Zinky Boys

by Svetlana Alexievich

  We never bothered ourselves with questions about whether we were doing the right thing or not. We carried out our orders the way we were trained to. Now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight and a lot of information which we didn’t have at the time, the whole business is being reconsidered and re-evaluated. After less than ten years! At the time we had the clear image of an enemy, an enemy very familiar to us from books and school and all those films about the basmach [members of the anti-Soviet independence movement in Central Asia, particularly in the late 1920s]. The White Desert Sun, for instance. I must have seen that film five times at least. Just when we were complaining that we’d been born too late for World War II — eureka! A ready-made enemy appeared on the horizon. We were brought up to find inspiration in war and revolution — and nothing else.

  As I said, we were the first relief contingent to be sent out. We were quite happy digging foundations for barracks, canteens and army clubs. We were issued with TT-44 pistols dating from World War II, the ones you see political commissars swaggering about with in old films. They were no use at all except to shoot yourself with, or sell in the bazaar. We walked around like partisans, in whatever we could find, usually sweatpants and trainers. I was like the Good Soldier Schweik. When it was 50° Celsius our superiors still expected us to wear ties and full uniform as per Army Regulations from the North Pole to the Equator!

  In the morgue I saw body-bags with human flesh hacked to pieces. That was a nasty shock. But within a few months we’d be watching a film in the open air and if tracer shells flashed past the screen we’d just carry on watching … Or we’d be playing volley-ball and a bombardment would begin, so we’d check where the shells were coming from and go back to the game. The films they sent out were either about war, or Lenin, or wives cheating on their husbands. I’d gladly have machine-gunned all those women sleeping with other men while their husbands were away! We all wanted comedies but they never sent a single one. The screen was two or three sheets sewn together and strung between a couple of trees, with the audience sitting on the sand.

  Once a week we had bath and drinks night. A bottle of vodka cost 30 cheki, so we brought it with us from home. Customs regulations permitted two bottles of vodka, four of wine but unlimited beer, so we’d pour out the beer and fill the bottles with vodka. Or else you might open a bottle of mineral water and find it was 40° proof! People drank used aeroplane kerosene and antifreeze. We’d warn new recruits not to touch antifreeze, whatever else they drank, but within a few days they’d be in hospital with their insides corroded.

  We smoked hash. One friend of mine got so high in battle he was sure every bullet had his name on it, wherever it was really headed. Another smoked at night and hallucinated that his family was with him, started kissing his wife. Some had all-colour visions such as in a film. At first the traders in the bazaar sold us the stuff but later they gave it us for free. ‘Go on, Russky, have a smoke!’ they would say. The kids would run after us, pushing it into our hands.

  A lot of my friends were killed. One touched the tripwire of a mine with his heel, heard the detonator click and, as always happens, looked at the noise in surprise instead of hurling himself to the ground. He died of dozens of shrapnel wounds. Then there was a tank which exploded so violently that the base opened up like a can of jam and the caterpillars blew off their rollers. The driver tried to escape through the hatch, we saw one arm emerge and that was all — he was burnt in his tank. Back in barracks no one wanted to sleep in his bed. One day a new recruit arrived so we told him to take the bed. ‘It doesn’t matter to you, you never knew him anyhow … ’

  We were most upset by the ones with children, children who’d grow up without a Dad. On the other hand, what about those who left no one behind, who died as if they’d never been?

  We were incredibly badly paid for fighting that war: we got twice basic pay (basic pay being worth 270 foreign currency vouchers), less all kinds of stoppages, compulsory membership-fees, subscriptions and tax. At that time an ordinary volunteer worker in the far north was getting 1,500. ‘Military advisers’ earned five to ten times more than us. The difference was particularly obvious going through customs at the border: we’d have a tape-recorder and a couple of pairs of jeans, they’d have half a dozen trunks, so heavy the squaddies could hardly carry them.

  When we got back in the Soviet Union, in Tashkent, it was no easier.

  ‘Back from Afghan? Want a girl? I’ve got one for you as soft as a peach, dear … ’

  ‘No thanks, I’m trying to get home on leave. To my wife. I need a ticket.’

