I’d like to go back there, but I don’t know how I’d feel about it all now. The broken-down and burnt-out old tanks and APCs — is that really all that’s left of us there now?
I went to the cemetery, to walk round the Afgantsi graves. I met one of the mothers there.
Go away, major! You’re old and grey. You’re alive. My son’s lying here, he died too young to shave.’
A friend of mine died not long ago. He’d served in Ethiopia and the heat ruined his kidneys. All his experiences over there died with him, but another friend told me what went on in Vietnam, and I knew others who served in Angola, Egypt, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968. Now we go fishing, look after our gardens and live comfortably on our pensions …
I had one lung removed in Kabul. Near Khmelnitsky, though, there’s a hospital for long-term casualties who’ve been rejected by their families or who just can’t face going home. One of them still writes to me. I had a letter from him not long ago. ‘I’m lying here with my arms and legs gone. When I wake up in the morning I don’t know if I’m a man or an animal. Sometimes I want to mew or bark. I have to bite my tongue.’
I need that pace, the excitement of going into battle. But who’s the enemy now? I couldn’t stand up in front of my lads nowadays and lecture them about how we’re the finest and fairest in the world. But I still maintain that that was what we were aiming at. We failed. But why?
Private, Artillery Regiment
We didn’t betray our Motherland. I did my duty as a soldier as honestly as I could. Nowadays it’s called a ‘dirty war’, but how does that fit in with ideas like Patriotism, the People and Duty? Is the word ‘Motherland’ just a meaningless term to you? We did what the Motherland asked of us.
Nowadays they say we were an occupying force. But what did we take away with us, except for our comrades’ coffins? What did we get out of it, apart from hepatitis and cholera, injuries and lives crippled in all senses of the word? I’ve got nothing to apologise for: I came to the aid of our brothers, the Afghan people. And I mean that. The lads out there with me were sincere and honest. They believed they’d gone to do good — they didn’t see themselves as ‘misguided fighters in a misguided war’, as I saw it described recently. And what good does it do, trying to make out we were simply naïve idiots and cannon-fodder? Who does that help? The so-called ‘truth-seekers’? Well, remember what Jesus said when he was examined by Pontius Pilate:
‘“To this end was I born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.’”
‘Pilate asked, “What is truth?’”
A question which is still waiting for an answer.
I have my own truth and it’s this: that we were innocent, however naïve our faith may have been. We thought the new government would give the land they had taken from the old feudal barons to the peasants, and the peasants would accept it with joy — but they never did accept it! We thought the tractors, combines and mowers we gave them would change their lives, but they destroyed the lot! We thought that in the space age it was absurd to think about God — we even sent an Afghan lad into space: ‘Look, there he is, up there where your Allah lives!’ we said.
But Islam was totally unshaken by our modem civilisation. It was all illusion, but that’s the way it was, and it was a special part of our lives which I treasure and don’t want destroyed or tarnished.
We protected each other in battle, threw ourselves between our friend and the mortar coming straight at him. You don’t forget something like that.
I wanted my homecoming to be a ‘surprise’ but worried about the shock to my mother, so I phoned: ‘Mum, I’m alive, I’m at the airport!’, and heard the receiver crash to the ground.
Who says we lost the war? Here’s where we lost it, here, back home, in our own country. We could have won a great victory here too. We came back as strong as steel forged in the fire, but we weren’t given the chance — or the power. Every day someone or other scrawls the same protest over the war memorial: ‘Put it in your Army HQ where it belongs!’ And my eighteen-year-old cousin doesn’t want to go into the army ‘to obey a lot of stupid or criminal orders’.
What is truth?
There’s an old woman doctor living in our block of flats. She’s seventy. As a result of all these articles nowadays, the revelations, exposes, speeches, the avalanche of truth crashing down on us, she’s gone mad. She opens her ground-floor window and shouts: ‘Long live Stalin! Long live communism — the glorious future of all Mankind!’ I see her every morning, no one bothers her because she’s quite harmless, but sometimes I’m terrified.
