by Oleg Pavlov
Matiushin had been waiting his turn for a long time. Now he’d been overcome by the hungry, hungover shakes, and he trembled as if he was waiting to be sentenced. As he trembled with those hungry shakes he thought: what did I do to deserve this? Somebody needs me, don’t they? I was born to live, wasn’t I, just like them? Make my life dear to them too, make them take pity on me …
And then it seemed as if everything dissolved and he was sitting in the corner, naked, feeling like a stump of a man, with no arms or legs. The stool was empty. The soldier Konovalov turned round with the clippers in his hand.
‘What are you doing squatting over there, like a bird on a perch?’ But his exclamation didn’t make Matiushin get up. ‘Get over here, you weirdo … ’ Konovalov said more simply now in his surprise.
Everything went quiet and everyone in the lobby turned serious. Only Konovalov dropped his hands helplessly.
‘What’s happening here? Just look at this walking wonder … Come and sit over here to get trimmed, I said.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Why, he’s drunk … ’ said the officer, peering at him reluctantly. ‘Look at the drunken face on him …’
But suddenly the officer started shaking with laughter. And then all the soldiers, and the woman, and Konovalov started laughing, their eyes goggling out so hard that the tears came; they couldn’t stop themselves. And no one noticed that the officer had started gasping for breath, coughing, doubling over, hawking into his fist. Matiushin watched only the officer, mesmerised. It was all happening right there in front of his eyes: the officer broke down, no longer choking on laughter but on his own cough, huddling up into a shuddering bundle, and then he slumped off his stool, face down. The woman was the first to catch on and she rushed to help him up. They picked the officer up and sat him on his stool. He twitched silently as he grew calmer, restrained by the soldiers’ hands. He was still short of air, his gaping mouth a black hole, his scarlet lips drooping, and he was struggling to say something. His lips tensed and went limp as if they were straining, but the words had proved too heavy.
‘That’s it … ’ he managed to squeeze out, struggling to recover his former serious bearing. ‘That’s it … K-ha, k-ha … What do you want? What are you waiting for? Konovalov … K-ha, k-ha … ’ And he nodded. ‘Do this one, get it over with …’
Matiushin still hadn’t gathered his wits after what he’d seen. But then Konovalov, furious, rushed over and grabbed him by the hair. Matiushin crept along on all fours, naked, crawling away from the pain and seeing everything so clearly that his eyes smarted, even the chips knocked out of the black clay floor, hearing Konovalov’s heavy panting above him. Konovalov dragged him across the lobby and Matiushin suddenly couldn’t care less where he was being lugged off to or what they might want to do with him.
Afraid that he might escape, break free, Konovalov pressed Matiushin’s head down against the stool as if he were washing it forcibly in a basin. His fist squeezed a metallic clanking out of the clippers and was gradually buried under a clump of hair. The bathhouse attendant surrendered to the languor that had spread through her soul and gazed at Konovalov, admiring the way he froze, motionless, leaning down over his work, and the way his whole body curved, seeming to reveal a hidden inner strength, becoming covered all over with knotty muscles. Matiushin wheezed regularly, gulping at the air, staying down on his knees with his cheek crushed against the stool, running his blank, unseeing gaze over the crowd of half-dressed, half-naked men who were either admiring or frightened by him.
‘Oi, I’ll die laughing! Oi, that’s the way they strip the bristles off a wild boar! Don’t you go and strip the skin off him, Petenka … ’ the woman exclaimed merrily, and her face turned radiant and serene with merriment and excitement.
‘A strapping great boar!’ Konovalov grunted in reply, as if complaining.
When he heard that, Matiushin felt happy, almost proud of himself, and forgot about everything, no longer aware that he was down on his knees with the clanking clippers tugging out his hair.
Konovalov finished his work but didn’t let Matiushin go: his blow tossed Matiushin over to the feet of the soldiers, who had been waiting just for this and threw themselves on him. Blunt kicks from boots showered down on Matiushin’s naked body. He came to his senses and called to them, imploring:
‘Guys, don’t hit me on the ears … Guys …’
‘Stop that! Konovalov!’ The order rang out suddenly and the blows subsided.
