STALKER Southern Comfort

by Balazs Pataki

  A Shellful of Memories

  Kiev, Rusanovka quarter, 18:02:31 EEST

  The old apartment blocks look depressingly gray in the heavy rain. A Lada Niva with the SBU crest on its doors drives along Davidova Street, its windscreen wipers fighting a losing battle with the thick raindrops. It stops in front of an apartment block. Tarasov, wearing a water-proof raincoat over his leave uniform and carrying a suitcase, gets out. He waves to the SBU driver and hurries towards the entrance where a lonely boy plays with a ball. The ball shoots out into the rain after an ill-directed kick. Tarasov skillfully kicks it back to him.

  “Thank you, officer,” the boy says catching the ball and curiously studying the medal ribbons on Tarasov’s uniform. “Do you fire real weapons in the army?”

  “We do.”

  “And did you ever kill someone?”

  “No.”

  “I guessed so,” the boy laughs. “My parents keep telling me that our army is no good.”

  He starts kicking his ball against the wall again. Tarasov hides his bitter smile and leaves the boy to his game. Stepping inside, he doesn’t mind the smell of garbage and pesticides. It was like that even back in his childhood. Just like the elevator, still operational after five decades without any apparent maintenance. A short, silver-haired woman opens the door, plumped up by age, with only her deep blue eyes telling of her former beauty.

  “Misha! What a surprise,” she cries out as she embraces Tarasov. He returns her hug.

  “Good to see you, mother.”

  “Please tell me you are on leave, sinok,” his mother says helping him out of his raincoat. “It’s been ages since I saw you last, my son.”

  “Five months and three weeks, to be exact.”

  “Yes. Are you well?”

  “I’m… normalno.”

  Throughout the trip from the air base, Tarasov had been trying to find the proper words to greet her with. His feelings were mixed: the grief and exhaustion of the last mission, the happiness and relief of being home again, the concern and anxiety about his new task – it is too much for him to put into a few words. Eventually, he says exactly what is on his mind.

  “Is there beer in the fridge?”

  His mother rushes into the kitchen. “I wasn’t expecting you. Why didn’t you call? I don’t have any decent food for you and you must be ravenous. Such a shame on me!” Tarasov takes off his shoes and makes himself comfortable in a chair in the living room. Only now does he start to realize that he is actually home. His mother arrives with a glass and a bottle of Obolon beer. “I still have a few galushki from yesterday… do you want some? Of course you do…”

  “Uh-hum,” replies Tarasov gulping the chilled, bitter drink. The rather ordinary Obolon tastes so good it’s as if he had never had beer before.

  “I see you were thirsty.” His mother looks down at him, radiating happiness. “Tell me, how are things in Zhitomir?”

  “Boring,” Tarasov replies, wiping the excess foam from his lips.

  “But what have you been doing there all the time?”

  “I told you many times before, mother. We’re a logistics division, repairing trucks.”

  “Couldn’t you at least come home more often? You are an officer after all.”

  “That’s why I can’t… you know how it goes. While the cat’s away, the mice will play.” Tarasov admits to himself that what he just said does actually fit his situation in the Zone.

  His mother turns to the TV. “I heard Baskov and Fedorova are getting married,” she says.

  “I don’t really care about celebrities, mother.”

  “But I do love their songs. By the way… will you meet Tanya while you are home?”

  “No. She wrote me one of those letters a few weeks ago.”

  “What letters?”

  “You know, mother,” Tarasov explains patiently, “a letter beginning with ‘my dearest’ and ending with ‘I hope we can still be friends’.”

  “Is that so?” His mother sounds disappointed. “I’m sorry to hear that. I took her for such a decent woman.”

  “Maybe she got impatient.”

  “My mother waited four years for your grandfather. I don’t understand…”

  “Girls are different nowadays. Tanya wrote she joined a dating site on the internet. Just for fun, of course. Then she hooked up with a dentist from London and fell in love with him. How romantic! Can I have another beer?”

  “Such a negodnitsa… I’m sure you will find another one.”

  “Why, you don’t keep them in the fridge?”

  “I meant another girl. You are still young, and have a safe job in the army,” his mother says as she follows him into the kitchen. “They do keep you safe, don’t they?”

  “Oh yes,” Tarasov reassuringly says and opens the fridge. “The only danger is of being bored to death.”

  “Mishka, my son…”

  “Where’s the bottle opener?”

  “On the table.” She eagerly gets it for him. “You know, when Fedorova and Baskov were on TV last night, I prayed for your happiness…”

  Tarasov cuts into her words. “Mother, I’m home for a single night and I have to leave early in the morning. Could you do me a favor and switch off that damned TV?”

  “The army is a bad influence on you… you were such a sweet boy before.” Shaking her head, his mother goes back to the living room and picks up the remote. “You never used to use such profanities.”

  Tarasov cannot resist laughing, but suddenly feels compassion for his mother living alone in a sea of concrete buildings, having only television and the neighbor’s gossip for company and above all else believing that her only son tends to trucks in a dull garrison.

  “Mother,” he says as softly as he can, “please, could I have some coffee?”

