The first thing he does is submit a report to the regimental commander who is amazed to hear he has a communications company, and he immediately assigns us to a duty detail.
‘Hell,’ wails Loop when he hears this. ‘We should have got out of here before they knew about us. Now they’re going to lumber us with duty details.’
He’s right. The day we arrived they put us on our allowances and then just forgot about us. We didn’t go to the sentry musters and our company just dropped out of the regiment’s life. No-one had any interest in the eight soldiers who got beaten up on the second floor of the red-brick barrack block at Mozdok-7. It would have been the easiest thing to do a runner and no-one would have come after us. They could kill us in this regiment, drag us off to Chechnya at night or just butcher us in the barracks - that had happened before - and no-one would look for us or care where the radio company had got to, and they wouldn’t inform our families of our disappearance.
I’m on orderly duty almost all the time now. The recon don’t want to relieve us on duty details so we relieve ourselves for the second week running, and we are on every other day.
So here I am doing sentry duty and watching Zyuzik washing the floor. When he reaches the post with the dent it will be the exact middle of the corridor and we’ll swap places. He’ll stand as sentry and I’ll wash the floor.
The recon are drinking in their billet. Before, when I was on orderly duty and I couldn’t get away from the barrack block, I tried to stay in the latrines, away from the drunken recon guys. I would sit on the narrow windowsill and watch the runway for hours. Occasionally they would call me into their billet and beat me, and then I would go back into the latrines and sit on the sill. I might sit there all night long. Whenever I heard footsteps in the corridor I hid in a cubicle, thinking they wouldn’t find me. Sometimes they didn’t, but when they did they’d beat me right there on the crapper. Once I decided not to open the door, then Boxer brought a rifle, loaded it with a blank round, stuffed a cleaning rod into the barrel and fired it straight through the cubicle door above my head. Almost half of the rod sank into the wall, and after they’d beaten me I had to pull it out.
Now I don’t bother to hide in the latrines. I am long since used to the blows and I know that if they want to beat me up they’ll do it wherever I am, in the toilet or in the next bed.
‘Orderly!’ comes the shout from the billet. I jump up and run to them.
The next morning Chuk shows up in the barracks. He’s the regimental duty officer today - talk about a stroke of luck...
When I leave the armoury Chuk is holding Zyuzik by the shoulders and methodically smacking his back against the wall, to and fro like a pendulum. Zyuzik looks devotedly into Chuk’s eyes, his head swinging around like a doll’s.
‘Why is there such a mess in your billet, orderly?’ he asks me. ‘Why is the orderly asleep on sentry duty, eh? I can’t hear you!’
Zyuzik is always falling asleep, slumped on the sentry’s platform. The rest of us, Loop, Andy and I have developed some kind of sixth sense and we manage to open our eyes in time. No sooner does the officer set foot on the staircase than we bark in his face: ‘Nothing to report in your absence, sir!’ Zyuzik has no such instinct and only wakes up when he is hit.
Chuk wakes him with a jab under his rib and, as the halfcrazed Zyuzik struggles to work out what’s going on, kicks him in the groin. And so it goes on, day in, day out.
‘What does he have to go and kick me in the balls for, the son °f a bitch!’ Zyuzik wails afterwards. His face is red from pain, he can’t breathe and he gasps for air like a fish. ‘I’ll go and hang myself and write a note that it’s his fault! Bastard! When is this going to stop?’
None of us gets enough sleep; we grab short snoozes in the armoured car at night while on duty, or under the staircase if we can sneak in there without being seen and the recon don’t find us. Zyuzik has it worse than the rest of us; he was not cut out to serve in the army, so small and weedy and defenceless. Lack of sleep is wrecking him and now he nods off while he’s on sentry duty. Chuk kicks him in the groin every time, and it has already become a kind of ritual.
‘Orderly, come with me,’ says Chuk, and goes into the latrines. I’m confident they are clean enough to pass muster; Zyuzik and I scrubbed those crappers all night so I have nothing to fear now. Sure enough, Chuk is satisfied with his inspection. He’ll go now, I think, but he suddenly turns into the utility room. On the ironing board someone from recon has left a tiny cassette radio and a Tetris game, which is very popular in the regiment.
