I spit a tobacco grain onto the asphalt. My spit tastes of salt and blood; my teeth were busted loose ages ago and wobble in my mouth. I can’t eat solid food and have trouble even chewing bread. When they give us rusks in the canteen I only eat the soup. We’re all the same. We can’t chew and we can’t breathe in properly because our chests have been so battered by the fists of the dembels - the recruits on their last six months before demobilization - that they became one huge bruise. We inhale carefully, taking only quick short breaths.
‘Only the first six months is tough in the army,’ Pincha says. ‘After that you don’t feel the pain.’
They brought us to this unit only three weeks ago, but it already seems an eternity.
Damn, if I had only been able back then to persuade the major to put my dossier in the other pile, everything would be different! But the major put it where he did, and here I am. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe Kisel and Vovka are already dead, while I am still alive. I lived three more weeks - that’s a bloody long time, that much we do know by now.
The next pair of attack planes accelerates on the runway. I wonder why the pilots fight? No-one forces them. They aren’t me - they’re free. There is no way I can leave here; I have another eighteen months of national service. So I sit on the porch watching the planes accelerate, and I think what I can tell Timokha so he doesn’t beat me too badly.
The planes take off with a roar that shakes the barracks windows and disappear into the night, the twin dots of their exhausts twinkling. I take a final drag on the cigarette, stub it out and go up to the second floor.
‘Well, did you bring it?’ asks Timokha, a tall, swarthy guy with big cowlike eyes. He is sitting in the storeroom, his feet up on the table as he watches TV. I stand in front of him, staring silently at the floor.
I try not to annoy him. When you’re asked why you haven’t done something, the best thing you can do is to stand there and maintain meek silence. We call this ‘switching on the fool’.
‘Has the cat got your tongue? Did you bring it?’
‘No,’ I reply, barely audibly.
‘Why not?’
‘I haven’t got any money.’
‘I didn’t ask you if you've got any money, dickhead!’ he roars. ‘I don’t give a damn what you do or don’t have. I’m asking you why you haven’t brought 600,000 roubles.’
He gets up and punches me in the nose, from below, hard. The bridge of my nose crunches and my lips become warm and sticky. I lick the blood from them and spit it out on the floor. The second blow hits me under the eye, then I take one in the teeth. I fall with a moan. I can’t say it hurt that much, but it’s best to moan loudly so the beating stops sooner.
This time it’s no joke the way Timokha gets worked up. He kicks me and screams: ‘Why didn’t you bring the money, fucker? Why didn’t you bring the money?’
He makes me do press-ups and when I’m on my way up he kicks me in the teeth with a dirty boot. He catches me hard and my head snaps right back. I lose my bearings for a moment, my left arm collapses under me and I fall on my elbow. My split lip gushes onto the floor, and I spit out blood and the polish that I had scraped off Timokha’s boot with my teeth.
‘Count!’ he yells.
I push myself up again and count out loud. Spurts of blood fly onto the floor. There’s a news report on the television, something about Chechnya. The army commander has arrived for an inspection in Vladikavkaz. He is satisfied with the state of battle readiness and discipline in the forces. Tomorrow the commander is due to visit our regiment and check the discipline here. He’ll probably be satisfied with the disciplinary readiness of our regiment too.
Timokha eventually tires. He orders me to get a cloth and clean up the blood. I wipe the boards but the blood has already soaked into the wood and left a noticeable stain.
‘What are you trying to do, asshole, drop me in trouble?’ Timokha hisses and hits me in the forehead with his palm. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing splashing your filthy blood here for, eh, moron? Now wipe that off! I’ll give you one more week to get the money, understand? I’m going on leave in a week. If you don’t get the money by then I’ll come back and kill you. The clock’s ticking.’
I go back to my billet and sit on the bed. I have to last one more week. Timokha will get back from leave in two or three months, no sooner. No-one comes back earlier, and three months is a long time, almost half a lifetime, anything could happen.
