The road wound past two abandoned villages of smouldering mud huts — perfect cover for enemy snipers, so we needed to be extra-vigilant. Once we were past the villages we’d get out of the vehicles. This was the procedure: the dog ran zigzagging in front of us, followed by the sappers with their probing rods poking the soil as they went. All you had going for you was God, your sixth sense, experience and flair. You might notice a broken branch, or a bit of rusty iron, or a rock, which hadn’t been there the day before. The muj would leave little markers like that to avoid getting blown up themselves.
That bit of iron, now, was it there by chance or was there a battery under the sand, connected to a bomb or a crate of TNT? A man’s weight won’t trigger an anti-tank mine — it needs a 250–300 kilo load to set it off.
After my first explosion I was the only man left sitting on our tank. All the others got blown off. My place was by the barrel so I was protected from the full force of the blast by the gun turret. I quickly checked my arms, legs and head were all where they should be. We picked ourselves up and carried on.
We set off another blast a little further on. The lightly armed trailer-tractor was blown up and split in two by a powerful fougasse, or land mine, which left a crater three metres long and as deep as a tall man. The tractor was transporting mines, about 200 mortars — they were thrown into the branches and on to the side of the road like a giant fan. We lost all five soldiers and the lieutenant on the tractor. I’d spent the past few evenings with them, talking and smoking and now they were literally blown to pieces. We went and collected them up, including a dust-covered head, so completely squashed it looked as though there wasn’t any bone.
We filled five crates and divided them so that there would be something of each man to be sent home.
The dogs were a tremendous asset. They’re just like people, some gifted with intuition, others not. A sentry might doze, but a dog — never. I was very fond of one called Toby. He’d snuggle up to us but bark at our Afghan National Army allies! Admittedly, their khaki was a bit greener, and ours rather yellowish, but still, how could he tell the difference? He could sense a mine at several paces. He’d stop dead with his tail sticking up straight, as if to say: KEEP OFF!
No two mine-traps are the same, but the worst are the homemade devices which never repeat themselves exactly. They might be hidden in a rusty tea-kettle, or a tape-recorder, watch, or can. Units who went out without sappers were known as ‘suicide squads’. Mines were everywhere, on mountain paths, on the roads and in houses. It was always the sappers who went in first.
We were checking out a trench one day. There’d already been one explosion and we’d spent two days raking it through. I jumped down into it and — BANG!
I didn’t pass out — I looked up at the sky, which seemed to be on fire. A sapper’s first reaction after a blast is to look upwards to check that his eyes are intact. I kept a tourniquet on my gunbutt which they used to bandage me above the knees. But I knew that limbs are always amputated three to five centimetres above the wound.
‘Where are you tying it?’ I shouted at the medic.
‘You’ve lost them both up to the knee, sir.’
The field hospital was fifteen kilometres away and it took them 1½ hours to get me there. There my wounds were sterilised and I was given novocaine to kill the pain. My legs were amputated the same day; I lost consciousness only when I heard the saw, it sounded like a circular saw. The following day they operated on my eyes. The flame from the blast had seared my face — the surgeons practically darned my eyes and gave me twenty-two stitches. Only two or three a day could be removed — otherwise the eyeball would have fallen to bits. They’d shine a torch into my eyes, left and right, to find out whether I reacted to light and whether the retina was intact.
I’ll never forget the red beam of that torch.
I’d like to write a book about the way an officer can be reduced to a housebound wreck, earning his bread assembling lamp-sockets and wall-plugs, about a hundred a day, or putting the metal bits on the ends of shoelaces. What colour shoelaces? Red, black, or white, he never knows, because he can’t see; he’s been officially declared totally blind. He ties string-bags, and glues little boxes — the sort of work he used to think only lunatics did. Thirty bags a day and I’ve reached my daily target, my ‘norm’.
