Zinky Boys

by Svetlana Alexievich

  The mountains above you, scorched by the sun, down below, a little girl calling her goat, and a woman hanging out her washing. Just like at home in the Caucasus … To tell the truth, I was a bit disappointed, until one night they shot at our camp-fire. I picked up the tea kettle and there was a bullet under it.

  On route-marches the thirst was sheer torture and utterly humiliating. Your whole mouth dried up, it seemed to be full of dust and you couldn’t work up enough saliva to swallow. We licked up the dew and even our own sweat. I was determined to get through it. I caught a tortoise, slit its throat with a sharp stone, and drank its blood. No one else could face it. I was the only one.

  I realised I was capable of killing. I had a gun in my hand. The first time we went into battle I noticed how some of the lads were in a state of shock. They fainted, or started vomiting when they realised they’d killed people or saw human brains or eyes being blown out. I could take it though. One of the lads was a hunter who bragged that before he joined the army he’d killed hares and wild boar, but he vomited with the rest of them. It’s one thing to shoot animals, quite another to kill human beings. In battle you go as stiff as wood, cold reason takes over, you calculate … This is my gun and my life. The gun becomes part of your body, like a third arm …

  It was a partisan war, and set-piece battles were rare. It was you against him. You grew as sharp as a lynx. You fire a burst — he stays still. You wait — what next? You feel the bullet whistle past you even before you hear the bang. You crawl from stone to stone, you hide, you race behind him like a hunter. Your body’s like a coiled spring and you don’t breathe until you pounce. If it comes to it you kill him with your gun-butt. You kill him and you sense you’re alive! ‘I’M ALIVE!’ But there’s no joy in killing a man. You kill so you can get home safe.

  No two dead bodies look the same. Water, for instance, does something to the human face that gives it a kind of smile. After rain they all look clean. Death in the dust, without water, is more honest, somehow. The uniform may be brand-new but there’s a dry red leaf where the head should be, squashed flat like a lizard. You find bodies propped against the wall of a house: I saw one by a pile of nut-shells he must’ve just cracked, his eyes were open because there’d been no one to close them. You’ve only got 10–15 minutes to close the eyes after death — then it’s too late … BUT I’M ALIVE! I saw another, curled up, with his flies undone, he was relieving himself. They lie there the way they were at the last moment of their lives … BUT I’M ALIVE! I need to touch myself to make sure …

  Birds aren’t scared of death, they sit and watch. Nor are children, — they sit there too, and look on calmly, like the birds. They’re curious.

  Back in the canteen you eat your soup, look at your neighbour and imagine him dead. There was a time when I couldn’t bear to look at photos of my family. When I got back from action I wouldn’t look women and children in the face. Eventually you get used to it, go and work out next morning as usual — I was into weight-training. I was keen on fitness and wanted to be in good shape to go home. I admit I couldn’t sleep, but that was because of the lice, especially in winter. We sprayed the mattresses with some kind of dust, but it didn’t make much difference …

  I only started to be afraid of dying when I was back home and my son was born. Then I was scared that if I died he’d grow up without me. I was hit seven times, I could easily have kicked the bucket, but I didn’t. Sometimes I even have the feeling I didn’t play the game to the end, or fight to the finish, rather …

  I don’t feel guilty and I don’t get nightmares. I always chose honest combat — him against me. If I saw a couple of our lads beating up a POW with his hands tied behind his back, lying on the ground like a bundle of rags, I’d chase them away. I despised people like that. One chap started shooting eagles with his automatic and I socked his ugly mug for him. The birds hadn’t done anything wrong, after all.

  When my family asked what it was like over there I’d just say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’ll tell you some other time.’

  I graduated and now I’m an engineer. I just want to be an engineer, not a ‘veteran of the Afghan war’. I want to forget all that, although I don’t know what will become of us, the generation that went through it.

