by Oleg Pavlov
Matiushin took a sip from the flask, and when he felt the strange drink scorch his throat, he realised indifferently that it wasn’t vodka and it wasn’t wine, but some kind of home-brewed moonshine. The Chinese smiled, pleased.
The next day Matiushin was assigned to guard duty in the zone. He remembered those new days – clear but colourless. The company’s pig died: it had eaten some barbed wire on the dump when the swineherd wasn’t watching. Gadjiev boiled up the dead animal’s flesh into a thick meat jelly that looked like ham, and they stuffed themselves with it in the guardhouse. In the middle of the day Matiushin went out to take a break from the food; the guardhouse yard had got too cramped and the soldiers who weren’t up on their towers crept outside, onto the road. There were several women of indeterminate age, who had probably come to meet husbands in the camp, hovering about at the camp reception point, various people from the village were strolling past along the road, and a bus was waiting at the gates: a body was brought out to it on a stretcher from the zone, and then another one. The convicts lay there quietly. They were alive, but one of them, a young guy, had a hunk of metal sticking out of his chest and he was holding it with his hands. When the warders started loading up the stretchers, the young guy got frightened and started groaning. The stretchers were put in the passage between the seats, so when the bus drove away from the zone it looked empty.
The night was over. The tower on which Matiushin had spent it was always called the ‘vodka tower’ by the locals – in the guardhouse and the zone and the village – but he had only understood why this night, although everyone else seemed to know. The sergeant-major had frisked the squad before they went out onto the path, but now Matiushin realised that these searches were always meaningless. He left the guardhouse empty-handed. During the night shift, flasks full of moonshine were brought to the tower by the Chinese and the trainer, who completed an inspection tour round the path at least every hour. The booze had already been ordered by the zone, so this night they were delivering to the zone what they had taken money for in advance. After guard duty Matiushin was supposed to receive his share from the trainer in the outbuilding. The trainer and the Chinese didn’t tell him who had taken the orders from the convicts on the other side of the barbed wire or where the moonshine came from. He had to do his own job: take the risk of receiving the flasks at the tower and tossing them into the zone to the messengers who named the right name and, at the same time, if necessary, accepting new orders.
After the change of guard at the end of those twenty-four hours, Pomogalov didn’t release him with the platoon – he ordered him to hand in his rifle to Dojo and said he should follow him. They dropped back from the others and went through a little door in the camp gates, coming out into a blank dead end that looked like a yard, beside a different set of gates. Here at the guardhouse lodge, a delivery from the zone had been left for the sergeant-major: weighty rolls of polythene, the height of a man. Pomogalov slung one onto his own shoulder and Matiushin shouldered the other and set off in step with the sergeant-major. Anybody wandering along unburdened who met them on the way greeted Pomogalov respectfully as they approached and he replied:
‘And good health to you too!’
They walked as far as a brick house surrounded by a high fence. The sergeant-major pushed open the wicket in the iron gates, which were as ugly to look at as the camp gates, but inside them was a quiet, well-kept yard with chickens, where Pomogalov was met by his daughter, who was playing with her father’s shoes on the porch, an intelligent-looking Alsatian that made no sound but watched Matiushin keenly, and a round, sturdy woman who came hurrying out at the noise. They dumped the rolls beside the skeleton of a fresh new greenhouse and Pomogalov strode over to the lavatory with a sigh. The moment he walked into the yard, his daughter had attached herself to him and started following him about, and she didn’t notice the soldier who had come with him. The young wife went into the house and came out with a piece of pie, but Pomogalov rebuked her sternly.
‘Why not pour him a glass of vodka as well, you fool! Come on now, no spoiling my soldiers. That’s how it is, lad. You haven’t deserved my pies yet.’
After the sergeant-major had dumped his load, he straightened up and squared his shoulders. In his own home he seemed like a colder and greedier man than when he was striding about with a tired, understanding expression on duty, where he didn’t begrudge anything.