I crawl under my dusty, dirty blanket. Of the sixty beds in the empty barracks only four are made-up, for Zyuzik, Loop, Osipov and Yakunin. Ginger is gone.
‘Did he beat you?’ Loop mumbles from under the blanket. His lips are now like two purple dumplings from his share of knocks.
‘Yes,’ I reply, smearing toothpaste under my eye.
We learned this trick back in training, a tried and tested treatment for black eyes. If my eye swells up the next day, Timokha will beat me even harder; he’ll tell me I’m a snitch and that this is how I’m trying to turn him in. Even though there isn’t a single new guy in the regiment who still has an unmarked face.
My split lips ache even in my sleep.
I am on orderly duty and wash the floor. The officers have been drinking in the storeroom all evening. The commander of the recon company, Lieutenant Yelin, is now seriously drunk; his corpulent face is sunk into his shoulders and his eyes are dazed and empty apart from the glow of hatred in his pupils.
Alternately resting his rifle on his knees, Yelin is methodically firing at the ceiling. That’s a habit of his. When he gets drunk he sits in this armchair and fires at the ceiling. It’s probably because of his shell shock - they say he used to be a cheerful, smiley man. Then half of his company got killed near Samashki, and later he got blown up in a carrier. Then I heard the same thing happened again. These days Yelin is the craziest officer in the regiment; he hardly talks to anyone, he uses his fists to give orders and he couldn’t give much of a damn about anything, not the lives of the soldiers, or the Chechens, or even his own. He doesn’t take prisoners, instead he slaughters them himself, the same way they slaughter our soldiers, by pinning their heads to the ground with his foot and slitting their throats with a knife. The only thing he wants is for the war never to end so that there is always someone to kill. The whole ceiling of the storeroom is riddled like a sieve with bullet holes and the plaster showers down on Yelin like rain, but he pays no heed and just keeps firing upward.
Next to him sits a small Armenian, Major Arzumanyan, commander of a tank battalion. He’s also suffering from mild shell shock. Vodka doesn’t affect him, and he loudly tells Yelin about a battle in Bamut.
‘Why didn’t they let us totally flatten that shitty little village, eh? Who set us up, who was it? We had already driven them out into the mountains, all we needed was just one more push, a last dash, and suddenly we get told to pull out! Why? Why? We had two hundred metres to go to the school. If we’d taken it the village would have been ours! Who bought up this war and who’s paying for it, eh? Three of my vehicles are burnt out, and I’ve got thirty dead men! Now I’m going to pick up some more, choose a new lot of greenhorns and send them off to the slaughterhouse, all over again. All they’re good for is snuffing it in big bunches. And who’s supposed to answer for that, eh?’
Yelin grunts and shoots at the ceiling. They pour another round and the cold vodka glugs into the glasses. I can smell it, the tang of raw vodka. They make this stuff here in Mozdok, at the brick factory, and it’s dirt cheap. Every soldier knows a few houses in the village where you can buy this cheap stuff stolen from the factory. It was me who went and got them this bottle.
I am washing the floor by the open door of the storeroom and try not to make a noise and catch their attention. The main thing in the army is not to be noticed; then you get beaten less and you’re pestered less. Or is it best to get out of here altogether like Ginger, who hasn’t been seen in the barracks for several days. He’s living out in the stepp
e somewhere like a dog, and only visits the regiment to get some grub. I’ve seen him a couple of times at night, near the canteen.
They notice me all the same.
‘Hey, soldier,’ Arzumanyan says. ‘Come here.’
I do as I’m told.
‘Why do you pricks go and get killed like flies, eh? What do they bother training you for if all you can do is die? What did they teach you there? Do they teach you to shoot at all?’ he asks.
I say nothing.
‘Well, you dumb sheep?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Yes... So how many times did you fire a weapon?’
‘Twice.’
‘Twice? Pricks. Want to join my tanks? Come on, tomorrow you’ll fly with me to Shali where they’ll have you for breakfast. And me. Well, are you coming? Yelin, let me have him.’