The soldiers who had been beating him moved away and Konovalov, who was afraid of nothing, but obeyed the officer who had spoken, helped Matiushin to get up and led him to the steam room, intoning under his breath:
‘Have a good soak, buddy. Feel the thrill, you bastard …’
Scalded by his beating from the soldiers, Matiushin skidded into the steam room as if he was slithering down an icy slide.
Men who had already settled into the warm womb of the bathhouse were walking about with small tubs, moving from one tap to the next and splashing water on themselves. When the water toppled out in a solid block from the tub raised over Matiushin’s head, he huddled up tight – and breathed out so deeply, it was almost a groan, and then thrilled to the pleasure and stroked himself with his hands. All around there were untaken tubs, gaping open. Colourless, hot and cold streams flowing. The roaring of these countless torrents set his soul trembling at the gills, like the soul of a fish. Matiushin dissolved in that roaring, nuzzling his mouth at the icy cold water disintegrating into spray, spurting out of the tap so hard that his lips went numb. He drank his fill, gulping down water straight out of a tub that was full to the brim, snuggling up to the calm, smooth little lake, barely able to hold the weight of it in his hands. Feeling as if he hadn’t just quenched his thirst but found peace and freedom, Matiushin held his tub in his hands and wandered round the hut, which was rippling, mirage-like, with little pools and streams. He found a small piece of coarse rag and a small abandoned piece of soap. He washed. He sluiced himself off from the tub, tempering himself with the cold until he was blue. He got tired.
After the steam room, the air in the lobby was so light and easy, it took his breath away. The lobby was filled with vigorous, swarming merriment. The men laughed at each other, stroking their own unfamiliar naked craniums. They clambered joyfully into the loose official-issue trousers and tunics that were now theirs, feeling a new freedom in them. Everything was issued too large, for the wrong size, apart from the boots; they only stuck to the right size for the boots. The soldiers from the quartermaster’s section laughed when they saw what the parade looked like. In the crush, Matiushin was given everything in the very biggest size, and on top of that they issued him with a knapsack. He squeezed through the scrum, found a place on a bench and got dressed, following standard procedure. Only he hadn’t been taught how to wind on the foot wrappings – and he sat there crumpling up the two rags in his hands, with no idea of what to do with them, with all his buttons already done up, but barefoot. But others who were as ignorant as he was spoke up. The officers shouted for the sergeants, who had been loitering in the yard for too long, and it turned out they were keen to teach the men. Some sat down on the bench with lads they liked the look of, others stood over a small bunch of barefoot men and gave them orders on what to do from above. Matiushin was spotted too: a sergeant squatted down a bit and emerged from the bathhouse bustle in a tunic that was scorched white, with a faded little red flag tucked into his belt. He smiled, looking at Matiushin, and told him which angle to lay the foot wrapping out at and where to tuck in the ends. When Matiushin put his boots on, this goodhearted man disappeared as unobtrusively as he had arrived, leaving nothing behind except for this essential knowledge that cost nothing.
Out in the yard, relaxing after the steam, the new recruits smoked a bit and the officers and sergeants mingled with them as if they were soldiers already, telling them what was in store for them: they would be marching to Dorbaz, the military field c
amp. The officers complained drearily about the crowds of non-Russians that had colonised the regiment. One officer told them confidentially that there was an order to change the situation that had arisen, and that was why they were drafting Russians and Ukrainians to serve in the regiment for the second year in succession, since the commanders had no one else they could rely on – it was enough to make you weep. They all listened to the officer, thinking they were being entrusted with a secret. For a brief moment, this prideful, rather foolish feeling actually made them feel united, which none of them had felt on the journey, when all they’d done was yell and drink, unable even to make out each other’s faces. They were in a festive, jolly mood. They all had red shoulder straps. But the officers had smarter ones – velvety, still brand new, with curly yellow letters. The sergeants who were loitering beside them turned out to be newcomers to the regiment as well and they didn’t know what fate had in store for them either. They’d only just arrived from some place called Karakemir, from a boot camp far off in the mountains, way off on the other side of the world, where they’d been pounded into shape as sergeants. They tried to look tough, putting on a brave face, but it was clear they were having a hard time in the regiment. The officers asked confidentially if they had any complaints and did anyone want to go to the jakes. Then suddenly a little officer came running up and announced that he was the regiment’s Communist Youth League organiser, collected the League members’ cards, still panting, and ran off again.
