by Oleg Pavlov
One day they were herded off to drill as usual, across the steppe and round the camp. Hard as he was trying, Matiushin fell behind. The sergeants turned the platoon, which had run on a long way ahead, and drove them all back to Matiushin – and as soon as he dropped behind by a hundred metres or so, the whole thing was repeated. The soldiers dragged themselves along, the formation groaned and wheezed, but no one dared glance at Matiushin, although he could sense their explosive internal resentment as his gaze crashed painfully into their dirty, mute faces running with sweat and their blank backs swollen up into humps. It seemed to Matiushin that he was running fast, or so he tried to convince himself, and in trying, he suddenly hardened against himself, as if this cruelty to himself was a second wind, bringing him strength out of nowhere. But the truth was that he was barely trudging along, staggering from side to side, slumping onto others’ backs, hiding within this group of burnt-out, exhausted men who could still run – and they ran and ran … Suddenly he hated them. He imagined that this was their unspoken conspiracy: they were straining themselves to the limit to keep running and so taking their revenge on him. And he mustn’t be left on his own or even behind them all, he had to stay with them. Totally burned out, they started swearing and yelling at him, although there was nothing he could do about his feet. The sergeants were amused. Matiushin put up with it, realising that they were running in circles because of him, but suddenly a mysterious surge of strength turned everything in him upside down. It happened when one sergeant who was bored with being amused dashed up and started kicking at his sluggish feet.
Matiushin had never hit anyone in the face as hard as he hit that young guy: with all his strength, with strength he didn’t even know he had, given to him by nature for just such a case as this, so that he could maim, or even kill. The sergeant went flying and crashed to the ground, rolling around in the dust and screaming piercingly, clutching at either his head or his mouth. His fellow sergeants dashed over to him, lifted him up and led him away to the camp. He couldn’t speak, but only howl in pain. It was clear that Matiushin had injured him badly, but even so they couldn’t start exacting retribution from Matiushin in front of the entire formation, in front of a crowd of witnesses, and anyway they still didn’t know what form their retribution would take. They just ordered him to fall in. The command to run rang out again, as if they had decided to finish the drill. But the sergeants bringing up the rear drove the platoon on with their boots, so the men at the back crowded onto the ones in front, driving them on in turn, in order not to be beaten. Matiushin realised what they were doing to him – the entire platoon, guys just like him, drove him along, desperately forcing their fists into his back, no longer parting around him. The sergeants didn’t tire. At the most terrible moment, when he felt as if he was going to break down and fall, Matiushin suddenly felt someone at his side, preventing him from falling, helping as much as they could, holding him up. It was Rebrov, silently gritting his teeth and lugging Matiushin along, and someone else he didn’t remember or didn’t know, a little red-haired soldier who was using his body as well as he could to hold back the pressure from the men who were pushing forward as they were beaten by the sergeants. Matiushin held on, but when Rebrov and the redhead had no strength left to drag him along, he broke down and ended up plodding along in the rear of the platoon, where the sergeants in their berserk fury kicked him around like a football all the way back to the camp.
While they were getting their wind back at the camp, when the platoon split up on command beside the latrine, and all day long on the parade ground Matiushin could feel a blank wall around him. His fellow recruits were afraid of him, they shunned him, and the sergeants seemed to be in cahoots with them, they didn’t even look in his direction. The Moldavian issued commands, strolled calmly around the parade ground and seemed even more confident than usual. But the whole camp knew that a little half-soldier had struck a sergeant, and not only struck him, but seriously injured him.
Only one thing happened afterwards – the commanding officer of the training company ordered Matiushin to be brought to him and he hobbled to the officers’ tent, silently escorted by the Moldavian. The officers at Dorbaz didn’t live in barracks but separately, in tents. Under the gloomy vault of the tent, Matiushin caught sight of unmade beds and felt a pang of greed at the table piled high with leftovers. The dusky light was filled with the famished breath of stale alcohol fumes. The commanding officer was lounging on his bed with his boots still on, trying to escape from the heat. Another officer – it wasn’t possible to make out who – was dozing in his corner, dead to the world. Without asking permission, the Moldavian sat down on a free bed and Matiushin was left standing on his own.
