I had a dream, a warning as clear as a knock at the door. I was in a long black dress, holding on to a black cross carried by an angel. I began to lose my grip and looked down to see whether I would fall into the sea or on to dry land, and saw a sunlit crater.
I waited for him to come home on leave. For a long time he didn’t write, then one day the phone rang at work.
‘I’m back, mother of mine! Don’t be late home! I’ve made some soup.’
‘My darling boy!’ I shouted. ‘You’re not phoning from Tashkent, are you? You’re home? Your favourite bortsch is in the fridge!’
‘Oh no! I saw the saucepan but didn’t lift the lid.’
‘What soup have you made, then?’
‘It’s called “idiot’s delight”! Come home now and I’ll meet you at the bus stop!’
He’d gone grey. He wouldn’t admit that he was home on hospital leave. ‘I just wanted to see that golden mother of mine for a couple of days,’ he insisted. My daughter told me later how she’d seen him rolling on the carpet, sobbing with pain. He had malaria, hepatitis and other things, too, but he ordered his sister not to say a word to me.
I started going to his room in the morning again, to watch him sleeping.
Once he opened his eyes: ‘What’s up, mother of mine?’
‘Go back to sleep, darling, it’s still early.’
‘I had a nightmare.’
‘Just turn over, go back to sleep, and you’ll have a good dream. And if you never tell your bad ones they won’t come true.’
When his leave was over we went with him as far as Moscow. They were lovely sunny days with the marigolds in bloom.
‘What’s it like out there, Valera?’
‘Afghanistan, mother of mine, is something we should definitely not be doing.’ He looked at me and at no one else as he said it. He wiped the sweat from his brow and embraced me. ‘I don’t want to go back to that hell, I really don’t,’ he said, and moved away. He looked round one last time. ‘That’s all, Mama.’
He had never, ever called me ‘Mama’, always ‘mother of mine’. As I say, it was a beautiful sunny day and the marigolds were in bloom. The girl at the airport desk was watching us and started crying.
On the 7th of July I woke up dry-eyed. I stared sightlessly at the ceiling. He’d woken me, he’d come to say goodbye. It was eight o’clock and I had to go to work. I wandered round the flat, I couldn’t find my white dress for some reason. I felt dizzy and couldn’t see a thing. It wasn’t until lunchtime that I calmed down.
On the 7th of July … Seven cigarettes and seven matches in my pocket, seven pictures taken on the film in my camera. He’d written seven letters to me, and seven to his fiancée. The book on my bedside table, open at page seven, was Kobo Abe’s Containers of Death …
He had three or four seconds to save his life as his APC was crashing into a ravine: Out you jump, boys! I’ll go last’. He could never have put himself first.
‘From Major S. R. Sinelnikov: In execution of my military duty I am obliged to inform you that 1st Lieutenant Valery Gennadevich Volovich was killed today at 10.45 a.m. … ’
The whole town knew. His photograph in the Officers’ Club was already hung with black crêpe, and the aeroplane would soon be landing with his coffin. But no one told me, no one dared … At work everyone around me seemed to be in tears and gave me various excuses when I asked what was wrong. My friend looked in at me through my door. Then our doctor came in.
It was like suddenly waking from a deep sleep. ‘Are you mad, all of you? Boys like him don’t get killed!’ I protested. I started hitting the table with my hand, then ran to the window and beat the glass. They gave me an injection. ‘Are you mad, all of you? Have you gone crazy?’
Another injection. Neither of them had any effect. Apparently I shouted, ‘I want to see him. Take me to my son!’
‘Take her, take her, or she won’t survive the shock.’
It was a long coffin, with VOLOVICH painted in yellow on the rough wood. I tried to lift the coffin to take it home with me. My bladder ruptured.
I wanted a good dry plot in the cemetery. Fifty roubles? I’ll pay the 50 roubles. Just make sure it’s a nice dry plot. I knew it was a swindle but I couldn’t object. I spent the first few nights here with him. I was taken home but came back again. It was harvest time and I remember the whole town, and the cemetery too, smelt of hay.