  This is the first time I’ve talked about it, talking like we’re strangers in a train and getting off at different stops. Look, my hands are shaking, I’m upset for some reason. I thought I’d come out of it relatively unscathed. If you write about me don’t mention my surname. I’m not afraid of anything, I just don’t want to be involved again …

  Civilian Employee

  I was due to be married that December, but in November I went to Afghanistan. My fiancé laughed when I told him. ‘Doing your “solemn duty to defend the southern borders of our Socialist Motherland”, I suppose?’ You know what he said when he realised I wasn’t joking? ‘Aren’t there enough boys for you to sleep with here?’

  I thought, I missed out on the BAM and tselina projects [the Baikal-Amor Railway and the Siberian Virgin Lands], but I’m in luck — I’ve got Afghanistan! I believed the songs the boys brought back, and sang them all day long:

  So many of our Russian sons

  Lie among the rocks and stones

  Of Afghan soil …

  I was an ordinary, rather bookish, Moscow girl. I thought I’d find real life only somewhere far away, where the men were strong and the women beautiful. I wanted adventure and escape from everyday life …

  The three nights I was en route for Kabul I didn’t sleep a wink. At the customs they thought I was a drug addict. I remember I had tears in my eyes trying to convince them:

  ‘I’m not a junkie. I just need some sleep!’

  I was lugging a heavy suitcase full of Mum’s home-made jam and biscuits and not a single man offered to help. And these weren’t just any old men, but healthy, strong, young officers! In Moscow I had all the boys running after me — they adored me. So I was utterly amazed. When I asked, ‘Can someone give me a hand?’ they looked at me as if to say, ‘We know what kind of girl you are!’

  I had to hang about at the clearing-centre for another three days. On the first day a junior lieutenant came up to me. ‘If you want to stay in Kabul, spend the night with me,’ he said. He was fat and soft — later on a girl told me his nickname was Balloon!

  I was taken on as a typist. We used World War II army machines. The first few weeks my fingers bled and I had to type all bandaged up — my nails were dropping off.

  One night, a couple of weeks later, a soldier came to my room. ‘The CO wants to see you,’ he said.

  Tm not going.’

  He looked at me. ‘Why make life hard for yourself? You knew what you were getting into when you came here.’

  Next morning the CO threatened to post me to Kandahar, which was generally recognised as the dirtiest and most dangerous dump in the country. For a few days I was really scared of being ‘accidentally’ hit by a car, or shot in the back. Two girls shared the room next to mine in the hostel. One had a job in electricity supply, so everyone called her ‘Elektrichka’; the other worked in water purification so she was ‘Chlorka’! Whenever I complained about things they just shrugged their shoulders: ‘Well, that’s life...’

  Just at that time there was an article in Pravda called ‘Afghan Madonnas’. As a result we got admiring letters from girls from back home, and some of them were so impressed they went down to their local recruiting offices and asked to be sent to Afghanistan. The reality was rather different: we couldn’t walk past a group of soldiers without sneering comments like ‘Well, Bochkarevka! How’s our little heroine today? Doing our international duty in bed, are we?’ The name ‘Bochkarevka’ comes from the little houses (they look a bit like railway carriages) known as ‘bochki’ reserved for senior officers — majors and above, so the girls who, well, ‘serviced’ them were known as ‘Bochkarevki You’ll often hear soldiers who’ve served here say things like this: ‘If I hear that a cer
tain girl’s been in Afghanistan she just doesn’t exist for me.’ We got the same diseases as they did, all the girls got hepatitis and malaria, we were shot at too, but if I meet a boy back home he won’t let me give him a friendly hug. For them we’re all either whores or crazy. ‘Don’t sleep with a woman like that, don’t soil yourself … ’ ‘Me? Sleep with that? I sleep with my gun’, etc, etc. It’s hard even to smile at a man after you’ve heard that kind of thing.