‘I’m not blind,’ sighed Pomogalov. ‘I see that you’ve sneaked back onto guard duty. Ok, so stand duty while our little Frenchman is bathing in the sea. It’s not my headache. Go for it, rake it in. But if anything happens, son, I’ll have your hide and hang it out to dry. You need the nose of a wolf round here. You know what did for Karpovich? He kept his money with Gadjiev, thought it would be as good as in the savings bank in those pots and pans of his. But when Karpovich wanted all his savings back, the cook gave the nod – and that was the end of Karpovich. And look at how it was done: neat and tidy, all legal and above board! Well, why are you cringing like that? Ok, drop it, I’m not the little Frenchman, and this isn’t the prosecutor’s office, but I know you earned yourself a tenner last night. Everybody knows that, son, that’s just the way things are. So just you think, think on … Now, all right! Svetlanka, pour me and the soldier boy a big one each!’
With an incredulous air, the woman brought out a clean, domestic-looking bottle from somewhere.
‘My own stuff!’ said the sergeant-major, nodding in satisfaction at the bottle, and added rather strangely: ‘Remember … Remember Karpovich, son!’
They flogged the booze into the zone in flasks and even in hot water bottles, as if they were deliberately running down their stocks, dumping it. They were in a hurry. They took risks. Matiushin fearlessly ordered himself a new pair of tarpaulin boots in the zone and replaced his old, darned ones that every dog in the regiment knew. His new boots didn’t have just a whiff of the zone about them, they reeked of it. The deputy commander for political affairs came back from leave, bringing fine rain and cold weather to go with his mood, although he himself had got a tan and looked fitter. He made enquiries and saw what had happened in the company but didn’t say anything, and Matiushin carried on standing guard duty – on the vodka tower.
The Chinese and the trainer were a bit dejected and trade quietened down, but only for a while, and there was no way Matiushin could get away from the vodka tower. Even the money – the reason he was handling the booze – started to frighten him. Sometimes in the guardhouse he was overcome by fear that they would hold a search, and only calmed down after he had dropped the money beyond reach in the privy.
A month later, in October, they heard about Karpovich. A company convoy escorted convicts to the pre-trial detention centre in Karaganda, and while they were there they got talking with the prison guards, who boasted that they had a soldier with red shoulder tabs awaiting trial there and his cellmates had already made him their bitch; his name was Karpovich. When they got back from the convoy, the company men couldn’t wait to shock everyone with the news; they went round the barracks as if they were dragging a dead cat by its tail. The rumour even reached the zone via the ‘convoy post’. The convicts yelled mockingly to the tower men from the roofs of their barracks huts, saying they should send Karpovich to them under escort. But the soldiers set out into the zone to take revenge. At night, in the guardhouse, volunteers were gathered to take a stroll to the punishment cells where the non-cooperating prisoners and criminal bosses were held: Dybenko went round the prisoners one by one and afterwards he told everyone how he and the others went into a cell, announced that they were taking revenge on the organised criminals on behalf of a soldier, handcuffed the prisoners and beat seven shades of shit out of them.
That was when Matiushin decided that he would just grab about three hundred roubles and run. If he screwed the price up, there wouldn’t be a peep out of the convicts – dealing in booze had got more risky. He felt his own strength in the fact that he had a g
oal – to escape. Escape. Stick the money in his boot – and bolt into the hospital. If he couldn’t manage it by cunning, he’d have to smash his head open against the wall or pay off the doctors. The hospital was the most important thing, he needed them to send him to be checked for something really serious, so he could be declared unfit, an invalid. Escape, escape! And if everything was coming together as Matiushin suspected, he needed to get into that hospital quick, or the November winds would start howling and the frosty winter would set in, harder than death. He sensed the approach of winter very keenly.
However, in the same way as they could sometimes tell in a camp when someone was planning an escape, Arman seemed to sense that Matiushin had made up his mind and was almost ready to run. The searches and checks became more frequent, with the political officer suddenly appearing in the guardhouse in the middle of the night. And he virtually chained Matiushin to it, putting him on guardhouse duty – demobilised men had been leaving one by one and no new soldiers had arrived in the regiment yet, so they all had to serve for two men, but Matiushin was the only one the political officer kept in the guardhouse day after day without a change of watch.
