A young Tsarandui (that’s Afghani for policeman) said to me once, ‘Allah will take me to heaven when I die, but where will you end up?’
Where I ended up was hospital. My father came to see me there in Tashkent.
‘You’ve got the right to stay in the Soviet Union if you’ve been wounded,’ he told me.
‘How can I stay here when my friends are over there?’
He’s a communist, a party member, but he went to church and lit a candle.
‘What did you do that for, Dad?’
‘I need something to put my faith in. Who else can I pray to for your safe return?’
The lad in the bed next to mine was from Dushanbe [Soviet Tadjikistan]. His mother came to visit him with cognac and baskets of fruit.
‘I want you home, son. Who do I have to go and see?’
‘Look, Mum, let’s just drink to our health and leave it at that.’
A Mother
Perhaps she’s alive, my daughter, somewhere far away from here … I’d be happy wherever she was, just as long as she’s alive. I want it so much it’s all I ever think of.
I dreamt she came home, took a chair and sat in the middle of the room. She had lovely long hair falling to her shoulders. She pushed it out of her face. ‘Mama, why do you keep calling me over and over again, you know I can’t come to you. I have a husband now, and two children … I have a family.’
Even in my dream I remembered that about a month after we buried her I started thinking she’d been kidnapped, not killed. Whenever we went for a walk people used to turn round and look at her, she was so tall and lovely, and her hair just poured. Anyway, no one took me seriously, but I had a sign that she was alive …
I’m a medic and I’ve always thought of it as a sacred profession. I loved my daughter and pushed her in the same direction. Now I blame myself — if she’d been in some other line of work she’d have stayed at home and be alive now. It’s just the two of us now, my husband and I, no other children. It’s a completely empty existence. We sit at home in the evening and watch television. Sometimes we don’t say a word to each other all night. When I start singing, and crying, my husband groans and goes out for a walk. You can’t imagine the pain in my heart. In the morning I don’t want to get up but I have to go to work. Sometimes I think I’ll just stay in bed and wait until they come and take me to her.
I’ve got a dreadfully vivid imagination. I feel I’m constantly with her and she’s changing all the time. We even read together although now I prefer books about plants and animals, anything but people.
I thought nature would help me, and springtime … We went for walks, my husband and I, saw the violets in bloom and the tiny leaves unfurling on the trees, but I began to cry. The beauty of nature and the joy of life hit me so hard. I was frightened by the passing of time. I knew it would take her, and the memory of her, away from me. Some things about her are receding already, the things she used to say, the way she smiled. I collected the stray hairs from her suit and kept them in a matchbox.
‘What are you doing that for?’ my husband wanted to know.
‘Let me do it. It’s all there is left of her.’
I’ll be sitting at home sometimes and I’ll hear her voice, suddenly and clearly: ‘Don’t cry, Mama.’ I look round but there’s no one there. So I go on thinking about her. I see her lying there, the grave already dug and the earth ready to receive her. I kneel next to her: ‘My darling little girl, my darling little girl. What’s happened to you? Where are you? Where have you gone?’ But we’re still together, as if I were lying in the coffin with her.
I remember that day so well. She came home from work and told me, ‘The medical director called me in today.’
‘And?’ Even before she answered I knew something was wrong.
‘He’s had an order to send one member of staff to Afghanistan.’
‘And?’
‘What they actually want is a theatre sister.’ She was theatre sister on the cardiology ward.
‘And?’ I couldn’t think of anything to say, I just repeated that one word.
‘I said I’d go.’
‘And?’
‘Someone’s got to. And I’d like to be somewhere I’m really needed.’
We knew there was a war on, blood was being spilt, and nurses were needed. I burst into tears, but I couldn’t say no to her. She looked at me sternly. ‘We’ve both taken the Hippocratic oath, Mama,’ she said.
It took her several months to get her papers ready. She came and showed me her references, including one which proclaimed she had a ‘correct understanding of Party and Government policy’, but I still didn’t believe she was going.
Talking to you like this makes me feel better, as though she’s here with us, and I’m going to bury her tomorrow. The coffin’s here in the room. She’s still with me. Perhaps she’s still alive … All I want to know is — where is she now? Does she still have her long hair? And what blouse is she wearing? I need to know everything.
To tell you the honest truth, I don’t want to see anyone. I prefer to be alone with Svetochka and talk to her. If someone comes in it spoils everything. I don’t want to let anyone into this world of mine. I don’t want to share her with anyone. One woman did come to see me once, from work. I wouldn’t let her go, we sat together until it was so late we thought she’d miss the last bus; her husband phoned, he was worried about her too. Her son had been in Afghanistan, but he’d come back totally different from the boy they’d known. ‘I’ll stay home and help you with the baking, Mum,’ or ‘I’ll go with you to the launderette, Mum.’ He was scared of men and only got on with girls. She asked the doctor about it and he told her to be patient and everything would get better. I feel closer to people like her now. I understand them. I could have made friends with her, but she never came to see me again. She saw Svetochka’s picture on the wall and cried the whole evening …
But I was trying to remember something … What was I going to tell you … ? Oh yes, the first time she came home on leave? No, how we saw her off when she first left? Her school-friends and colleagues came to the station to say goodbye, and an old surgeon bowed and kissed her hands. ‘I’ll never come across hands like these again,’ he said.
