I looked at him as he gazed indifferently at the road. The rage disappeared as suddenly as it had surfaced, and I couldn’t work out what had come over me.
We always sat on the coffins, providing there was no escort, and it had never bothered us. Coffins were much more comfortable than the low, frozen benches, and we were well accustomed to being in close proximity to death. Feigning mournful faces as we carted coffins around airports and stations five times a day was just stupid. It wasn’t disrespect for the dead; it was just that these people had died and didn’t give a damn where the lads moving them sat.
It could have been us that died; each of us had had plenty of chances to lie there rattling around in a truck behind the lines, lurching around frozen solid in our metal coffins. But we had been lucky and now we were moving those who had been less so.
We’re all cynics, I thought every time I looked at the boys. We’re only nineteen but we’re already dead. How are we supposed to live now? How are we to sleep with girls after these coffins, or drink beer, and rejoice in life? We are worse than senile, hundred-year-old men. At least they are afraid of death; we’re not afraid of anything, and nor do we want anything. We are already old, since what is old age anyway if it’s not living with memories of a past life? And all we have left is our past. The war was the main thing we had to do in our life and we did it. The brightest, best thing in my life was the war and there won’t be anything better. And the blackest, lousiest thing in my life was also the war, and there won’t be anything worse. So my life has been lived.
It grew dark. Nocturnal Moscow lit up its streetlamps and in the watery light of the bulbs the heavy, falling snowflakes seemed deceptively warm.
I was now frozen through. For six hours we’d bumped around in the utterly freezing, wind-blasted back of the truck and the cold had driven me to a state of exhaustion.
There was more space in the back of the truck after we handed over the colonel in Domodedovo, so now we stamped our feet on the floor and huddled together in an attempt to get warm, constantly rubbing our noses and cheeks which were covered with white spots of frostbite. When the truck stopped at traffic lights pedestrians turned in puzzlement towards the source of the groans and swearing inside the truck.
I took off one boot and frenziedly rubbed my frozen foot. I stuffed the sock into my armpit to warm it up while I rubbed and rubbed my glassy toes, restoring the blood circulation.
A voluptuous blonde in a mink fur sitting behind the wheel of a red Nissan stared at me, her lips pursed in disgust. We were standing at the traffic lights by the Balchug hotel and I felt that my bare foot looked stupid in the centre of Moscow. And here by the Balchug, among the expensive cars, casinos, dance halls, beer bars, girls, fun and general carefree air, I also felt rundown in my old, stained jacket and coarse boots, having endured four months of death, undercooked dog meat, corpses, lice, despair and fear.
‘Stupid cow! What the hell are you staring at! I’d like to get you and your curls in the back of this truck, you made-up bitch!’ I angrily looked into the blonde’s eyes and then suddenly and to my own surprise I spat on the shiny red bonnet of the car.
The truck passed the gatehouse, turned onto the parade ground and stopped near the barracks. I heard the cab door slam and a second later the major’s head appeared over the tailgate.
‘Wait here. I’ll report back to headquarters. Then I’ll take you to supper.’
We stirred, tearing our frozen trousers from the bench, and jumped down from the truck.
I was the last to approach the tailgate. I was afraid that my frozen legs would shatter into a thousand tiny pieces like cut glass from the impact on the asphalt, so I let everyone else out first, delaying the moment I had to jump.
Finally I climbed out over the tailgate, stood for a second and, looking down at the black frozen square and inhaling a little deeper, I leapt. A sharp pain hit my feet and pierced my whole body and it felt like white-hot nail had been driven into the crown of my head. I groaned.
Stamping his feet, Dachsie came over and handed me a cigarette.
‘Like hell I’m going to wait for him. As if I won’t get any supper without his help! He’ll spend half an hour in there talking while we freeze out here.’
He stood up straight and looked over at headquarters.
‘Talk of the devil, here he is.’
The major was heading hurriedly towards us. Even before he reached us, he shouted: ‘Where’s the truck?’
I got a nasty ache in the pit of my stomach and looked at Dachsie, who looked back.