  ‘Tickets cost money … D’you want to sell your Italian sunglasses?’

  ‘It’s a deal.’

  To get on the plane to Sverdlovsk cost me 100 roubles, those Italian sun-glasses, a Japanese lurex scarf and a French make-up set. In the ticket-queue I learnt the way things worked: ‘Why stand here for days? Forty vouchers slipped into your service passport and you’ll be home next day.’

  I get to the ticket-window. ‘Ticket for Sverdlovsk.’

  ‘No tickets. Open your eyes and look at the board!’

  I slip the forty vouchers in and try again. ‘Ticket to Sverdlovsk please, miss.’

  ‘I’ll just go and check. Oh, lucky you came by, we’ve just had a cancellation.’

  You get home and land in a completely different world — the world of the family. The first few days you don’t hear a thing they say. You just watch them, touch them. I can’t explain what it means to stroke your child’s head after everything that’s happened. The morning smell of coffee and pancakes, your wife calling you to breakfast …

  In one month you have to leave again. Why and where — you don’t know. You don’t think about it — you simply mustn’t think about it. You just know you’ll go because you must. At night, lying beside your wife, you still taste the Afghan sand, soft as flour, between your teeth. A few days ago you were lying in that red dust next to the APC … You wake up, jump out of bed — no, you’re still home, it’s tomorrow you’re going back.

  Today my father asked me to help him slaughter a piglet. In the past I’d refuse and run out of the house with my hands over my ears so as not to hear the screaming.

  ‘Hold it a moment,’ says my father.

  ‘No, not like that, straight to the heart, like this,’ I say, and take the knife and kill it myself.

  In the morgue I saw body-bags with human limbs hacked off. Yes, that was a nasty shock. You should never be the first to spill blood — it’s a process that’s hard to stop. Once I saw some soldiers sitting around while an old man and a little donkey passed by on the street below. Suddenly they lobbed a mortar and killed the old man and his donkey.

  ‘Hey, lads! Have you gone mad? It was just an old man and a donkey. What did they do to you?’

  ‘An old man and a donkey came by here yesterday, too. By the time they’d gone past our mate was lying here dead.’

  ‘But it might have been a different old man and a different donkey?’

  Never be the first to spill blood, or you’ll forever be shooting yesterday’s old man and yesterday’s donkey.

  We fought the war, stayed alive and got home. Now’s the time to try and make sense of it all …

  A Mother

  I sat by the coffin. ‘Who’s in there? Is it you, my little one?’ I repeated over and over again. ‘Who’s in there? Is it you, my boy?’ Everyone thought I’d gone insane.

  Time passed, and I wanted to find out how my son was killed. I went to the local recruitment HQ. ‘Tell me how and where my son was killed,’ I begged. ‘I don’t believe he’s dead. I’m sure I’ve buried a metal box and my son is alive somewhere.’

  The officer in charge got angry and even started shouting at me. ‘This is classified information! You can’t go around telling everyone your son has been killed! Don’t you know that’s not allowed?’

  He had a long and painful birth, but when I realised I had a son I knew the agony had all been worthwh
ile. I worried about him from the day he was bom — he was all I had in this world. We lived in a little one-room hut with just enough space for a bed, pram and two chairs. I worked on the railways, switching points, for 60 roubles a month. The day I left hospital I went straight on nightshift. I took him to work with me in the pram, I had my little hot-plate with me and fed him and put him to sleep at the same time I was meeting the trains. When he was a bit older I left him at home alone; I had to tie his ankle to the pram and leave him alone all day long. Still, he grew up a fine boy.

  He got into building college in Petrozavodsk, up in Karelia, near the Finnish border. I went to visit him there once. He gave me a kiss and then ran off somewhere. I was quite hurt — until he came back, smiling.

  ‘The girls are coming,’ he said.

  ‘What girls?’

  He’d gone off to tell these girls I’d arrived and they were coming to inspect this mother of his they’d heard so much about.

  No one had ever given me a present. He came home for Mother’s Day and I met him at the station.

  ‘Let me help you with that bag,’ I said.

  ‘It’s heavy, Mum. You take my portfolio-case, but be careful with it!’

