Requiem for a Soldier

by Oleg Pavlov

  ‌THE ETERNAL TOOTH

  It had been a month since another boss had thrust this demobilised dead soul upon Institutov’s infirmary: warrant officer Abdullayev, head of the firing range, who went by the nickname of Abdulka. The deaf and useless old soldier held sway out in the desolate steppe, a hundred kilometres from Karaganda. Abdullayev had previously served in one of the prison guard companies, but during some field exercises held on the anniversary of the October Revolution, he’d been maimed. Two fateful events had occurred on that day in the make-believe zone of hostile fire. First, he had stumbled and fallen, and second, right at the spot where he fell, as if on cue, a thunderbolt had exploded mimicking a blast as a hundred-odd men in khaki were acting out the shift from defence to offence.

  From the watchtower somebody continued to gaze down on the soldierly swarm of little men in khaki, and the only annoyance – a brief one, no doubt – came when one ant-like man let out a scream, began bleeding profusely, and lay there unable to fathom why this had happened to him. Abdullayev was left facing the cruel fate of an invalid consigned to the scrap heap.

  It was his sheep that saved him – his own humble yet lovingly tended livestock. On someone’s suggestion, Abdullayev had offered a lamb to each man on the medical commission and in the unit who had any sway over his fate. And each of them duly reasoned that a man who was deaf, in all senses of the word, could in fact be endowed with hearing. Mindful that the shell-shock victim no longer complained of hearing loss, one by one the recipients of the lambs declared Abdulla Ibrahimovich Abdullayev fit for service, that is to say, as right as rain. The last man to stick his neck out and allow the deaf man to stay in service offered him a livelihood in the farthest-flung place of all: the training ground, quiet as a graveyard, a sandy, rocky site in the steppe, all bashed up with bullets and blasts. Thus the wild and barren spot where he’d been robbed of his hearing – robbed of half his life, as it had seemed – had turned the deaf little man in khaki into an army boss.

  To keep in their good books, once a year the shell-shocked man would visit his benefactors bearing something delicious to eat.

  Abdulka always had one private reporting to him, in line with his entitlement. He must have been the only commander in the regiment with just one man in his charge. For the bulk of the year, during the weeks and sometimes months when the firing ceased, the deaf man lived with his missus in a small rural settlement, only visiting the distant training ground for the sake of propriety, while in summer and winter his single soldier would dwell in the wild, arid steppe, keeping watch over the wind. Fatherly old Abdulka doted on all his little soldiers and he’d reminisce about them as though they were sons, each becoming his one and only when the time came for them to part. These privates of his were odd creatures – as good as masters of all that Abdullayev personally presided over for barely a month in the year. They would arrive at his training ground all much the same – strangers, gazing about the steppes like doomed men. When they left a few years later, each unfailingly superseding the last in this post in the plains, they were still largely alike – beloved sons, eyes brimming with the enlightenment of sages, some already going grey at the tender age of twenty. That autumn Abdullayev had just lost the latest to be demobbed. The soldier should have left for home long ago. But fatherly old Abdulka couldn’t let him go just like that: he decided to bestow on him an eternal steel tooth.

  The explosion, his own bloodcurdling scream, the sight of blood running from his ears – everything terrible that occurred at the firing ground that day had shaken and shocked Abdulka so deeply that, ever since, all manner of things would conjure in him a feeling of eternity. Abdullayev had already had some metal teeth fitted, even a gold one, but he’d never before reflected on the fact that they would remain after he was gone; that, say, in a thousand years’ time someone might find them in his grave. This touching and timid desire to contain something eternal had moved Abdulka to get his healthy teeth replaced with ones of steel, and from then on his life’s pride and joy were those stainless chinks of eternity, gleaming and glinting in the sun whenever the shell-shocked man lost his temper or grinned. To give a steel tooth to his latest son was like sharing this triumph of human life between the two of them. ‘What kind of man are you, without a tooth? Nothing to shout about, eh, just ashes and dust. You’re like the sand – one puff of wind and you’ll come to grief!’ Abdulka spoke loudly; like all deaf men, he couldn’t hear what he was saying, and his voice boomed as though from a loudspeaker.

