be going on as usual, as though we didn’t exist. There was no war in Moscow. I walked along the Arbat, stopped people and asked them: ‘How long’s the war in Afghanistan been going on?’