Still, we didn’t betray the Motherland …
A Mother
The door-bell rings. I rush to open it but there’s no one there, I’d thought it might be my son, home unexpectedly …
Two days later there’s a knock at the door. Two soldiers.
‘Is my son with you?’
‘Well, no … ’
It got very quiet. I fell to my knees in the hall, by the mirror. ‘My God! My God! Oh my God!’ I cried.
There was an unfinished letter on the table:
‘My dearest son, I read your last letter and was very pleased with it. There’s not a single grammatical error, but two punctuation mistakes, like last time. “I think” and “I did” are subsidiary clauses which are not followed by a comma. You should have written: “I think you’ll be proud of me” and “I did what Dad told me”. Now, don’t be cross with your old Mum!
‘It’s hot in Afghanistan, dear, so do be careful. You catch cold so easily.’
A lot of people came to the funeral but they kept silent. I stood there with a screw-driver and wouldn’t let anyone take it away from me. ‘Let me see my son! Let me see my son!’ I demanded. I wanted to open the zinc coffin.
My husband tried to commit suicide. ‘I can’t go on. Forgive me, mother, but I can’t go on living.’
I tried to talk him out of it. ‘We must put up a gravestone to him,’ I said.
He couldn’t sleep: ‘The boy comes to me when I go to bed. He kisses me, puts his arms round me … ’
By tradition we keep a loaf of bread for forty days after the funeral. It crumbled into little pieces within three weeks. That was a sign that the family would crumble away, too …
We hung our son’s photographs everywhere in the flat. It helped me, but made it worse for my husband:
‘Take them down. He’s looking at me,’ he would say.
We put up the stone, a good one, of expensive marble, and spent all the money we’d been saving for his wedding on the memorial. We adorned the grave with red tiles and planted red flowers. Dahlias. My husband painted the railings round the grave.
‘I’ve done all I can. The boy will be pleased with it.’
The next morning he took me to work. He said goodbye. When I came back from my shift I found him hanging from a towel in the kitchen, opposite a photograph of our beloved son.
‘My God! My God! Oh my God!’
You tell me — were they heroes or not? Why must I bear all this grief? Sometimes I think, yes, he is a hero, and there are so many of them lying there in the cemetery, and at other times I curse the Government and the Party. And yet I myself taught him that ‘duty is duty, my dear. We must do our duty.’ At night I curse the lot of them, but in the morning I run to the cemetery and kneel by his grave and beg him to forgive me.
‘Forgive me, dearest, for talking like that. Forgive me,’ I say.
A Widow
I got a letter. ‘Don’t worry if you don’t get any letters for a while. Write to the old address,’ it said. Then I heard nothing for two months. It didn’t occur to me that he might be in Afghanistan. In fact I was getting ready to go and visit him at his new posting.
In his next letter he didn’t say a word about war, just that he was getting a tan and going fishing. He sent a photograph of himself on a donkey kneeling in the sand. I didn’t realise they were being killed out the
re.
He’d never bothered much with our little daughter. He didn’t seem to have any fatherly feelings, perhaps because she was too little. Then he came home on leave and spent hours sitting and watching her, but there was a sadness in his eyes which terrified me. Every morning he got up and took her to nursery school — he loved to carry her on his shoulders — and picked her up in the afternoon. We went to the cinema and theatre but most of all he enjoyed staying at home.
He was greedy for love. He resented me going to work, or even into the kitchen to do some cooking. ‘Stay with me’, he would say. ‘Go and ask them for leave while I’m here. And we can do without stew today.’ On his last day he deliberately missed the plane so we could have another two days together.
That last night … it was so good I burst into tears. I was crying, and he wasn’t saying a word, just looking, looking … Then he said:
‘Tamarka, if you have another man, don’t forget this.’
‘You must be mad! You’re not going to be killed! I love you so much you’ll never be killed.’
He laughed.
He didn’t want me to get pregnant. ‘When, if, I come back, we’ll have another baby,’ he said. ‘How would you manage with two of them on your own?’