  The soldier didn’t protest, believing that the shell-shocked man meant him nothing but good. Abdulka paid Institutov a visit, bearing a lamb carcass wrapped up like a log in hessian – he was offering this generous gift of his own accord and only out of naïvety. Institutov would have softened at the sight of a mere leg of lamb, but Abdulka was already pining so badly for his cherished soldier that no powers of reason or forces of any description could make him diminish his sacrifice.

  Just behind fatherly Abdulka, decked out in dress uniform and looking almost guilty, stood that soldier. He was like an overgrown child lost in a fog of bewilderment ever since emerging into the world. He had with him his soldier’s identity papers, a cash payment of forty-five roubles that he’d just been issued in the regiment’s accounting department, and a document entitling Private Aleksei Mikhailovich Kholmogorov to a second-class ticket to anywhere in the whole vast country.

  Quick on the uptake, the pragmatic head of the infirmary did not heap praise upon the generous soul of Abdulla Ibrahimovich; rather he vowed to fix the soldier up with the finest steel tooth, placed prominently and bonded to him until death. Abdulka readily believed not so much this man’s words as the laws of human life, which he surrendered to like a worker ant, and which, as a human, he could infringe only on pain of instant punishment tantamount to death. And by those laws, no man on earth – no fellow worker ant – could cheat Abdulka once he’d accepted advance payment, because the man wouldn’t be able to live with himself afterwards. This was all the assurance Abdulka had wanted when preparing the lamb for Institutov. But upon hearing the word ‘death’, Abdulka was moved, and suddenly his eyes welled up with tears as if he were at a funeral. The shell-shocked commander followed conversations by reading people’s lips, yet people would be taken aback – unless they’d forgotten he was deaf – by the unexpected emotion in his responses to seemingly mundane utterances.

  The moment fatherly old Abdulka started weeping, Kholmogorov almost burst into tears himself, feeling somehow orphaned. ‘Abdulla Ibrahimovich, I’ll get along fine without the tooth, come on, let’s be on our way!’ Alyosha said. Having already taken payment for his task, the head of the infirmary winced horribly. But the deaf man heard nothing and the soldier, who for some reason felt a pang of conscience, stayed put. Institutov said a long goodbye to the commander of the firing ground, then stole a few glances at the youngster, whose asinine appearance was already riling him. Worried that once Abdulka had gone he could well enough drop in unannounced, Institutov set straight to work and extracted the tooth destined for replacement with a steel one, but after biding his time for a couple of days, he forgot about his debt. At first he insisted that you couldn’t produce a tooth to last for centuries in the space of just a few days. Breathing a sigh of relief, Alyosha believed the head of the infirmary. Trust always came more naturally to him than mistrust. He would only stop believing a man once he’d been well and truly duped; before the realisation set in, though, the man would have time to bamboozle him several times over.

  Kholmogorov reassured himself: ‘It’s all right, I’ll give it another week and then I’ll catch the train and go home.’ To make the time pass more quickly, he agreed to do the tasks they set him in the infirmary. But here too it turned out he was helping them not of his own free will; rather, he was paying off Institutov personally for the long-awaited eternal tooth. Kholmogorov could pack up and leave whenever he liked. He had all the documents required, and he’d long ago been take
n off the roll. Institutov, though, was ready to tolerate his presence in the infirmary – indeed, to benefit from it. He dared not kick him out for fear Abdulka would catch wind of it. And lately he seemed to have dropped his ‘I’ll give him the tooth when I feel like it’; instead, he was setting him tasks as his debtor: ‘He’ll get the tooth when he’s earned it.’ Indeed, he spelled it right out: ‘You, my friend, as it happens, are free to leave.’ But as if to spite him, Kholmogorov hung on and waited patiently for what he had been promised.