  “But of course, why…”

  Tarasov walks back to the living room and finishes his second beer. With the TV switched off, he can hear the rain rapping on the window. He steps to the big cupboard where his mother’s memories are neatly lined up in a china cabinet: cheap souvenirs from trade union holidays in the Crimea, faded postcards and other trinkets from the long-gone Soviet world that formed the backdrop to his parents’ lives.

  The exhilarating smell of freshly boiled coffee comes from the kitchen. Tarasov takes one of his mother’s cigarettes that lie on the table and lights it up. The smoke twists and curls on the window glass. Outside, beyond the grey curtain of rain and the canal, lies a park that stretches into the distance.

  This is how it must have been before.

  With Pripyat in his mind he feels the Zone creeping back into him. He wishes he could be back there now; he wishes Degtyarev hadn’t come today.

  “I love the bracelet you gave me for last Christmas,” he hears his mother saying from the kitchen. “The elevator was out of order last week and I had to climb the stairs, but imagine, my old joints didn’t hurt at all… That amulet seems to really work. Did you really get it from a UN observer from India?”

  A smile comes to Tarasov’s face. The bracelet has a piece from a Soul artifact inside.

  “I only wish it was a bit lighter, sinok… lead is not very elegant.”

  Too bad, mother. The thing emits radiation.

  “You better not tamper with it,” he shouts back. “It will lose its healing power if you remove it from the lead bracelet.”

  China jangles as his mother arrives from the kitchen, bringing with her the smell of freshly boiled coffee.

  “I didn’t make your coffee too strong,” she says. “If you need to leave early tomorrow, you better have a good night’s sleep. I switched on the heater in the bathroom. You’ll have hot water in twenty minutes. The galushki will be ready by then.”

  “Thank you. I love your galushki, you know.”

  His mother sits down with a satisfied sigh and stirs the sugar in her coffee. “Why do you have to leave so early?”

  Returning her glance, Tarasov feels sadness and regr
et over the lies he has to tell her. But for once, he can tell the truth.

  “I have some unfinished business down there… in the south.”

  Then he switches on the TV so as to direct his mother’s attention to a Brazilian soap opera with Russian voice-over, before she can ask more questions that could only lead to him telling more lies. He joins her on the sofa and stares at the screen, sipping the hot coffee and trying to switch off his exhausted mind.

  Alejandro, eu não quero mais viver assim!

  Alekhandro, ja bolshe ne mogu tak zhit.

  Too many melodramatic exclamations sound from the TV. They are made even worse by the male speaker emotionlessly dubbing the actress’ theatrical sighs. Frustrated, Tarasov gets up, takes his suitcase and walks into his room, closing the door.

  He steps to the shelves, moving his fingers along the rows of books with a movement that is almost a caress. It occurs to him to take a book for the long flight but a half-empty bottle of vodka draws his attention. It still stands on the table, just as he left it when he was here almost half a year ago. He opens it and takes a swig. Tarasov looks around in the cramped room holding the memories of a life he has almost forgotten by now. In the corner a guitar stands, which he never learned how to play. He moves his fingers across the transparent plastic boxes holding his compact discs. To his surprise, they are not dusty – his mother must keep the room neat and clean, maybe waiting for the day when he comes back for good. Aside the big pile of old, yellowed issues of Guns Magazine, an outdated desktop computer stands on the table. Next to it, another plastic box holds more compact disks.

  Dammit, he thinks, I wouldn’t mind playing Doom for old times’ sake, if I wasn’t so tired. Or Baldur’s Gate…Degtyarev doesn’t know but that’s how I learned English – translating all those endless conversations with a dictionary. And Guns Magazine.

  A cartridge casing lies besides the keyboard. Tarasov takes and studies it with a sad smile. It is all that remains of the first live cartridge he ever fired.

  It’s been a long way, old friend.

  Holding the olive-green shell in his hand, the boy’s words come to his mind. What he said about the army was exactly what he had felt when arriving at the Zone, three years ago, as a lieutenant. When he reported for duty, he had been hoping for an exciting and dangerous assignment. Khaletskiy, then still a major, ordered him to gather twenty bottles of vodka instead. When he’d set out to follow this order, bitching and grumbling under his breath, he still hadn’t known that it would take him a week and a trip all the way to the abandoned industrial site of Rostok, fighting off mutants and hostile Stalkers all the way, before eventually sneaking into the Stalker base disguised as a Stalker himself, wearing the light suit taken from a rookie’s corpse after the idiot was crazy enough to open fire on him. He had developed a liking for clandestine missions – there were enough corpses bearing a faction’s characteristic armor, from hand-made Stalker suits to Freedom’s more sophisticated body armor and the old OMON tactical suits worn by mercenaries. It was not the thrill of sneaking he liked but the relief of moving around freely, without unnecessary kills. He realized soon enough that the worst enemy was not the humans who tried to survive in the Zone, but the creatures who had once been human but hadn’t survived as such: zombified civilians, Stalkers and soldiers turned into mindless killing machines by the Brain Scorcher; controllers, like the one who made the weakest-minded member of his squad kill the lieutenant; burers - ugly, fat dwarves, creating anti-gravity fields that repelled bullets; snorks - jumping at their prey like predatory frogs and tearing them to pieces. Animal-like mutants, even if dreadful at first sight, were at least predictable.