She did come home on leave. She was thin and small and slept for three days. Got up, ate and slept. And again. And again.
‘How are you getting on out there, Svetochka?’
‘Fine, Mama. Everything’s fine.’ She sat there quietly smiling to herself.
‘What’s happened to your hands, Svetochka?’ I hardly recognised them, they were like a fifty-year-old’s.
‘There’s too much work out there for me to worry about my hands, Mama. Before an operation I wash my hands with antacid. “Aren’t you worried about your kidneys?” one doctor asked me. Men dying, and he’s worrying about his kidneys. But don’t you worry, I’m happy there, it’s where I’m really needed.’
She went back three days early:
‘Forgive me, Mama, but there are only two nurses left for the whole field-hospital. Enough doctors but a shortage of nurses. The girls are exhausted. I’ve just got to go.’
She was terribly fond of her grandmother, who was nearly ninety. We went to see her in the country. She was standing by a big rose-bush and Svetochka told her, ‘Don’t go and die on me, Grandma. Wait for me!’ Grandma cut all the roses and gave them to her …
We had to get up at five in the morning. ‘I haven’t had enough sleep, Mama,’ she said when I woke her. ‘I don’t think I’ll have enough sleep again.’ In the taxi she opened her bag and gasped. ‘I’ve forgotten the key to the flat. What happens if I get home and you’re not here?’ I found her key in an old skirt and was going to send it to her, so she wouldn’t worry about opening the door.
Suddenly she’s alive. She’s walking somewhere, laughing, enjoying the flowers — she loved roses. I still go to Grandma’s, she’s still alive. “Don’t go and die on me. Wait till I get home!” Grandma sti
ll remembers that. Once I got up at night. On the table was a bunch of roses she’d cut that evening, and two cups of tea …
‘Why aren’t you asleep?’
‘I’m having a cup of tea with Svetlanka’. She always called her Svetlanka.
I dream about her and in my dream I tell myself, ‘I’ll go and kiss her now. If she’s warm it means she’s alive.’ I go to her, kiss her, she’s warm — she’s alive!
Suddenly she’s alive, in another place.
Once I was sitting by her grave in the cemetery and two soldiers passed by. One of them stopped. Oh! That’s our Sveta. Look!’ He noticed me. ‘Are you her mother?’
I threw myself at him. ‘Did you know Svetochka?’
He turned to his friend. ‘She had both her legs blown off during a bombardment, and died.’
I burst into tears. He was shocked: ‘Didn’t you know? Forgive me.’ And he ran away.
I never saw him again. Or tried to find him.
Another time I was sitting near the grave and a mother came by with her children. ‘What kind of a mother would let her only daughter go off to war at a time like this?’ I heard her tell them. ‘Just give away her daughter?’ The gravestone had ‘To My Only Daughter’ carved on it.
How dare they. How can they? She took the Hippocratic Oath. She was a nurse whose hands were kissed by a surgeon. She went to save their sons’ lives.
‘People!’ I cry inside me. ‘Don’t turn away from me! Stand by the grave with me for a little while. Don’t leave me alone … ’
Sergeant, Intelligence Corps
I assumed people would become kinder and gentler after all the bloodshed. Surely they wouldn’t want even more killing?
But this friend of mine picks up the paper. ‘They have returned from captivity,’ he reads, and starts swearing.
‘What’s up with you?’ I ask.
‘I’d put ’em all up against the wall and shoot them myself!’
‘Haven’t you seen enough blood already?’
‘They make me sick, those traitors. We were getting our arms and legs blown off while they were going round New York looking at skyscrapers.’¶
Over there we were so close I never wanted to be away from him. Now I’d rather be alone. Loneliness is my salvation. I enjoy talking to myself.
‘I hate that man. I hate him.’
‘Who?’
‘Me!’
I’m scared to go out of the house. I’m scared to touch a woman. I’d be better off dead, then they’d have put up a memorial plaque at my old school and make a hero out of me …
How we do go on about heroes and heroism! Everyone wants to be a hero. Well, I didn’t. I didn’t even know there were Soviet forces in Afghanistan. I wasn’t interested — I was in love for the first time. Now I’m scared to touch a woman, even when I’m jammed against one in a crowded trolley-bus. I’ve never admitted that to anyone. I can’t relate to women now. My wife left me. It was strange, the way that happened. I burnt the kettle. It was smouldering away on the gas and I sat and watched it getting blacker and blacker. My wife came home from work.
‘What have you burnt this time?’ she asked.
‘The kettle.’
‘That’s the third one … ’
‘I like the smell of burning.’
She slammed the door and left, two years ago now, which is when I started being afraid of women. A man should never let a woman know too much about him. They’ll listen kindly to what you have to say and condemn you later, behind your back …
‘What a night! You were shouting again, killing someone all night long.’ That’s what my wife used to say.
I never got round to telling her about the sheer joy of our helicopter pilots when they were dropping their bombs. It was ecstasy in the presence of death.
