I begged him. I went on my knees. I was prepared to kiss his hand. ‘He’s my only child.’ He didn’t even get up from his desk. ‘Please, at least write his name down!’ I begged as I left. I still hoped he might reconsider, if he didn’t have a heart of stone.
Four months went by. They were put through an accelerated intensive three-month training course and suddenly I got a letter from my son in Afghanistan. Just four months … A single summer.
One morning I left the flat to go to work. They met me as I was going down the stairs. Three soldiers and a woman. The men were in front, carrying their caps in their left hands. Somehow I knew that this was a sign of mourning. I turned round and ran upstairs. They realised I must be the mother so they followed me upstairs. I went down in the lift — I wanted to rush into the street and run away, escape, put my hands over my ears and block everything out. By the time I reached the ground floor — the lift had stopped to let people get in — they were standing there waiting for me. I pressed the button and went up again … I got to my floor and ran to the flat, but in my shock forgot to slam the door shut. I heard them coming in. I hid in the bedroom, they came after me, with their caps in their left hands.
One of them was Goryachev, the Military Commissar. With what little strength I had left I threw myself at him like a cat.
‘You are dripping with my son’s blood!’ I screamed. ‘You are dripping with my son’s blood!’
He said nothing. I tried to hit him. I can’t remember what happened after that.
It was over a year before I felt I could face people again. Before that I was totally alone. I blamed everyone for my son’s death — my friend who worked in the bakery, a taxi-driver I’d never seen before in my life, Commissar Goryachev. I realise that was wrong. Then I wanted to be with the only people who could know what I was going through.
We got to know each other at the cemetery, by the gravesides. You’ll see one mother hurrying from the bus in the evening after work; another already sitting by her gravestone, crying; a third painting the railing round her son’s grave. We talk about only one thing — our children, as if they were still alive. I know some of their stories off by heart.
‘I went out on to the balcony, looked down and saw two officers and a doctor. Back in the flat I looked through the peep-hole to see where they were going. They stopped in our hallway and turned right. Was it to the neighbours? They had a son in the army, too. The bell … I open the door:
‘“Has my son been killed?”
‘“Be brave, Mother … ” “Mother”, they called me.’
‘It wasn’t like that for me. They just said: “The coffin’s outside, Mother. Where shall we put it?” My husband and I were getting ready to go to work, the eggs were frying, the kettle was boiling … ’
‘Mine was called up, had his hair shaved off … and five months later they brought him back in a coffin.’
‘Mine too … ’
‘Mine — nine months … ’
‘“Is there anything in there?” I asked the soldier accompanying the coffin.
‘I saw him being laid in the coffin. He is there.’ I stared at him and he lowered his eyes. ‘Something’s in there … ’
‘Did it smell? Ours did … ’
‘And ours. We even had little white worms dropping on to the floor … ’
‘Mine smelt only of fresh timber.’
‘If the helicopter is blown up they collect the pieces. They find an arm, or a leg, and identify them by the watch, or the socks … ’ ‘Our coffin had to wait outside for an hour. Our son was six foot six tall, he was a para. It was like a sarcophagus, a wooden coffin inside a zinc one. It took six men to get it up the stairs … ’ ‘It took them eighteen days to bring mine home. They wait until the plane is full, the black tulip … They flew to the Urals first, then to Leningrad, and only then to Minsk … ’
‘They didn’t send back a single one of his belongings … If only we had something to remember him by … He smoked — if only we had his lighter … ’
‘I’m glad they don’t open the coffins, so that we don’t see what has happened to our sons. I’ll always remember him alive and in one piece … ’
How can we survive? We won’t live long with this pain and these wounds in our hearts.
‘We’re going to give you a new flat,’ I was promised by the local authority. ‘You can choose any empty flat in the area.’
I found one in the city centre, built of proper brick, not prefab concrete, with a nice modern layout. I went back to the town hall with the address.
‘Are you out of your mind? That block’s strictly for Central Committee members.’
‘Is my son’s blood that much cheaper than theirs?’
The local Party secretary at the institute where I work is a good man, and honest. I don’t know how he managed to get access to the Central Committee on my behalf. All he said to me was this: ‘You should have heard how they spoke to me. “All right, she’s grief-stricken — but what’s wrong with you?” That’s what they asked me. I was almost thrown out of the Party.’
Perhaps I should have gone myself to get an answer from them?
‘I’m going to the grave today. My son is there, with his friends, and mine.’
Private, Tank-Crew
There’s something wrong with my memory and I may have to drop out of my second year at college. Words and faces, even my own feelings, seem to escape me. All that’s left are fragments, bits and pieces, as if there’s something missing inside …
I remember these words from the military oath:
‘I stand ready to defend my Motherland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, when ordered to do so by the Soviet Government, and, as a soldier of the armed forces of the USSR, I swear to defend it with courage, skill, dignity and honour, not sparing my blood and even my life for the achievement of total victory over our foes … ’
From my first days in Afghan …
I thought I was in paradise. For the first time I saw oranges growing on trees. I hadn’t yet seen mines hanging like oranges from those same trees (the tank-aerial touches the trip-wire and triggers the bomb). When the ‘Afghan wind’ blows, your porridge is full of sand, the sun is blotted out and it gets so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. A few hours later the sun comes out and you see the mountains again. Not a sign of war. Then — a burst of machine-gun fire, a mortar attack, the crack of a sniper’s bullet, and two of your mates are dead. Sun, mountains, and the gleam of a snake in the sand.
