Time loses its meaning. We lie behind the garage, pressing ourselves into the snow. How long this all lasts, I have no idea.
At last the bombardment dies down and helicopters start firing on our houses, but the shells are lighter calibre and it’s not nearly the same sensation. Their NURS mini-rockets don’t penetrate the houses and they burst outside in the yard. The helicopters empty their magazines and fly off. It’s over.
The infantry return. Amazingly we don’t have a single casualty, not even any wounded. Our armoured cars aren’t even damaged. Despite standing right near the houses that took the brunt of the strike, they are only covered in light debris.
Once again Gantamirov’s boys come off worse, with two seriously wounded. The shell that flew down the middle of the yard exploded right inside their headquarters while two men were there. The leg and side of one of them was blown to pieces and the other had both legs torn off.
Again we run the wounded to the carrier on stretchers and load them inside. Again they make no sound, except for when one opens his eyes and says quietly: ‘Get my leg.’ Sigai picks up the severed remnants of the leg and carries it along beside the stretcher. Five of them carry him, in pieces, four taking his torso and one his leg. When they load him into the carrier, the limb is placed beside him.
The other wounded man dies.
When the lads get back, Sigai comes over to me and asks for a cigarette. We light up.
I look at his hands as he rolls and loosens the tobacco with his thumb and then clenches the cigarette in his lips and draws on it. It seems to me that his hands, lips and the cigarette have bits of human flesh stuck to them, but it’s just my imagination. His hands are clean, and there isn’t even any blood on them.
We stand there, smoking. Then Sigai says: ‘That’s odd. When I went off to war, this was what I feared most, blown-off legs, human flesh. I thought it would be horrific. But then it turns out there’s nothing horrific about it.’
09/ Sharik
He came to us when we had only two days of food supplies left. A handsome, smart face, fluffy coat and a tail that curled in a circle. Amazing eyes, one orange, the other green. He was well fed, but not as much as the other Grozny dogs that went out of their minds as they gnawed on corpses in the ruins. This one was good-natured.
We warned him. We talked to him like a person and he understood everything. Here, at war, everyone and everything seems to be at one with their surroundings, be it a person, a dog, a tree, a stone, a river. It seems everything has a spirit. When you dig a foxhole in the stony clay with a sapper’s shovel, you talk to it as if it were a loved one: ‘Come on my dear, just one more shovel, just a tad more’, and it yields to your entreaties, gives another chunk, hiding your body deeper. Everyone and everything understands and knows what their fate will be. And they are entitled to make their own decisions - where to grow, where to flow, where to die.
We didn’t need to reason with him, just one word and it was all clear. We warned him and off he went. But later he came back anyway, because he wanted to be with us. It was his choice, no-one forced him.
Then our food started to run out. We stretched it another day, thanks to some beef given to us as by the 15th regiment, which was stationed a little way off from us. Then it was all gone.
‘I’ll skin and gut him if someone else kills him,’ said Andy, our cook, stroking Sharik behind the ear. ‘I won’t kill him. I love dogs, and all animals really.’
No-one wanted to do it. We agonized for another half day while Sharik sat at our feet and listened to us discuss who would kill him.
Finally Andy took it upon himself. He led Sharik off to the river and put a bullet behind his ear. It killed him outright, not even a whimper, and his skinned body was soon strung from a tree branch.
Sharik had plenty of meat on him and the fat on his side glistened. ‘That has to be cut off, dog fat tastes bitter,’ Andy told us.
I did as he said and then cut up the warm flesh. We boiled it for two hours in a pot and then stewed it in some ketchup left from the dry rations. It tasted pretty good.
Next morning they brought us supplies of oats.
10/ The Apartment
I had an apartment in Grozny. Actually, I had lots of apartments in Grozny - plush ones, plain ones, ones fitted out with nice mahogany furniture and others totally smashed up, large and small, all sorts. But this one was in a class of its own.
I found it in the first neighbourhood, in a yellow five-storey block. From the front door, upholstered in cheap, fake leather, hung the keys. The owners didn’t lock the door, as if imploring visitors to live here by all means, but just not to destroy the place.