I learnt to wait. But I felt ill if I saw a hearse go by, and wanted to scream. I’d go home and wish we had an icon. I would have gone down on my knees and prayed, ‘Keep him safe for me! Keep him safe!’
The day it happened I’d gone to the cinema, for some reason. I stared at the screen but saw nothing. I felt very agitated inside but without understanding why; I had a strong sense that people were waiting for me, that there was somewhere I had to go. I could hardly sit the film out. Later I learnt that it was then the battle was at its height.
I heard nothing for a week, and even had two letters from him. Usually I was overjoyed and kissed them, but this time I felt angry and frustrated. How much longer do I have to wait for you? I thought.
On the ninth day a telegram was pushed under the door. It was from his parents: ‘Come. Petya deaa.’ I started screaming, which woke the child. What to do? Where to go? I had no money. Petya’s salary cheque wasn’t due until tomorrow. I wrapped my little girl in a red blanket, I remember, and went out. The buses weren’t running yet.
I stopped a taxi. ‘The airport.’
‘I’m going to the park.’
‘My husband has been killed in Afghanistan.’
Without a word he got out of the car and helped me in. First I went to my friend to borrow money. At the airport I couldn’t get tickets for Moscow and I was frightened to show them the telegram. Suppose it was a mistake? If I believed he was alive he would be alive. I was crying, everyone was looking at me. Eventually they found us two seats in an old cargo plane.
That night I flew to Minsk. I had to get to the Stariye Dorogy district but the taxis didn’t want to do the 150 kilometre journey. I begged and pleaded until one finally agreed: ‘Give me 50 roubles and I’ll take you.’
I got to the house at two in the morning. Everyone was in tears. ‘It’s true, Tamara. It’s true.’
In the morning we went to the local enlistment office and got a typical military explanation: ‘You will be informed when it arrives.’
We waited for two days and then phoned Minsk. ‘You can come and fetch it yourselves,’ they told us. We got to the district office. ‘It’s been taken to Baranovichi by mistake,’ they told us there. That was another 100 kilometres away, and we hadn’t enough petrol for the minibus we’d hired. By the time we got to Baranovichi Airport it was the end of the day and there was no one about. Eventually we found a watchman sitting in a hut.
‘We’ve come to … ’
‘There’s a crate of some sort over there. Go and have a look at it. If it’s yours you can take it.’
We found a dirty box lying on the airfield, with 1st Lieutenant Dovnar’ scrawled over it in chalk. I tore open a board where the little window was let into the side of the coffin. His face was uninjured but he was unshaven, he hadn’t been washed and the coffin was too short. And the smell … I couldn’t bend down and kiss him. That’s how my husband was returned to me.
I knelt by the man who had been my love.
This was the first Afghan coffin to come to Yazyl, his parents’ village. I saw the horror in everyone’s eyes. No one had any idea what was going on out there. The coffin was still being lowered into the grave when a tremendous hailstorm began. The hailstones, like white gravel thrown over the budding lilac, crunched underfoot as we stood there. Nature itself was protesting.
I could hardly bear to be in his parents’ home because his presence was so strong there, with his mother and father.
We talked very little. I felt his mother hating me because I was alive and he was dead: I would get married again but she had lost her son for ever. Nowadays she tells me, ‘Tamara, get married.’ But at the time I couldn’t look her in the eyes. His father almost went mad. ‘Such a wonderful boy … dead,’ he said, over and over again. We tried to rally him, Petya’s mother and I, saying Petya had won medals, that Afghanistan had needed him, he’d died defending our southern borders, and so on. He didn’t listen. ‘Bastards!’ he shouted. ‘Bastards! Bastards!’
For me the worst time came later. The most terrible thing was getting used to the thought that I must stop waiting, because there was no one to wait for. I’d wake up wet with horror: Petya was coming home and little Olesha and I were living somewhere else. It took me a long time to realise that I was and would be alone now. I looked at the post-box after every delivery. All ‘Addressee is a casualty’. I hated holidays and special occasions, and stopped going out. I had only my memories … and of course you only remember what was good.