You can’t imagine what death is like even with the bullets whistling overhead. A body lies in the dust and you call out to it, because you can’t take in what’s happened, although a voice inside you says, ‘That’s what death is.’ I was wounded in the leg, but not as badly as I thought. ‘I seem to be injured,’ I thought. I felt surprised but calm. My leg was hurting, but I couldn’t quite believe that this had happened to me personally. I was still a new boy — I wanted a chance to fight and go home a hero.
Someone cut away the top of my boot and applied a tourniquet to my vein, which was severed. I was in pain but it would have been cowardly to show it so I kept quiet. Running from tank to tank means crossing an open space up to a hundred metres wide. There were shells flying about and rocks flying in all directions but I wasn’t about to admit I couldn’t run and crawl with the rest of them … I’d’ve looked like a coward. I crossed myself and ran, covered with blood. The battle lasted for another hour or more. We’d started out at 4 a.m., fighting didn’t stop until 4 p.m., when we had something to eat. I remember my bloody hands tearing at the white bread. Later I found out that my friend had died in hospital from a bullet in the head. I kept waiting for his name to be mentioned at evening roll-call: ‘Igor Dashko was killed while fulfilling his international duty.’ He was a quiet boy and no ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’, but all the same, he shouldn’t have been forgotten so immediately and completely, and just wiped off the lists …
Who wa
s I talking about? Oh yes, Igor Dashko … I saw him laid out in his coffin. I wasn’t even sad any more, but I looked at him for a long while so I wouldn’t forget …
From my time back home:
We flew to Tashkent and went to the station, but couldn’t buy tickets. That evening four of us slipped 50 roubles each to two conductors, who — lo and behold — found us seats in their train. They got 100 roubles each, nice work if you can get it, but we didn’t care. We were laughing like madmen and thinking, ‘We’re alive, we’re alive!!’
When I got home I opened the door, picked up a bucket and crossed the yard to fetch some water. Ecstasy!
I was presented with a medal at my college. Next day there was an article in the paper, with the headline: ‘A Medal Finds Its Hero’. I laughed, they made it sound as though the Frontier Scouts had been searching for me for forty years. And I certainly never said that we ‘went to Afghanistan dedicated to the dawn of the April revolution on Afghan soil’. But that’s what they wrote.
I loved hunting before I went into the army. I planned to go to Siberia after I was discharged and become a professional hunter. Well, one day I went hunting with a friend of mine. He shot one goose, then we saw another, injured. He was trying to shoot it and I was racing after it, trying to save it. I was sick of killing and I still am.
There’s something wrong with my memory. Just fragments, bits and pieces, as if there’s something missing inside …
A Soldier
What was happening to my body didn’t show on the outside, and my parents refused to let me be obsessed with something I couldn’t do a thing about.
I went to Afghanistan with my dog Chara. If you shout, ‘Die!’, she falls to the ground. ‘Shut your eyes!’ she covers her face with her paws. If I was upset she’d sit herself next to me and cry.
I was bursting with pride my first few days over there. I’ve been seriously ill since I was a child and the army had turned me down. ‘Why isn’t this lad in the army?’ people asked. I was ashamed, and hated the idea of people laughing at me. The army is the school of life and makes a man of you. Well, I got into the army and started applying to be sent to Afghanistan.
‘You’ll kick the bucket before the week’s out,’ they warned me.
‘I still want to go.’ I needed to prove I was the same as everyone else.
I didn’t tell my parents where I was stationed. I’ve had cancer of the lymph glands since I was aged twelve and they’ve devoted their lives to me. I told them only the Forces Post Box Number, and that I was ‘attached to a secret unit in a location that cannot be disclosed’.
I took my dog and guitar with me.
‘How did you manage to end up here?’ I was asked by the army security department.
‘Well … ,’ and I told them about all my applications.
‘You actually volunteered? You must be mad!’
I’ve never smoked but I nearly took it up over there.
I fainted the first time I saw casualties, some of them with their legs tom off at the groin or with huge holes in their heads. Everything inside me was shouting, ‘I want to be alive!’
One night someone stole a dead soldier’s submachine-gun. The thief was one of our soldiers too. He sold it for 80,000 afoshki, and showed off what he’d bought with the money: two cassette-recorders and some denims. If he hadn’t been arrested we’d have torn him to pieces ourselves. In court he sat quietly, crying.
When we read articles in the Soviet press about our ‘achievements’ we laughed, got angry and used them as toilet paper, but the strange thing is this: now I’m home, after my two years out there, I search through the papers to find articles about ‘achievements’ and actually believe them.