Matiushin lived in the guardhouse and never went off duty but, more than that, instead of the sleep he was entitled to, Arman sent him to work on the reinforcements. Mountains of sand had been brought to the four sides of the zone and they were spreading it along chains of men with spades, then scattering it and levelling it out with harrows. The harrows were made especially for the men: a pipe was welded in an arc, like a tow bar, to a serrated iron pile. Three men at a time got into a harrow, leaned their chests against the pipe and dragged it until the sand had been dispersed. And then they went back, flung the harrow onto the mounds that other soldiers had heaped up with their spades and dragged it forward, covering the exclusion zone with an even layer of sand. After dragging a harrow about, Matiushin marched off to the vodka tower, and after that he got into harness again, and then went off to the vodka tower again. He felt as if his hands had turned rusty. He went on dragging himself round the camp in these circuits – first into the harrow, then up onto the tower – until he puked, but he believed that now at last he would get at least twenty-four hours to rest: tomorrow he’d go off-duty with all the others and slope off to the company headquarters.
It was some time after midnight. Matiushin had been relieved and returned to the guardhouse with his squad, but he had sat up late with the ginger-haired guy whose job as controller at the checkpoint meant that he had to run through night after night without any sleep but slept to his heart’s content in the daytime, when he was relieved from checking passes.
Matiushin hid in the torture cell of the ginger guy’s tiny little room with its barred window, whiling away his usual boredom, not wanting to join the crush around the arms locker that everyone made a dash for, jangling and swearing, straight from the doorway to hand in their automatics – hurrying as if desperate to relieve themselves. The ginger guy livened up, glad to see another living soul, and in an effort to keep Matiushin there, he treated him to the narcotic chifir tea and brought out some sweets. He chirped tremulously away with such passion that the coursing streams of his heartfelt voice were enough to warm Matiushin up. All that the ginger guy needed was someone to be there. His eyes watered with bright tears and he spoke without a pause, not even looking at Matiushin, squinting blindly, his gaze aimed somewhere to one side. Matiushin didn’t have the strength to leave. He didn’t even stir from the spot, dissolving in the man’s voice as if into oblivion, with a sweet kind of pain. Sagging over their heads with the paint flaking off it, the tiny room’s low, oppressive plywood ceiling didn’t seem like a ceiling at all but a gaping breach, a hole. Even the prison corridor, which was the only entrance to the zone via the building and was protected by the ugly barred window of this little room squeezed into two square metres, seemed like a breach and a hole, with its armoured doors, locks and bolts and its fur coat of cold, naked concrete instead of walls.
The automatic dangling from Matiushin’s shoulder, which he hadn’t handed in to the arms locker, looked as dead-beat and exhausted as Matiushin really was, although he seemed as tough as iron. Even though the bustle and confusion had settled down long ago and the watch rooms were deathly quiet with sleeping men, Matiushin carried on wasting away his rest time with this little soldier who was condemned not to sleep, penned in between these four walls, knowing that he himself would never get enough sleep, and also feeling penned in, his bones squeezed tight into a little room where it was easier to stand than sit – and easier to die than live.
He refused to believe that this time of his had been counted and there would be no way for him to grab even a short minute of sleep when they drove him back out to the tower. It also pained him that those men who were sleeping like babies on the other side of the wall didn’t have the strength simply to swallow down their own hunger and weakness and not prolong them sickeningly, day after day, but he also hated them because, although he was among them, he was different, alien, as if he was some freak who wouldn’t be able to hold out for long on his own. That is, he hated them as if he knew that he was inexorably fated to be killed because of them, among them, but his very blood ached compassionately with a live-born, brutal love that might flare up in a furious impulse and make him shoot every one of the sleepers so that they wouldn’t be tormented day after day, so that these innocent babes wouldn’t be forced, day after day, day after day, to live.
Feeling painfully unnecessary even to himself, Matiushin suddenly became aware what a secure human position he held in this little room, as if he, not the controller, were in charge here. He also realised that the ginger guy needed him, couldn’t manage without him, although there was nothing in the company to make them friends, and Matiushin even resented this hardy controller’s easy desk duties – although that too, surprisingly, bonded them together, setting each of them precisely in his place. Matiushin forgave the ginger guy for his ignoble desk job, realising that his own guard duty on the tower had earned him a stronger position than the controller in this quiet little room of his, where he even paid for attention with sweets …
Matiushin awoke from his stupor – he fancied that he had heard a scream far away in the night. He was instantly flooded with strength, intent on the silence, but he couldn’t hear anything – and then, literally a moment later, there was a lingering clamour, a howling and screaming from the direction of the zone that rolled on and on, growing like a snowball: someone was running towards the checkpoint, yelling at the top of his lungs. In that instant the ginger guy froze, surprised and fearful, looking helplessly to Matiushin, then took fright at the automatic rifle on which Matiushin had already jerked the breech lock, readying himself, and was now waiting.
‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’
‘Shut up, you fool!’ Matiushin hissed, not knowing what was going to happen to them. ‘I …’
A screaming warder came dashing into the checkpoint area like a wild boar and rushed desperately towards the first set of bars blocking the corridor, which couldn’t be unlocked from the outside, because the bolt mechanism of the barred gate was controlled from the little room, from the checkpoint.
The warder was unharmed except for a split eyebrow, but a little lake of blood had flooded his eye, and he was goggling wildly with the crimson bubble, unable to see anything through the caked blood. Not knowing that it was only his eyebrow that was split, the warder was shuddering and trembling as if his eye had been gouged out. He screeched sickeningly, squealing that there was a bloody massacre in the barracks and pressing himself against the bars in terror as if someone was pursuing him, hot on his heels, to gouge out his remaining eye and kill him; he was sobbing in his desperation to break into the shelter of the guardhouse. The iron frame of the barred door shook under his assault, seeming suddenly no heavier than a cobweb although he was only scrabbling on the spot, twitching convulsively as he dangled there in its net.
The
ginger guy started staggering towards the door but he didn’t have the heart to run, and he looked tearfully back at Matiushin, afraid to unlock the barred door himself and let the wounded, squealing warder into the guardhouse. The warder, realising that the soldiers could leave him there, that their orders were the most important thing for them, started cursing them with implacable spite, demanding that they obey him, like a berserk woman.
‘Don’t let him in: that might be just what they’re waiting for!’ Matiushin said firmly, and the warder gave a bloodcurdling howl:
‘I hate you, you bas-ta-a-ards … ’ The buttons of his uniform clattered as they slithered down over the bars and his carcass slumped onto the grey concrete floor.
Matiushin thought it was hilarious, everything suddenly seemed funny to him; the more hopelessly dark and confused it became, the funnier it was, but he too was alternately shuddering with cold and suffocating in the heat. He dashed out into the guard room and started yelling. The ginger guy rushed to Arman’s watch officer’s room – and then it began.
Many of them didn’t have their boots on yet and were dragging them along behind, some had given up looking for their boots and were jostling fearfully, barefoot, around the arms locker. Some who had automatics were staggering from one corner to another without any orders, without anyone in command. But suddenly the real alarm signal was howling, and then the soldiers started thrashing about in a frenzy, thrusting each other aside, trampling over each other. Whose idea was it to turn on the siren? The soldiers were up and the siren only disorientated them, it was so deafening. Matiushin was overwhelmed by the siren’s howling too, but he went dashing blindly into the formation, and although he didn’t know the authorised sequence of personnel, something led him to occupy the right place, or perhaps it wasn’t his, but anyway he was there with everyone.
They set off at a rush, hurtling forward with the Alsatians dashing along in a pack at the front. The dogs were swept along by a kind of frenzy that wasn’t in the men, but the soldiers ran just as furiously, spurred on by the howling of the siren. The only reason Matiushin knew he was still alive was this being pressed up against the others, being at one with them. With so many men around you, it’s not possible to believe in death. Or perhaps it was the hope somewhere inside him that his death would fall on another man: the one who was panting hard at Matiushin’s back, or the one whose head was right there in front of Matiushin. The strongest feeling of all, though, was that nobody could be killed: that Lady Death, if she existed, would be afraid of so many men, would overshoot and miss her target. He couldn’t keep up with his thoughts about death, unable to work out if he was dashing towards or running away from it, or what kind of night this was; like an animal, he was swept away by a single, headlong, mighty feeling, a clash of all the human impulses – love, hate, despair, fear – that existed separately in his soul but had suddenly united into one vital, living force, as if another heart had started beating beside his first heart, and Matiushin, who couldn’t even cope with one life, suddenly had two lives in his chest.