We went dancing the first time we met. Next day we walked in the park. On the third day he asked me to marry him. I was already engaged — we’d even applied for the licence. When I told my fiancé he went away and wrote me a letter in huge capitals covering the whole page: ‘A-A-A-A-A-A!!’ Petya decided he’d come home on leave in January and we’d get married. I didn’t want to get married in January: I fancied a spring wedding! In the Minsk Palace of Weddings, with music and flowers.
Well, we had a winter wedding, in my home village. It was funny and quick. At Epiphany, when they say that your dreams foretell the future, I had a dream and told my mother about it.
‘There was this handsome boy in soldier’s uniform, Mum, standing on a bridge calling to me. But as I went towards him he moved further and further away until he’d disappeared altogether.’
‘If you marry a soldier you’ll be left on your own,’ she said.
Two days afterwards he turned up.
‘Let’s go to the registry office!’ he said on the doorstep.
There they took one look at us and said, ‘Why bother to wait the two months? Go and fetch a bottle of cognac and we’ll do it for you now!’
We were man and wife within the hour. There was a snowstorm outside.
‘Where’s the taxi you ordered to carry your young bride home?’ I demanded.
‘Here it is!’ He raised his hand and stopped a passing tractor.
For years I went on dreaming of those early days, that old tractor … He’s been dead for eight years now and I still dream about him often.
‘Marry me again!’ I beg him.
But he pushes me away. ‘No! No!’
I grieve for him not just because he was my husband but because he was a real man, with a big strong body. I’m so sorry I never gave him a son. The last time he came home on leave I wasn’t at home. He hadn’t sent a telegram and I wasn’t expecting him; in fact, I was at my girl-friend’s birthday party next door. He opened the door there, heard the loud music and laughter, sat down on a kitchen stool and started crying.
Every day he met me from work. ‘When I’m walking to meet you my legs start shaking, as though we’re going to say goodbye.’
Once, when we went swimming, we sat on t
he riverbank and lit a bonfire. ‘I hate the idea of dying on foreign soil,’ he said.
‘Don’t get married again, Tamarka,’ he begged me that night.
‘Why do you say such things?’
‘Because I love you so much. I just don’t want to think of you with someone else.’
Sometimes I feel I’ve been alive for ever, and yet my memories are so few.
Once, when my daughter was still tiny, she came home from nursery school. ‘We had to tell about our Daddies today and I said mine was a soldier.’
‘Why?’
‘The teacher didn’t ask if he was alive, just what his job was.’
She’s growing up now. ‘Get married again, Mum,’ she advises me when I’m irritable with her.
‘What kind of Dad would you prefer?’
‘I’d prefer my own Daddy.’
‘And if you can’t have him?’
‘Someone like him.’
I became a widow at twenty-four. In those first few months I’d have married the first man who came along. I was going out of my mind and had no idea how to look after myself. All around me life was going on as usual: someone was building himself a dacha, or buying a car, or had a new flat and was looking for a carpet or some nice red tiles for the kitchen. Other people’s normal lives simply showed up the fact that I had none. It’s only very recently that I’ve begun to buy a bit of furniture or bake a cake. How could we celebrate any special occasion in this flat?
In the last war everyone was in mourning, there wasn’t a family in the land that hadn’t lost some loved one. Women wept together then. There’s a staff of 100 in the catering college where I work, and I’m the only one who had a husband killed in a war which all the rest have only read about in the papers. I wanted to smash the screen the first time I heard someone on television say that Afghanistan was our shame. That was the day I buried my husband a second time.
Private, Intelligence Corps
We arrived at the Samarkand conscript reception-centre. There were two tents: in one we had to get out of our civvies (those of us with any sense had already sold our jackets and sweater and bought a bottle of wine with the proceeds); in the other we were issued with well-used uniforms, including shirts dating from 1945, kirzachi and foot-bindings.# Show those kirzachi to an African, who’s lived with heat all his life, and he’d faint! Yes, even in Third World African countries soldiers are issued with lightweight boots, trousers and caps, but we were expected to do heavy building work — and sing as we worked! — in 40 degrees Celsius while our feet were literally cooking.
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