Zinky Boys

by Svetlana Alexievich

  No one who was over there wants to fight another war. We won’t be fooled again. All of us, whether we were naïve or cruel, good or rotten, fathers, husbands and sons, we were all killers. I understood what I was really doing — I was part of an invading army, let’s face it — but I don’t regret a thing. Nowadays there’s a lot of talk about guilt-feelings, but I personally don’t feel guilty. Those who sent us there are the guilty ones. I enjoy wearing my army uniform, I feel a real man, and women go crazy over it. But once I went to a restaurant in my field-uniform, and the manageress stared at me in a very hostile way, and I just longed for her to make trouble. I would have told her: ‘You don’t like the way I’m dressed? Too bad! Make way for a hero!’

  Just let someone even hint they don’t like my field-uniform! For some reason I’m looking for that someone — I’m spoiling for a fight.

  A Mother

  My first was a girl. Before she was born my husband used to say, girl or boy, he didn’t mind, but a girl would be better because she’d be able to do up her little brother’s shoelaces! And that’s the way it turned out.

  Second time round, my husband rang the hospital.

  ‘It’s a girl.’

  ‘Good. That’s two we’ve got.’

  Then they told him the truth: ‘You have a son, a little boy!’

  Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!’ That showed his true feelings.

  The first two days the nurses brought the babies to their mothers, all except mine. No one said a thing. I started crying and ran a temperature. The doctor came. ‘Now, Mum,’ she comforted me. ‘Nothing to worry about. You’ve got a little giant there. He’s still asleep and he won’t wake up till he’s hungry.’ But I didn’t calm down until they brought him to me, unwrapped him and let me see him asleep.

  What name to choose, that was the next thing. Our three favourites were Sasha, Alyosha and Misha. So my husband and daughter came to the hospital and Tanechka decided to draw ‘lotths’ — she couldn’t say ‘lots’. The bit of paper with ‘Sasha’ written on it came out of the hat twice, so that was that. He was bom big, four and a half kilos and sixty centimetres long. I remember he could walk at ten months and speak at a year and a half, but until he was three he couldn’t say his ‘r’s and ‘s’s. ‘I’ll do it myself’ he used to say, and he called his friend Sergei ‘Tiglei’. His nursery-school teacher, Kira Nikolayevna, was ‘Kila Kalavna’. The first time he saw the sea he shouted: ‘I wasn’t bom, a wave threw me up on to the shore!’

  I gave him his first photo-album when he was five. He had four altogether, one from his nursery-school days, one from his big school, one for his military academy days and the last for the photos he sent us from Afghanistan. I gave my daughter her own albums too. I loved my home and my children. I wrote them poems:

  ‘Through the frosty springtime snows

  A little snowdrop poked his nose

  When the sun shone bright each morn

  My little baby boy was born … ’

  At the school where I taught my pupils loved me, I was always cheerful and happy …

  Sasha loved playing cops-and-robbers and always wanted to be the goodie. When he was five and Tanechka nine we went on holiday to the Volga. We got off the boat to walk the half-kilometre to their grandma’s house. Sasha refused to budge. ‘I’m not walking. Carry me!’

  ‘Carry a big boy like you?’

  ‘I’m not walking and that’s that!’ And he didn’t. We used to tease him about that.

  At nursery school he loved dancing. He had lovely red trousers — we’ve got a photo of him in them. He collected stamps until he was fourteen, we’ve still got his album; then it was badges, there’s a big basket full of them somewhere. He liked music, we’ve kept his cassettes with all his favourite songs …

  When he was a child he wanted to be a musician, but as he grew up he was surrounded by army life. His father was a soldier and we’d lived in army compounds all our lives. He ate with soldiers, cleaned cars with them, so there was no one to say ‘no’ when he applied for the military academy. On the contrary, all he heard was: ‘You will be a true defender of the Motherland, my son’. He was a good student and joined in everything. He passed out well and the Commandant wrote us a personal letter about him.

  1985. Sasha was in Afghanistan. We were proud of him, of the fact that he was at the front. I’d tell my pupils and his friends about him, and longed for him to come home on leave.