They walked through the Tashkent regiment’s desert base in a now fresh, green, brand-new army column, trying to look like soldiers. Acting as its guards, the sergeants strode along at the sides with little flags, and two officers strode briskly at the head of the column, chatting chummily. At the checkpoint, a grubby, tattered, downcast-looking sentry opened the gates for the column, then shouted and pulled threatening faces as they left. The humpbacked roofs of the barracks and the camp’s fences fell further and further behind. The column crushed the silence beneath the clatter of its boots. They strode along a shady street that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Kids they guessed were homeless ran about freely here, playing in the roadside dust. Women who looked like Gypsies gazed out from warm, blossoming yards with little low fences in which the gates were flung wide-open. White-bearded old men emerged from their homes, while behind them the lavish gardens, like bright trimmings round their calm, ramshackle mud houses, exploded brightly into the hot air, resting their light, fragrant branches on the old men’s shoulders. Soon the old town disappeared in the haze and the blueness of the steppe, with its greyish tint of grass and plants, opened up to its full extent – and they strode across that steppeland, scattered, each man on his own, towards some point on the horizon, towards which a line of immense, wide-branching metal pylons retreated, pulling their high-voltage black threads across the sky.
Flasks were supposed to be issued to them at Dorbaz, so they walked without water and as evening came on they crept into the camp dirty right up to their necks and panting with thirst. Dorbaz was three long, spindly, freshly painted plywood barracks huts. A patchy puddle of rolled asphalt, withered in the dry steppe, was the camp parade ground in front of the barracks huts. The place was empty and dead, but it turned out that the camp was having supper. The new arrivals lined up on the parade ground, and the sergeants came out after supper to join their buddies who had been away for a day. Here in the camp they were more important than the officers, who immediately disappeared. The senior sergeant, whom everyone called ‘the Moldavian’, even to his face, walked about in flip-flops, undershorts and an army hat, as if he was on the beach. He held a knapsack check.
The sergeants stood and looked on good-naturedly to see what various bits and pieces had arrived in Dorbaz with the knapsacks, but they didn’t attempt to take anything. They would filch it all that night, which was why they were so genial now. The senior sergeant just confiscated a can-opener from someone and strolled along the line-up, toying with it, tossing it from one hand to the other and explaining his laws – and he was affable, because he was explaining those laws for the first and last time. Matiushin didn’t hear a thing. His feet were on fire with a pain so bad, it felt as if they’d been shoved into a furnace. Standing was even more unbearable than walking. Matiushin thought he had to endure this pain – that was what he believed every other day too, as he re-bound his blister-tortured feet in their blood-soaked wrappings during a moment’s break when they were allowed off the parade ground, and then the Moldavian’s favourite command would ring out smartly:
‘Co-o-o-mp-a-a-any, fall in! A-a-at the dou-ou-ouble!’
When they had been out marching around the parade ground for hours and the weaker soldiers – who weren’t even soldiers yet but half-soldiers who still hadn’t sworn the oath – were dropping with sunstroke, unable to take the forty-degree Asiatic furnace, they were got up on their feet and back into line with the help of sal ammoniac supplied to the sergeants by the army doctor. Drinking water was trucked in. A cauldron of water was boiled up with desert acacia collected out on the steppe, and everyone was given a flask of this sticky, nauseating tea to drink every day. It wasn’t possible to drink much of it: only a swallow, and besides that, the boiling water had only cooled off a bit and no one felt like drinking something hot. A tank of water for technical use was moored behind one hut, by the kitchen. This water was taken from wells in the steppe and it was tainted with infection, dangerous to drink but, either because they wanted to get infected and end up in hospital or because they didn’t understand, at night many of the men would sneak over to the tank and drink from it.