‘So what’s all this? Got too much strength, don’t know what to do with it?’ the commanding officer said, looking up at him from the bed. ‘Do you know what they do here to people who don’t know what to do with their strength? I’m talking to you, comrade soldier: answer!’
‘No, sir … ’ Matiushin declared through his stupor.
‘Moldavian, why is he so slow-witted? You’re a really bad bastard. I entrusted the company to you; do you go about with your eyes closed?’
‘We’ll handle it, comrade Captain. I have my procedures.’
‘Handle it, handle it … I know about all that business. You’ve turned the barracks into a den of vice. Just remember: if need be, I’ll have your hide, and you can go to hell, I don’t give a damn about you.’
‘I won’t go to hell,’ the Moldavian retorted. ‘And my hide’s tough enough to handle it.’
‘Get up! And get out! And don’t you go getting cocky, or I’ll cocky you! You’ll cocky yourself into prison camp, have you got that? And explain to this fine fellow of yours where all roads lead to!’
When they emerged from the stuffy half-light of the officers’ tent, the Moldavian didn’t hurry – he smoothed down his uniform and drew himself erect. He ordered Matiushin to walk forward, to the latrine. The hump of the little adobe shed stood on the outskirts of the camp, a long way behind the barracks, as grey and dried-up as the steppe. Matiushin remembered only the loud buzzing of the flies: there were as many of them as bees in a hive. The Moldavian pressed him hard up against the wall with his chest, but didn’t hit him; he only spoke in a powerful whisper:
‘I’ll call for you tonight, and then you come, without any fuss. Better on the quiet. There are plenty like you in the regiment. They have a good life. They get to guzzle their fill. If I take a shine to you, I won’t let the others have you, you’ll be mine.’ He stepped away and stood menacingly over the toilet to relieve himself.
The sergeants probably knew what kind of justice there would be that night, what sentence the Moldavian had pronounced. They stared at Matiushin cunningly and every last one of them kept shouting: ‘Better hang yourself! Better hang yourself!’ But Matiushin couldn’t understand what they wanted to do to him.
The thought that they could kill him wasn’t frightening: if the Moldavian killed him, then later the Moldavian would be killed for that. In fact he, Matiushin, was the one who had been born to kill him.
He was already delirious; a mysterious fire was devouring him. The camp was wearily living out the remains of the day in hungry anticipation of the evening roll call, remembering the rations that had been eaten at supper and not the long night that was approaching. Rebrov appeared out of nowhere and sat down on the bench beside Matiushin. He smoked a whole cigarette he’d got hold of from somewhere through the teeth at one side of his mouth, like an old hand. He didn’t talk about anything, he just kept quiet, as if he was a stranger, which was true in a way, because ever since the train, Matiushin had shrunk away from him. And before today’s events the two Yelsk men had avoided each other here in the camp too.
‘So that’s it, then. We could have gone to NCO school together. I told you: stick by me, but now it’s goodbye and farewell,’ Rebrov hissed, looking round. ‘There’s still time. Clear out of the camp …’<
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Matiushin remembered being woken by a searing pain. In a cold little room flooded with light where the air conditioner was rattling its box, in the infirmary. He was pressed down onto the couch, facing the ceiling, and the army doctor was straining to pull a boot off his swollen foot.
‘Alive? Grin and bear it then, if you’ve come round!’ the doctor said in a very loud voice. ‘No, we’ll have to slit the boot … What have we got for cutting?’
‘There’s a knife,’ someone’s voice replied in a humdrum tone.
‘Bring it over … Slit it there on the side, and don’t tug it or he’ll bawl.’
‘But what’s wrong with him?’ another voice, curious, drifted down from the ceiling.