  ‘My daughter’s in Afghanistan,’ my mother told all her friends proudly. Poor naïve Mum! I wanted to write and tell her, ‘Keep quiet, Mum, unless you want someone to tell you your daughter’s a tart.’ Perhaps I’ll calm down and get over it gradually once I’m home. But here I feel broken to bits inside. You asked me what I’ve learnt in Afghanistan? Well, I’ll tell you what you can’t learn here: about goodness, kindness or happiness.

  Little boys run after me shouting: ‘Khanum! [woman] Show us your … ’ They even offer me money, so presumably some of the girls take it.

  I used to think I’d never make it home, I’m over that now. I have two dreams, over and over again. In the first, we go to a gorgeous shop, with carpets on the walls and jewellery everywhere … And I’m being sold by some of our boys. Sacks of money are brought out, they count the notes while two mujahedin twist my hair round their fingers … The alarm clock wakes me up and I’m screaming with fear, so I never find out how it ends.

  In the other dream we’re flying in an Ilyushin-65 troop transport plane from Tashkent to Kabul. We can see the mountains through the portholes: then it gets dark. We begin to sink into some kind of abyss: there’s a layer of heavy Afghan soil over us. I dig like a mole but I can’t reach the light. I’m suffocating. I go on digging and digging …

  If I don’t stop now I’ll go on talking for ever. There isn’t a day that passes without something terribly upsetting happening here. Yesterday a boy I know got a letter from his girlfriend back home: ‘I don’t want to be friends with you any more, your hands are dripping with blood.’ He ran to me and I held him tight.

  We all think of home but don’t talk about it much. We’re superstitious. I’m longing to go home, but where is home? We don’t talk much about that, either.

  We tell jokes instead:

  Teacher: ‘Children, what do your Daddies do for a living?’

  Hands go up. ‘My Daddy’s a doctor.’

  ‘My Daddy’s a plumber.’

  ‘My Daddy’s in the circus …

  Little Vova stays quiet. ‘Vova, don’t you know what your Daddy does?’

  ‘He used to be a pilot, but now he’s got a job as a fascist in Afghanistan.’

  At home I used to love books about war, but here I carry Dumas around with me. When you’re at war you don’t want to see it around you; although some of the girls did go and see some dead bodies. ‘They were lying there in their socks,’ they told me. There are so many men hopping about the streets on crutches here. Not everyone can take it. I can’t, really. I wanted to be a journalist, but now I’m not so sure, I find it hard to believe in anything.

  Once I’m back home in Moscow I’m never going south again. Whenever I see mountains now I get the feeling I’m going to get bombed. Once, during a bombardment, I saw a girl just kneeling and crying and praying. I wonder who she was praying to. We’re all a bit secretive here, no one’s really honest about themselves. Everyone’s harbouring some disappointment or other.

  I spend most of my time crying and praying for that bookish Moscow girl who doesn’t exist any more.

  Private, Grenadier Regiment

  I went to Afghanistan thinking I’d come home with my head held high. Now I realise the person I was before this war has gone for ever.

  Our company was combing through a village. I was patrolling with another lad. He pushed open a hut door with his leg and was shot point-blank with a machine-gun. Nine rounds. In that situation hatred takes over. We shot everything, right down to the domestic animals. In fact, shooting animals is the worst. I was sorry for them. I wouldn’t let the donkeys be shot — they’d done nothing wrong, had they? They had amulets hanging from their necks, exacdy the same as the children. It really upset me, setting fire to that wheat-field — I’m a country boy myself.

  When I was over there I only remembered the good things about life back home, especially my childhood, like the way I used to lie on the grass among the bluebells and marguerites, how we roasted ears of wheat over a log-fire and ate them …

  The heat from the fire was so terrific that it melted the iron on the roofs of the little shops. The field was swallowed up by the flames in an instant. It smelt of bread and that reminded me of when I was a boy, too.

  In Afghanistan night falls like a curtain. One moment it’s light, the next — night. A bit like me — I was a boy but I became a man all at one go. That’s war for you.

