Zinky Boys

by Svetlana Alexievich

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How long’s the war … ?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why d⁏you ask?’ Or, ‘Two years, I think.’ Or even, ‘Is there a war there? Really?’

  What were we thinking about all that time? Well? Nothing to say? Nor have I. There’s an old Chinese proverb which goes something like this: ‘The hunter who boasts of his prowess when the lion at his feet has died of old age is worthy of the greatest contempt: but the hunter who has vanquished the lion at his feet is worthy of the highest praise.’ Some may say the whole thing was a terrible mistake, but not I. Sometimes I’m asked: ‘Why did you keep silent at the time? You were no youngster, you were nearly fifty.’

  Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them. I still do. You could even say I love them. I like their songs and prayers, as peaceful and timeless as their mountains. But the fact is that I, personally, truly believed that their nomadic tents, their yurts, were inferior to our five-storey blocks of flats, and that there was no true culture without a flush toilet. We flooded them with our flush toilets and built concrete homes to put them in, brought in desks for their offices, carafes for their water and pretty tablecloths for their official meetings, together with countless portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. You’d see them on every office wall, just above the boss’s head. We imported thousands of shiny black Volgas, and tractors, and our finest breeding-bulls. The peasants, dekhkani they were called, wouldn’t accept the land we gave them because it belonged to Allah. The broken skulls of the mosques looked down on us as if from outer space …

  We have no idea how the world appears to an ant. Look that up in Engels. As Speserov, a famous orientalist said: ‘You cannot buy Afghanistan new, only secondhand.’ One morning I lit up a cigarette and there was a lizard, no bigger than a mayfly, sitting on the ashtray. I came back a few days later and the lizard was still silting there in exactly the same position. He hadn’t even moved his little head. It suddenly occurred to me, that’s the essence of the Orient! I could disappear and reappear a dozen times, break things up and change things round as often as I wanted, and he’d still be in no great hurry to turn his tiny little head. It’s the time-scale, you see. It’s 1365 according to their calendar.

  Now I sit at home in my armchair in front of the TV. Could I kill a man? I couldn’t swat a fly! If we buy a live chicken from the market, it’s my wife who has to slaughter it. Those first few days I was there, with the bullets slicing off the mulberry branches, there was a sense of unreality. The psychology of war is so different from anything else. You run and aim at the same time, moving in front of you, to the side. I never did body-counts, I just ran; took aim, here, there … I was a target too, a living target. No, you don’t come back a hero from a war like that …

  We’ve paid our debt. In full.

  We have this image of the soldier returning home in 1945, loved and respected by all. Naïve, a bit simple-minded, with his heavy army belt, asking nothing except victory and to go home. But these soldiers back from Afghanistan are something else — they want American jeans and Japanese cassette-recorders. You know that saying: Let sleeping dogs lie? It’s a mistake to ask more of human beings than they can humanly be expected to give.

  I couldn’t bear to read my beloved Dostoevsky over there. He was too grim. I took science fiction with me everywhere. Ray Bradbury I liked. Who wants to live for ever? No one.

  I remember once seeing a mujahedin leader in prison. He was lying on his metal bed reading a book with a familiar cover. Lenin’s The State and Revolution. ‘What a pity I shan’t have time to finish this,’ he said, ‘but perhaps my children will.’

  Once a school got burnt down and just one wall was left standing. Every morning the kids came to school and wrote on that wall with bits of charcoal from the fire. After school the wall was whitewashed as clean as a blank sheet of paper, ready for the next day’s lessons.

  A lieutenant was brought back from the bush with no arms or legs. They’d cut off his manhood too. You know what his first words were, when he came out of shock? ‘How are my men?’

  The debt has been paid and we’ve paid more than anybody — more than you, that’s for sure.

  We don’t need anything. Just listen to us and try to understand. Society is good at doing things, ‘giving’ medical help, pensions, flats. But all this so-called giving has been paid for in very expensive currency. Our blood. We come to you, now, to make our confession. We want to confess, and don’t forget the secrecy of the confessional.

