Zinky Boys (17 page)

I remember all that and wonder: did he really shoot people out there, that little boy we loved and pampered?

I went to visit him at training-camp in Ashkhabad. ‘Andryusha,' I told him, ‘I'm going to have a word with the Commandant. You're my only child and … '

‘Don't you dare, Mum! They'll all laugh at me and say I'm a mummy's boy.'

‘How do you like it here?'

‘The lieutenant's great, he's just one of the lads, but the cap
tain's quite likely to give us a punch in the face if he feels like it.'

‘What? Grandma and I never once even gave you a smack on your behind!'

‘It's a man's life here, Mum. Things go on here that you and grandma … Well, it's best you don't know about them.'

He was only truly mine when he was tiny. He'd jump in and out of puddles like a little devil, and I'd scrub him clean, wrap him up in a towel and cuddle him. I thought nothing could ever take him away from me and I wouldn't let anyone else look after him. But they got him in the end …

When he was about fourteen I persuaded him to go to technical college, to learn the building trade. I thought he'd have an easier time of it when he was called up — he might even avoid conscription and go on to higher education. His ambition was to be a forester. He was always happy in the forest, he could recognise birds from their song and knew just where to find which wild flowers. In that way he was just like his father, who's from Siberia. He was so fond of nature he even stopped them cutting the grass in the yard in front of the flats. ‘Everything's got a right to grow!' Andryusha fancied the forester's uniform and cap: ‘It's like an army uniform, Mum,' he'd say.

Did he really shoot human beings out there?

He often wrote to us from Ashkhabad. I've read one of his letters a thousand times. I know it off by heart:

‘Dearest Mum and Grandma. I've been in the army over three months now and I'm doing fine. I can cope with all the things we have to do here and haven't had any complaints from above. Recently our company went to a field-training camp in the mountains 80 kilometres from Ashkhabad. They spent two weeks on a special course preparing for mountain warfare, including tactics and firearms practice. Three other lads and I didn't go with them. We stayed at the base because we've been working in a furniture factory nearby, building a new extension. In return our company is getting new tables from the factory. We've been doing bricklaying and plastering, both of which I'm good at.

‘You asked whether I got your letter. Yes, I did, and the parcel
and the ten roubles inside! We spent the money on quite a few meals in the canteen and bought sweets as well … '

I tried to cheer myself up with the hope that he might go on being used for building work. I didn't mind if they made him put up their own private dachas and garages
†
, just so long as he wasn't sent away.

This was in 1981. There were all sorts of rumours of wholesale slaughter going on in Afghanistan, but how could we believe that kind of thing? We knew very few people; on television we saw pictures of Soviet and Afghan troops fraternising, tanks strewn with flowers, peasants kissing the ground they'd been allotted by the Socialist government …

The next time I went to visit him at Ashkhabad the hotel was full. ‘Fine, I'll sleep on the floor!' I said. ‘I've come a long way to visit my son and I'm not budging from here!'

‘OK, you can share a four-bed room. There's another mother in there who's come to see her son.'

This woman told me (and this was the first I'd heard of it) that they were selecting a new group of conscripts to go to Afghanistan. She told me she'd come with a large amount of money, ready to pay off someone who'd make sure her son wasn't among them. She went home a happy woman, and her last words to me were: ‘Don't be a naive idiot!'

My mother burst into tears when I told her the story. ‘You should have gone on your knees and begged them! You could have offered them your earrings.' Those earrings, worth a few kopecks, were the most expensive things in our lives. To my mother, who'd lived more than modestly all her life, they were riches. My God, what have we been reduced to? If he hadn't gone some other boy would have had to take his place, some other boy with a mother …

Andryusha himself never understood how he came to be chosen for the paratroop battalion and Afghanistan. He was terribly chuffed about it, though, and didn't try to hide his feelings.