It wasn’t luxurious but it was undamaged. It still bore signs of life - evidently the owners had left just before the storming of the city. It was homely, quiet, and bore no reminder of things military. Simple furnishings, books, old wallpaper, carpeted floor. Everything tidy, unlooted. Even the windowpanes were intact.
I didn’t go in straight away. And when I went back to the platoon, I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want some stranger rifling through this little pocket of peaceful life, upsetting the order in the cupboards, looking at the photographs and rummaging in the drawers. I didn’t want outsiders’ boots trampling on things or their hands fiddling with the stove and ripping up the parquet floor for firewood.
This was peace, a fragment of quiet, calm life, a life that I once lived, free from war, with my family and with my girl, chatting over supper and making plans for the future.
This was my apartment, just mine, my very own home, so I thought up a game.
In the evening, when it got dark, I would come home after work and open my door with my keys. Boy, what a joy it is to unlock your door with your own keys, to enter your home and flop down exhausted in the armchair. To let your head loll back as you light up a cigarette and close your eyes...
She comes over to me, curls up on my lap and tenderly rests her little head on my chest. ‘Darling, where have you been so long? I was waiting.’ - ‘I’m sorry, I got held up at work.’ - ‘Did you have a good day?’ - ‘Yes, I killed two people.’ - ‘Well done, I’m so proud of you!’ She kisses me on the cheek and caresses my hand. ‘Heavens, what have you done to your hands? Is that from the cold?’ I look at them. Her small, slender hand with its smooth skin, scented with cosmetics, rests on my rough, dirty, cracked and bleeding paws. ‘Yes, from the cold and dirt, eczema, but it’s nothing to worry about, it’ll pass.’ - ‘I don’t like your job,’ she tells me. ‘I’m scared here, let’s move away somewhere.’ - ‘We will move away, my love, I promise, don’t worry, just be patient a little while longer. There, behind the ninth neighbourhood, is my demobilization and peace. And you... We’ll move, just be patient.’ She gets up, goes into the kitchen, treading softly on the carpet. ‘Go and wash your hands, supper’s ready. I’ve made borscht, the real thing, not the halfcooked slop they give you at work. There’s water in the bathroom, I brought it in from the well. It’s cold now, but we can warm it up.’ She pours borscht into the bowl, passes it over and sits down opposite me. ‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘You tuck in, I’ve already eaten. Take off your webbing first, silly,’ she says with a peal of laughter. ‘And don’t dip your grenades in the soup, give them here, I’ll put them on the windowsill. They’re filthy, shame on you,’ she says taking a cloth and wiping them. ‘By the way, I cleaned your rocket launcher today, it was all dusty. I put it by the wardrobe, is that OK? I thought you might be cross at me. That thing scares me, when I was wiping it I was afraid it would go off. Will you take it to work with you, or can we maybe put it away in the cupboard?’ - ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take it with me. I might need it tonight; there are some snipers in the high-rise blocks.’ - ‘Are you going now?’ - ‘Yes, I have to go, I just popped in to see you.’ - She comes over and puts her arms round my neck and presses herself against me. ‘Come home soon, I’ll be waiting. And be careful, don’t get shot.’ She fastens the top clip of my webbi
ng and finds a small hole on the shoulder strap. ‘I’ll sew that up when you get back,’ she says, and kisses me goodbye. ‘Go on, off you go now or you’ll be late. Take care... Love you!’
I open my eyes and sit motionless for a while. My soul is empty, barren. The ash from my cigarette has dropped onto the carpet. I am seized with melancholy but I also feel good, as if it had all really happened.
I came a few times to the apartment, every day, and played the ‘peace game’, albeit with a few aberrations like grenades on the windowsill, but still. Later, when we moved on, I dropped by one last time, stood on the threshold and carefully closed the door. I left the key in the lock.
TWO
11/ The Runway
We lie at the edge of the runway, Kisel, Vovka, Tatarintsev and I, our bare bellies turned up to the sky. They made us march over from the station a few hours ago and now we wait to see what will happen next.
