Free Fall

by Nicolai Lilin

  I got up, opened a jar and, using my fork, pulled a hunk of stewed meat from the pan, where it was mixed with fat and God knows what else. I dunked it into my jar before taking a bite.

  I was standing up, enjoying my food, when Nosov looked me in the eyes, serious, and said:

  ‘Today the order from the division commander came: you’re fired, criminal…’

  I set the jar on the table and sat down with them, unable to say a word. I felt soft, as if I were made of cotton inside.

  ‘Starting today you’re free again. Live, do whatever you want…’ Moscow smiled. ‘But never forget your brothers…’

  Just then Zenith came in. He was walking with an arm over his stomach; it was obvious that he had something hidden under his jacket.

  ‘So, you’re abandoning us, I hear. Well, how about one last bender first?’ He opened his jacket and pulled out some bottles of vodka, uncorked one with his teeth and took a long drink.

  ‘Hey, leave some for me too!’ Spoon shouted, leaping up from his bunk.

  Shoe and Deer came over too, laughing like a couple of fools.

  ‘What’s so funny, soldiers?’ Nosov asked, pretending to be angry, still chewing.

  ‘I think we won’t be alone at Kolima’s goodbye party,’ Shoe said. ‘Our Deer has made quite an impression on the cook!’ and he shouldered Deer so hard he fell down. Everyone burst out laughing.

  I really didn’t know how to act. It was the last time I would be with my team; the last time I would see all the men together. Over the months I had often thought about the fact that my discharge day would come, but I had never imagined what it would be like. Sure, I had seen it happen other times, when friends or other people I knew only by sight left, but I’d never believed that one day I would be in their place. I seldom thought of the future; maybe somewhere inside I believed that I was never going back. I had expected to die in that war… And yet here I was with my friends, celebrating the end of my military service.

  It didn’t occur to me that it was a special occasion, the last chance I would have to ask my comrades about their lives, or to tell them the stories I’d always wanted to… Thinking back on it now I realise that, like an idiot, I wasted that moment, as if I didn’t know that the next day I was going to be far away, far from my comrades with whom – because of the war – I had formed an intense bond. I don’t know why, but at that moment I didn’t have any of these thoughts in my head; I drank, I got drunk and I watched my friends’ faces grow blurry and distant until I passed out.

  At five in the morning a military car would take me to another camp, and from there I would get on the plane that was finally going to take me back home. That was the last thing I remembered from the night before…

  At five in the morning, however, I was still so drunk that I couldn’t drag myself from one bunk to another. My head was spinning like a giant propeller, my comrades’ voices, shouting and joking, throbbed in my ears. The moment a thought appeared in my head, vomit lurched into my throat, as if the workings of my brain somehow irritated my stomach.

  I could hear Nosov describing yet another of his adventures in one of the many wars he had been in, while a few bunks away Deer was making love to the young cook, and Shoe and Spoon were teasing him, throwing empty clips at him, for a few laughs… I was in an endless delirium, like a sudden fall off a precipice, like a feast in a time of plague.

  I remember that at some point two soldiers I’d never seen before lifted me up from the bed; one of them took my papers, the other my bag, and they carefully dragged me to the door of the container. One of them suddenly dropped me – I fell to the ground and hit my head. I didn’t know if he’d done it on purpose or not, but either way I didn’t feel any pain.

  The captain got up from the table, where he was still sitting with Zenith and Moscow, took a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes and gave them to the soldier with these words:

  ‘Be careful, boys, make sure you don’t harm this soldier. He has saved many lives. He’s a good sniper…’

  One of the soldiers took the offering from Nosov’s hands and slipped it under his jacket. He and the other guy lifted me to my feet, made a show of dusting off my uniform and addressed Nosov in a pleasant voice:

  ‘Don’t worry, Comrade Captain. Your sniper will reach his destination safe and sound, I will see to it personally. May we be dismissed?’ He asked Nosov’s permission before leaving, as military regulation demands. My captain looked me in the face and said:

  ‘Have yourself a peaceful life, Nicolay, without too many worries…’

  Then he turned to the two who were holding me up and saluted:

  ‘Soldiers, you are dismissed!’

