Zinky Boys

by Svetlana Alexievich

  A stretcher went past with an old Afghan woman lying on it, smiling.

  ‘Where’s she been wounded?’ someone asked.

  ‘In the heart,’ the nurse answered.

  I went to Afghanistan full of enthusiasm. I thought I could do something useful out there. I expected to be needed by the people. Now all I remember is how the little girl ran away from me, trembling, how frightened she was of me. It’s something I’ll never forget.

  I never dreamt about the war while I was there. Now I’m scared to go to sleep at night. I keep chasing that little girl with her olive eyes and her dangling arm …

  ‘Do you think I ought to see the shrink?’ I asked some of the lads.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘About being afraid to go to sleep.’

  ‘We’re all afraid to go to sleep.’

  I don’t want you to think we were supermen, with cigarettes clenched between our teeth, opening cans of bully beef over the bodies of the enemy and carelessly eating water-melons after battle. That image is utter rubbish. We were ordinary boys and any other boys could have taken our place. When I hear people accusing us of ‘killing people over there’ I could smash their faces in. If you weren’t there and didn’t live through it you can’t know what it was like and you have no right to judge us. The only exception was Sakharov. I would have listened to him.

  No one can understand that war. We were left to sort the whole thing out on our own. Now we’re expected to feel guilty and justify ourselves. To whom? may I ask. We were sent by our leaders and we trusted in them. Don’t confuse those who sent us with those who were sent. A friend of mine, Major Sasha Krivets, was killed. Go and tell his mother, or his wife, or his children, that he’s guilty. ‘You’re in good condition,’ the doctor told me. How can we be in good condition after what we’ve been through?

  The idea of the Motherland seemed completely different over there. We didn’t even use the term, we called it the ‘Union’ instead. ‘Say hello to the Union,’ we’d tell the boys going home.

  We assumed there was something big and strong behind us which would always be there to defend us. Once, I remember, we’d returned to barracks after a battle, with many dead and wounded, and in the evening we switched on TV, just to relax and find out what was going on back home. A huge new factory was being built in Siberia; the Queen of Britain had given a luncheon for some VIP; a gang of teenagers had raped two schoolgirls in Voronezh, out of boredom. Some prince had been killed in Africa … We realised we weren’t important and that life at home was going on as usual. Suddenly Sasha Kuchinski exploded. ‘Turn it off!’ he shouted. ‘Or I’ll blow the thing to bits!’

  After battle you make a report by walkie-talkie: ‘6 three zero zeroes and and 4 zero twenty-ones,’ or whatever. ‘Three zero zero’ is the code for ‘wounded’; ‘zero twenty-one’ means ‘fatality’. You look at a dead soldier and think of his mother. I know her son’s dead, you think, and she doesn’t — yet. Could she sense it? It was even worse if someone fell into the river or a ravine and the body wasn’t found. The mother would be told he was ‘missing’.

  This was the mothers’ war, they were the ones who did the fighting. The Soviet people in general didn’t suffer much. They were told we were fighting ‘bandits’. But why couldn’t a regular army, 100,000 strong, with all the latest equipment, defeat a few disorganised bandits after nine long years? You can’t imagine the power and accuracy of our ‘Grad’ and ‘Hurricane’ jet-propelled rocket-launchers: they make telegraph poles fly about like matchsticks and all you want to do is crawl into the ground like a worm. All the so-called bandits had were those Maxim machine-guns, the sort you see only in old films. Later, I admit, they got Stinger missiles and Jap non-recoil automatics, but still …

  We’d bring in POWs, skinny exhausted men with big peasant hands. They weren’t bandits, just ordinary people.

  It didn’t take us long to understand they didn’t want us there, so what was the point of our being there? You’d go past abandoned villages with smoke still curling over the log-fires, you could smell food cooking … Once I saw a camel dragging its insides after it, as though its humps were uncoiling. I should have finished it off, I know, but I couldn’t, I have a natural dislike of violence. Someone else might well have shot a perfectly healthy camel, just for the hell of it. In the Soviet Union that kind of behaviour means gaol, but over there you’d be a hero for ‘punishing bandits’. Why is it that seventeenand eighteen-year-olds find it easier to kill than thirty-year-olds, for example? Because they have no pity, that’s why. When the war was over I noticed how violent fairytales were. People are always killing each other, Baba Yaga even roasts them in her oven, but the children are never frightened. They hardly ever even cry!