I know nothing about military matters, so perhaps there's something I don't understand here. But I wish someone would explain to me why my son was kept busy bricklaying and plastering when he should have been training for war. The authorities knew what they were sending those boys into. Even the papers published photographs of the mujahedin, strong men thirty or forty years old, on their own land and with their wives and children beside them … How did he come to join the paratroop battalion
one week
before flying off to Afghanistan? Even I know that they choose the toughest boys for the paras, and then put them through specially gruelling training. Afterwards the Commandant of the training-camp wrote to me. ‘Your son was outstanding in both his military and political training,' he said.
When
did he become outstanding? And
where
? At his furniture factory? I gave my son to them and they didn't even bother to make a soldier of him.

We had only a single letter from Afghanistan. ‘Don't worry, everything's lovely and peaceful here,' it said. ‘It's beautiful and there's no fighting.' He was just reassuring us so that we wouldn't start writing letters to have him transferred. They were just raw boys, almost children, who were thrown into the fire and accepted it as a matter of honour. Well, that's the way we brought them up.

He was killed within a month of arriving in Afghanistan. My boy, my skinny little thing. How did he die? I'll never know.

They brought him back to me ten days after his death. Although I hadn't been informed, of course, my dreams during those ten days were full of my losing and not being able to find things. There were so many signs … The kettle whistled strangely on the stove. And I love house-plants, I always had lots on the window-sill, the cupboards and the bookshelves, but every morning, during those ten days, I dropped the pots when I watered them. They just seemed to jump out of my hands and break, so there was a perpetual smell of damp earth in the flat …

I saw the cars stopping outside our block — two jeeps and an ambulance. I knew straightaway they were coming to us. I opened the door: ‘Don't speak! Don't say a word! I hate you! Just give me my son's body. I'll bury him my own way, alone. We don't need your military honours.'

1st Lieutenant, Battery Commander

Only a madman will tell you the whole truth about what went on there, that's for sure. There's a lot you'll never know. When the truth is too terrible it doesn't get told. Nobody wants to be the first to come out with it — it's just too risky.

Did you know that drugs and fur coats were smuggled in in coffins? Yes, right in there with the bodies! Have you ever seen necklaces of dried ears? Yes, trophies of war, rolled up into little leaves and kept in matchboxes! Impossible? You can't believe such things of our glorious Soviet boys? Well, they could and did happen, and you won't be able to cover them up with a coat of that cheap silver paint they use to paint the railings round our graves and war memorials …

I didn't go over there with a desire to kill people. I'm a normal man. We were told over and over again that we were there to fight bandits, that we'd be heroes and that everyone would be grateful to us. I remember the posters: ‘Soldiers, Let Us Strengthen Our Southern Borders!' ‘Uphold The Honour Of Your Unit!' ‘Flourish, Lenin's Motherland!' ‘Glory To The Communist Party!' When I got home I caught sight of myself in a big mirror — over there I'd only had a small one — and didn't recognise the person staring back at me, with his different eyes in a different face. I can't define how I'd changed, but I had, outside and inside.

I was serving in Czechoslovakia when I heard about my transfer to Afghanistan.

‘Why me?' I asked.

‘Because you're not married.'

I made my preparations as if I were going away on ordinary army business. What should I pack? No one knew, because we didn't have any Afgantsi with us. Someone recommended rubber boots, which I didn't use once in my two years there and left in Kabul. We flew from Tashkent sitting on crates of ammunition and landed in Shindanta. The first thing I saw was the Tsarandoi, or Afghan police, armed with Soviet tommy-guns of World War II vintage. Soviet and Afghan soldiers were equally dirty and shabby and looked as though they'd just crawled out of the tren
ches — a sharp contrast to what I'd been used to in Czechoslovakia. Casualties were being loaded on to the plane. One, I remember, had shrapnel wounds in the stomach: ‘This one won't survive, he'll die on the way,' I heard one of the helicopter crew, ferrying the wounded from the front line, comment casually. I was shocked how calmly they talked of death.