  They saluted back and I tried to as well, but my arm wouldn’t hear of travelling all the way to my head, so I must have just jerked it awkwardly. I was a mess.

  I remember Nosov’s words and the look he gave me perfectly, and I often find myself thinking about it. But I can’t remember if or how I said goodbye to the guys in the group before leaving, what I said to them or what they said to me. All I remember is that phrase of the captain’s, the last thing I ever heard him say: ‘Have yourself a peaceful life…’

  Then I had a surreal ride in the car. I wavered on the border between sleep and waking, each time thinking that I was in a thousand different places – at first I felt as though I was on the armoured car with the rest of the team on our way to a mission; then I thought I was wounded; finally, I was sure I’d been captured by the enemy – I looked for my rifle and despaired when I couldn’t find it… Then I realised I wasn’t wearing my bulletproof vest, and I got so scared I started shaking. I was on the verge of tears. I don’t remember if I was delirious or not, but when we got to the camp I heard one of my escorts who was smoking outside the car say to the other that it would have been better if I’d been shot in the war, because returning a person like me to society was a real crime.

  There was no plane waiting when we stopped, so I thought that it was just a break and we hadn’t yet reached our destination. But I was wrong – I was taking the train home, not a plane. At that point even if they had told me I had to ride a donkey home, I’d still have been happy – without arms or ammo, without my precious vest, I felt naked. I wanted to go home as soon as possible, in peace.

  They showed me to a barracks, where I had to have a physical examination. A military bureaucrat, without asking me a single question, without even looking me in the eyes, filled out a few forms and wished me luck. The examination was already over. Then they asked me to take off all my clothes, and gave me a chance to take a hot shower, in a barracks-cum-bathroom. Then they gave me a new uniform, which stank of mustiness; it was the typical smell of military depots. All the army stuff smelled like that.

  I got dressed, took my bag and left for the station, accompanied by the same two soldiers. In the car with me were three other soldiers, who had just been discharged: an infantryman, a paratrooper and an artilleryman. None of them had any desire to talk or joke around; they were as desolate as I was, lost in thought, wearing the signs of their farewell celebrations from the night before. For the whole trip my three companions smoked like it was their last, and so I arrived at the station half-cured, pissed off and with a pounding headache.

  The train trip was long and boring. The carriages were full of other discharged soldiers, officers on temporary leave and OMON officers who had finished their war service and were returning to their police precincts. As the wheels of the train ate through the kilometres of tracks people gathered in small groups to drink, tell stories and complain about everything and everyone… There was a lot of anger, but it was softened by the fact that we were alive, returning home in one piece, thinking of the future. I for one couldn’t wait to lie down in my bed and sleep in peace for as long as I wanted, without anyone interrupting my rest.

  As soon as I stepped off the train I took a walk around my home town, and I realised that I had an inexplicable impulse to shoot everyo
ne I saw on the street. I felt a lethal charge of hatred: it was eating me up inside, making me scorn everything that represented peaceful life.

  I ate an ice cream but the feeling didn’t go away, so I bought a bottle of vodka and once I got home I started to drink. But even drowned in alcohol, my state of mind stayed the same – it was as if peace bothered me, as if I sensed something false, something wrong with people, and their polite behaviour. I left the house; it was hard for me to stay in one place for too long.