In the morning a soldier came up to me. ‘Good morning, mother.’ Yes, he called me ‘mother’. ‘Your son was my commanding officer. I would like to tell you about him.’
‘Come home, with me, son.’
He sat in Valera’s chair, opened his mouth and changed his mind. ‘I can’t, mother.’
When I come to the grave I always bow to him, and I bow to him again when I leave. I’m only home if people are coming. I feel fine here with my son. Ice and snow don’t bother me. I write letters here. I go home when it’s dark. I like the street-lights and the car headlights. I’m not frightened of man or beast. I feel strong.
‘I don’t want to go back to that heil.’ I can’t get those words of his out of my mind. Who is to answer for all this? Should anyone be made to? I’m going to do my best to live as long as possible. There’s nothing more vulnerable about a person than his grave. It’s his name. I shall protect my son for ever …
His comrades come to visit him. One of them went on his knees. ‘Valera, I’m covered in blood. I killed with my bare hands. Is it better to be alive or dead? I don’t know any more … ’
I want to know who is to answer for all this. Why do they keep silent? Why don’t they name names and take them to court?
‘My fellow officers — my lords!
I shan’t be the first or the last
To perish on enemy swords’
I went to church to speak to the priest. ‘My son has been killed. He was unique and I loved him. What should I do now? Tell me our old Russian traditions. We’ve forgotten them and now I need to know.’
‘Was he baptised?’
‘I so much wish I could say he was, Father, but I cannot. I was a young officer’s wife. We were stationed in Kamchatka, surrounded by snow all year round — our home was a snow dugout. Here the snow is white, but there it’s blue and green and mother-of-pearl. Endless empty space where every sound travels for miles. Do you understand me, Father?’
‘It is not good that he wasn’t baptised, mother Victoria. Our prayers will not reach him.’
‘Then I’ll baptise him now!’ I burst out. ‘With my love and my pain. Yes, I’ll baptise him in pain.’
He took my shaking hand.
‘You must not upset yourself, mother Victoria. How often do you go to your son?’
‘Every day. Why not? If he were alive we’d see each other every day.’
‘Mother Victoria, you must not disturb him after five o’clock in the afternoon. They go to their rest at that time.’
‘But I’m at work until five, and after that I have a part-time job. I had to borrow 2,500 roubles for a new gravestone and I’ve got to pay it back.’
‘Listen to me, mother Victoria. You must go to him every day at noon, for the midday service. Then he will hear your prayers.’
Send me the worst imaginable pain and torture, only let my prayers reach my dearest love. I greet every little flower, every tiny stem growing from his grave: ‘Are you from there? Are you from him? Are you from my son?’
* Communist Union of Youth. Until recently, membership was almost unavoidable.
† Basmach: A Central Asian partisan fighting for independence in the Civil War after the Revolution. Tolstoy’s story deals with a similar war of resistance to Tsarist rule in the Caucasus.
‡ Meresyev was a World War II pilot who lost both his legs in action but, equipped with artificial limbs, returned to the front to perform further acts of heroism.
§ In the Soviet Union a trunk call is signalled by a longer and harsher ringing tone than that of a local call.
¶ A r
eference to a few well-publicised cases of Soviet Army deserters who were taken from Afghanistan to the USA and other Western countries (where they were much feted) but who later returned voluntarily to the USSR.
# Kirzachi: heavy, multi-layered waterproof boots of substitute leather. Foot-bindings are used in the Soviet Army instead of socks.