‘It’s you who should be asked what’s wrong with him! He’s got raw steak for feet. Haven’t you got anything better to do, you savages?’
‘Has anyone even touched him? No one’s laid a finger on him … He probably slashed up his own feet and pissed on them – the bastard’s trying to wangle his way into hospital, to fill his belly.’
‘Who taught him to piss on his wounds? You, sergeant? You should have taught him how to wind on his footcloths!’
‘He knows that himself, he’s as smart as they come.’
Something plumped onto the floor like a rat. The pain subsided and through his drowsy state Matiushin heard the voices talking.
‘That’s it for me … Take him into the sick bay …’
‘But all the beds are taken in there. Where can we put him?’
‘You can leave him on the stretcher; he’ll stay there until morning. Only don’t leave him in the passage, you fool, find a spot off at the side.’
He felt his own weight – they lifted it up and carried it, panting.
‘Oo-ooph, the bastard … He’s getting off on it … Right, up you get! Get up!’
‘Shut it, you … The senior lieutenant will hear you.’
‘But he’s just getting off on it, getting off on us carrying him …’
‘When we get him there, we’ll drop him; only flesh and bone isn’t he, let him snivel …’
They dropped the stretcher in the dark and laughed raucously, because Matiushin did what they intended and roared. Beds round about started creaking and bodies in them stirred and came to life.
‘They’ve woken up! Want to eat, think I’m going to feed them!’ the male nurse laughed. ‘Don’t know if it’s day or night, those jaundice cases!’
‘Come on, rise and shine, you bastards!’ the sergeant called merrily. ‘A flash over there on the right! Gas, fuck it! Lie down! Get up!’
Cheerful and delighted with himself for giving them a fright, he sauntered off, listening to the scraping of his own boots, and issued a command into the deathly darkness.
‘Okie-dokie, stand down. As for you, footless wonder, don’t sleep, we’re coming visiting tonight. Oh, we’ll be visiting you all right … ’ Matiushin heard in his black hole.
Everything went quiet, but in his agony Matiushin didn’t believe that the sergeant and the male nurse had gone. So he waited. The darkness breathed, lying doggo, until a glassy transparency appeared in it – and then, no longer trying to find those other two, Matiushin began weeping at his own helplessness, at being dumped alone on the bare floor, far away from the little white clouds of the beds. But his tears weren’t heard and there was no one to rescue him. He fancied that the bare blackness was not the floorboards but the night itself. The little clouds were melting, melting … He crawled off the stretcher and, dragging his useless legs along, without even knowing what he was doing, crept in under one of the beds, as if he was squeezing into a crack, and fell quiet there. At night they came, he heard the tramp of their feet, their drunken, bovine wheezing, their whispers. They were probably too drunk to make any sense of what had happened to him or where he’d vanished to, and they couldn’t get away with making a racket by rummaging about to find him.
In the morning the ambulance from the medical unit came to pick up its cargo. That was when he was missed. They searched right through the camp for him. It was obvious that no one in his condition could get far, even if he crawled. The tooth doctor pumped the male nurse and discovered that the new soldier had had visitors in the night, and then he beat out of him who those visitors were. The ambulance stayed where it was parked. The Moldavian and three other sergeants were summoned to the tent, where the officers, who had just woken up after a drinking session and were in a vicious mood, beat them mercilessly until they lost consciousness to make them tell the truth about what they’d done to the soldier during the night – after all, they could have killed and buried him. The Moldavian toughed it out, although the officers pushed him really hard, aiming to break him and not even concerned that he might croak. The other sergeants faltered, broke down and let out a few things about the Moldavian and what he did to the men. And so in the fever of that morning they started interrogating everybody, holding the Moldavian secure in the tent – and, not seeing him around any longer, the folk came clean.
The jaundice patients found a man, half-alive, asleep under a bed, but when Matiushin was discovered, the top brass no longer had any time for him – he was dragged out, dumped on a stretcher and loaded up.