‘So what’s that then, eh?’ Chuk screams. His already bulging eyes fill with fury. ‘I’m asking you, orderly!’ He knocks the player onto the floor with his enormous hand and then breaks the Tetris over my head.
He rages for another twenty minutes and then he finally leaves. I pick up the pieces of the broken game. Shit! Now recon will make me conjure up a new Tetris. It won’t bother anyone that Chuk whacked me with it like a stick - it broke on my head, which means it’s my problem.
When the recon come back to the barracks after lunch I tell them about Chuk’s visit.
‘Did he break anything?’ Timokha asks me.
‘Yes, Timokha, he broke the cassette player and the game...’ I start to mumble. ‘I didn’t know they were lying there, someone left them at night, I didn’t see who, 1...’
‘Fucker!’ interrupts Timokha. ‘What a fucker that guy is. Shame Sanya didn’t knock him down yesterday!’
Timokha takes the news surprisingly well. I get away with it, thank God. Where would I get a Tetris here anyway?
Zyuzik is in the latrines, crying by the window. He is leaning with his head against the wall, his hands pressed between his knees, red-faced.
‘Bastard,’ he says with a muffled moan. ‘Why does he always go for my balls... bastard, bastard, bastard.’
Strictly speaking, there is no dedovshchina bullying in our regiment. Dedovshchina is a set of unofficial rules, a kind of a code of laws which, if violated, incur corporal punishment.
For example, your walk. Your walk is determined by the amount of time you have served. The spirits, those who have just been called up, are not supposed to walk at all, they are supposed to ‘flit’ or ‘rustle’. Those in their second six months -the ‘skulls’ or ‘bishops’ - are entitled to a more relaxed mode of walking but their gait is nonetheless supposed to reflect humility. Only the ‘lords’, who are about to be demobilized, can walk with a special swagger that is allowed to the older recruits alone; a leisurely pace, their heels scraping the floor. If I had even thought about walking like that in training I’d immediately have been showered with punches. ‘Up for demob now, are you?’ they’d have asked, and then they’d have given me hell. If I stuck my hands in my pockets I’d also get a thump on the head: that is the privilege of the older soldiers. A spirit should forget about his pockets entirely. Otherwise they fill them with sand and sew them up. The sand chafes the groin and two days later you have weeping sores.
You can get a beating for anything at all. If a spirit doesn’t show respect in his conversation with an older soldier, a ‘Granddad’, he’ll get beaten up. If he talks too loudly or goes about the barracks clattering his heels, he’ll get beaten up. If he lies on his bed in the day, he’ll get beaten up. If the people back home send him good rubber slippers and he decides to wear them to the shower, he’ll get beaten up and lose his slippers. And if a spirit even thinks of turning down the tops of his boots or walking around with his top button undone, or if his cap is tipped back on his head or to one side, or he doesn’t do his belt up tightly enough, they’ll thrash him so hard he’ll forget his name. He is a spirit, the lowest dregs, and it’s his job to slave until the older soldiers have been discharged.
But at the same time the older soldiers jealously guard their rights over their spirits. Every self-respecting granddad has his own spirit, a personal slave, and only he is allowed to beat and punish him. If someone else start
s to harass this spirit then he’ll go straight to the granddad and then there are conflicts: ‘You’re bugging him so you’re bugging me...’
It’s also good for a spirit to have his personal granddad. First of all, only one person beats you. Then you can always complain to him if someone else makes claims on you, and he’ll go and sort it out. If a skull, a soldier in his second six months, thumps a spirit’s head or takes money from him, then he’ll get a good sound beating - only granddads are allowed to rob the young ones. A spirit is only obliged to rustle up money, cigarettes and food for his own granddad, and he can ignore anyone else’s demands. The only exception is a granddad who’s stronger than yours.