  Luckily for him, he was away on another intelligence-gathering mission when die-hard Stalkers captured Major Khaletskiy and the Spetsnaz raid to free him turned into a disaster. Khaletskiy eventually escaped and Tarasov’s next mission was to eliminate the Stalker leader responsible for the military’s bloody nose. The assassination brought him a promotion – and the first doubts about who his real enemy was. What he already knew by then about Major Khaletskiy’s shady dealings, achieved through the blood of soldiers and Stalkers alike, caused the first cracks to appear in his hitherto unshakeable sense of duty.

  Then the day came when Strelok, the Marked One, opened up the path to the CNPP’s secrets. Friend and foe had rushed to the nuclear power plant to see if the legend of the Wish Granter were true, mercilessly killing each other en route. Freedom ambushing Duty in the Red Forest; Duty storming Freedom’s base at the abandoned military warehouses. And all factions and Loners bogged down in a fight against the Monolith, the mysterious and fanatic protectors of the Wish Granter.

  The military wanted to have its share, too. Khaletskiy had bought himself a step up in ranks and was replaced by Major Kuznetsov, but neither of them was in the cramped compartments of the helicopters and BTR personnel carriers that stormed the CNPP. As always, it was the grunts that had to remove the obstacles between the generals and anything that would make them rich – artifacts, information, whatever. And just like always, most of them died. By then, Tarasov had become a squad leader. His men survived the onslaught brought down upon them by the fanatic, but heavily armed and well-organized Monolithians. In the aftermath of the operation, Kuznetsov became rich – soldiers were obliged to hand over any artifacts they found, and there were many artifacts around the CNPP. Tarasov was made captain; an empty pat on the back for services rendered.

  For the army, obtaining control over the CNPP was like candle light to a moth. The Holy Grail of the generals. Again, an operation was launched and again it failed. Holed up in Pripyat and prepared to make a last stand against Monolith forces and mercenaries, help came from where the beset Spetsnaz had least expected: Degtyarev had turned up with a rag-tag band of Stalkers, whom he almost opened fire upon when they emerged from a secret tunnel leading to Pripyat. Later Strelok himself showed up, alone, but carrying a treasure trove of information about the best-kept secrets of the Zone. When he was rewarded and promoted to major after Operation Fairway, Tarasov couldn’t care less if that was for bravery under enemy fire or for catching a bullet for Strelok, the keeper of all secrets. All that counted was that he got a week’s leave.

  And then it happened that I met her, he thinks looking at a photograph pinned to the wall. He puts the shell back into its place.

  The photograph, not of very good quality and obviously taken with a mobile phone in a mirror, shows a pretty, blonde woman with blue eyes and full lips.

  “You sent me one single photograph and even on that, you were making that stupid duck face,” Tarasov grumbles to the photograph. He tears it from the wall, then crumples and tosses it under the neatly made bed. “Slag… I prefer brunettes anyway.”

  Everything looks to him as if he would be trespassing in a stranger’s room – he might have survived everything that the Zone threw at him, but the young man who once dreamed and loved here did not.

  Tarasov opens his suitcase and takes out the PDA. Waiting for it to start up, he takes his old school map from the shelf. It opens up almost on its own at the two-page map of the USSR. One line, drawn by a faded pen stroke, connects Kiev with a place in Afghanistan, still marked on the outdated map as ‘Democratic Republic of Afghanistan”. In the margin, distances and names of places in childish handwriting remind him of a childish plan to go there.

  I wanted to hitch-hike but didn’t get past the first militiaman.

  When he turns the pages to find a closer map of the area, a black and white photograph falls out.

  Picking it up from the floor and looking at it, Tarasov’s sight becomes hazy. It shows three young soldiers in ragged fatigue leggings, wearing stone-age flak vests over their striped tee-shirts. With a broad smile that flashes bad teeth, they lean against an armored vehicle. The soldier in the middle, wearing a tank driver’s black headwear, looks like a younger version of himself: a lean face with sunken cheeks, dark eyes and a smirk. Only his moustach
e and long hair tells how long ago the picture was taken.

  He turns the photograph over to read the few words on the back, the handwriting looking oddly old-fashioned: With love from Kunduz, October 1987. Yuriy and the gang.

  “That damned operator has the mind of a controller,” he murmurs to himself, putting the photograph in his pocket. “He mentioned my father to motivate me into this insane mission.”

  With a muted beep, his PDA signals its readiness. Tarasov opens the map, switches to 3D mode and scrolls all the way from Rusanovka to Afghanistan. A smile comes to his face when he compares the capabilities of his PDA to the yellowed school map. The state of the art combat gear waiting for him in Termez comes to Tarasov’s mind, and his smile hardens.

  Things will be different now. And I swear by God - I’ll make the dushmans suffer.

  He hears his mother knocking on the door.

  “Misha! Come, dinner is ready!”

  “I’m coming,” he reluctantly replies. “Just a minute!”

  “I hope you didn’t start playing video games again… you will never change, sinok!”