I think that was the most incomprehensible thing of all over there — the attitude to death. As I said before, the whole truth you'd never … What's unthinkable here was everyday reality over there. It's frightening and unpleasant to have to kill, you think, but you soon realise that what you really find objectionable is shooting someone point-blank. Killing
en masse
, in a group, is exciting, even — and I've seen this myself — fun. In peacetime our guns are stacked in a pyramid, with each pyramid under separate lock and key and protected by alarms. Over there you had your gun with you all the time — it was a part of you. In the evening you'd shoot out the light bulb with your pistol if you were feeling lazy — it was easier than getting up and switching it off. Or, half crazy with the heat, you'd empty your submachine-gun into the air — or worse … Once we surrounded a caravan, which resisted and tried to fight us off with machine-guns, so we were ordered to destroy it, which we did. Wounded camels were lying on the ground, howling … Is this what we were awarded medals from ‘the grateful Afghan people' for?

War is war and that means killing. We weren't given real guns to play cops and robbers with. We weren't sent to mend tractors and build houses. We killed the enemy wherever and whenever we could, and vice versa. But this wasn't the kind of war we knew about from books and films, with a front line, a no man's land, a vanguard and rear echelons, etc. You know the word
kiriz?
It's the word the Afghans use for the culverts, originally built for irrigation purposes. This was a ‘kiriz war'. People would come up out of them like ghosts, day and night, with a Chinese submachine-gun in their hands, or the knife they'd just slaughtered a sheep with, or just a big stone. Quite possibly you'd been haggling with that same ‘ghost' in the market a few hours before. Suddenly, he wasn't a human being for you, because he'd killed your best friend, who was now just a lump of dead flesh lying on
the ground.
My
friend's last words to me were: ‘Don't write to my mother, I beg you, I don't want her to know anything about this … ' And to them you're just a Russky, not a human being. Our artillery wipes his village off the face of the earth so thoroughly that when he goes back he literally can't find a trace of his mother, wife or children. Modern weaponry makes our crime even greater. I can kill one man with a knife, two with a mine … dozens with a missile. But I'm a soldier and killing's my profession. I'm like the slave of Aladdin's magic lamp, or rather the slave of the Defence Ministry. I'll shoot wherever I'm told to. When I hear the order ‘Fire!' I don't think, I fire, that's my job.

Still, I didn't go there to kill people. Why couldn't the Afghan people see us as we saw ourselves? I remember their kids standing in the snow and ice, barefoot except for their little rubber slipovers, and us giving them our rations. Once I saw a little boy run up to our truck, not to beg, as they usually did, but just to look at us. I had twenty Afganis in my pocket, which I gave him. He just knelt there in the sand, and didn't move until we'd got back in the APC and driven away.

On the other hand, there were instances of our soldiers stealing a few miserable kopecks from the kids who brought us water and so on … No, I wouldn't go there again, not for anything. I repeat: the truth is too terrible to be told. You lot, who stayed at home, don't need to know it, and neither do we, who were over there. There were more of you, but you kept quiet. Our behaviour there was a product of our upbringing. Our children will grow up and deny their fathers ever fought in Afghanistan.

I've come across fake veterans. Oh, yes, I was there … ' they'll say.

‘Where was your unit?'

‘Er … in Kabul.'

‘What unit was that?'

‘Well … er … Spetsnaz' [Special Forces, somewhat equivalent to the SAS in the public mind].

Lunatics in asylums used to shout, ‘I'm Stalin!'; now, normal guys stand up and claim: ‘I fought in Afghanistan.' I'd put the lot of them in the madhouse.

I prefer to be on my own when I think about those days. I have
a drink, sit down and listen to the songs we used to sing. Those times are pages from my life, and, although they're soiled I can't throw them away.

The young vets get together and get very angry that nobody wants to know. They find it hard to settle down and find some kind of moral values for themselves. ‘I could kill someone — if I knew I'd get away with it,' one admitted to me. ‘I'd do it just like that, for no particular reason. I wouldn't care.' They had Afghanistan, now it's gone and they miss it.

You can't go on repenting and praying for forgiveness all your life. I want to get married and I want a son. The sooner we shut up about all this the better it'll be for everyone. The only people who need this ‘truth' are the know-nothings who want to use it as an excuse to spit in our faces. ‘You bastards! You killed and robbed and now you expect special privileges?' We're expected to take all the blame,
and
to accept that everything we went through was for nothing.