In addition to the Russian draft, there were Armenian, Georgian and Ukrainian drafts in training, or ‘quarantine’ here: about a hundred men. During the day the officers walked to the village (its name was also Dorbaz) and filled themselves so full of tea in the chaikhana that when they got back to the camp in the evening, they just flopped onto their beds and slept like dead men. For them the month of quarantine was penal servitude in exile from their families, from a better life. At night the sergeants went to the village. They bought hashish and moonshine from the locals and had a high time in the barracks until dawn. After getting stoned, some spent half the night trying to extort money for a hangover cure, while others spent half the night torturing and passing judgement on those guilty of offences under their law, allowing those to whom they took a liking to smoke hash and drink moonshine with them for the rest of the night. To amuse themselves they held battles in the passageway that ran in a broad strip between the beds. Young Russian, Georgian, Kazakh and Armenian guys – some intimidated and some plain terrorised – fought tooth and nail while the bombed sergeants giggled.
The most brutal atrocity was the safety tax imposed on the half-soldiers by the Moldavian. They all had to line up and then the Moldavian would punch every one of them on the left side – on the heart.
The sergeants told them that this blow had long ago made the Moldavian famous in the regiment. After his punch your heart might stop, and only another blow from him could make it start working again. Even if that didn’t happen, the Moldavian’s brand would be there on your chest – and he was very proud of it, that bluish mark left by his fist. He was also fond of saying that that was what the heart was like – the size of a fist. But one night something happened that everyone saw, and Matiushin saw it too.
The Moldavian reached the middle of the line, where the Georgians were standing, when suddenly, after taking a punch, a man dropped dead. There was a horrified hush. Already stepping on to the next man, the Moldavian flung himself at the crumpled body, roaring and bellowing, no longer a man or even an animal, and started working away so furiously with his fist that in an instant he’d turned crimson and was running with sweat. Who can tell how many men prayed at that moment that the Georgian wouldn’t come back to life and that would put an end to the Moldavian’s amusement? But suddenly the little Georgian jerked and started breathing ferociously, his eyes alr
eady wide open, and the Moldavian ordered the frightened sergeants to pour him a glass of moonshine and walked on, drunk on what he’d just experienced, to pound all the others anywhere he fancied, working off his fear. Matiushin would suffer ten of those blows, over ten nights … They made everything go dark in front of his eyes.
Although they called the training centre a concentration camp and a disciplinary battalion, there was a certain bravado in this talk, as if, without even noticing it, they somehow managed to feel proud of themselves and this deathtrap of a place. This was why they squabbled blindly with each other over all that was best there and, if a Russian offended a Georgian or vice versa, a bloody battle would immediately erupt right there in the barracks or on the parade ground, and crowds of men fought frenziedly. Matiushin never had time to understand what made these fights flare up, and many of the others also didn’t understand, although they still went rushing off in a crowd to crush the foreigners. But Matiushin always felt his life was coming to an end in the daily torment on the parade ground. His foot wrappings and tarpaulin boots were the same as everyone else’s, but once he’d made the first march from Tashkent to Dorbaz, his feet had been transformed into open wounds. Everything had started wrong for him, and Matiushin didn’t understand what it was that he’d done and the others hadn’t; why were their feet all right? But they had announced at the very beginning that anyone who got bloody feet wouldn’t be treated, but punished. The Moldavian had another rule like that: if you wanted to go to the infirmary, then you would pay the price at night before you went back to the regimental barracks. Matiushin endured his suffering. The commander of the infirmary was a tooth doctor from the regiment, sent to Dorbaz for the summer months, and he worked indefatigably – day in and day out he bundled off to the regiment men with jaundice and those who couldn’t be got back on their feet and into formation even with sal ammoniac. But Matiushin’s endurance, or his health, were stronger than the jaundice, stronger than the broiling sun. His suffering deprived him of the desire to eat and he just chewed on his bread ration, three chunks of bread a day.
