Free Fall (6 page)

They gave me a pair of thick rubber gloves that went
all the way up to my armpits, typically used in the chemical protection units. Then they gave me a long rope with a slipknot at the top, like the kind people hang themselves with. One guy explained succinctly how to move the bodies:

‘You take two of them, tie their legs together with the rope and then drag them to the truck. Don't go through their pockets and don't take anything from the bodies, otherwise you'll be in deep shit. If you find any weapons, take them to the sergeant.'

The battle had taken place a few days earlier. There were bullet holes everywhere, and the streets were filled with craters from the explosions from mortar fire and hand grenades. At the entrance to the village there was a Russian armoured car, gutted and burned. The wheels didn't have tyres anymore, the back doors were slightly ajar and you could see a leg dangling out and an army boot. It was strange, like looking at a painting. I had the impression that I was entering a dimension where time had stopped: everything was dead, nothing living could pass there.

I took a few steps in the direction my new comrade had pointed and I saw a corpse in a ditch near the main road that led to the centre of the town. It was striking, because it didn't resemble any corpse I'd ever seen before – and I've seen quite a few dead people in my day. The ones I'd found the most revolting had been the bodies of the drowned that I'd pulled out of the river – unfortunately, some of them had even been friends – and the thing that had struck me most was the smell. When they were still in the water you
didn't notice at all, but once they were brought to shore they started to stink so badly just being near them made you want to vomit. The bodies of the drowned get terribly deformed; they swell up, full of rotting parts and leaking fluids, until they look like a big ball of gelatin. When I was a boy, in the summer of 1992, after the war between Transnistria and Moldavia, I saw many war corpses in the streets, but I'd been almost indifferent to those bodies. I was too occupied with trying to find the weapons and ammunition, and I hadn't given the dead much thought.

My first body in Chechnya, however, made a different impression on me. I felt pity, because it seemed like he'd been taken by surprise, at a moment when he hadn't expected anything bad to happen. He lay straight, his legs extended, his hands joined over his heart, as though before dying he had tried to keep his soul from coming out. His face was completely white; his skin looked like marble, all taut over his bones, but the veins on his neck and temples were black. His eyes were wide open, so dark you couldn't tell their colour. His mouth was slightly open and you could see his teeth, stained with blood.

I studied his body for a moment and then I grabbed him by his bulletproof vest near his neck, and tried to pull him to the road. At first glance he had seemed hefty, but when I pulled him up out of the ditch I was shocked. He weighed almost nothing; it was like moving a wet rag. I carefully examined his uniform, which in certain spots was paper thin, as if beneath it there were no longer a body but only the impression of a human being, the depth of a piece of cardboard. Standing there, motionless, with
that poor man in my arms, I felt a sudden hard, violent tug coming from inside his body. Terrified, I instinctively slackened my grip.

The body dropped, and from the vest – where, a second before, my hand had been – came a giant sewer rat. His tail was greasy and disgustingly hairless, the skin glistening. As he came into the light of day, the rat gave me a look full of hatred, and then slowly crept back down into the ditch. Frozen, I tried to comprehend what I had just seen. Behind me, I heard the voice of someone else on the clean-up crew:

‘Never grab them by the vest, they're full of rats. They're dangerous, those beasts – they eat human flesh, so they're strong and aggressive. Last year a rat almost tore three fingers off one guy in a single bite. Follow my advice; just grab the bodies by the legs and before you tie them, tap them with your foot a couple times, and those pests will run away.'

I couldn't tell whether the man was messing with me or telling the truth. Either way, from that day on I did as he said.

When the truck was full, we climbed in and sat on the benches at the sides. The corpses were piled on top of one another in front of us. They made us eat in front of the bodies so we would get used to their presence. Sometimes, when the truck went around a corner on the trip back, the corpses fell on top of us. It bothered me the first few times, but after a while I got used to it. I'd shove them off and put them back on the pile. I learned to treat bodies like objects of no importance.

After two weeks of corpses and rats, they told me that I could officially become one of the saboteurs.

Everything in the saboteur unit seemed chaotic. At first glance one might think that we were a group of regular guys, people who had nothing to do with military life and had somehow ended up in the middle of a war. In reality, we had our own philosophy, a series of very precise rules and most importantly our own way of understanding war. The only thing the superiors really cared about was the outcome of a sabotage operation or the continual patrol of the territory. Other than that we could act however we liked. We were autonomous – we just had to do our job well.

The group was very close knit; we were more like a family than a military unit. This happens with people who have to be together no matter what – when you share tough times you develop a sort of collective brain, an ability to understand the world by putting aside your personal point of view and using the mentality of the group.

Often the drafted soldiers – especially the younger ones – were really angry, because they felt trapped, exploited by the regime. These feelings formed a wall of hatred between people, and made day-to-day life difficult. Especially in the large army units, where hazing was very common, there was no communication between the soldiers and none with the officers. This is why internal disputes were so frequent, and when disciplinary measures were taken many soldiers became deserters – and some committed suicide.

The effects could clearly be seen during war operations. Many units weren't able to carry out their assigned tasks because the soldiers didn't know one another or were afraid of their comrades. They were subject to frequent breakdowns; they felt alone and they didn't trust anyone.

Among the saboteurs, on the other hand, hazing didn't exist. We were like brothers, because each of us knew that in hard times it's always better to have a brother by your side than an enemy.

I had been with my team for just a few days when I witnessed the tragic end of a group of infantrymen. Ten young soldiers were killed by one of their own, a machine-gunner who lost his mind during a mission and started shooting at everyone who tried to come near him.