‘Yeah, great supper we had.’
Dachsie stared with hatred at the major, spat and shouted back: ‘Gone to the motor pool, Comrade Major, what happened?’
Panting, the major said: ‘Someone go and get it, we have to make another run. To Kursk station and then to Kazan station. A mother and her son. Come on, look lively, they've already called several times. Now I’m going to cop it from the regiment commander.’
Dachsie silently handed me a cigarette and we lit up. I sat back as comfortably as I could, stretching out with my foot resting on the zinc coffin’s wooden covering. Then I remembered and drew it back quickly, glancing towards the back of the truck, where squeezed into a dark corner there sat a little woman in a grey coat, taking a coffin containing her son back home. She sat quietly, hemmed in on all sides by soldiers, her vacant eyes staring blankly in front of her.
The woman’s presence disturbed us. She had appeared just after we had jumped down from the back of the truck, swearing as usual, and grabbed hold of the coffin handles. She came up quietly and looked at the coffin, then leant down and removed an ice-cream wrapper that had stuck to the underside. She did it like she was taking care of her son, as if he preferred to lie in a clean coffin. And she stood beside us watching as we loaded it into the truck.
We immediately bit our tongues and worked in silence after that, without looking at her, trying to be as careful as we could with the coffin, as if it were made of expensive Bohemian glass.
Her presence broke down the defensive shield that we threw up around ourselves with our swearing, spitting and profane joking. We felt guilty in front of her, the guilt any living person feels before the mother of a dead person. And although we had all been through the same experiences as her son, and every one of us had the same chances of being killed, and it wasn’t our fault that we had stayed alive, still... We, the living, were now carrying her dead son back home, and not one of us could look into her empty eyes.
‘Fall in!’ the major ordered as soon as the truck stopped at the Kazan station goods yard.
What does he mean, ‘fall in’? I thought as I jumped out of the truck, flapping my arms to try and warm up. Let’s just unload as quickly as possible and go back. It must be minus twenty and we haven’t had a thing to eat since early morning.
The major came over, his officers’ boots squeaking on the snow.
‘I said fall in. Right here, in one line.’
Resentfully we did as ordered, giving the major surly looks and trying to work out what he was up to.
The major strode around in front of us his hands clasped behind his back. He smelled of the warm cab he’d been riding in. Finally he spoke.
‘You committed a crime in wartime. You deserted the Motherland in her hour of need, cast your weapons aside and fled like cowards. Before you there sits the mother of a soldier who did his duty to the end. You should be ashamed to stand in her presence...’
I didn’t immediately understand what he meant. When it dawned on me I had a hot flush, frozen as I was. My palms became moist and I heard a roaring in my head. Son of a bitch, rear-lines scumbag who warmed his backside in the supplies regiment and now stands here slagging us off. Now I’ll tell you what’s what, I’ll tell you who should be ashamed!
Hardly aware of what I was doing I strode forward, fists clenched, and at that point my gaze met the mother’s eyes.
She was sitting in the same pose in
the back of the truck, quite still, watching us in silence with her empty eyes. She was completely engulfed by her grief and her gaze didn’t fix on us but rather looked right through the rank of soldiers, to a place where her son was still alive.
The heat in me suddenly abated. I couldn’t say anything in my defence, could offer no words of justification beneath this mother’s gaze. Indeed I suddenly felt very ashamed. Ashamed of the major and his pat phrases, ashamed of how the major couldn’t see the mendacity of his words, and how ridiculous his staged little show appeared. Ashamed for the army that had killed her son and had now put on this display in front of her, and ashamed of myself as a component of that army.
I wanted to sit down with her and tell her it wasn’t true, this label of ‘deserter’ that the major had slapped on us; that it wasn’t true I hadn’t done my duty; that each of us had also died a hundred times; that I had come here to bury my own father, straight from the trenches, starving and ridden with lice. I wanted to tell her how I had intended to go back after the funeral but my body hadn’t held out and I’d succumbed immediately to dysentery and pneumonia, and while I lay in hospital my ten-day leave had run out. And about how, when I finally appeared at headquarters to be registered, they took away my belt and laces on the spot, despite my protestations, and then threw me in a cell and opened a criminal case against me. And that most of the others were in the same boat.