Sappers were the least likely of all to come back intact, or even alive, particularly the specialised mine-clearing units. They were all either dead or wounded. Out of habit, we never shook hands before going into action. The day of that last explosion our new CO shook my hand, out of sheer friendliness — no one had warned him. And I got blown up … Was it just superstition? Who knows? There was another belief: if you’d volunteered for Afghanistan you’d end up dead, but if you were just posted there you might get home alive.
That was five years ago. I still have this dream. I’m in a long mine-field. I’ve drawn up a plan, based on the number of mines and the number of rows, and markers to find them by. But I’ve lost the plan. (In fact we often did lose them, or else the marker was a tree which had been destroyed, or a pile of stones which had been blown up. Nobody wanted to go and check, and risk getting blown up by our own mines.) In my dream I see children running near the mine-field, they don’t know there are mines there. I want to shout: ‘Stop! Mines!’ I want to warn the children. I want to warn the children … I’m running … I have both my legs back, and I can see, my eyes can see again … But that’s only at night, only in my dream. Then I wake up.
Doctor, Bacteriologist
Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, especially in the context of this particular war, but I’m a romantic. I hate the pettiness and materialism of everyday life. The very day I arrived the medical director called me in. ‘What makes a woman like you come here?’ he asked me, and I was obliged to tell the story of my life to a complete stranger, a military man at that, someone I might just have met in the street. For me, that was the most unpleasant and humiliating aspect of life in Afghanistan: the complete absence of privacy and intimacy. Everything took place on a public stage. Do you know a film called Off Limits, about convict life in the camps? We lived life by exactly the same rules, right down to the little barbed-wire compounds we were restricted to.
The girls I lived with were young waitresses and cooks, whose sole subject of conversation seemed to be roubles, foreign currency vouchers, and how to steal meat, smoked sausage or Bulgarian biscuits from the hospital kitchens. Before I arrived I imagined an elevating and inspiring atmosphere of self-sacrifice, with the womenfolk fulfilling their role of protecting and caring for our boys. If men were spilling their blood for the cause I would give my blood too! I realised just how wrong I was even before I left the clearing-centre in Tashkent. I sat in the plane and burst into tears. Life here was exactly the same as everything I was running away from at home. Vodka flowed like water at the centre. You know that song:
‘We dream of the grass at the cosmodrome
The green green grass that means we’re home!’
Well, I felt as though I were flying into outer space. Back home everyone at least has their own home they can make into their little fortress, but we slept four to a room. The girl who worked as a hospital cook used to bring meat she’d stolen from the canteen and hide it under the bed.
‘Wash the floor!’ she orders me.
‘I washed it yesterday, it’s your turn today.’
‘I’ll give you a hundred roubles to wash that floor.’ I say nothing.
‘I’ll give you some meat.’
I say nothing. Then she takes a bucket of water and empties it over my bed. They all burst into laughter.
Another girl was a waitress. Her speech consisted entirely of foul language but she loved the poet Marina Tsvetayeva [1892–1941, one of the three or four greatest Russian poets of the century]. When she came back from her shift she’d sit down and play patience: ‘Will I, won’t I, will I, won’t I?’
‘Will I won’t I what?’
‘Fall in love, of course.’
There were real weddings out there, and love too, though not much of it. Love usually stopped at Tashkent — after that it was ‘him to the left, her to the right’.
Tanya the Tank, as we called her on account of her build, liked to sit and talk into the early hours. She drank only pure alcohol.
‘How can you take it?’ I asked her.
‘Vodka’s just too weak, love! It doesn’t do a thing for me.’ When she went home she took five or six hundred postcards of movie stars she’d bought in the bazaars, where they were expensive. ‘Money spent on art is never wasted,’ she told us proudly.
I remember another girl, Verochka Kharkov, sitting in front of the mirror with her tongue stuck out. She was worried about typhoid and somebody had told her that one of the symptoms was toothmarks on the tongue!