  I carried it carefully and he made sure I did. Must be important drawings, I thought. When we got home he went to change and I rushed to the kitchen to check on my pies. I looked up and there he was with three red tulips in his hand. How on earth had he managed to get hold of tulips up there in March? He’d wrapped them in cloth and put them in his case so they didn’t freeze. It was the first time anyone had ever given me flowers.

  That summer he worked on one of those special intensive building projects. He came home just before my birthday. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get here earlier, but I’ve brought you a little something,’ he said, handing me a money order. I looked at it. ‘12 roubles 50 kopecks,’ I read out.

  ‘Hey, Mum, you’ve forgotten the noughts! That’s for 1250 roubles!’

  ‘Well, I’ve never had a crazy sum like that in my hands! How would I know how it’s written?’

  He was very good-hearted. ‘You’re going to retire and I’m going to earn a lot of money for both of us. Do you remember when I was a boy, I promised I’d carry you in my arms when I grew up?’

  And so he did. He was 6 foot 5 inches tall and he carried me around like a little girl. We loved each other so much because we had no one else, probably. I don’t know how I’d have let a wife have him. I don’t suppose I would have.

  He got his conscription papers and decided he wanted to be a paratrooper. ‘They’re enlisting for the paras, Mum, but they won’t take me because I’m so big. They say I’ll break the parachute shroud-lines! And I just love those berets.’

  All the same, he got into the Vitebsk Parachute Division. I went to the swearing-in ceremony, when they have to take the oath. I noticed he’d straightened up — he wasn’t ashamed of his height any more.

  ‘Why are you so tiny, Mum?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve stopped growing because I miss you so much,’ I tried to joke.

  ‘We’re being sent to Afghanistan, but I’m not going because I’m an only child. Why didn’t you have a little girl after you had me?’

  Lots of the parents came to the oath-taking ceremony. All of a sudden I heard someone on the platform asking, ‘Where is Mama Zhuraleva? Mama Zhuraleva, come up and congratulate your son!’ I went up to give him a kiss, but I couldn’t reach the 6 foot 5 inch bean-pole. ‘Private Zhuralev! Bend down so that your mother can give you a kiss!’ ordered the commandant. As he bent down and kissed me someone took a photograph of us. It’s the only photo I’ve got of him in uniform.

  After the ceremony they were given a few hours off and we went to a nearby park. We sat on the grass. When he took off his boots I saw that his feet were covered in blood. He told me they’d done a 30-mile route-march, but there were no size 11 boots so he had to wear 9½s. But he didn’t complain — on the contrary. ‘We had to run with our backpacks full of sand, and I didn’t pour half mine out like some of the lads.’

  I wanted to do something special for him. ‘Shall we go to a restaurant, dear? We’ve never been to a restaurant together.’

  ‘I tell you what, Mum — buy me a couple of pounds of sweets. That’s what I’d really like!’

  Then it was time for him to go back to barracks. He waved me goodbye with his bag of sweets.

  They put us relatives up for the night on mattresses in the sports hall, but we hardly slept a wink — we couldn’t help walking round and round the barracks where our boys were fast asleep. When reveille sounded I rushed outside, hoping to see him one more time as they marched off to the gym, even if it was only from a distance. I saw them running, but they all looked the same in their striped vests so I couldn’t make him out. They had to keep in groups all the time, even going to the canteen or the toilet — they weren’t allowed to go anywhere on their own because before, when the lads realised they were going to Afghanistan, some had hanged themselves in the toilets or slashed their wrists.

  In the bus I was the only one who cried. I just sensed I’d never see him again. Soon I had a letter from him: ‘I saw your bus, Mum, and ran after it so that I could see you one last time.’ When we were sitting in the park they’d played that lovely old song over the loudspeakers, ‘When my mother said goodbye to me’. I hear it in my head all the time now.

  His next letter began, ‘Hello from Kabul … ’ I started screaming, so loud that the neighbours rushed in. ‘It’s against the law and civil rights!’ I shouted, banging my head on the table. ‘He’s my only child — even under the Tsar they didn’t take an only child into the army. And now he’s been sent to fight a war.’ It was the first time since Sasha was born that I was sorry I hadn’t got married. Now I had no one to protect me.