I swore at myself, pulled out cigarettes and gave one to Dachsie and we lit up.
The pain in my frozen feet gradually abated and relief spilled through my body with a hot rush, relaxing my muscles. The half-lit barracks was filled with warmth and lulled me gently. I was drifting off when Dachsie turned over in the next bed and asked: ‘You asleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hey, the sergeant-major says we’ve got two trips lined up already for tomorrow. Back to Kursk station and then somewhere else. Going out again, we are. Shame we didn’t get supper today after all. It’s a bloody dog’s life.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I curled up, pulled the blanket round my chin, enjoying its warmth against my skin and the languor of sleep. I had no wish to think about driving anywhere tomorrow and being shaken round all day in the freezing cold, loading and unloading coffins. I wanted to sleep. Tomorrow... who cared about tomorrow? What counted was that today was over. Thoughts turned over heavily and lazily in my head. I remembered the coffin and the soldier’s mother sitting in the depths of the truck, her vacant eyes and her thin coat. Then I remembered the major. ‘I’d have told you all right, you goat-faced git,’ I said out loud, ‘I’d have told you.’
15/ New Year's Eve
The New Year's Eve of 2000 was to have been the most exotic of my life. What plans I’d had! What great celebrations I’d imagined to greet the millennium! Paris, Milan and London opened up before me, inviting me to welcome the twenty-first century in their embrace. Such a date only happens once in a thousand years! I was going to save money and head for Europe to have a time to remember for the rest of my life.
I remember it all right... As they say, Man proposes and God disposes. And that’s just what he did. Instead of Paris I got a slush-covered field in Chechnya, instead of a five-star hotel, a smoky dug-out, and instead of a celebration, an anti-terrorist operation.
We didn’t manage to get any vodka. The sixty litres of diesel that Kuks tried to sell to the Chechens in Urus-Martan went to their ‘free assistance fund’, that is, they cheated us. Pity. Three canisters of diesel - that’s a fortune here.
We are sitting round our festive shell box, stirring the lukewarm tea in our cups. The dismal winter covers the field right up to Goity. Somewhere behind the fog a lone self-propelled gun is firing, and occasionally the infantry shoot from the perimeter trenches. It’s cold and damp.
But still, we are content with life. Yesterday Pincha traded some cigarettes with the artillery for two shell crates, and we also have some firewood. He is an indispensable soldier to us; now he’s cutting the boards with his bayonet and throwing the chips onto the fire. He’s a city boy, but you can’t tell. In his crumpled, holey boots, singed jacket and ripped trousers he is the scruffiest member of our platoon. He spends every spare second sleeping, and he can’t even be bothered to wash. The lice make the most of this and crawl about him in columns, having laid their paths to the most succulent places, his belly and armpits. But then Pincha knows how to make a fire in a puddle of water, light a cigarette in driving rain or sleep like a baby during mortaring.
Best of all, he has an incredible instinct for food and cigarettes. As well as finding firewood he’s also managed to pawn to the cooks a trophy case of rifle rounds with a displaced centre of gravity, so they spin. We don’t need them and the cooks use them to dice cabbage. It’s an easy trick: you cover the cabbage with a helmet and fire one of these spinning rounds into it, the bullet goes ratatatat inside, and your cabbage is instantly diced. All you have to do is hold the helmet down with your foot so it doesn’t spin off.
Red flecks dance on Pincha’s face and heat radiates through the dug-out. We feel good. We don’t have warmth very often, even more rarely than food and tobacco, and because we now have two whole shell crates to burn, our spirits are soaring. The warmth instils in us the expectation of some miracle - some thing must happen, something good. Maybe there will be peace, maybe we’ll get demobbed, and maybe - the things that come to mind, eh? - the supply officer will in a fit of generosity give us a double portion of pearl barley today instead of oats. It is New Year’s Eve, after all.