I thought I’d be happy when I got home, and planned big changes in my life. A lot of soldiers go home, get divorced, remarry and go off somewhere new. Some take off to Siberia to work on the oil pipe-line; others go to Chernobyl, or join the fire brigade. Somewhere where there’s risk and danger. They have a craving for real life instead of mere existence. Some of our boys had terrible bums. First they go all yellow, then they shed their skin and turn pink.
Mountain operations? Well, you carry your gun, obviously, and a double issue of ammo, about 10 kilos of it, plus a mine, that’s another 10 kilos, plus grenades, flak-jacket, dry rations. It comes to at least 40 kilos. I’ve seen men so wet with sweat they look as though they’ve been standing in torrential rain. I’ve seen the orange crust on the frozen faces of dead men. Yes, orange, for some reason, I’ve seen friendship and cowardice … What we did had to be done. No, don’t start on that subject, please! There are a lot of clever dicks around now, but why didn’t they tear up their Party cards, or shoot themselves in protest, while we were over there?
When I got home my mother undressed me and patted me all over. ‘All in one piece, you’re fine!’ she kept saying. Yes, I was fine on the surface, but inside I was on fire. Everything irritates me now — even sunshine, or cheerful songs, or someone laughing. My old books, my tape-recorder, photos and guitar are all in my bedroom as before — but I’ve changed. I can’t walk through the park without looking behind me. If a waiter in a café stands behind me to take my order I want to jump up and rush out — I can’t stand anyone standing at my back. If someone provokes me my immediate reaction is, ‘Shoot the little shit!’ In war we had to do the exact opposite of what we’d been taught in normal life, and now we’re meant to unlearn all the skills we learnt in war. I’m an excellent shot and my grenades always hit their target. Who needs all that now?
We believed we were there to defend something, namely the Motherland and our way of life. Yet back home, what do I find? My friend can’t lend me a fiver because his wife wouldn’t like it. What kind of a friend is that? I soon realised we were surplus to requirements. We might just as well not have made it — we’re unwanted, an embarrassment. After Afghanistan I got a job as a car mechanic. Then I worked for the Komsomol at regional level in the ideology department, but I left there too, even though it was a cushy job. Life here is one big swamp where all people care about is their wages, dachas, cars and how to find a bit of smoked sausage. No one gives a damn about us. If we didn’t stand up for our rights ourselves nobody would know a thing about this war. If there weren’t so many of us, 100,000 in fact, they’d have shut us up, like they did after Vietnam and Egypt … Out there we all hated the enemy together. But I need someone to hate now, so that I can find some friends again. But who?
I went to the recruiting office and applied to go back to Afghanistan but I was refused. The war would soon be over, they said. A lot more like me will be home soon. Yes, there’ll be a lot more of us one day.
You wake up in the morning and you’re glad you can’t remember your dreams. I never tell my dreams to anyone. There is something that really happened that I can’t talk about either …
I dream I’m asleep and see a great sea of people, near where I live. I look round and feel very cramped, but for some reason I can’t stand up. Then I realise I’m lying in a coffin, a wooden coffin. I see that so clearly, but I’m alive, and I know I’m alive, even though I’m in a coffin. A gate opens and all the people pass through the gate on to the road, carrying me along with them. The faces of the crowd are full of grief but also a kind of mysterious ecstasy I can’t understand. What’s happened? Why am I in this coffin? Suddenly the procession comes to a halt. ‘Give me a hammer!’ I hear someone say. I suddenly realise I’m dreaming. ‘Give me a hammer!’ I hear again. The lid is hammered down, then I hear hammer-blows and one nail goes through my finger. I beat my head and legs against the lid. Bang — the lid flies off. The people watch as I sit up straight. ‘I’m in pain!’ I want to shout. ‘Why are you nailing me down? I can’t breathe in here.’ They’re crying but they can’t, or won’t, speak to me. And I don’t know how to get them to hear me. I think I’m shouting, but my lips are glued together and I can’t open them. So I lie back in the coffin. ‘If they want me to be dead perhaps
I am dead and must keep quiet.’ Again someone says, ‘Give me a hammer!’
* The ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40, about which the Soviet public was, until very recently, permitted to know almost nothing.
† An allusion to the widespread practice of officers using their men for private gain. His work at the furniture factory may well have been on the same basis, despite the reference to ‘our company getting new tables’.
The Third Day
Author: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth …
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters …
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so …
And the earth brought forth grass, the herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind …
And the evening and the morning were the third day.’
What am I looking for in the scriptures? Questions, or answers? Which questions and which answers? How much humanity is there in man? A great deal, according to some; very little, say others.
Perhaps my Leading Character will be able to help me. I wait by the phone all day, but it is evening before he calls.
Leading character: ‘So the whole thing was a stupid mistake, was it? Do you realise what that means to me and the rest of us? I went over there an ordinary Soviet bloke, sure the Motherland wouldn’t betray us or lie to us. You can’t stop a madman going mad. Some people say we went through a form of purgatory, others call it a cesspit. A plague on both your houses, is what I say! I want to live! I love life! I’ll soon have a baby son and I’m going to call him Alyoshka, in memory of my friend. To my dying day I won’t forget how I carried him, his head, and his legs, and his arms, all separate, and his flayed skin … If it’s a girl I’ll still call her Alyoshka …
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