‘What a night! You were shouting again … ’
I never told her how our lieutenant was killed. On patrol one day we came to a stretch of water and stopped the vehicles.
‘Halt!’ he shouted and pointed to a dirty bundle lying near the water-line. ‘Is it a mine?’
The sappers came and picked it up: the ‘mine’ began to cry. It was a baby.
What to do with it? Leave it? Take it with us? ‘We can’t abandon him,’ the lieutenant decided. ‘He’ll die of cold. I’ll take him to the village. It’s just nearby.’
We waited an hour. The village was 20 minutes away there and back.
We found them lying in the village square. The lieutenant and his driver. The women had killed them with their hoes …
‘What a night! You were shouting and killing someone all night long!’
Sometimes I even forget my name and address, or what I’m meant to be doing. You pull yourself together, try and start living again …
I leave home and immediately start worrying. Have I locked the door or haven’t I? Did I turn the gas off? I go to sleep and wake up wondering if I set the alarm-clock. When I go to work in the morning and meet my neighbour, I can’t remember if I’ve said Good Morning to him or not?
As Kipling said:
Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!’
When she married me my wife said: ‘You’ve come back from Hell, from Purgatory, I shall save you.’ In fact I’d crawled out of a dung-heap. And now I’m afraid to touch a woman. When I went to Afghanistan the girls here were in long dresses — now they’re all in short ones. I can’t get used to it. I asked her to wear a long dress, but first she laughed, then she got angry. That’s when I began hating myself.
What was I talking about? Oh yes. About my wife’s long dresses. They’re still hanging in the cupboard. She never bothered to come and fetch them.
And I still haven’t told her about …
Major, Battalion Commander
I’ve been an army man all my life. True soldiers think in a particular way, which doesn’t include asking questions like whether this or that war is just or unjust. If we were sent to fight, that in itself meant it was both just and necessary. I always made a point of personally explaining to my men how important the defence of our southern borders was. I gave them my own ideological grounding, you could say, in addition to their twice-weekly political education lectures. How could I admit to doubts? The army won’t tolerate free-thinking; once you’re in harness you live by command. From morning to night.
I never once saw a portrait of Tsiolkovsky [a Russian philosopher, scientist, and pioneer of the Soviet space programme], for example, or Tolstoy, on the barracks walls. What you’d find were pictures of people like Nikolai Gastrello and Alexandr Matrosov, heroes of our Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. Once, when I was a young lieutenant I hung up a picture of Romain Rolland in my room — I’d cut it out of some magazine or other. The CO came round.
‘Who’s that?’ he said.
‘Romain Rolland, a French writer, Comrade Colonel.’
‘Well, take your Frenchman down, and be quick about it! Haven’t we got enough heroes of our own?’
‘But Comrade Colonel … ’
‘Dismiss! You’ll go straight to the depot and come back with Karl Marx.’
‘But he was a German.’
‘Silence! 48 hours’ arrest!’
Who cares about Marx? I myself used to point out to my men how useless foreign machinery was. ‘What good is this foreign car? It’ll fall to bits on our roads! Our industry and our cars and our people are the best!’ It’s only now — and I’m in my fifties — I’m beginning to realise that Japan might make a higher-quality machine-tool, the French might be better at producing nylon stockings, and Taiwan has the prettiest girls.
I dream I’ve killed a man. He’s down on all fours, he won’t lift his head. I can’t see his face (and ye
t, however often I have this dream he always has the same face). Calmly I shoot him. I see his blood. I shout out, wake up and remember the dream …
The war is now being described as a ‘political mistake’, a ‘crime’, and ‘Brezhnevite adventurism’. That doesn’t alter the fact that we had to fight, kill and be killed. ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged!’ What were we there to defend? Was it the April Revolution? No, even at the time I didn’t think so, although I was terribly torn inside. So I tried to convince myself we were defending our garrisons and our own people there.
I remember paddy-fields on fire — war is the ally of fire — and peasants running away. You never see Afghan children crying. They’re skinny and small and you can never guess how old they are, with their little legs sticking out of those wide trousers they wear.
You always had the feeling that someone was trying to kill you. It’s something you never get used to like the melons and watermelons, which are enormous there, and so ripe they burst if you poke them with a bayonet. Dying is simple, killing is much harder. We never spoke of our dead. That was one of the rules of the game, if I can put it like that.
I always put a letter to my wife in my pocket before I went into action. A goodbye letter. ‘Drill a hole in my revolver and give it to our son,’ I wrote. And I had to take letters out of the pockets of my lads, and photos: Tanya from Chernigov, or Mashenka from Pskov, taken in provincial studios, all very similar, with those well-worn phrases painstakingly written on them: ‘Write soon, my love, to your waiting dove’, or ‘Sent with a kiss for the darling I miss’. Sometimes they lay on my desk like playing-cards, the faces of those simple Russian girls …
I can’t adjust to this world. I tried, but it didn’t work. My blood pressure shot up — I need the stress, the edge, that contempt for life which sends the adrenalin racing round my veins. I need that fast pace, the excitement of going into attack … The doctors diagnosed clogged-up arteries.
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