  We wanted to stay normal. I remember a singer who came to entertain us troops. She was a beautiful woman and her songs were very moving. We missed women so much — I was as excited to see her as if she were a member of my family. Eventually she came on stage. ‘When I was on my way here,’ she announced, ‘i was allowed to use a machine-gun. I can’t tell you how I enjoyed firing that thing.’ She started singing, and when it came to the refrain she urged us to clap in time: ‘Come on boys, let’s hear you now!’ No one clapped. No one made a sound. She walked off stage and the show was abandoned. She thought she was some kind of supergirl come to visit superboys. But the fact was that there were ten or fifteen empty bunks in those boys’ barracks every month, with the occupants lying in the morgue. The other lads arranged letters from their mothers or girlfriends diagonally across the sheet — it was a kind of tradition.

  The most important thing in that war was to survive — to avoid getting blown up by a mine, roasted in a tank or shot by a sniper. For some, the next most important thing was to take something back home, a TV or a sheepskin coat, for example. There was a joke that people back home got to know about the war through the commission shops, where things like that fetched a good price. In winter you see all the girls in their Afghan sheepskins — they’re very trendy just now.

  All us soldiers had amulets round our necks, charms our mothers had given us. When I got home my mother confessed, ‘I didn’t tell you, Kolya, but I had a spell cast over you, that’s why you’ve come home safe and sound.’ She’d actually taken a lump of earth from our garden to the local witch!

  When we went on a raid we’d pin a note to the upper part of our body and another to the lower part, so that if we were blown up by a mine one or the other would be found. Or else we wore bracelets with our name, number and blood group engraved on them. We never said Tm going … ’ always ‘I’ve been sent … ’ And we never said the word ‘last’:

  ‘Let’s go and have a last drink.’

  ‘Are you crazy? There’s no such word! Final, ultimate, fourth, fifth, anything, but not that word!’

  Superstition was rife. For example, if you shaved, or had your photo taken before going on an operation, you wouldn’t come back alive. War has a strange logic of its own. The blue-eyed boys, determined to be heroes, were always the first to die. ‘I’m going to be a hero!’ you’d hear someone say, and he’d be killed next time out. In action we relieved ourselves where we lay. There’s a soldier’s saying that goes, ‘It’s better to roll in your own shit than to be blown into shit by a mine.’ (Excuse my language.) Most fatalities occurred during the first or last month of a tour of duty. The early ones were due to curiosity, the late ones to a kind of blunting of the self-preservation instinct.

  Joke: An officer in Afghanistan goes back home on army business. He goes to the hairdresser.

  ‘How are things in Afghanistan?’ she asks him.

  ‘Getting better,’ he replies.

  A few minutes later she asks him again: ‘How are things in Afghanistan?’

  ‘Getting better.’

  A little while later: ‘How are things in Afghanistan?’

  ‘Getting better.’

  Eventually he pays and goes. ‘Why did you keep asking hi
m the same question?’ her colleagues ask her.

  ‘Whenever I mentioned Afghanistan his hair stood on end and it was easier to cut.’

  I’ve been home three years and I still yearn to go back. Not to the war, or the place, but to the men I lived and worked with. When you’re there you can’t wait to get home, but when the day comes you’re sorry and go around collecting your friends’ addresses.

  Valeri Shirokov, for example. He was a slim, delicate chap, but with a soul of iron. He never said an unnecessary word. At one time we had a real miser with us, who did nothing but hoard, buy, sell, and barter. One day Valeri went up to him, took 200 foreign currency vouchers out of his wallet, tore them up into little pieces before his very eyes, and then left the room without saying a word.