Postscript: Notes from my Diary
I perceive the world through the medium of human voices. They never cease to hypnotise, deafen and bewitch me at one and the same time. I have great faith in life itself — I suppose I’m an optimist by nature. At first I feared that the experience of my first two books [about World War II] in this ‘voice genre’, as I call it, might actually get in the way of this third venture. I needn’t have worried, for this was a totally different war with much more powerful and merciless weaponry: take, for example, the ‘Grad’ rocket-launcher, which is capable of dislodging a mountain-side. The bitter psychology of this conflict was also very different from the positive mood of the nation as a whole during World War II: Afghanistan wrenched boys from their daily life of school and college, music and discos, and hurled them into a hell of filth. These were eighteen-year-olds, mere school-leavers who could be induced to believe anything. It was only much later that we began to hear such thoughts expressed as, ‘We went to fight a Great Patriotic War, namely World War II, but found something totally different.’ Or, ‘I wanted to be a hero but now I don’t know what kind of a person they’ve turned me into.’ Such insights will come, but not soon and not to everyone.
‘There are two things necessary for a country to love bullfighting. One is that the bulls must be raised in that country, and the other, that the people must have an interest in death.’ (From Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway.)
After excerpts from this book were published in various newspapers and Belorussian magazines a storm of queries and opinions, judgments, convictions and prejudice, broke about my head, together with the political rhetoric inseparable from ‘intellectual’ life in our country. There was a deluge of telephone calls, letters and personal encounters which left me feeling that the book was still in the process of being put together …
From some of those letters:
I find your book impossible to read. It makes me want to cry out loud, perhaps because it is only now that I begin to understand what kind of war this was. Those poor boys — we all stand guilty before them! What did we know about the war? We should embrace every one of them and ask his forgiveness. I didn’t fight in this war, but I was part of it.
Here are some of the things I felt, thought and heard at the time.
I read a book by Larissa Reissner, a Bolshevik writer of the 1920s, describing Afghanistan as full of half-naked tribesmen dancing and chanting, ‘Long live the Russian magicians who helped us drive out the British.’
The April Revolution gave us the immense satisfaction of believing that socialism had triumphed in yet another country. All the same …
‘Just a few more parasites hanging round our neck,’ whispered a man sitting next to me in the train.
At a seminar at city Communist Party HQ the following question was posed: why did we allow Amin to kill Taraki?* The seminar leader, a Moscow functionary whose job it was to lay down the Party line, replied: ‘The strong had to be replaced by the weak.’ This left an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
At the time, the official justification for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was that ‘the Americans were on the brink of an airborne invasion which we anticipated and thus prevented by less than one hour.’
Afghan sheepskins were suddenly all the rage. Women envied their friends whose husbands were in Afghanistan. The press reported that our soldiers were planting trees and rebuilding bridges and roads.
Leaving Moscow by train I found myself sharing a compartment with a young couple. We began talking about Afghanistan and I more or less spouted the official line, which they ridiculed. They were doctors who’d spent two years in Kabul. They strongly defended soldiers who bought goods there to resell in the Soviet Union. They said life out there was very expensive and the pay was inadequate. In Smolensk I helped them down with their luggage, which consisted of a large amount of Western-made articles, such as radios, videos and sophisticated kitchen equipment.
When I got home my wife told me the following story about a neighbour of ours. This woman had no husband and her only son had been posted to Afghanistan. She went to whoever it was she had to go to, went down on her knees to beg him, kissed his boots, and returned satisfied. ‘I’ve got my boy out!’ she said. She also coolly described how ‘the top brass are buying their own sons out’.
My son came home from school and told us that some Green Berets, the parachute force, had been to the school to give a talk. ‘You should have seen their Japanese watches!’ he said wonderingly. I later asked one such veteran how much his watch had cost and how he could afford it. After some umming and aahing he admitted, ‘We stole a truckload of fruit and sold it.’ He told me that everyone particularly envied soldiers on petrol-tanker duty. ‘They’re all millionaires!’
I can’t forget the harassment of Andrei Sakharov. I certainly agree with one thing he said: ‘We always prefer dead heroes to living men and women who may have made a few mistakes.’
I heard recently that some rank-and-file soldiers and a couple of officers were studying for the priesthood at the seminary at Zagorsk [a famous monastery not far from Moscow]. What, I wonder, drove them to it? Was it repentance, or a desire to escape from the cruel realities of life, or a thirst for some kind of spirituality? For them, apparently, the privileges their war veterans’ cards bought them — the extra food, the flashy foreign clothes and the private land — were not enough to keep their mouths and eyes shut.