But our mood is festive anyway. Our table of goodies is resplendent to the point of disbelief. Between the twelve of us we have two tins of beans, two tins of stewed meat, five tins of fish and, best of all, three tins of condensed milk! One tin between four of us. We haven’t had such abundance for a long time.
We’ve also got humanitarian aid biscuits to go with the milk, thirty each, courtesy of President Boris Yeltsin. It’s good that ours is the smallest platoon in the battalion - it makes it easier to share out the aid packages. They also contain New Year’s cards:
‘Dear Russian soldier,’ writes the president. ‘In this difficult and trying hour for our Motherland, when dark forces... We shall not yield an inch... We will strike back... But don’t forget that your duty is not only to defend constitutional order, but also to cast your vote in the coming elections. I hope that you will make the right choice on that day.’
‘And ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ adds Oleg. ‘May you rest in peace.’
‘Amen,’ says Pincha.
But in the end we didn’t get to make any choice. The election campaign agitators decided not to go to the combat zone with their mobile ballot stations.
‘What’s the time, Oleg?’ I ask.
‘Five to twelve,’ he answers. He is the only one in our platoon with a watch: he picked it up in Grozny and has guarded it like the apple of his eye ever since.
‘So, gentlemen, what do you say we get down to it?’
We clink cups of tea, drink, and set upon the condensed milk, scooping it out with biscuits. The war taught us to eat properly, and we scoop out a little at a time and chew it thoroughly. If you eat in small measures then you can fool a hungry stomach and create the illusion of plenty.
Condensed milk! My oh my! Back home I couldn’t stand the stuff, but here a tin of it is my ultimate dream.
After we’ve eaten our fill we all collapse back from the crate and contentedly stroke our sated bellies. We light up. Life’s pretty good right now after our feast with condensed milk, and even the president had spared us a thought. It’s New Year’s Eve.
‘Oleg, what’s the time?’
‘Ten past twelve.’
‘Shall we go and shoot?’
‘Come on then.’
We take magazines that we filled earlier with tracer rounds, throw back the dug-out flap and go out into the black southern night.
The dark is impenetrable; you can’t even see the hand in front of your
face. It seems there is no sky, no ground, no life, no light, no joy, no love, and no heroism. Just night and death. Because night is the time of death. Every time the sun goes down, life dies. We don’t know if we will live to see the next day, and all we can do is freeze motionless in our trenches, press ourselves into the ground and wait for sunrise as we listen into the darkness. Our eyesight is useless but our hearing is razor sharp.
At night the wounded die. At night soldiers go out of their minds. Back on that wretched mountain, trapped within fifteen metres of the enemy trenches, they heard their shouts, heard the screams of the prisoners as the rebels cut off their fingers and then burst out laughing.
At night we are alone. Now I am sitting with Oleg, two little glimmers of life under a heavy black sky. Each of us is on his own.
‘Bloody hell, it’s a bit unnerving, this silence,’ says Oleg.
‘Screw the lot of them! It’s New Year, after all. A new century! A new millennium! It’s our given right, come on,’ I say.
We point the barrels to the sky and pull the trigger. The rifles kick and thunder in our hands, shattering the silence. Two lonely streams of tracer rounds shoot over our heads, enter the low clouds and vanish in the frosty murk.
And suddenly, as if receiving an order, the whole battalion joins in. Everyone is firing ceaselessly, letting off magazines in one burst as if in protest at the wretched life of the soldier. Tracers fan out and divide the sky, fly into the mountains and into the field. To the right of us the recon fire from a machine-gun, to the left the drivers use their under-barrel grenade launchers. In front of us medics throw smoke flares and behind us anti-aircraft gunners pound away. The shells crackle into the clouds and explode, and illuminate the positions of our battalion in misty, watery flashes.
It’s a fantastic sight. Green, red and white tracers, illumination flares, orange smoke. War would be very beautiful if it weren’t so frightening. The HQ commander comes out of the command tent in his slippers and runs over to us. He punches me in the jaw. Oleg manages to dodge.
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