  Private, Artillery Regiment

  No, it’s not a bad thing it ended the way it did, in defeat. It opened our eyes.

  It’s impossible to give you a complete picture of life out there. I saw only a small part of it and I can describe only a tiny part of what I saw. What’s the point anyway? It won’t help Alyoshka, who died in my arms with eight bits of shrapnel in his belly. We got him down from the mountains at six in the evening, he’d been alive an hour earlier. You think all this might be a memorial to Alyoshka? That would mean something only to people who believe in God and an after-life. Most of us feel no pain, no fear and no guilt about what we did. So why rake over the past? Do you expect us to talk about our ‘socialist ideals’ like all those interviews in the official media? I don’t need to tell you it’s hard to have ideals when you’re fighting a useless war in a foreign country. We were all in the same boat there but that didn’t mean we all thought the same way. What we had in common was that we were trained to kill, and kill we did. We are all individuals but we’ve been made into sheep, first here at home and then over there.

  I remember when I was twelve or thirteen our Russian literature teacher called me to the blackboard and asked: ‘Who is your favourite hero, Chapayev or Pavel Korchagin¶?’

  ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ I answered.

  ‘Why Huck Finn?’

  ‘Because when he had to decide whether to turn in Jim the runaway slave or burn in hell, he said, “I don’t give a damn, I’ll burn,” and didn’t turn him in.’

  ‘What if Jim had been a White Russian, a counter-revolutionary in the Civil War, and you’d been in the Red Army?’ asked my friend Alyoshka after class. It’s been like that all our lives, red or white, ‘he who is not with us is against us’.

  I remember once in Afghanistan, near Bagram it was, we came to a village and asked for something to eat. According to their law it is forbidden to refuse warm food to a person who comes to the door hungry. The women sat us down and fed us. After we left the other villagers beat them and their children to death with sticks and stones. They knew they’d be killed but they didn’t send us away. We tried to force our laws on to them, we entered their mosques with our army caps on …

  Why force me to remember all this? It’s terribly private — the first man I shot dead, my own blood on the sand, the camel swaying high over me just before I lost consciousness. And yet I was there, no different from all the others.

  Only once in my life did I refuse to be like all the rest. At primary school. They made us hold hands and march in twos, but I wanted to walk on my own. The young teachers tolerated this little quirk of mine but then one of them got married and left and we got a new one we called Old Mother Klava. ‘Hold Seryozha’s hand!’ said Old Mother Klava.

  ‘Don’t want to!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I want to walk on my own!’

  ‘Do what all the good little boys and girls do!’ said Old Mother Klava.

  ‘No.’

  After our walk Old Mother Klava undressed me, she even took my pants and vest away, and left me in a dark empty room for three hours. Next day I took Seryozha’s hand and behaved like all the rest.

  At school and university it was the class or the course which dictated everything: at work the collective was in charge. It was always other people making decisions for me. We had it drummed into us that one person on his own could achieve nothing. In some book o
r other I came across the phrase ‘the murder of courage’. When I was sent over there I didn’t want to kill anybody but when they said: ‘Volunteers, two paces forward, march!’, forward I stepped.

  In Shindanda I saw two of our soldiers who’d gone crazy. They kept talking to the mujahedin, trying to explain socialism to them the way we’d learnt it in our last year at school. They reminded me of that fable of Krylov’s#, where the pagan priests climb inside the hollow idol to harangue the credulous populace.

  When I was about eleven we had a visit and lecture at school from a woman called Old Mother Sniper, whose claim to fame was that she’d killed 78 Germans in the war. When I got home that day I started stammering and my temperature shot up. My parents thought I’d caught the flu. I stayed at home for a week and read my favourite book, The Gadfly, by Voinovich.**

  Why force me to remember all this? After I got back I couldn’t bear to wear my ‘pre-war’ jeans and shirts. They belonged to some stranger, although they still smelt of me, as my mother assured me. That stranger no longer exists. His place had been taken by someone else with the same surname — which I’d rather you didn’t mention. I rather liked that other person.