  I looked at the houses, searching obsessively for signs of destruction, but everything was too nice. The window frames and panes were intact, and behind the glass, signs of a life of comfort and peace. Everything was in order: the light bulbs in their places, the brightly-coloured curtains, the flowers on the windowsills… it all seemed horrible to me. At night people would drink tea and watch television, laugh at some comedian’s idiotic jokes, listen to pop songs by singers decked out like living Christmas trees… And as the star machine cloned new idols, everyone wanted to be like the famous figures. Young people competed to see who was the most ignorant, because ignorance is something that’s always in fashion – running to the nightclubs to dance at desperate parties that went on until dawn, finally feeling like they were the stars of something. If you’re rich, you can do anything; if you’re beautiful, you should exploit your beauty to manipulate everyone – this seemed to be the only valid rule, besides unwarranted, limitless violence, because being violent is fashionable too.

  The chaos of war seemed more ordinary and comprehensible than the so-called morality of peaceful society. I thought back to everyone I had seen die in the name of peace, and I was increasingly convinced that this kind of peace didn’t deserve to exist. Better the bloodbath I’d known, where at least we knew what the enemy’s face looked like and there was no chance of getting it wrong, where everything was as simple as a bullet. But now I had been returned to a peace that enabled me to be a consumer of the beauties of the universe, making me believe that they had been chosen just for me, even prepaid: packaged food and virtual sex, and after those fake orgasms you’re left with nothing but contempt for yourself and for the world.

  Back at home, trying to calm down, I turned on the television, but all the news I heard seemed like a joke to me: in some cellar four Azerbaijanis had mixed tap water with a little alcohol and sold it as vodka, for the price of a stabbing during a fight in a nightclub car park; the former attorney general had been filmed doing drugs and having sex with an underage prostitute, later claiming that it was just an evening of fun, his civic right; politicians made lots of promises, then would get into ridiculous arguments that amounted to ‘who’s the more disgusting’, while on another channel the President spoke like a genuine criminal, openly threatening anyone who got in his way but at the same time so charismatic and reasonable that even I wanted to applaud his speeches…

  When I saw a news feature about a group of our soldiers who had recently died in a battle in the mountains during a terrorist operation in Chechnya, I unthinkingly grabbed a clock and hurled it at the television, cracking the screen. The piece dedicated to our fallen soldiers had come on after two other stories: one on breeding pigs in southern Russia; the other on some young models who had won international beauty pageants and were ready to take on the world, thus making an enormous contribution to the cause of Mother Russia.

  I sat there in front of the broken television all night, thinking of how, like sheep to the slaughter, we had obediently gone to sacrifice our lives in the name of an ideal that the rest of the country cared nothing about. By the time I got up from the chair it was already morning, and something that an Arab prisoner once told me kept going through my head: ‘Our society doesn’t deserve all the effort we’re putting into this war.’ Only at that moment did I comprehend how right he was, this person, this man whom I had continued to call an enemy.

  In the subsequent days I wandered around the city, and I saw some absurd scenes. On the streets, groups of police officers, out of their minds on drugs or alcohol – people who were so ignorant they were incapable of reading the information on the passports of the people they stopped – vented their frustrations by beating up anyone that came within range. Even the conversations on the bus scared me – the night before, on a reality show, one of those tarts who enjoy being thrown in a house with a bunch of other idiots had pulled down her pants on live TV, showing the whole country her privates. Some young women sitting next to me were debating whether this girl waxed or not… Nowhere was spared from this lunacy. Even in church, at the door, the first thing they offered you was the chance to donate some money, as if your relationship with God could be condensed into some sort of restaurant menu, just like at a fast food establishment, the church had become a fast faith establishment: ‘Today only, a menu fit for a saint on his way to Heaven. Try it!’ Even love for God had become a privilege…

  With every molecule in my body I could feel the hypocrisy of peace, a forced peace, taken to the limit of human possibility; a contest whose prize was the right to get bitten by one of those many chimeras. I had better keep to myself.

  Living in a house once again, my house, I decided that the light coming through the windows bothered me, so I covered them up with blankets.

  I needed to hold a weapon in my hands; I felt a physical lack, as though I couldn’t breathe properly. I took an AK out of a hiding spot – it had come directly from Chechnya, thanks to some of my driver friends in the army.