  Sasha used to tease me: ‘Why don’t you get married, Mum?’ he’d ask.

  ‘Because you’d be jealous!’ I told him. He’d laugh and say no more about it. We thought we’d be living together for a long, long time.

  He wrote a few more letters and then there was such a long gap that I wrote to his commanding officer. Soon afterwards I got a letter from Sasha! ‘Mum, don’t write to the CO any more, your last letter got me into trouble. The reason I didn’t write is, I was stung on the hand by a wasp. I didn’t ask anyone else to write a letter for me because a stranger’s handwriting on the envelope would have given you a shock.’ He was sorry for me and made up stories — as if I didn’t watch TV every day and couldn’t guess he’d been wounded. After that, if I didn’t get a letter every day I could hardly get up in the morning. He tried to explain. ‘How can you expect them to send off our letters every day when we only get fresh drinking-water delivered every ten days?’

  One letter was happy: ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! We escorted a convoy to the Soviet border, and even though we weren’t allowed to cross, we saw the Motherland in the distance. It’s the best country in the world!’

  In his last letter he wrote: ‘If I can get through the summer I’ll be home.’ On the 29th of August I decided summer was over and went to buy him a suit and some shoes. They’re still in the cupboard …

  On the 30th I took off my ear-rings and ring before I went to work. For some reason I just couldn’t bear to wear them.

  That was the day he was killed.

  I only went on living after his death thanks to my brother. For a whole week he slept by my bed like a dog, watching over me, because all I wanted to do was run to the balcony and throw myself out of our seventh-floor window. When the coffin was brought into the sitting-room I lay on it, measuring it with my arms over and over again. Three foot, six foot, six and a half, because that’s how tall he was. Was it long enough for him? I talked to the coffin like a madwoman: ‘Who’s there? Is it you, my love? Who’s there? Is it you, my love? Who’s there? Is it you, my love?’ The coffin was already sealed when they brought it so I couldn’t kiss him goodbye, or stroke him one last time. I don’t even kn
ow what he’s wearing.

  I told them I’d choose a place for him in the cemetery myself. They gave me a couple of injections and I went with my brother. There were already some ‘Afghan’ graves in the central alley.

  ‘That’s where I want my son to be — he’ll be happier with his friends.’

  The man who was with us, some boss or other, shook his head. ‘It’s forbidden for them to be buried together. They have to be spread about the rest of the cemetery.’

  That was when I exploded! ‘Don’t get so angry, Sonya, don’t get so angry,’ my brother tried to calm me down. But how can I not be angry?

  When I saw their Kabul on TV I wanted to get a machine-gun and shoot the lot of them. I’d sit there ‘shooting’ until, one day, it showed one of their old women, an Afghan mother, I suppose. ‘She’s probably lost a son, too,’ I thought. After that I stopped ‘shooting’.

  I’m thinking of adopting a boy from the children’s home, a little blond chap like Sasha. No, I’d be frightened for a boy, he’d only get killed, a girl would be better. The two of us’ll wait for Sasha together … I’m not mad, but I am waiting for him. I’ve heard of cases where they’ve sent the mother the coffin and she’s buried it, and a year later he’s home, alive, wounded but alive. The mother had a heart attack. I’m still waiting. I never saw him dead so I’m still waiting … ’

  Major, Propaganda Section of an Artillery Regiment

  I won’t begin at the beginning. I’ll begin from when everything started to collapse.

  We were on the road to Jalalabad. A little girl, about seven, was standing by the side of the road. She had a broken arm hanging down, like the arm of an old rag doll dangling by a bit of thread. Her olive eyes stared and stared at me. I jumped out of the car to pick her up and take her to our hospital but she was in a state of sheer terror, like a little wild animal. She leapt away from me screaming, with her little arm still dangling, looking as though it would drop off at any moment. I ran after her, I was shouting too. I caught up with her and clutched her to me, stroked her. She started biting and scratching, then shaking, as though some other wild animal had caught her. I suddenly realised she thought I was going to kill her.