  ‘Father,’ the gadfly asks his former mentor, Montanelli, ‘is your God satisfied now?’ I’d like to throw these words like a grenade — but at who?

  Civilian Employee

  How did I end up here? I simply believed what I read in the papers. ‘There was a time when young people were really capable of achieving something and sacrificing themselves for a great cause,’ I thought, ‘but now we’re good for nothing and I’m no better than the rest. There’s a war on, and I sit here sewing dresses and thinking up new hair-dos.’ Mum wept. ‘I’ll die,’ she said. ‘I beg you. I didn’t give birth to you just so as to bury your arms and legs separately from the rest of you.’

  My first impressions? Kabul Airport was all barbed wire, soldiers with machine-guns and barking dogs. Officers turned up to pick out the prettiest and youngest of us girls. Quite openly. A major came up to me. ‘I’ll give you a lift to your battalion if you don’t mind my truck’.

  ‘What truck’s that?’

  ‘It’s a 200.’

  I already knew that ‘200’ meant dead bodies and coffins. ‘Any coffins?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re being unloaded right now,’ he told me.

  It was an ordinary KamaZ truck with a tarpaulin. They were throwing the coffins out like so many crates of ammunition. I was horrified and the soldiers realised I was a new arrival.

  I got to my unit. The temperature was 60 degrees Celsius and there were enough flies in the toilet to lift you from the ground with their wings. No showers. I was the only woman.

  Two weeks later I was summoned by the battalion commander. ‘You’re going to live with me, sweetheart!’ he informed me. I had to fight him off for two months. Once I almost threw a grenade at him: another time I grabbed a knife and threatened him with it. ‘You’re just after bigger fish. You know which side your bread’s buttered!’ was his usual comment. I got as tough as old boots there. Then one day he just said, ‘Fuck off!’ and that was the end of it.

  I started swearing too. In fact, I got really coarse. I was transferred to Kabul as a hotel-receptionist. To begin with I reacted to men like a wild animal. Everyone could tell there was something wrong with me. ‘Are you crazy? We won’t bite you!’ they’d say.

  I just couldn’t get out of the habit of self-defence. If someone asked me for a cup of tea I’d yell at them: ‘Yeah, and what else — a quickie?’ Then one day I found … love? That’s not a word much used over there. He used to introduce me to his friends as his ‘wife’, and I’d whisper in his ear, ‘Your Afghan wife, you mean.’

  Once, when we were driving together in an armoured car, we were shot at. I threw myself over him but luckily the bullet went into the hatch. He’d been sitting with his back to the sniper and hadn’t seen him. When we got back he wrote to his wife about me. He didn’t get any letters from home for two months after that.

  I love shooting. I enjoy emptying a whole magazine at a single burst — it makes me feel good. Once I killed a muj. We’d gone into the hills to get some fresh air and make love. I heard a noise from behind a rock. I was so scared it was like an electric shock. I fired a burst, then went to look and saw this strong, goodlooking bloke lying there. ‘You can come with us on recce patrol!’ the lads said. That was the highest compliment they knew and I was as pleased as Punch. They also liked the fact that I didn’t loot the body, except for the gun. On the way back, though, they kept an eye on me, because I started retching and vomiting. But I felt OK. When I got home I went to the fridge and ate as much as I’d normally get through in a week. Then I broke down. They gave me a bottle of vodka — which I drank down without getting drunk — and realised with horror that if I hadn’t shot straight my mother would have been sent a ‘200’.

  I wanted to be in a war, but not like this one. Heroic World War II, that’s what I wanted.

  Where did all the hatred come from? There’s a simple answer to that. They killed your mate. You’d shared a bowl of chow, and there he was, lying next to you, burnt to a cinder. So you shot back like crazy. We stopped thinking about the big questions, like who started it all and who was to blame? That reminds me of our favourite joke on the subject. Question to Radio Armenia:†† ‘What is the definition of politics?’ Radio Armenia replies: ‘Have you heard a mosquito piss? That’s the definition, except politics is even thinner.’