I stand in front of them, drenched in sweat, with wet, rolled-up sleeves and a rag in my hand. I hang my head and say nothing. I have no wish to fly with the shell-shocked major to Shali and get eaten for breakfast. I want to stay here, get my bruises but remain alive. I’m afraid that Yelin really will hand me over. I’m not one of his men, but they won’t look into it if he does. One wave of his hand and it’s done.
Yelin blearily looks up at me from under his lowered brow, struggling to take everything in. Now they’re going to give me a beating.
The tank officer suddenly deflates. The spring in him unwinds and he slumps back in his armchair.
‘Get the hell out of here,’ he says with a wave of the hand. ‘You wouldn’t fit in a tank anyway - too tall.’
I leave and creep out of the barracks before Yelin can stop me.
I sit down in the porch, light up and look at the take-off strip. I wouldn’t mind sneaking into the cockpit with them and flying the hell out of here. Or even better, I could get transferred to the pilots corps. Now they have it good! In their barracks there are just officers and two dozen soldiers. The pilots don’t beat the soldiers; they feed them well and the only work there is making the beds and washing the floor.
But I have no right to complain, I had a lucky night tonight; I didn’t get beaten or whisked off to Shali.
Ginger and Yakunin did come up with some money in the end. They took a high-pressure fuel pump off one of the wrecked BMP tracked carriers and sold it to the Greek. The Greek is a builder who lives on the construction site and plasters the barracks. Apart from that he’s the link between the soldiers and the market outside, and does a bit of business on the side, just like everyone else does in this war.
A fuel pump is a much sought-after item; you can put them on normal diesel trucks as well as army vehicles. In the regiment you can get hold of one for half the usual price.
Ginger sold the pump to the Greek for exactly 600,000 roubles. He won’t give this money to Timokha. After lunch they are going to do a runner and they start to persuade Loop to go with them. He agrees immediately.
We stand in the queue outside the canteen, waiting for them to let us in. Loop is next to me; he doesn’t tell me anything but I know that after lunch Yakunin and Ginger will be waiting for him beyond the runway. They vanished from the regiment in the morning and didn’t even show up for breakfast.
‘Don’t leave me here Loop. Don’t leave me alone, I’ll get beaten to a pulp here, do you hear?’ I tell him. ‘There’s only you and me left. Kisel’s gone, so has Vovka, don’t you go and leave now, eh? Let me come and leg it with you guys. I’ll find some money. Don’t abandon me here, we should stick together, otherwise they’ll tear us to pieces. Why are you doing a runner? Let’s get together and give the recon a good thrashing, what do you say?’
I grab his sleeve and spout all sorts of nonsense. I’m terrified of staying here on my own. As it is now they beat all six of us and it’s easier to put up with the torment together.
‘The plane leaves tonight,’ says Loop, pulling his arm away. ‘You won’t manage to get the money together.’
Loop is unbelievably lucky. Yakunin and Ginger are just taking him along, he hasn’t done anything, he didn’t have to get the money. We are all trying to get away from this regiment and he manages it without the slightest effort. I have no idea how I’ll get by here on my own. We can forget about Zyuzik. Andy, well, he’s still here, but two isn’t enough. He’s not in my detachment and I feel an incredible solitude.
Yakunin and Ginger go on their own. They don’t take Loop in the end; there isn’t enough money for them all. We stay.
Now Timokha demands money from me and Zyuzik. We are sitting on the porch, I’m smoking and Zyuzik is scraping off the freshly fitted tiles with a twig. The afternoon sentry muster is starting the drumbeat on the square, and the regimental duty officer is quizzing the assembled soldiers about the duties of an orderly.
We have to last two more days. Timokha is going on leave the day after tomorrow. Two days is a hell of a long time if you measure it in smashed faces.
‘So what are we going to do?’ Zyuzik asks.
‘I don’t know. We’ll have to sell something.’
‘What?’
