by Oleg Pavlov
That was the way he wanted to live, the way that he lived, Matiushin repeated over and over to himself, unable to understand: live so that no one notices you’re alive? But the Uzbek carried on talking. Even if someone asks you to bring them a mug of water, refuse, don’t do people any kindnesses. If someone falls, don’t help him up, let him lie there, that way they’ll bother you less. Think about how not to fall, not about how to interfere and be better than others. If you eat bread, think that you’re eating shit, and if you eat shit, think that you’re eating bread. Do the work you’re told to do with a good will, be patient, but don’t let them force you to do that work. Matiushin heard more and more fuzzily: don’t have a lot of things, spend all your money as soon as you get your hands on it, give it all away, so no one can take anything from you by force or make you give it away. Respect the strong, acknowledge them, let yourself be beaten. If you don’t respect them, they’ll make you wish you were dead, or kill you. You have to live, think about nothing but living day and night.
Even though it seemed to Matiushin that in listening to the Uzbek, he had penetrated a secret that no one else in this carriage knew, all this still remained alien and unnecessary to him. He felt sorry for the Uzbek, but all he could do was say nothing, calm in the knowledge that everything would be different for him, the way he wanted it to be: it couldn’t be any other way.
The vestibule and the berth emptied – lots of people were sleeping now. Those who weren’t asleep kept on waiting and waiting for something, although there’d been no point in waiting for ages already, no one had any inner strength left. That night the train crossed a multitude of bridges, trundling over rivers. Almost every hour there was that heart-stopping, airy rumble, as if they weren’t riding but flying high up into the sky.
The next twenty-four hours of the journey were over strange land – across the steppe. After the wild, drunken night, the bewildered men in the carriage gazed out of the windows, not recognising this land. Grey bushes and clay hills, clay hills and grey bushes. The captain said nothing about when they would arrive and where, as if he were keeping an important secret. They guessed in riddles:
‘We’ll get there when we need to … Wherever we’re going, that’s where we’ll get to …’
Those who had saved some money started hanging on to it, and the implacable heat started driving everyone crazy. Men dropped on the spot without warning. The others poured water on them and they revived. Someone said they should drink more water, and the men dashed to drink not water but vodka, moonshine; they weren’t interested in enjoying themselves, they just wanted to get blasted. That night fights broke out. In their drunkenness they smashed the windows in their carriage – to get some air. A bloody brawl started up, but the captain didn’t interfere, he remained stoic and said nothing. Clumping together for a smoke in the vestibule, three or four men who were still on their feet and had lost sight of sleep marvelled at the captain’s good nature. Why did he put up with it? Why didn’t he take any notice? He only went once to the conductor who was selling the booze and he couldn’t even frighten him. He’d made up his bed early and was lying there, sleeping. But would he report everything when they reached the unit? They could court-martial you for drunkenness now, couldn’t they, but could they court-martial everybody?
And then Matiushin suddenly realised with relief that the recruiting officer was calmly getting a good night’s sleep because their destination was already close. With that thought he dragged himself back to his berth and lay down on his bunk, although he didn’t feel sleepy. But he did drop off, just for a moment – and woke up when men were already jostling in the passage and the berth with all their things, and the train was moving slower and slower. Shouts tore through the carriage, chasing each other along:
‘Tashkent! Tashkent!’
It was cool, almost cold, the sun wasn’t even on the rise yet, and a breeze as delicate as frothing cream quivered in the fresh-milk-steamy air. Matiushin’s bag seemed empty without any food and he left it in the carriage, although his razor, toothbrush, soap and a lot of things that seemed worthless just then were still inside it. Solitary trees with dusty grey skin like an elephant’s. And standing at a distance, white and gauzy: the station.
People drifting by, indifferent … Only an hour later they were being driven along in a covered army truck through smooth, even heat, as pure as breathing.
They offloaded somewhere in the backstreets – in a corner formed by whitewashed fences with bulging coils of barbed wire along the top and bitty little buildings with no windows that looked like storehouses crowding in from the sides, as squat as if they had been hammered into the dried-up earth blow by blow. The small open space was scorching in the hot sun. They stood in a crowd beside the truck. Fresh, neat officers flitted in and out of sight, questioning the captain, who looked at them respectfully, no doubt waiting to be dismissed. Soon about ten sergeants were herded into the space from somewhere else and began standing guard, and the moment the officers went away, dirty little streams of soldiers started trickling through the sergeants’ sparse line of security. Armour-clad faces, sunburned black, stared insolently, only it wasn’t the Russians they were sizing up, but what they were wearing. There weren’t enough officers to impose order. They’d hidden from the blazing sun in the patch of shade on the other side of the barracks, where little green trees stood like sentries and the parade ground, scorched to desert whiteness, began. There behind the barracks huts, a semi-naked, half-wild crowd had come running and gathered on the parade ground, and the officers allowed it to gape at the new arrivals and bawl and yell on the small, sweltering-hot islets of asphalt. From the parade ground the crowd could see what the officers had hidden away from on that side of the barracks: soldiers menacing the guards and working away furtively once they got in behind them, not wasting a moment to grab their booty, accosting the recruits who were better-dressed, intimidating them more and more brazenly by raising their fists and each snatching what he could.