  Sometimes when it rains there you look up and see the rain falling, but it never hits the ground. We watched TV programmes by satellite showing life at home going on as normal, but it was irrelevant to us somehow … I can talk about all this to you but I feel terribly frustrated, because I can’t get over to you what it was really all about.

  Sometimes I want to write down everything I saw. Like, in hospital, the lad who’d lost his arms, his legs and his mate. I remember sitting on his bed writing a letter for him to his mother. Or the little Afghan girl who pinched a sweet from a Soviet soldier and had both her hands hacked off by her own people. I’d like to write it all down exactly as it was and without any comments. If it rained I’d say it rained, just that, without a lot of talk about whether it was a good or bad thing that it was raining.

  When it was our time to go home we expected a warm welcome and open arms — then we discovered that people couldn’t care less whether we’d survived or not. In the courtyard of our block of flats I met up with the kids I’d known before. Oh, you’re back — that’s good,’ they said, and went off to school. My teachers didn’t ask about anything either. This was the sum total of our conversation:

  I, solemnly: ‘We should perpetuate the memory of our school fellows who died doing their international duty.’

  They: ‘They were dunces and hooligans. How can we put up a memorial plaque to them in the school?’

  People back home had their own view of the war. ‘So you think you were heroes, were you? You lost a war, and anyhow, who needed it, apart from Brezhnev and a few warmongering generals?’

  Apparently my friends died for nothing, and I might have died for nothing too.

  Well, at least my Mum was looking out of the window, the day I got home, and saw me coming, and ran out on to the road shouting for joy. Whatever anyone says, and however much history gets rewritten, I know that those boys who died there were heroes.

  I had a talk with an old lecturer at college. ‘You were a victim of a political mistake,’ he said. ‘You were forced to become accomplices to a crime.’

  ‘I was eighteen then,’ I told him. ‘How old were you? You kept quiet when we were being roasted alive. You kept quiet when we were being brought home in body-bags and military bands played in the cemeteries. You kept quiet over here while we were doing the killing over there. Now all of a sudden you go on about victims and mistakes … ’

  Anyhow, I don’t want to be a victim of a political mistake. And I’ll fight for the right not to be! Whatever anyone says, those boys were heroes!

  Artillery Captain

  I was lucky. I’ve come home alive, with my arms, legs and eyes. I wasn’t burnt and I didn’t go mad. We soon realised this wasn’t the war we’d expected to fight, but we just decided to get it over with, stay alive and go home. There’d be plenty of time to analyse it later.

  Mine was the first relief contingent to go to Afghanistan. We had orders, not ideals. You don’t discuss orders — if you did you wouldn’t have an army for long. You know what Engels said? ‘A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.’ I learnt that by heart. You go to wa
r in order to kill. Killing is my profession — that’s what I was trained to do.

  Was I afraid for myself? I just assumed that other people might get killed, but not me. You can’t really comprehend the possibility of your own annihilation. And don’t forget — I wasn’t a boy when I went out there, I was thirty years old.

  That’s where I learnt what life was about. I tell you straight — they were the best years of my life. Life here is rather grey and petty: work — home, home — work. There we had to work everything out for ourselves and test our mettle as men.

  So much of it was exotic, too: the way the morning mist swirled in the ravines like a smokescreen, even those burubukhaiki, the high-sided, brightly decorated Afghan trucks, and the red buses with sheep and cows and people all crammed together inside, and the yellow taxis … There are places there which remind you of the moon with their fantastic, cosmic landscapes. You get the feeling that there’s nothing alive in those unchanging mountains, that it’s nothing but rocks — until the rocks start shooting at you! You sense that even nature is your enemy.

  We existed between life and death — and we held other men’s life and death in our hands too. Is there any feeling more powerful than that? We’ll never walk, or make love, or be loved, the way we walked and loved and were loved over there. Everything was heightened by the closeness of death: death hovered everywhere and all the time. Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger — I’ve got a sixth sense for it now. We’re homesick for it, some of us; it’s called the ‘Afghan syndrome’.