We have absolutely nothing to sell. We don’t have any equipment or weapons, and we can’t steal anything either because we don’t know where there is anything worth taking.
‘I don’t know. Let’s sell some cartridges.’
‘Where are we going to get them?’ he asks. ‘We only have guard duty tomorrow, and Smiler won’t open the armoury till then.’
The armoury is locked with a simple padlock and the duty soldier has the keys. Today it’s Smiler. He can take as much weaponry as he sees fit. No-one monitors the ammunition, the bullets are simply heaped in the corner and no-one has ever so much as counted them. Tomorrow, when I get guard duty, we can sell as many as we like. But the problem is that we need the money by tomorrow morning.
‘Listen, maybe Sanya has some in his carrier,’ I say.
Yesterday bow-legged Sanya made me wash his carrier and under the turret I saw a sports bag stuffed with cartridge belts that he had put aside for himself. It’s risky, of course -he’ll kill us if he finds out, but we have no other choice.
We wait till lunchtime, and when the recon go to the canteen I climb into the vehicle. The bag is under the turret, where I left it. He’ll guess immediately who took it.
I open the bag and swear under my breath. It turns out that it doesn’t hold machine-gun belts but shells for a rapid-fire BMP cannon. They are much bigger and there’s no real demand for them. The Chechens don’t have many armoured cars so there’s no-one to sell them to. But I take two of them just to try, one explosive shell and one incendiary.
In the evening we go into Mozdok. There’s no fence around our regiment and it’s easy to slip away, straight out of the barracks. The soldiers wander around the steppe like stray dogs -no-one counts them or guards them. You can be absent from the barracks for weeks and no-one will be after you. You may get murdered, or abducted and sold into slavery, and no-one will know. In this regiment we are left to our own devices; the commanders pay little attention to such trifling matters as what the soldiers get up to.
We walk along the streets in the evening, offering the shells to everyone we meet. No-one is the least bit surprised at this since everyone sells weapons down here. The locals shake their heads. A couple of people ask what kind of rounds they are but when they hear BMP cannon they carry on. One boy of about twelve asks us if we can get Fly rocket launchers, he’ll give a million roubles for each one. We agree to meet him again in two days.
We don’t manage to sell the shells. We stand at the bus stop as the streets begin to empty and the town gradually goes to sleep. No-one walks around here at night; it’s too dangerous. The explosive shell weighs heavily in my pocket, so I take it out and toss it into the bushes behind the bus stop. Zyuzik dumps the incendiary shell there too.
‘So what do we do?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know.’
We have no intention of going back to the barracks without
the money. We are prepared to stand at this bus stop for two days until Timokha goes on leave, just so as not to go back. He won’t let us sleep today anyway; he’ll come harassing us for the money. The closer he gets to his leave the crazier he gets, and he keeps close tabs on our search for cash.
In the station a train begins to move, a passenger train heading not towards Chechnya but home, to the north. We wander around just for the hell of it, without any particular aim. A car stands parked alone in one of the house yards. It is fitted with a stereo system and a plan immediately formulates in my head.
‘Listen, Zyuzik, go and keep watch.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Nothing. Go and keep watch.’
He runs to the corner of the house.
I pick a stone up from the ground and throw it at the side window, which instantly fractures into a web of cracks, and falls into the car with a crunch. I quickly put my arm through, open the door and get inside. I have no idea how you steal a car stereo, in fact I have never stolen anything before in my life, but I work quickly and surely as if I had spent an entire lifetime thieving.
‘The speakers, get the speakers!’ Zyuzik hisses at me from the corner. I rip the speakers out with all the wiring and we grab our loot and run across the road through more yards.
‘This is stealing!’ Zyuzik informs me as we try to regain our breath in a doorway where we stop to stuff the stolen gear into our clothing.
‘If they catch us we’ll get locked up for this.’ ‘Yep. And they’ll make us stand in the corner,’ I answer.
I hide the stereo inside my jacket, he takes the speakers and we keep going. We rob three more cars this night. By my calculations that should be enough.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 6