When war gets tough, and emotions run very high, the stress can push you over the edge. It happens to everyone sooner or later, and it happened to me too. In times like that it's important to have the support of people who will stand by you. You need someone who will give you a word of encouragement, listen to you, or keep you from feeling alone and abandoned. If there's not a solid bond among your comrades, the person in trouble can become very dangerous – then everything ends in tragedy, just as it did with that machine-gunner.

I remember that for an instant I had him in the crosshairs of my rifle. I could see his face, he was desperate, his eyes were crazed and he kept on shouting something
incomprehensible, shooting and crying. I followed him with my scope but I couldn't bring myself to kill him – it seemed unnatural to shoot one of my own. In the end, since he wasn't responding to our requests to stop fire, the paras were forced to shoot him down.

We knew that to survive we had to trust our comrades, but we also had someone else to lean on: Captain Nosov. He was like an older brother. We knew that whatever he did, he did it to save our skins, so that we could return home to our mothers alive and in one piece.

Nosov belonged to the generation of those whom the old generals referred to as ‘gladiators', so called because many soldiers from that draft had never experienced a time of peace. They had gone to the war in Afghanistan as young men, and had embarked on a long, sad life, bouncing from one war to another without rest, taking part in every bloody conflict that broke out in USSR territory before and after its fall.

He had fought in all the post-Soviet wars; for a time he had even been stationed in the former Yugoslavia, where he was an instructor for the special units of the Serbian army. When the Chechen conflict broke out, he'd been one of the first Russians sent out there.

He was an expert saboteur, old Ivanisch, and every time one of us mentioned his name it was evident that the soldiers in the other units knew and respected him. Our enemies knew him well too, because when he fought in the war in Afghanistan, Chechnya was still part of the USSR and many Chechens had actually done their military service under him. It was incredible to think that the same
soldiers – now grown men and professional soldiers – were now fighting against us. It often happened that one of the Chechen prisoners would recognise among the Russian soldiers an old friend from military school with whom they had once fought.

Sometimes Nosov would tell us war stories, and what struck me the most about him was the tenderness of the words he used to describe all the brutality and horror of social collapse. It was like he was talking about something very dear to him, like family. At times even the enemy seemed like a fundamental part of his existence, as though without it his life would make no sense.

In my head, I had extremely contradictory images of our captain. Sometimes he seemed too brutish, almost inhuman, while at other times I felt that he cared more about us than he cared about himself. In time I would come to understand that for Ivanisch a single person was less important than the whole unit. Our personal histories didn't interest him. He saw in each of us a role; we were part of a mechanism intended to carry out specific tasks. This was his way of caring about us; he couldn't allow himself to get too attached to the individual.

Nosov didn't like to talk about himself or his family; we knew only that he had a sister named Rita, and that once in a while she would write to him.

He burned those letters right after reading them, and if the circumstances allowed it he would immediately ask one of us – often me – to write a reply. He always said the same things; he told her how charming the places we found ourselves in were, how the sun went down, how
beautiful the rivers that flowed high in the mountains were. He explained how hard life was for the people there, and then every so often would ask us to add something of our own, ‘for beauty's sake', as he would say. In every letter he would reassure his sister, telling her to ‘keep clear of the war' – of course he didn't write that he was actually part of an active unit on the front lines; instead, he invented little stories about us, the men who were guarding a warehouse with him, in a safe place, on some Russian air base.

All we knew about Nosov was that he didn't have a house, a wife or children. His relationships with women were limited to the little parties organised by his officer friends, where young nurses and cooks would go. He himself called those soirées ‘bordellos', and after every one they had to carry him back to the unit. He'd come in very drunk, semi-unconscious and with scratch marks from a woman on his face. All the officials said that Nosov was a hit with the ladies because he had a ‘big calibre'.

There weren't many of us; perhaps that's why we became close to one another so quickly.

The first time I felt a strong sense of solidarity was during one of my first battles. We were walking close to the wall of a house when we were attacked by surprise. As we tried to cross the yard a group of enemy soldiers lying in wait on the roof of the house across the way opened fire on us. A hail of bullets came down around us, and pieces of brick flew off the wall and ricocheted. We took off running. In the chaos, however, we managed to keep calm; nobody changed direction or passed anyone
else, and we moved as we always did; three covered, the others ran, then switch . . . We were in complete synchrony, linked parts of a single organism. As I ran with the others, that feeling gave me courage.

Of course, living together wasn't easy at first – each of us had led very different lives, until we found ourselves in hell alongside a bunch of complete strangers.

My comrades came from all over Russia, and obviously each had his own story behind him, but we had all been marked by the same things: run-ins with the law, unstable families, difficult personalities . . .

The oldest comrade was Moscow, who, as you can tell by the nickname, came from the nation's capital. He'd been called to arms two years late, because as soon as he had come of age he had run away from home to avoid military duty, but ultimately even he, like me, had been caught and sent to war.

One of our other brothers was Shoe. He had two juvenile convictions for burglary under his belt. His name was really Viktor, but he had earned his nickname because he never wanted to take off his shoes. Nosov was always yelling at him, telling him that if he didn't wash his feet, sooner or later the smell would poison the entire unit. Shoe was always cheerful and had an athlete's physique: he was nimble like a mouse, and he could fit through even the narrowest of spaces.

Another was Zhenya, aka Deer, so called for his hunting
skills. He came from the region of Altai, in southern Siberia. His parents were scholars; his mother was an archaeologist or anthropologist, something like that. Deer was a normal guy, but when he got mad or didn't believe what you were telling him his eyes became two slits so narrow that they disappeared.

Then there was Spoon, whose real name was Roman. He was physically strong, a little wild in his way of doing things. He would eat whatever he came across; he was always hungry. He was originally from a remote village in the woods at the foot of the Ural mountains. He got his nickname because of his surname, which in Russian sounded very similar to the word ‘spoon'.