  Living in garrison towns we never locked our front door. So one fine day he came in without ringing the bell, shouting, ‘Was it you that wanted the television repairman?’ From Kabul he and his friends had flown to Tashkent and then as far as Donetsk. Then on to Vilnius, where he had to wait three hours for his train, which was frustrating because home was only a couple of hundred kilometres away. In the end they took a taxi.

  He was tanned and thin, but his teeth were lovely and white.

  ‘You’re skin and bones, my love!’ I cried.

  ‘I’m alive, Mama, I’m alive!’ He swung me round the room. ‘Do you realise, I’m alive, alive, alive!’

  Two days later it was New Year’s Eve. He’d hidden presents under the Christmas Tree. Mine was a big scarf. A big black scarf.

  ‘Why did you choose black, my love?’ I asked.

  ‘There were various colours there, Mama, but by the time I got to the front of the queue there was only black left. Anyhow, it suits you.’

  I buried him in that scarf, and wore it for two years afterwards.

  He always loved giving presents. ‘My little surprises,’ he used to call them. Once, when the children were still small, I came home with their father and we couldn’t find them. I went to the neighbours, on to the street — they were nowhere to be found and nobody had seen them. I started crying and carrying on. Suddenly, out they crawled from the big box our new television had been packed in. We hadn’t got round to throwing it away! They’d laid the table, made the tea, and while they were waiting for us Sasha had an idea for one of his surprises — hiding in the box. They’d got in the box and then fallen asleep!

  He was unusually affectionate for a boy. He loved kissing and cuddling me, and after he went to Afghanistan he became even more loving. He loved his home, but there were times when he’d just sit there, saying and seeing nothing. At night he’d jump out of bed and pace up and down his room. Once he woke me up with his shouting. ‘Explosions! Explosions! Mama, they’re firing!’ Another time I was woken up by crying. Who could it be? There were no small children in the house. I opened his door. He was holding his head in his hands and sobbing.

  ‘Why are you crying, my love?’

  ‘It’s horrible, Mama, horrible.’ He wouldn’t say another word, to me or his father.

  His leave came to an end and off he went. I baked him a suitcaseful of his favourite nutty biscuits, enough for him and all his friends. They missed home cooking over there.

  He spent the following New Year with us too. We originally expected him for the summer. ‘Mama, make lots of preserves and jam. I’ll eat the lot!’ he wrote. He postponed his August leave until September because he wanted to walk in the woods and pick the chanterelles, but still hadn’t arrived by November. Then he wrote to say he’d like to come for New Year, for the Christmas Tree, for his father’s birthday in December and mine in January.

  I spent the whole day at home on 30 December, reading his latest letter. ‘Mama, bake lots of your special blueberry dumplings, cherry dumplings and cream cheese dumplings.’ When my husband got home from work he waited while I rushed to the shop to buy a guitar we’d ordered and which had just come in. Sasha had asked for one. ‘Nothing too professional,’ he’d said.

  By the time I got back he’d arrived.

  Oh, and I wanted to be here to welcome you’.

  ‘What a beautiful guitar!’ he said when he saw it. He danced round the room. ‘I’m home. How lovely it is! I could smell that special smell downstairs in the street.’

  He sa
id we lived in the most beautiful town, and the most beautiful street, with the most beautiful acacias in our courtyard. He loved this flat. It’s hard to stay in now — everything reminds us of Sasha. And it’s hard to go out — he loved it all so much.

  He had changed, though. We all noticed it, his family as well as his friends. ‘How lucky you are!’ he told them. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. Every day’s a holiday here.’

  I went to the hairdresser and came home with a new hair-do. He liked it. ‘Have your hair done like that all the time, Mama. You’re beautiful!’

  ‘It’s expensive, dear.’

  ‘I’ve brought money. Take it all. I don’t need it.’

  A friend of his had a baby son. I remember the way Sasha looked when he asked to hold him. Towards the end of his leave he got toothache, but he’d been scared of the dentist ever since he was a child, so I had to drag him by the hand to the clinic and wait with him until it was his turn. He was literally sweating with fear.

  If a TV programme about Afghanistan came on he’d leave the room. A week before he was due to go back his eyes became full of real anguish, that’s the only word for it. Can it be that I’m imagining it now? But I was a happy woman then. My son was a major at thirty and this time he’d come home with a Red Star, awarded for valour. At the airport I looked at him and couldn’t believe that this handsome young officer was really my son. I was proud of him.