  Or Sasha Rudik. I saw the New Year in with him on a raid. We made a Christmas tree out of guns stacked in a pyramid and hung grenades on them instead of presents. We wrote ‘Happy New Year!!!’ in toothpaste on the rocket-launcher, with three exclamation marks for some reason. He was a good painter. I’ve still got a landscape of his, with a dog, a girl and maple trees, painted on a sheet. He never did mountains — they soon lost their charm for us. If you asked men there what they missed most they’d answer: ‘I’d like to walk in the woods, swim in the river, drink a whole jug of milk.’

  Or Sashik Lashuk. He was a decent lad who wrote home often. ‘My parents are old,’ he’d say. ‘They don’t know I’m here. I’ve told them I was posted to Mongolia.’ He arrived with his guitar and left with it, too.

  No two of us were alike, so don’t think we were all the same over there. To begin with the media kept quiet about us, then we were all heroes for a time, and now we’re being knocked off our pedestals again so we can be forgotten about. One chap might throw himself on a mine to save the lives of men he didn’t even know, while another would come to you and say: ‘Look, I’ll do your laundry for you if you want, but don’t send me into action.’

  Our KamaZ trucks would drive around with the names of cities written on them — ‘Odessa’, ‘Smolensk’, ‘Leningrad’. Others might say ‘I want to go home to Alma-Ata’, etc. When an Odessan or Leningrader met someone from his home town they’d hug each other like brothers. And here, back home, we’re like brothers too. After all, if you see a young man hopping down the road on crutches, wearing a nice shiny medal, he’s obviously one of us. We might sit down on a bench and have a smoke, and chat all evening. We’re all suffering from a wasting disease, you know. Over there it showed itself as a mismatch between our weight and our height, but here, back home, it’s a mismatch between our feelings and our ability to express them in what we say and do.

  When we landed back in the Soviet Union we were taken by bus from the airport to a hotel. We were all silent, overwhelmed by the first few hours in our own country. All of a sudden, though, our collective nerve broke. ‘Drive in the ruts!’ we shouted at the driver. ‘Keep to the ruts!’ Then we burst into hysterical laughter — we were home and didn’t need to worry about mines. We could drive on the side of the road, in the ruts or out of them, wherever we wanted — we were drunk with happiness.

  A few days later we noticed we were all walking about round-shouldered. We’d lost the habit of walking upright. I used to tie myself to the bed at night to train myself to straighten up.

  I gave a talk at the officers’ club. ‘Tell us about the romantic side of service life in Afghanistan,’ I was asked. ‘Did you personally kill anyone?’ Young girls were especially keen on bloodthirsty questions. Ordinary life is a bit dull, I grant you, but can you imagine anyone asking about the romantic side of World War II? Three generations fought side by side against the Germans — grandfathers, fathers and sons. This war was fought by naïve boys looking for adventure. I saw how keen they were to try everything. They wanted to know what it felt like to kill, to be scared, to take hashish. Some got high on it, others got into the state we called shubnyak, where a bush turned into a tree, or a rock became a hill, so that when they marched they had to lift their feet twice as high as the rest of us. That made the world even more frightening for them.

  Another question I got asked was this: ‘Could you have refused to go to Afghanistan?’ Me personally? Only one of our group of professional army officers, Major Bondarenko, a battery commander, refused. The first thing that happened was, he had to face a ‘court of honour’, which convicted him of cowardice. Can you imagine what that does to a man’s self-esteem? Suicide might be the easiest way out. Then he was demoted to captain and posted to a building battalion as punishment. Then he was expelled from the party and eventually discharged with dishonour. How many men could go through all that? And he was a military man to the bone — he’d spent thirty years in the army.

  When I went through customs they wiped my Rosenbaum [a mildly ‘dissident’ singer] tape. ‘Hey, lads, what are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve got this list of what’s allowed and what isn’t.’

  When I got home to Smolensk I heard Rosenbaum blaring out of all the student hostel windows!

  Nowadays, if the police need to frighten the local mafia they come to us Afgantsi. ‘Come on boys!’ they say, ‘give us a hand!’ Or if they want to harass or break up some unofficial political group, ‘Call the Afgantsi in!’ they say. An Afganets, in other words, is a killing-machine, with big fists, a weak head and no conscience. No wonder we’re feared and disliked by everyone.