And still the soldiers kept on demanding more and more, as if it was all theirs. One who ended up with a shirt tossed it onto the roof of a hut and went back to trying to scrounge or steal something else. Shirts, t-shirts, shoes, cigarettes, jeans, wristwatches – they took all these and then fought in screeching frenzy over who would get what.
Then the Russians showed up, looking for men from their own parts. They had white teeth and a sickly-sweet smell of eau de cologne. The officers let them through, probably because they knew them all by sight. The Russians had an aura of calm and self-confidence. Sitting down by the recruits, quizzing them crudely about where they were from, they struck up conversations and helped themselves to cigarettes, even if they couldn’t find anyone from back home. They said they served in some kind of special platoon, the only Russian platoon in the regiment – there weren’t any more Russians, only Ukrainians from previous drafts serving in the prison camp companies, and they’d been scattered around. That this was some kind of escort regiment. No one would have it easy in this regiment. And if anyone was put in the special platoon, he should soap up a piece of rope, that was what they said, grinning: we won’t beat you on the first day, that’s our custom, but afterwards go hang yourselves, you’ve had it, guys. They started driving home the very sensible idea that it was best to give any money to them now. After all, they were Russians, their own kind.
Matiushin’s head was aching from its drunken spinning and he had a thirst more agonising than any he had ever known, so he kept thinking he could hear water gurgling. He was only distracted from it when a kind of scruffy beggar crept in under his shoulder, covered in filth from head to toe, so coal-black that even his round white eyes with red rims breathed out heat, like glowing coals.
‘Kid, give us the trainers,’ he said with a Ukrainian accent. ‘Give ’em us, they won’t be no good to you. I ain’t got nothing and I walks over coal in the boiler room, come on, kid.’
‘Just stop your whinging, will you … ’ Matius
hin managed to force out, and scraped off one trainer, tanned with thick dust that had turned it to clay. And then, with a sudden sense of relief, he freed himself of the other one and closed his eyes so as not to see anything any more.
A sensation of lightness entered his apathetic soul. He could hear everyone whispering about the bathhouse, but they wanted to drink, not wash themselves. And he fancied that there was a freezing-cold sea in the barracks hut, but when the hut was opened, they would choke on it. And only that morning hadn’t there been a light breeze blowing over everything, but now it was midday and the sun was a blazing pillar in the sky and it had chained him to itself. That’s it – the thought flared up and faded away again: everybody’s thinking about the same thing, longing for the same thing – but then a tiny whisper trickled in from somewhere and there was a whiff of coal:
‘Kid, kid …’
Matiushin opened his eyes. Like some little demon, the ragamuffin conjured himself out of the wall of the hut again right there in front of him. Smouldering joyfully, with his bony back curved over and his vertebrae glittering with coal, he pulled out from under his belly, as scarily as if it were his own liver, a dull mug or can, trembling with moisture.
‘Tekit, have a drink of water. I’ve got lots, got a whole tapful in the boiler room. Cummon kid, tekit, it ain’t infectious!’
Matiushin looked for a long time, as if he didn’t believe it, but his throat contracted at the glitter of the bright, pure water, and he reached out a trembling hand for the can and took a swig from it, then took another swig – and he came alive, feeling the hard pebble of coldness clutched in his hand, giving him weight, transfixing him with a keen, smarting strength. Immediately arms were held out towards him like sticks from all sides.
‘Give me a drink! Leave a bit of the water!’
He looked round – the scruffy beggar had disappeared in an instant, they’d frightened him off. Looking into the can – he fancied that it was still full to the brim – Matiushin forced himself to make that single movement, to put it into someone’s hands. The small can passed noisily and joyfully from one man to the next and vanished.
‘Water, water!’ Matiushin heard, more and more faintly. ‘Water! Water …’
Jangling her bunch of keys as if blessing the grey, stony yard with it, the mistress of the place arrived – a heavy-bellied, solidly built woman in a dirty white coat – and started yelling. She calmed down once she had driven off all the marauders; she enjoyed demonstrating her sternness to the new arrivals. The bunch of keys jangled as she brushed the flies away with it, shouting at them there in front of the unlocked barracks hut.
‘You’re for the bathhouse! I’ll give you a proper steaming, you sons of whores!’