  Alyosha might not have known that great law of life so revered by Abdulka, but he trusted him. And so he had to believe the head of the infirmary, in whom Abdulla Ibrahimovich had placed his trust. Thus the slippery, meaningless promise of tomorrow – that desperate promise made by a restless, cornered little man – suddenly grew into a momentous human truth. Meanwhile, everyone he ran into would ask him how he’d lost his tooth and Alyosha would gladly launch into conversation: ‘They’ve pulled it out to make room for a new one. Was going to be the first to go home, couldn’t believe my luck. But I stayed on to mend my teeth and now it’s looking like I’ll be last to leave. Ah, but it’ll save me hassle in the long run. A steel tooth will last me a lifetime.’ They tried to shoot down this certainty of his: ‘But what if it rusts?’ And as they all laughed at him, he too smiled, but with a squirming, faraway smile so disfiguring his face that their sniggers of disgust began to die down and resemble coughs before fading out. Alyosha twitched like a frog wired to the mains; he was happy at the thought they were all listening to him. ‘I don’t think it’ll rust or wear down – life’s too short for that. Well it’s not like I’m going to live to two hundred! Nobody on Earth can do that yet!’

  From time to time he felt sad, of course, sometimes he even ached inside, but an intense wonder for life would burst through the sadness and aching like grass striving towards light. As Alyosha entered adulthood this wonder took such hold over him that to onlookers he’d appear rather dopey and idle, and a holler would usually catch him off guard. Then he’d wake up and knuckle down to work. But if you spurred him on, his innate clumsiness would spoil his work and heighten the problem and he’d begin to wreck things more than fix them.

  Alyosha Kholmogorov’s soul was like thick porridge – rather than spattering about, all it did was retreat into itself, its warmth gravitating towards stillness. When his soul became suffused with heat, it just puffed up impetuously like a toad’s bulging throat. And it always needed time – it was slow to flare up and slow to cool off. Alyosha was loath to relinquish any spot he’d been occupying for even an hour. And whenever his life took a new turn, he would clam up and start living in vibrant memories of the comfortable past. Reticence would overpower him at first – but only until the anxiety passed, the unknown had grown familiar and his life become humdrum again.

  With the trepidation of a man partaking of a divine mystery, Alyosha considered himself graced with luck and worried that this good fortune could vanish just as capriciously as it had been bestowed. But what he counted as lucky was miraculous only to him, for he always got the dregs. He had a compelling sensation that he was different from other people, as if a gift had been conferred on him, and, noticing the shortcomings of those around him, he somehow managed to feel sorry for them, unable to see that he’d have been better off pitying himself. At first glance he looked a sullen, furtive creature, backward and deficient, remarkable only for his clumsiness. When the new conscripts were delivered to the drill ground, this was all that the recruiters saw in him. Each one waved him aside: ‘Ha, you can send that knucklehead off to Abdulka. We’ve no need for his talents. He’d be one mouth too many for us!’ And so they sent him off in a scabby old ambulance without fellow passengers on a one-way journey. Alyosha parted from the regiment, pondering his incredible fortune at being sent somewhere so special and deserted, and what blind faith they had shown in him – or was it recognition? – while the rest of the men, poor souls, were essentially being sent into exile.

  Everyone knew and remembered the road to the firing ground. In summer it was a rocky, sun-baked rutted track, and in winter a narrow channel which a tractor had hewn from the marble of the snow banks. It was fifteen kilometres to the nearest inhabited village. Abdulka used to ride out from there on his motorbike.

  When they held range practice, for three days on end the companies would arrive one after another at the ground. They unfurled into human chains, dug trenches, did a bit of shooting; afterwards the firing ground would empty and grow still. All its desolate lands stretched beyond the compass of the eye. Such a sweeping expanse could not be enclosed, and so its boundaries were marked by lone posts, spaced within eyeshot of one another. They looked like giant death cap mushrooms, sheltering from heat or rain the sentry guards who were posted there briefly while a profusion of bullets that had missed their targets flew randomly across the steppe and the occasional civilian straying from their path would wander onto the firing ground, dazed by the thunderous roar of guns.