  A month later we had a letter wishing his father all the best on Soviet Army Day and praising me for my mushroom pies. But after that letter something happened inside me. I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie in bed, wide awake, until five o’clock.

  On 4 March I had a dream. There was a great field with explosions of white everywhere, and flashes and long ribbons of white stretching into the distance. Sasha was running, running in zigzags, with nowhere to hide. Still there were flashes everywhere. I raced behind him, trying to overtake him, to get in front of him. Once in the country I had thrown myself over him during a thunderstorm, and I had heard him scratching under me like a little mouse, whimpering, ‘Save me, Mama, save me … ’ But in the dream I can’t catch up with him, he’s so tall and his strides are so long. I run until I drop, but I can’t reach him …

  The door slammed and my husband came in. I was sitting with my daughter on the sofa. He walked across the room towards us in his boots, overcoat and cap, a thing he’d never done before — he’s a tidy, orderly man who’s spent his whole life in the army. He knelt in front of us: ‘My little ones, I have tragic news … ’

  Then I noticed people in the hall, a nurse, the CO, a teacher from my school, friends of my husband …

  That was three years ago, and we still can’t bring ourselves to open the suitcase full of his things that they brought with the coffin. They seem to have his smell about them, even now.

  He died almost immediately from fifty shrapnel wounds. His last words were, ‘It hurts, Mama.’

  What did he die for? Why him? He was so affectionate, so kind. These thoughts are slowly killing me. I know that I’m dying — there’s no sense in going on. I force myself to be with people, I take Sasha with me, I talk about him. Once I gave a talk at the Polytechnic and afterwards a student came up to me. ‘If you’d stuffed less patriotism into him he’d be alive today,’ she told me. When I heard that I felt ill and fainted.

  I gave that talk for Sasha’s sake. He can’t be allowed to just disappear like that …

  Now they say it was all a dreadful mistake — for us and for the Afghan people. I used to hate Sasha’s killers … now I hate the State which sent him there. Don’t mention my son’s name. He belongs to us now. I won’t give him, even his name, to anyone.

  Helicopter Pilot, Captain

  A flash, a fountain of light, then night. Darkness. I open one eye and crawl along a wall. Where am I? In hospital. I check — are my arms there? Yes. Further down I touch myself, I’m too short. I realise I’ve lost both legs … Hysteria. Desperate thoughts: death would be a better hiding-place than this ward. Death straightaway and then nothing. I wouldn’t have to look at myself, or the rest of the world. Then I black out. I forgot all my previous life. Acute amnesia. I opened my passport and read my surname, place of birth and age: thirty. I read that I was married, with two boys. I try to remember their faces, but can’t.

  Mother was my first visitor. ‘I’m your Mama … ’ she said. She told me about my childhood and schooldays, details like the overcoat she bought me when I was fourteen, the marks I got in class, how I loved her pea-soup. I listened to her and seemed to see myself from a distance, like an objective observer.

  One day in the canteen the nurse called me. ‘Into your wheelchair! Your wife’s come to see you!’ I noticed a beautiful woman standing by the ward, but where’s my wife? She is my wife.

  She told me about our love for each other, how we met, how I kissed her the first time, our wedding, the birth of the boys. I listened and couldn’t remember, but then it began to come back, faintly. When I tried to recall things I got terrible headaches …

  I tried to remember the boys from photographs, but when they came they were so different, mine yet not mine. The fair one had got darker, the toddler was quite grown up. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw they were like me.

  I’ve completely forgotten the war, all two years of it. The only thing is, I hate winter now. Mother tells me that when I was a boy I loved wintertime and snow more than anything else …

  The lads talk about the war, and I watch films. ‘What was I doing there?’ I wonder. They sent young kids out there, but I was an officer, a professional, I volunteered.

  The doctors say that my memory may come back. When that happens I’ll have two lives — the one they’ve told me about, and the one I know myself.

  *About one month’s pay for a medium-grade civil servant.

  † All Soviet males are in principle liable to two years’ compulsory conscription at the age of eighteen (three in the navy).

  ‡ The virgin lands of Kazakhstan and Western Siberia which have been intensively cultivated only since 1954.