Our boots stand in a row, our puttees spread out on top to dry as we soak up the sun’s rays. It seems we have never been so warm in our lives. The yellow tips of the dry grass prick our backs and Kisel plucks a blade with his toes, turns onto his stomach and crumbles it in his hands.
‘Look, dry as a bone. Back in Sverdlovsk they’re still up to their necks in snow,’ he marvels.
‘It sure is warm,’ agrees Vovka.
Vovka is eighteen, like me, and looks like a dried apricot -dark-complexioned, skinny, tall. His eyes are black and his eyebrows are fair, bleached by the sun. He comes from the south of Russia, near Anapa, and volunteered to go to Chechnya thinking this would take him closer to home.
Kisel is twenty-two, and was drafted into the army after college. He’s good at physics and maths and can calculate sinusoids like nobody’s business. Only what’s the use of that now? He’d be better off knowing how to put on his puttees properly - he has white flabby skin and still manages to walk
his feet to a bleeding mess because they are poorly wrapped. Kisel is due to be demobilized in six months and had no wish to be sent to Chechnya. All he wanted was to serve out his time somewhere in central Russia, near his hometown of Yaroslavl, but it wasn’t to be.
Next to him sits Andrei Zhikh, fat-lipped and small, the smallest soldier in our platoon, which earned him the nickname Loop, after the little leather ring where you tuck the loose end of a soldier’s belt. He’s no more than one metre fifty tall but he puts down enough food for four. Where it all goes is a mystery, and he stays small and skinny like a dried cockroach. What strikes you about him are those huge doughnut lips that can suck down a tin of condensed milk in one go and which turn his soft Krasnodar accent into a mumble, and his stomach, which swells up to twice its size when Loop stuffs it with food.
To his right sits Vic Zelikman, a Jew who is more terrified than any of us of getting roughed up by the older soldiers. We are all afraid of this, but the puny, cultured Zyuzik, as we call him, takes the beatings particularly badly. In a year and a half of army service he still can’t get used to the fact that he is a non-person, a lowlife, a dumb animal, and every punch sends him into a depression. Now he sits thinking about how they will beat us here, wondering if it’ll be worse than during training or not as bad.
The last member of our group, Ginger, is a quiet, sullen, stocky lad with huge hands and flaming red hair. Or rather he used to have flaming red hair before the barber got to him. Now his bald soldier’s head looks like it’s strewn with copper filings, as if someone filed a pipe over it. All he cares about is how to get the hell out of here faster.
Today we managed to eat properly for the first time. The officer in charge of our group, a swarthy major who shouted at us all the way here, is sitting a good distance away in the middle of the field. We make the most of this and wolf down our dry rations.
Back on the train the only food the major had given us was a small tin of stewed meat for each day of the journey, and our stomachs were now pinched with hunger. When we halted briefly on spur lines to allow other trains through there wasn’t enough time to distribute the bread and we were hungry all the time.
So as not to swell up from the pangs we swapped our boots for food. Before we left we had all been issued with new lace-up parade boots. ‘I wonder where they think we’ll be doing parade marching in Chechnya,’ said Loop, who was the first to trade his pair for ten cabbage pies.
The women selling food at the stations took our boots out of sheer pity. When they saw our train pull in they swarmed round with pies and home-cooked chicken. They saw what sort of train it was standing on the line, started to wail and blessed us with crosses drawn in the air by our carriages, and accepted boots and long johns they had no use for in exchange for food. One woman came up to our window and silently passed us a bottle of lemonade and a kilo of chocolates. She promised to bring us cigarettes, but the major shooed us away from the window and told us not to lean out any more.
In the end they didn’t manage to distribute all the bread and it simply went mouldy. When we left the train in Mozdok, we walked past the bread wagon at the back just as they were throwing out sacks of fermented, green loaves. We grabbed what we could and managed to get more than most.
Right now our stomachs are full of stewed pork, although there was more fat than meat (Ginger assures us it’s not fat at all but melted lubricant grease mixed with boot polish), and barley oats. On top of that, we had each tucked away a whole loaf of bread, and you could say life was looking pretty rosy just then. Or at least for the next half an hour it had taken on a clear definition, beyond which no-one wanted to guess what lay in store. We live only for the moment.