  Kholmogorov arrived at the training ground as it fell dark. The tender twilight gloom obscured all that he was so eager to see. The wind was blowing from the dark with an almighty chill and droning in his ears like the whoosh of a seashell. The ambulance headlights melted the dusky gold of swarming sand grains visible only in their beams. Two human voices – the driver and the head of the firing ground – were quarrelling somewhere in the gloom, unable to reach agreement. The driver, a lowly conscript like Alyosha, shouted goodbye with macabre cheer, disappearing into the cab of the vehicle. ‘Your commanding officer’s deaf! You can yell right in his ear and he won’t hear a thing. If you want to, mate, you can swear at him to his face. Oi, Abdulka. You jerk! Bonehead! Smelly git!’

  When night had descended on the spot where a moment ago the engine was grunting hotly and headlights shining wanly, all was suffused with loneliness. On the island where a white tower-shaped edifice soared serenely over the dark, resonant steppe with the clarity of a lighthouse, its low, almost ground-level windows glowing and its top crowned with a powerful black-eyed searchlight, two men were left standing: Alyosha, who had just been dumped there, and the savage in his homely old clothing and slippers on his bare feet, whom the driver had mocked in parting.

  The stocky unshaven man, who resembled a bath house attendant, or maybe a gravedigger, terrorised Alyosha with his loud and garbled barking as he hauled him into the tower. Kholmogorov found himself in a big empty box-shaped room with a discreet iron staircase that led up to an unlit hatch in the ceiling. It turned out the commander of the firing ground was in a hurry to leave before it got late. It was Abdullayev who had left everything there, but he exploded in anger as if he had found the room in an outrageous mess. And it was all the fault of Alyosha – who hadn’t yet grasped that this was where he’d be spending the night. The shell-shocked man clattered into everything in his path and, yelling until he managed to get at least a nod out of Alyosha, he gestured: ‘That’s where you’ll sleep, got it? Tomorrow I’ll bring you food, water, bedclothes and soap – got it? Hey, you deaf? I’m talking to you!’ Abdulka locked the door from the outside, turned off the light and left. Alyosha lay on his bed as if in a prison cell and only fell asleep at daybreak, when light began to glimmer through the windows, soothing his soul. His commander rushed to the firing ground bright and early, and gave his new worker a wake-up call.

  Several days passed. Kholmogorov silently and obediently carried out everything he was charged with by the gruff, shouty man, who at the end of each day would lock him in the castle tower before vanishing. One day while at work, when Kholmogorov addressed his superior from behind and Abdulka failed over and again to respond to his ever-louder calls, Alyosha suddenly realised that the commander of the firing ground could not hear him. He stood for a while in silence, then, overcoming his fear, tapped his shoulder: Abdulka spun around and leaped to his feet with a ferocious look – but then wilted sheepishly upon seeing the bewildered young kid who’d gone lim
p at his suspicion. And he did his best to comfort Alyosha. ‘You and me, we’ll be like one soul, sonny. Don’t worry, just give me a shove if you need to. I may be deaf, but I’m no woman, you can touch me.’

  Kholmogorov merely said, ‘Please, mister, could you tell me your name? What should I call you? Do you understand?’

  ‘What’s that, eh? What d’you say?’ Abdulka started shouting again but when he realised what was being asked, he said indulgently, ‘You talk too much – look, who cares? I’m like a father to you. That’s all you need to know.’

  Abdulka was keen on thinking aloud. Upon hearing the deaf man’s unearthly voice, Alyosha would sink into self-pity. If only I had someone here to talk to, he brooded. It dawned on him that for his entire service he was doomed to silence – and he sensed reality transforming into a dizzy confusion of mute thoughts and feelings. As he was feeling sorry for himself, something slippery and poisonous entwined his heart like a serpent of temptation: Look at him hollering away. He’s happy enough, while things are lousy for you and they’re not going to get any better.

  For a long time Abdulka kept watch over Alyosha, shouting at him, giving him no rest in his desire to haul him through the fire. He heaped him with work, the most futile tasks, to keep the boy from becoming an idle eater, while at the same time rebuking him continually for eating too much: he needed to take smaller portions, put less in his mouth and take longer chewing it. When the month was up, Alyosha gorged on all the supplies hoarded by his superior and was blissfully happy – and Abdulka exulted in being proved right. Kholmogorov grew fonder of the deaf man, powerless to resist that fatherly concern concealed in a man who had first cut back his rations for his own good, then generously doubled them, saving him from hunger.