They hardly even acknowledged my existence. For them I was some idiot who carried test-tubes full of germs about. I was the chief bacteriologist at the infectious diseases hospital, and all I ever talked about was typhoid, paratyphoid, hepatitis and the like. Casualties didn’t arrive at hospital straightaway — they might have been lying for up to ten hours, or even a day or two, in the mountain sand before they were located, with the result that open wounds became breeding-grounds for every kind of infection. I’d examine a patient in reanimation, for example, and find he had typhoid on top of everything else.
They died quietly. Only once did I see an officer crying. He was a Moldavian and the surgeon, who was also Moldavian, talked to him in their own language.
‘What’s the problem, my friend? Where’s the pain?’
That was when he began to weep. ‘Save me!’ he begged. ‘I must live. I have a sweet wife and lovely daughter. I must get back to them … ’ He would have died quietly too, if he hadn’t heard his mother tongue.
I hated going to the morgue, where human flesh still mixed with earth was regularly brought in. I’d think of that meat hidden under the girls’ beds … They’d put the frying-pan on the table shouting ‘Ruba, Ruba!’ which means ‘Let’s go!’ in Afghan. It was so hot their sweat dripped into the pan.
I was seeing wounded soldiers and their microbes all day long — and you can’t sell microbes, can you? At the army store you could buy toffees, which I adored, for foreign currency vouchers. Once, I remember, someone gave me two raw eggs from the hospital kitchen, because we doctors went around half-starved (we survived on reconstituted potato and frozen meat which was tough, tasteless and colourless). I grabbed the eggs and wrapped them in a handkerchief to take them back to my room to make an onion omelette. I looked forward to that omelette all day. Then I saw a young lad on a stretcher in a corridor, waiting to be evacuated to Tashkent. I couldn’t see what there was under the blanket, only his handsome face on the pillow. He looked up at me. ‘I’m starving,’ he said. It was just before lunch and I realised he’d be taken away before they brought the big tubs of food up from the kitchens. ‘OK,’ I said, and gave him the two eggs. I turned and left, not thinking to find out if he still had his arms and legs. I’d put the eggs on his pillow without breaking them or feeding him. What if he had no arms?
Once I was in a van for two hours with four corpses beside me, lying there in track-suits …
When I got back home to the USSR I couldn’t bear to listen to music or chat with people in the street and the bus queue. I’d have liked to shut myself into my room with just the TV for company. The day before I left, the medical director of our hospital, Yuri Yefimovich Zhibkov, shot himself. In Afghanistan some officer showed me this passage from the French writer, Fourrier, and I copied it down: ‘The foreigner who happens to find himself in Afghanistan may consider himself blessed by God if he leaves that country healthy, unharmed and with his head still on his shoulders … ’
I keep away from other Afgantsi — I’m always nervous they’ll put me down. I have a very gentle character but I sometimes think that even I have turned into a cruel and aggressive person. We had to prepare young soldiers for their discharge back into the army. They’d hide in the hospital attics and cellars and we’d have to catch them and drag them out.
At the clearing centre the girls told me to whom you had to give a bottle of vodka in order to get a comfortable job. Those seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds taught me all sorts of things like that — and I’m forty-five.
At the customs I was made to strip stark naked. ‘What’s your job?’
‘I’m a doctor — a bacteriologist.’
‘Your papers!’ Then: Open your cases. Let’s have a poke around … ’ All I was taking home with me was the same old overcoat, blanket, bed-cover, a few hair-pins and forks I’d come out with. They piled it all up on the table, looked at it and sneered, ‘She must be mad — or a poet of some kind.’
I can’t stand it back home either. It’s worse than over there. There, when anyone got or brought something from home we’d all sit round the table and share it. The third toast was always drunk in silence, to ‘absent friends’. We’d sit there with the mice playing round our feet and in our shoes. At four in the morning we’d hear a howling noise. The first time I heard it I jumped up and shouted, ‘Wolves! Wolves!’
‘It’s only the mullahs saying their prayers,’ the girls laughed, but for ages after that I always woke up at four in the morning.