They loaded up another stretcher too, with the injured sergeant – and they lay side by side. The ambulance hurtled across the steppe and they suffered torments in the jolting, bouncing vehicle. Matiushin groaned. And the sergeant, for whom groaning or moving his jaw was impossible, whined dully, clutching at the stretcher. The sweat streamed off him. He was exhausted by the pain, he was suffocating. They reached the regiment at breakneck speed. Matiushin was offloaded into the infirmary, and his bog-green, slashed boots that looked like toads were flung onto the stretcher – and those toads sat on his chest, watching over him all the way to reception. They offloaded the sergeant, who was in rather worse shape, and wheeled him further on, to the hospital.
Matiushin moved from the stretcher to a couch on his own and was able to get undressed when they told him to get all that filth off him: he used a towel moistened under the tap to scrub down this unfamiliar body overgrown with moss – himself – the way a male nurse told him to do. He heard the concerned army doctor talking about him:
‘Why is it we have this wasteful management at every turn? Tell me, Verochka. They take a man into the army, but they don’t teach him how to wind on his footcloths … It doesn’t look like he did the job deliberately, does it? What do you make of it, Verochka?’
However, they didn’t give him anything to put on. They told him to lie on a trolley and pushed him along head-first in front of them, which set everything spinning and swimming about.
On the operating table Matiushin fell asleep without any anaesthetic. He slept for twenty-four hours or even longer and, during that time, they dripped donated blood into him from a bottle and nourished him with injections of sweet water. He slept sweetly, dissolving like a lump of sugar, with the orphaned blood flowing through his veins. But after he had slept right through the day, he seemed to sense that the night had come and the anticipation of a call slipped into his mind and was driven home firmly. Drowsily preparing to jump to his feet, he woke up, unaware that he was lying in an infirmary instead of a barracks.
Everyone in the infirmary had to work, attending to their own needs and those of the army doctors. Matiushin was issued a pair of crutches and ordered to get up. His legs were bandaged up to the knees, as if they’d put a pair of white felt boots on him. He found it hard to stand on the crutches. The first thing they told him to do was provide a sample of urine. The male nurse gave him a little mayonnaise jar with no lid. Matiushin stuck it in the pocket of his dressing grown and tottered off to the privy. He made a real effort to manage the jar, but he just couldn’t do it. All he could do was pull down his underpants, but when it came to setting the jar in place, his hands couldn’t cope, the crutches kept slipping out from under his arms. He put the jar on the windowsill and hobbled over t
o the metal urinal – after all this hassle, he couldn’t hold out any longer. A downtrodden-looking guy with his head shaved in crude steps, as if in deliberate mockery, ran into the privy to relieve himself. Holding the jar in his hand like a stone, Matiushin barked out hoarsely:
‘Listen, brother, you’re not infectious, help me out with these samples …’
The downtrodden guy docilely did everything required – and disappeared. That was a load off Matiushin’s mind. Now he had to carry this stranger’s urine to the male nurse, but it spilled in his pocket while he was hopping and dragging himself along, and the male nurse wasn’t slow to speak up when he saw the wet patch on Matiushin’s side.
‘What’s up, bro, not pissed yourself, have you?’
The folks in the infirmary lined up in the little garden; the infirmary sergeant-major, a haughty soldier with a moustache who wasn’t sick with anything – in fact he was the plumpest, best-fed, healthiest of them all – gave the orders, striding up and down in front of the line. Some called him the ‘boss’ and some the ‘foreman’, like on a building site. He handed out work to everyone and, not bothering at all that Matiushin was on crutches, he told him to sweep the paths in the garden. Matiushin refused to do it, right there in the line-up. He thought the foreman was making fun of him. The foreman walked up and lashed him across first one cheek and then the other, with his open hand; Matiushin couldn’t even raise his hands, he couldn’t lift them off the crutches even to protect himself. And the foreman carried on lashing him across the cheeks until the lad next to Matiushin intervened – he shielded Matiushin with his body and persuaded the foreman to let him take on the job instead.