  § Celebrated figures in the Soviet pantheon: Pavel Korchagin is the protagonist of Hardened Steel, a novel about Soviet industrialisation; Oleg Koshevoi and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, heroes of the war-time Resistance, were murdered by the Nazis.

  ¶ Korchagin: see p. 29 above. Vassily Chapayev was a hero of the civil war who died in action.

  # Ivan Krylov: early nineteenth-century writer, the ‘Russian Aesop’.

  ** A popular novel on the school syllabus.

  †† ‘Radio Armenia’, a fictional station, is the source of hundreds of such bitter, absurd or paradoxical social and political jokes.

  ‡‡ A pun: the Chekists were Lenin’s forerunners of the KGB, who are also popularly called by this name.

  §§ Three characters from Russian folklore: Zmei, a dragon, has many heads, Kashei is immortal (Bessmertny) and Baba Yaga is an old and ugly witch.

  ¶¶ Another figure from folklore: a beautiful young girl.

  ## The model Pioneer camp for gilded Soviet youth. The Pioneer movement is roughly equivalent to the Scouts and Guides, but far more politically inspired.

  *** See p. 29 above.

  ††† Until recently a compulsory subject at Soviet universities and indispensable for the acquisition of a degree.

  ‡‡‡ As part of the regime of military secrecy conscripts are generally sent to their units straight from training-camp.

  §§§ Battles of the Russo-Japanese War. The war was subsequently seen as a cynical adventure initiated by the Tsar for his own political ends.

  The Second Day

  ‘But another dies with a broken heart’

  Author. He phoned again today. From now on I’m going to call him my leading character.

  Leading character. I wasn’t going to call you again, but I got on a bus and heard two women talking. ‘Fine heroes they were! Murdering women and children over there. They’re sick.
And just think, they get invited to speak at schools! They even get special privileges … ’ I jumped off at the next stop and stood there crying. We were soldiers obeying orders. In wartime you can be shot for disobedience, and we were at war. Obviously it wasn’t the generals themselves who killed women and children, but they gave the orders — and now they’re blaming us. Now we’re told that to obey a criminal command is itself a crime. But I trusted the people giving the orders. As far back as I can remember I’ve been taught to have faith in authority. No one ever told me to judge for myself whether or not to trust the authorities, whether or not to shoot. The message was hammered into us over and over again: have faith, trust us.

  Author. It was the same for all of us.

  Leading character: Yes, I was a killer and I’m covered in blood … But I saw him lying there, my friend who was like a brother to me, with his head cut off, and his arms, and his legs, and his flayed skin … I volunteered for the very next raid. I watched a funeral procession in a village, there were a lot of people there. The body was wrapped in white. I could see everything quite clearly through my field-glasses and I gave the order: ‘At the funeral — FIRE!’

  Yes, I killed because I wanted to go on living and get home again. Why do you want to drag all this up again? I’ve only just begun to stop thinking about death night after night. For three years I spent my nights choosing between a bullet in the mouth and a noose made from my tie. Now I can smell that horrible stink of thorn bush again, it’ll drive me mad eventually … Author. Why is it that, as he slams down the receiver again, I have the feeling that I’ve known him for a long, long time?

  Sergeant, Infantry Platoon Leader

  It’s like in a dream, as if I’ve already seen this before in some film, and the feeling now is that I’ve never killed anyone …

  I volunteered. I wanted to find out what I was capable of. I’m very ambitious. I went to university, but you can’t show — or know what you’re made of in a place like that. I dropped out in my second year. I wanted to be a hero and looked for a chance to be one. They say it was a man’s war but the truth is, it was a boy’s war. It was kids not long out of school who did the fighting. It was like a game for us. Self-esteem and pride were terribly important: can I do it or can’t I? He can — can I? That’s what we were worried about, not politics. I’d been preparing myself for a challenge of some kind since I was a young boy. My favourite author was Jack London. A real man had to be strong — and war makes you strong. My girlfriend tried to talk me out of it. ‘Do you really think writers like Bunin or Mandelstam thought that way?’ she asked me. None of my friends understood me either. Some got married, others got involved in Zen or yoga and suchlike. I was the only one who went to the war.