  But if you’ve got a bad arm you don’t amputate it, do you? You nurse it until it’s better.

  Shall I tell you why we go on meeting, we veterans? To save ourselves by staying together. All the same, once you’re home you’re on your own.

  1st Lieutenant i/c Mortar Platoon

  I have the same dream every night. It’s like watching a film over and over again. Everyone’s running and firing, including me. I fall down and wake up and I’m on a hospital bed. I start to get up to go and have a smoke in the corridor. Then I realise my legs have gone and I’m back in the real world …

  I don’t want to hear any talk about a ‘political mistake’, OK? Give me my legs back if it was really a mistake.

  Have you taken unfinished letters from soldiers’ pockets … ‘Dear Mama … ’, ‘My Darling … ’? Have you seen soldiers shot to pieces by old blunderbusses and modem Chinese machine guns at the same time?

  We were sent to Afghanistan to obey orders. In the army you obey orders first and then, if you like, discuss their merits — when it’s all over. ‘Go!’ means exacdy that. If you refuse you get thrown out of the party. You took the military oath, didn’t you? And back home, when you ask the local party committee for something you need, they tell you, ‘It wasn’t us that sent you!’ Well, who did send us?

  I had a friend out there. When I went into action he always said goodbye to me and hugged me when I came back alive. I’ll never find a friend like that here at home.

  I hardly ever go out now. I’m ashamed …

  Have you ever tried our Soviet-manufactured prostheses? I’ve heard that abroad people with artificial limbs go skiing, play tennis and dance. Why don’t the authorities use foreign currency to buy decent arms and legs instead of wasting it on French cosmetics, subsidised Cuban sugar or Moroccan oranges?

  I’m twenty-two, with my whole life in front of me. I need to find a wife. I had a girlfriend. ‘I hate you,’ I told her, to make her leave me. She pitied me, when what I wanted was her love.

  ‘I dreamt of home, of nights

  I lay Listening to the rowans sigh.

  “Cuckoo, cuckoo, tell me pray

  How many years before I die … ?” ’

  That was my favourite song. I used to go into the forest, and ask the cuckoo, and count his calls, but now — sometimes I don’t want to go on living one day longer.

  I still long to see that landscape again, that biblical desert. We all have that yearning, it’s like standing at the edge of a precipice, or high over water, and looking down until your head spins.
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br />   Now the war’s over they’re trying to forget all about us, or else hide us out of sight. They treated the veterans of the war with Finland the same way*. Thousands of books have been published about World War II but not one about the Finnish war. Our people are too easy on their rulers — and I’ll have accepted it myself in ten years or so.

  Did I kill anybody in Afghanistan? Yes. You didn’t send us over there to be angels — so how can you expect us to come back as angels?

  It took me six days by train to get to Moscow from Khabarovsk. We crossed the whole of Russia via the Siberian rivers and Lake Baikal. The railway attendant in charge of the tea-urn ran out of tea on the very first day; the water-boiler broke down the day after that. My family met me in Moscow, there were tears all round, but duty came first.

  I got off the plane and saw the kind of blue sky that in our country you find only over rivers. There was a lot of noise and shouting — but all of it from our own people. There were new recruits being met, old friends seen off, and packages from home picked up. Everyone looked tanned and cheerful. Hard to believe that somewhere out there it was 30° Celsius below freezing and armour-plating was cracking from cold. I saw my first Afghan through the barbed wire of the clearing-compound. I remember having no particular feelings (apart from a mild curiosity) towards this ‘foreigner’.

  I was posted to Bagram to take command of the road-engineers’ platoon in a sapper battalion.

  We lived a regular routine of getting up early and reporting for work. We had a mine-sweeper tank, a sniper unit, a mine-detecting dog, and two APCs to provide protection. We covered the first few miles in the armoured vehicles, just as long as the tracks of previous vehicles were clearly visible on the road. Dust covered everything like a fine powdery snow. If a bird landed on it you could see the traces. If a tank had passed that way the day before, though, special care was needed, because the caterpillar tracks could be concealing a mine. After planting the device the mujahedin would recreate the tracks with their fingers and clear their own footprints using a bag or an unrolled turban.