(N. Goncharov)
That was from a man who did not experience Afghanistan at first hand. The following is from a woman, a civilian employee, who did:
I’m one of those who went out there, although with every year that goes by I find it harder to answer the inevitable question: ‘You’re not a soldier, so what did you go there for?’ What business had a woman going out there? The more the war is condemned, the more we women are disapproved of and the less we are understood.
People like me were victims of blind faith. We believed all the talk about the April Revolution and accepted everything we’d been taught since our earliest schooldays. But we came home different people. We wanted the truth to be known. I waited and waited for it to start coming out.
If I could live my life again I wouldn’t go to Afghanistan. ‘Be done with the whole thing! And try and make everyone forget you were there!’ my friend wrote to me. No, I don’t want to just wash it away, but I would like to sort things out. My life might have turned out differently if I hadn’t gone — but to be absolutely honest, I don’t regret it. I still remember that sense of sharing our troubles and aiming at higher things. We realised we’d been deceived, and wondered why we were so gullible.
I was amazed when I saw how many women there were there. I’d thought I was the only little fool and somehow assumed I wasn’t quite normal. There were thousands of us! We all had some practical reason for going, of course, whether to earn money, or carve out a career, or solve some personal problem, but inside all of us there was still that … faith. We wanted to be needed and we wanted to help. I personally felt that there ought to be women wherever wars were being fought. Perhaps I was naïve to think that every war was like our Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, but how could a hospital, for example, function without women? Those defenceless, mutilated men needed them, even if only for the comforting touch of a soft hand. It was simple charity and a woman’s proper work. I met boys there who actually volunteered for dangerous action. They showed true heroism and didn’t stop to think they were going to their deaths.
I’m sorry these thoughts of mine are coming out in such a jumble. I’m upset and there’s so much I want to say …
The myt
h about brotherhood at the front was dreamed up here at home. It didn’t exist. Everything was for sale, including women. Yes, it’s true! But that wasn’t the most important thing. In spite of all that we were still idealists. We had our faith. The worst came later. We were sent to Afghanistan by a nation which sanctioned the war and returned to find that same nation had rejected it. What offends me is the way we’ve simply been erased from the public mind. What was only recently described as one’s ‘international duty’ is now considered stupidity. When was that frontier crossed? That’s the most important question of all.
I’m trying to think of a comparison. It’s like … a mountaineer, climbing up very high … then he falls, breaks his leg, but for the rest of his life he still longs for the mountains. That’s the nostalgia we feel — especially the men. They risked their lives and became killers — and because of that they think they’re somehow special. They’ve been touched by something unique. Perhaps it’s some kind of illness within us. Or perhaps we still haven’t come home?
(G. Khaliulina, civilian employee)
My son had just left school to enter a military academy when the war in Afghanistan began. Throughout those ten years, when other mothers’ sons found themselves in a foreign land with guns in their hands, I was sick with worry. I knew my son might be there one day. It’s not true that the public didn’t know what was going on. Everyone could see parents opening their doors to those zinc coffins or having their sons returned to them broken and crippled. Such things weren’t mentioned on radio or television, of course, or in the newspapers (until you recently dared to), but it was plain for all to see. And what did our ‘humane’ society, and we ourselves, do about it? Well, we handed out medals to the ‘great’ old men, Brezhnev, Andropov and the rest, at every conceivable opportunity.
We fulfilled, and over-fulfilled, one five-year plan after the other (while the shelves of our shops stayed as empty as ever), built our dachas and amused ourselves while eighteen- and twenty-year-olds were being shot and killed on foreign soil. What kind of people are we, and what right have we to ask our children to do the things they had to do there? How can we, who stayed at home, claim that our hands are cleaner than theirs? And although their suffering, their torture, has cleansed them of their sins, we have not yet been cleansed of ours. The machine-gunned and abandoned villages and ruined land are not on their consciences but on ours. We were the real murderers, not they, and we murdered our own children as well as others.
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