So I want to move on again. I’ve applied to go to Nicaragua. Someplace where there’s a war going on. I can’t settle down to this life any more. War’s better than this. It gives you a justification — or an excuse — for anything you do, good or bad. It’s incredible, I know, but that’s the way I catch myself feeling sometimes.
A Widow
The moment I saw him I knew he was the one for me. He was a tall, good-looking boy. ‘He’s mine, girls!’ I asked him to dance the ladies’ waltz, the one when the girls invite the gentlemen, and my fate was sealed.
I very much wanted a son. We agreed that if it was a girl I’d choose the name — I liked Olechka — and if it was a boy he’d choose between Artem and Denis. So Olechka it was.
‘Will we have a boy?’
Of course, just let Olechka grow up a bit.’ I wish I’d given him a son too.
‘Lyudochka!’ he told me, ‘don’t get upset now, or your milk will dry up (I was breast-feeding) but I’m being posted to Afghanistan.’
‘Why you? You’ve got a baby daughter.’
‘If I don’t go, someone else will have to take my place. “The party’s wish is the Komsomol’s command,” as they say.’
He was a perfect army type. ‘You don’t discuss orders!’ he used to say. His mother is a very dominant character and he got used to being obedient and submissive when he was young. Army life was easy for him.
We threw a goodbye party. The men smoked, his mother sat silent and I cried. The baby slept in her cot.
I met a madwoman in the street, a kind of witch, really — she was always wandering round the compound or the market. People said she’d been raped as a young girl, gone crazy and couldn’t even recognise her own mother afterwards. She stopped by me.
‘They’ll send you your husband back in a zinky,’ she said. Then she laughed and ran away.
After that, I knew something would happen. I didn’t know what.
I waited for him like the girl in that poem of Simonov’s:
‘If you await me, I’ll return … ’
Sometimes I wrote and posted him three or four letters a day. I felt that I was protecting him by thinking about him and longing for him. He wrote back that army life in Afghanistan was the same as everywhere else. Trust in fate, he told me, don’t worry and keep waiting.
When I went to visit his parents Afghanistan was never mentioned. Not a word about it from either his mother or his father. It was an unwritten rule. We were all too scared to say the word.
Then, one day, I was getting Olechka ready for nursery school. I’d just given her a kiss when I opened the door to two soldiers, one of th
em carrying my husband’s small brown suitcase — I’d packed it myself. I had an urgent feeling that if I let them in they would bring something terrible into our home, but if I could keep them out everything would be as it had been before. They were pulling the door open and I was pushing it shut.
‘Is he wounded?’ It was just a faint hope.
The military commissar came in: ‘Ludmilla Iosifovna, with the deepest sorrow we must inform you that your husband … ’
I didn’t cry – I screamed. I caught sight of my husband’s friend, Tolya, and threw myself at him. ‘Tolik, if you tell me it’s true I’ll believe it.’
He brought over the young cadet who was accompanying the coffin. ‘Tell her … ’ But the boy was shaking so much he couldn’t open his mouth.
Women came to kiss me. ‘Try to be calm. Give us your family’s phone numbers.’ I sat down and babbled out all the addresses and phone numbers, lots of them, all I could remember. Later, when they came across my address book, they found I’d got them all right.
We have a small, one-room flat, so the coffin was placed in the clubhouse. I threw myself over it. ‘Why? Why? What harm did you ever do anyone?’ I cried and passed out. When I came to again I looked at that box and remembered the crazy woman’s words: ‘They’ll send him back in a zinky … ’ I started shouting again. ‘I don’t believe this is my husband. Prove it’s him. There isn’t even a little window for me to see him through. Who have you brought me? What have you brought me?’
His friend was fetched again. ‘Tolik,’ I said, ‘swear that this is my husband.’
‘I swear on my daughter’s life that this is your husband. He died immediately and without suffering. That’s all I can say.’
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