All the new arrivals were drawn up in a column and then ordered to walk into that hut. The cold crept across their skin little by little. The place had an empty echo to it. There were low benches running along the walls, a wooden perch. The woman, who had to be the supply manager or the stores manager, or perhaps just the bathhouse attendant, paused briefly in the doorway to get her breath back before descending on them and filling up all the space.
‘Take everything off! Pull it off! Pull it all off, leave every part naked. No underpants now! You won’t need them, you’ll be issued with what you need.’
They got undressed and sat squashed together or stayed standing because there weren’t enough benches. They jostled, scraping against each other. They didn’t fold the clothes, simply dumping them straight onto the floor, and those who were standing, already naked, trampled them underfoot right there, beside the rucksacks and duffel bags. The woman watched with lively, sullen eyes, breathing heavily and shouting whenever she noticed someone hiding from her gaze.
‘Bah, what a handsome buck! Why, I’ve seen so many men … ’ And she ran her eyes over the floor, where the motley-coloured clothes were scattered.
She spotted something, stepped across, turned her backside towards them and bent down so that it swelled up in a huge downy pillow and the sumptuous curves of her flesh tumbled out from under her white coat. But when she soared back up as lightly as a piece of fluff and reassumed her shape, a quiet, cracked voice said:
‘Tatyana, don’t touch that.’
The man who called to her had halted in the doorway: he was short, thin and inconspicuous-looking, in a threadbare officer’s shirt.
‘Ah, come on, Sergei Lvovich, you’re so quick to … Why, I didn’t take anything … ’ she whined like an old woman.
The officer moved to one side without speaking and stood by the wall. Soldiers appeared. In just their white undershirts, as if they weren’t soldiers but kitchen hands, with fresh new boots dangling round their necks like bunches of bagels and lugging armfuls of foot wrappings and shorts, bundles of brand-new belts, heaps of rags. They carried it all in in a rush – and piled it where they were told by the officer, who called out plaintively from time to time:
‘Konovalov, how are our linings?’
‘Everything’s top-notch … ’ an implacable bass voice replied from out of the jostling crowd.
‘Konovalov, so where are the stools?’
‘Fuck it, Izmailov, I’ll bury you; where are the stools?’ the same boorish voice boomed out.
The soldiers rummaged silently in their own heaps, then immediately started on the abandoned civilian clothes, raking everything together from under the naked men’s feet.
‘Konovalov, come on, get started …’
A stool appeared from somewhere and a soldier with a forelock, who was stripped to his shorts, sat the first man on it. He stood behind him, seized his neck in his fingers, as if in a claw, and set to work with the clippers in his other hand, clenching and unclenching his fist. The man sat on the stool, naked as a corpse, and his hair showered down onto his body from the clippers. After the shearing he stood there, looking like someone else, doomed now, in full view of everyone – all the others had backed away from him in fright – and he asked if he should take his soap and bast scrubber. But Konovalov took him by the arm without saying a word, led him over to a little door, opened it so that it breathed out steam at them with a droning sound – and shoved him into the steam room, making everyone laugh.
The soldiers sorted through the kit without hurrying. The woman hovered close by, beside the things that were sneakily shoved to one side as still fit to be worn. The officer didn’t notice that. The soldiers forced her back. They started yelling furiously:
‘Where’s that shirt you filched? You take it, you greedy bitch, and we’ll take turns shafting you.’
‘Ah, you little bastards!’ She left the shirt alone and started complaining loudly and indignantly. ‘Aren’t you ashamed? I could be your mother! So I picked out a few rags; I didn’t think you wanted them. Now just you try coming to me asking for soap!’
‘Go choke on your soap, we’ve plenty of our own! What’s not needed is lying over there; you keep your nose out of this pile.’
However, biding her chance in the tumult of the bathhouse, she kept picking things out of that pile and hiding them inside her white coat. Soon a large lump had formed in there. Waddling well away from the soldiers, she sat down furtively by the officer, sighed and laid her hands on her swollen belly, with her face lengthening as she calmed down.
‘Grabbed a bundle?’ the officer said wearily.
‘What d’you mean? It’s hardly anything: maybe I’ll sew myself a housecoat out of the bits of rag …’
‘I’ll tell the supply and logistics commander to throw you out. I’m sick of this.’
‘You punish me as I deserve, Sergei Lvovich! I’ve robbed the Soviet Army blind, but I haven’t got a pair of drawers to my name. Look at the way you’ve shattered your own health, and they’ll sack you without any pants too …’
The lobby of the bathhouse was emptying. The last heads were being shaved. Konovalov was working not so much zealously as lovingly. He loved his clippers, calling them his ‘filthy slut’ as
he blew the hair off and brushed it away after dealing with yet another head. From the steam room came the sound of water and a babble of voices, abruptly interrupted now and then by patches of silence. Some men had already darted out of the steam room, wet from head to foot and as red as if they’d just been born into the world, and now they were queuing up to get their complete new kit from the soldiers.