  At night I couldn’t fall asleep. I stuffed myself with pills and alcohol, trying to get at least a few hours’ rest, but it was futile. After a month of insomnia, I realised what was wrong with my house: silence. There was too much silence, and I wasn’t used to it anymore. So I turned the television up as loud as it could go, and I fell into a sort of trance, a dark, empty space that erased everything, for four or five hours… Every time I woke up I had cold sweat on my face and I felt as though I were in imminent danger, as though I were sitting on a box of explosives about to blow up.

  During that period it was very hot and I often went around the house naked, with a Kalashnikov in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other; I wandered the rooms without any particular purpose, just to keep moving. Once in a while I’d sing a song or talk out loud, in an effort not to feel so alone. At night I would gaze out of the window. Turning off the light and aiming my rifle at the nearby houses, I would observe people; frame them in my sight and then shoot, pulling the trigger of my unloaded weapon. This gesture – shooting at real people with a real weapon, even if just in pretence – brought me some serenity and peace, and led me onto the right track. I was able to put my thoughts in order, just as some people relax by doing crossword puzzles.

  I had shaved off my beard but grown sideburns, even though seeing my face clean-shaven had a negative effect – a stranger staring back at me from the mirror.

  I had a hard time getting reaccustomed to having hot water, being clean – even eating fresh food. Every morning my grandmother came over and prepared the whole day’s worth of food for me, and I would give her a hand in the kitchen. We talked a little, but I got tired very easily, and I would get headaches, as if I were doing work that took great concentration. Then my grandmother would say goodbye, and leave me by myself. The rest of my family was very good to me, very understanding, but I didn’t feel like seeing anyone.

  And this was how I spent my days, shuffling back and forth in my apartment, in the dark, with the TV turned all the way up, naked as the day I was born, my Kalashnikov on my arm and my face shorn and sad. I thought of the war, imagined what was happening to my team at that moment, and every one of those thoughts triggered a fit of rage against myself – it was as if by accepting my discharge papers I had betrayed my comrades.

  One afternoon I went out on the river. I took my boat and pushed off towards the area where the most affluent residents had their second homes. I took up a position in the woods nearby and started aiming at their flowerpots
with my rifle. I went on like that for a few days. Before sundown, I would wipe out the flowerpots at the mansions of the wealthy. It made me feel good.

  The following week the weather was bad; it was a good opportunity to go back out in the city. I put on a cap with a brim and some sunglasses so I wouldn’t be recognised – at the time it bothered me to run into old friends. I would pass by people I knew, but usually they seemed to not even see me. Maybe I had changed too much. Once at the market I saw an old friend of mine; when we were teenagers we thought we were in love. She was right in front of me, and I took a step forward to say hello, but she bolted, pushing me away cruelly, with a look of anger on her face. I was taken aback by the malice I had seen in her eyes.

  Walking through my city, I stopped at an old shop with a wide window display, which reflected everything like a mirror. When I was a little boy, I often passed by that shop, because I liked the way my reflection would follow me as I walked. A thousand times, growing up, I stood there frozen as if under a spell, studying the details of real life reflected in that window; it was nice to observe things in reverse, as though I wasn’t really able to perceive their true character when I saw them in their actual dimension. I even went to the shop at night. I would sit down in front of the window and watch the reflection of the stars at the top. They seemed so close it took my breath away.

  And now there I was again, at that window. I looked at myself and in just a few seconds I knew that I was going crazy. I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly my thoughts became fluid and clear – there was no longer anything stopping them, no obstacles. I observed how I was dressed and I reflected on how I had spent the last few months, as if before, as I was living my life, I hadn’t been able to think. I had the impression that someone had stolen time from me, manipulated my life and reduced me to a zombie. An unpleasant sensation, but powerful and liberating, and it pushed me to start over again…