‘I wonder if they’ll put us straight on regular rations today,’ Loop mumbles through his doughnut lips, and slips a spoon that has been licked to a clean gleam back into the top of his boot. With lunch safely in his gut he immediately starts to think about supper.
‘Are you in a hurry to get there or something?’ Vovka says, nodding at the ridge that separates us from Chechnya. ‘As far as I'm concerned, it’s better to go without grub altogether just to stay on this field a bit longer.’
‘Or stay here for good, even,’ Ginger adds.
‘Maybe they’ll assign us to baking buns,’ Loop dreams out loud.
‘Yeah, that would be right up your street,’ answers Kisel. ‘The moment you’re let loose on a bread-cutting machine you’ll slip a loaf under each of those lips of yours and still not choke.’
‘Some bread now wouldn’t go amiss, that’s true,’ says Loop, a big grin on his face.
Back in training the swarthy major told us he was assembling a group to go and work in a bakery in Beslan, in North Ossetia. He knew how to win us round. To be assigned to a bakery is the secret dream of all new recruits, or ‘spirits’, who have served less than six months of their two-year spell in the army. We are spirits, and they also call us stomachs, starvers, fainters, goblins, anything they like. We are particularly tormented by hunger in the first six months, and the calories we extracted in training from that grey sludge they call barley porridge were burnt up in an instant on the windy drill square, when the sergeants drove us out for our ‘after-lunch stroll’.
Our growing bodies were constantly deprived of nutrition and at night we would adjourn to the toilets to secretly devour tubes of toothpaste, which smelled so appetizingly of wild strawberries.
Then one day they lined us up in a row and the major went along asking each of us in turn: ‘Do you want to serve in the Caucasus? Come on, it’s warm there, there are plenty of apples to eat.’
But when he looked them in the eye, the soldiers shrank back. His pupils were full of fear and his uniform stank of death. Death and fear. He sweated it from all his pores and he left an unbearable, stifling trail behind him as he walked around the barracks.
Vovka and I said yes, Kisel said no and told the major and his Caucasus where both of them could go. Now the three of us lie on this runway in Mozdok and wait to be taken further. And all the others who stood in that line are here
too, waiting beside us, fifteen hundred in total, almost all just eighteen years old.
Kisel is still amazed at how they duped us all so well.
‘Surely there has to be a consent form,’ he argues, ‘some kind of paper where I write that I request to be sent to the meat-grinder to continue my army service. I didn’t sign anything of the sort.’
‘What are you on about?’ says Vovka, playing along. ‘What about the instructions for safety measures the major asked us to sign, remember? Do you ever even read what you sign? Don’t you understand anything? Fifteen hundred blokes uniformly expressed a wish to protect the constitutional order of their Motherland with their lives, if need be. And seeing how our noble sentiment so moved the Motherland, we made it even easier for her and said: No need for separate consent papers for each of us, we’ll go off to war by lists. Let them use the wood they save to make furniture for an orphanage for Chechen children who suffer because of what we do in this war.’
‘You know what, Kisel?’ I say with irritation. ‘You couldn’t have signed anything and still end up here. If the order comes for you to go and snuff it, then you go - so why are you going on about your precious report? Why don’t you just give me a smoke instead?’
He passes me a cigarette and we light up.
There is constant traffic on the runway. Someone lands, someone takes off, wounded soldiers wait for a flight, and people crowd round a nearby water fountain. Every ten minutes low-flying attack aircraft leave for Chechnya, groaning under the weight of munitions and then later they return empty. Helicopters warm up their engines, the hot wind drives dust across the runway, and we get jumpy.
It’s a terrible mess; there are refugees everywhere, walking across the field with their junk and telling horrific tales. These are the lucky ones who managed to escape from the bombardments. The helicopters aren’t supposed to take civilians but people take them by storm and ride standing, as if they are on a tram. One old man flew here on the undercarriage: he tied himself to the wheel and hung like that during the forty-minute flight to Mozdok from Khankala. He even managed to bring two suitcases with him.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 3