  The government’s busy with politics while here you see blood all around you and you go crazy. You see burnt skin roll up like a laddered nylon stocking. It’s especially horrible when they kill the animals. Once they ambushed a weapons caravan. The humans and mules were shot separately. Both lots kept quiet and waited for death — except one wounded mule, which screeched like metal scratching metal …

  This place has changed the way I look and speak. The other day some of us girls were talking about a bloke we knew and one of us said: ‘Silly idiot! He had a row with his sergeant and deserted. He should have shot him and they’d have put it down as killed in action.’ That just shows how life here coarsens us all, even the women.

  The fact is many officers assumed it was the same here as back home, that they could hit and insult their men as much as they liked. Quite a few who thought that way have been found dead in battle, with a bullet in the back. The perfect murder!

  Some of the boys in the mountain outposts don’t see anybody for months at a time, except a helicopter three times a week. I went to visit one once. A captain came up to me. ‘Miss, would you take off your cap? I haven’t seen a woman for a whole year.’ All the men came out of the trenches, just to have a look at my long hair. Later, during a bombardment, one of them protected me with his own body. I’ll remember him as long as I live. He didn’t know me, but he risked his life simply because I was a woman. How could you ever forget something like that? In ordinary life you’d never find out if a man was prepared to give his life for yours.

  In these conditions good men get better and the bad get even worse. During that same bombardment one soldier shouted some obscenity at me and a few minutes later he was dead, his brain blown to bits before my eyes. I started shaking like in an attack of malaria. Even though I’d seen plenty of body-bags, and bodies wrapped in foil like big toys, I never shook as much as I did at that moment. In fact, I couldn’t calm down all the time I was up there.

  I never saw any of us girls wearing military medals, even when we’d won them honestly. Once someone wore the one ‘for Military Merit’ but everyone laughed and said, ‘For sexual merit’, because they knew you could win a medal for a night with the battalion CO.

  Why are there so many women here? Do you think they could do without them? Certain officers I can think of would simply go mad. Why are women so desperate to get here? The short answer’s money. You can buy cassette-recorders, things like that, and sell them when you get home. You can earn mor
e here in two years than in half a lifetime at home.

  Look, we’re talking honestly, woman to woman, right? They sell themselves to the local traders right in those little shops of theirs, in the small store-rooms at the back, and they are small, I can tell you! You go to the shops and the kids follow you, shouting ‘Khanum [woman], jig-jig … ’ and point you to the store-room. Our officers pay for women with foreign currency cheques, in fact they’re called chekists‡‡

  Want to hear a joke? Zmei Gorynych, Kashei Bessmertny and Baba Yaga§§ meet at a transportation centre here. They’re all off to defend the revolution. Two years later they meet again on the way home. Zmei Gorynych has only one head left (the others have been shot off), Kashei Bessmertny is alive only because she’s immortal, but Baba Yaga is looking marvellous in the latest French fashions. She’s in a wonderful mood and says she’s signing on for another year. ‘You must be mad, Baba Yaga!’ say the others, but she replies: ‘Back home I’m Baba Yaga, but over here I’m Vasilis Prekrasnaya.’¶¶

  Yes, people leave here morally broken, expecially the ordinary soldiers, the eighteen and nineteen-year-olds. They see how everything is for sale here, how a woman will sell herself for a crate, no, for a couple of tins of corned beef. Then they go home, these boys, and look at their wives and sweethearts in the same way. It’s not surprising they don’t behave themselves too well. They’re used to deciding things with the barrel of a gun.

  Once I saw a local selling melons at 100 Afganis each. Some of our boys reckoned that was too much, but he refused to go down — so one of them shot up the whole pile of melons with his machine-gun. When that boy gets back home just you try to tread on his foot in the bus or not let him push in front of you in the queue …