But there is none of this in our regiment. All of that stuff -the unbuttoned tunics, the belt and the walk - is all just child’s play. It’s the big league here. I can walk how I like and wear what I like and it doesn’t bother anyone. They beat us for completely different reasons. Our older conscripts have already killed people and buried their comrades and they don’t believe they’ll survive this war themselves. So beatings here are just the norm. Everyone is going to die anyway, both those doing the beating and their victims. So what’s the big deal? There’s the runway, two steps away from here, and they keep bringing back bodies by the dozen. We’ll all die there.
Everybody beats everyone. The dembels, with three months service to go, the officers, the warrant officers. They get stinking drunk and then hammer the ones below them. Even the colonels beat the majors, the majors beat the lieutenants, and they all beat the privates; and granddads beat new recruits. No-one talks to each other like human beings, they just smack each other in the mouth. Because it’s easier that way, quicker and simpler to understand. Because ‘you’re all going to snuff it anyway, you bitches’. Because there are unfed children back home, because the officer corps is addled with impoverishment and hopelessness, because a dembel has three months left, because every second man is shell-shocked. Because our Motherland makes us kill people, our own people, who speak Russian, and we have to shoot them in the head and send their brains flying up the walls, crush them with tanks and tear them to pieces. Because these people want to kill you, because your soldiers arrived yesterday straight from training and today they are already lying on the airstrip as lumps of charred flesh, and flies lay eggs in their open eyes, and because in a day the company is reduced to less than a third, and God willing, you’ll stay among that third. Because the one thing that everyone knows is how to get drunk and kill, kill and kill some more. Because a soldier is a stinking wretch, and a spirit doesn’t have any right to live at all, and to beat him is to actually do him a favour. ‘I’ll teach you what war is about, you pricks! You can all have a smack in the mouth so you don’t think life is too rosy, and thank your mother that she didn’t have you six months earlier or you’d all be dead now!’
Everyone hates everyone else in this regiment - the hatred and madness hang over the square like a foul black cloud, and this cloud saturates the young boys with fear, just like pieces of barbecue meat being marinated in lemon juice, only they get stewed in fear and hatred before they get sent off to the meat-grinder. It will be easier for us to die there.
I stand on sentry duty as Timokha walks past. He swings round and kicks me in the chest so hard I fly off my feet and hit the wall, knocking down the wooden sign with the timetable of the company’s activities: ‘The company is engaged in fulfilling a government assignment.’ They call this war a government assignment. In death notices sent to families they could just as well write: ‘Decapitated while on government assignment.’ The sign falls and its corner hits me hard on the back. I crumple up with pain. Timokha keeps walking.
A construction company shuffles barefoot across the stones to the canteen. The construction battalion lives separately in a different barracks, and they only show their faces in the regiment to go and eat. What goes on in their section no-one knows, but the rumours give you goose bumps. The bullying there is like a well-oiled machine. The dembels hit the young conscripts with spades, beat them so hard that some hang themselves later. They carry out bodies from there with frightening regularity. And yet we’d never heard of even one criminal case being opened in the construction battalion.
The builders stand to attention, silently, without moving. No-one looks around or down at his feet. The older ones had taught them that to stand to attention means just that. If anyone makes the slightest movement, he’ll get a beating. This column of walking dead cares nothing about anything: the war, Chechnya, the heaps of bodies at the airstrip. They are only worried about tonight, when the officers leave the barracks after the evening muster and they will get beaten again with spades.
In the morning the officers will come back, the thick-headed morons, and beat them for having spade marks on their faces.
They stand silently in front of the canteen. It’s like terror itself is standing here, after shuffling its way barefoot across the stones to feed, seeing nothing, paying attention to nothing, just waiting.
‘Now that’s a shitty place they’re in,’ whispers Loop, looking at the builders. ‘God forbid we end up serving there. It’s already bad enough here, but there it’s real hell.’
Loop knows what he’s talking about. Timokha once sent him to see the Greek, and he got the barracks mixed up and ended up in the construction battalion. They beat him so hard that he had to smash a window and jump from the first floor to escape.
We get a holiday period: almost the entire recon company goes to Chechnya. Only Smiler and Maloi are left, but they don’t touch us. Every morning they go to the park and muck around there doing something to the wrecked BMP, and come back only towards evening. Yelin ordered them to reassemble the engine and gave them two weeks to do it. The fuel pump got wrecked by shrapnel, now they are wracking their brains to work out where they can steal a replacement. They have eight days left to do it.
Timokha went on leave. As a farewell gesture he beat up Zyuzik and me, and smacked Osipov across the face with his elbows. Now Andy’s cheeks look like a pair of aubergines; they have a nice purple sheen, are slightly swollen and quiver like jelly every time he speaks. It’s pretty funny, as it happens, and every time I tell him he gets the hump.
‘How would you like a beating like that, eh?’
‘Take it easy, I’ve had my fair share,’ I answer.
We sleep like human beings for three days, waking to the sound of a drum roll that tells us it’s already nine in the morning and time for muster. We stretch blissfully in our beds and take our time getting up. The sergeant-major doesn’t come for another half an hour at least. We skip breakfast, loathe to swap our precious sleep for food, especially as we don’t get that hungry in such heat, and the last night’s supper easily sees us through to lunchtime. If not, we go to the pilots’ canteen and scrounge some bread there.
We rise at our leisure and go and wash when the parade passes the regimental commander to the accompaniment of a ceremonial march. Then the sergeant-major takes us to the park or we tidy the billet, or just do sweet nothing and laze on the grass.
It’s a happy time - we belong to ourselves and no-one beats us.
And here we are, lying in the orchard by the pilots’ quarters, smoking and chewing on ripe, juicy apricots. At lunchtime we filled our bellies with rice and chicken bones, and we have an hour and a half before the evening muster. You could say that we are pretty happy with life.
We come over to the pilots’ quarters every day after lunch. It’s nice here; their barracks are surrounded by a shady orchard where we can hide without anyone finding us. It’s my favourite place, better than the most comfortable hotel in the world with all of its luxury - I just feel good here.
At the edge of the orchard stands a great, thick oak tree, surrounded by moss that’s like a down pillow to sleep on, uncovered, in the summer’s warmth. All around there are free apricots and mulberry trees, the birds are singing and the sun tickles our cheeks through the leaves. It’s heaven on
earth.
On the way here we shook down a load of apricots and now we bask in the pleasure of life as we eat them, feeling almost like real people.
We are discussing Lena, with her hoarse smoker’s voice, small black eyes and shapely figure. Lena’s a little over thirty, swears like a trooper, raps cheeky soldiers over the knuckles with her ladle and dishes out generous portions, more than the ration.
Loop falls in love with her on the spot, insisting that it’s nothing to do with food. Strangely enough, I believe him. When Lena doles out the food Loop doesn’t even look at his plate, and with him this is indeed a telling sign. He can’t tear his eyes away from the object of his adoration, especially not from her firm bust, which is visible beneath her white coat.
‘Lenochka,’ he moans while sitting at the table, shifting on the bench, ‘Oh Lenochka, how I’d love to...' Loop doesn’t elaborate on his dream.
I don’t find her attractive myself, but she gives us double portions and I’m grateful to her for that.
And who are we to even talk about being in love with her or not, or whether she’s really a looker? Once, back in training, we all had to be checked for venereal diseases. They lined us all up on the parade ground and ordered us to drop our trousers. We stood there naked and a female doctor, a very beautiful Asian woman, made her way down the rows, examining us. Each one of us had to display his goods to her for a close-up.
None of us had ever stood waiting for a date with his heart missing a beat, or kissed a girl in a doorway, or declared his love for anyone or performed any feat or foolhardy deed for a girl. And here we were, standing naked in front of a beautiful grown-up woman, among hundreds of other stinking, dirty soldiers being examined like cattle. We were obliged to have a medical examination, and that’s what we did, as quickly and as practically as possible. What we all felt at that moment was of no interest to anyone. What love or romance could there be here, for God’s sake? It wasn’t the place for all that.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 8