At first, the Lieutenant Colonel searched for flaws within himself, but alas, he could not find a reason why the leadership mistrusted him.
‘I’m politically mature, I march well, I have a powerful commander’s voice. What else do they want?’ Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy mused, lying on his sofa.
His wife Nadezhda Pak saw Afanasy’s anguish but she was unable to help him, though she tried her best. She swept the floor earnestly, sang Korean folk songs animatedly in the mornings, washed the laundry until she was blue, played tunes from variety shows on the piano, brushed his uniform assiduously, polished his high boots, thought up tasty meals to cook and even managed to acquire a rather racy negligee from a junior officer’s wife. Wearing it she hoped to distract Afanasy and remind him of erotic delights, long forgotten.
‘You look like a whore,’ said the Lieutenant Colonel, lying on the sofa, when one evening, Nadezhda came into the room wearing her new negligee. ‘Disgusting,’ he added.
‘You don’t like it…’ Nadezhda said glumly, and Afanasy turned toward the wall not even glancing at her.
‘Afanasy, make love to me,’ moaned Nadezhda Pak, clinging to him. But the chief of the political branch was unresponsive, cold as ice. Women, including his wife, did not interest him; he only longed for the mountains.
His relationships with the officers under his command were no better. Major General Konstantin Abramovich Stanislavski, the chief of the division, even called Afanasy into his office one day and said: ‘Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, I’m beginning to doubt whether I should recommend you for promotion.’
After such a ‘hint’ the chief of the political division Afanasy Pak fell into a profound despair. He left all functions to his subordinates, abandoned his political education duties, and once was even late for morning drill, for which he was reprimanded by Major General Stanislavski.
‘See that this does not happen again,’ Major General Stanislavski said. ‘Do I have your word?’
‘You have my word,’ muttered the chief of the political division Afanasy.
However, Afanasy soon forgot the warning.
He thought about the mountains and oftentimes, gazing at the political map of the world in his office, he would daydream. Here he would see himself in the mountains with an AK in his hands, lobbing a grenade into a cave, returning fire, interrogating a captured enemy, carrying a wounded comrade over a mountain pass, giving commands to attack here and retreat there before, at last, the Minister of Defence awards him a medal for bravery…
During those moments, Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy Kazimy-rovich Pak was reinvigorated: cheeks flushed, he would feel a stirring manliness and resume writing his reports.
Alas, a negative reply would arrive and Afanasy again roamed the division dejectedly. Officers and soldiers began to avoid Afanasy and had nothing to say when he addressed them.
It pained Afanasy to hear new arrivals to the division, who had already served in the mountains, talk about their experiences. They spoke of clandestine ambushes, raids, intelligence operations, and battles waged not only by the artillery units but also fighter pilots, tank crews and saboteurs. The chief of the division’s political branch, Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy, despised the newly minted heroes – many among whom sported the order of the Red Star on their chests. The yellow ribbon worn by light casualties and the red ribbon given to those who had been seriously wounded in the course of duty so enraged him that he could not look; he would turn his head away. Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy was incandescent with rage.
After a while, Afanasy, unable to get a posting to the mountains, became utterly despondent. He showed no tenderness toward his wife, he retreated into himself and became even more careless in the execution of his duties as chief of the division’s political branch. He was no longer interested in the party plenaries, decisions or programmes; he became apolitical. There were rumours in the division that the army political leadership was even considering whether or not Afanasy Pak was competent to carry out his duties. Afanasy viewed all this with indifference. He had, it seems, arrived at a critical point, and his wife Nadezhda began to worry about, God forbid, suicide. She no longer thought about love or emotions.
It would not have taken much for him to announce that he was transferring to the reserves without waiting for retirement and to cross the border into the mountains as a volunteer. Lying on the sofa, Afanasy imagined himself as a free agent – a sniper. Well hidden in the mountains he would wait for the enemy convoy. When it appeared, he would shoot every single one – he would finish off the wounded with a shot to the head. Once the task was completed he would shoulder his weapon and move forward to wait for another enemy convoy. He was invincible. His bravery and accuracy was legendary, yet no one knew what he looked like. Afanasy Kazimyrovich Pak had no need for glory, medals or rank – he was a warrior. Afanasy Pak loved to imagine himself wounded in the belly. He would rip open his shirt, pour some alcohol from his canteen onto the wound, sterilise his bayonet in the flame of his lighter and, suffering the most excruciating pain, extract the bullet from his stomach. He would lose consciousness after the operation but not for long. Upon regaining his senses, he would bind his wound, rise and continue fighting more bravely than ever.
‘Afanasy, Afanasy, let’s make love,’ Nadezhda Pak would beg, but Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy would pretend that he was asleep. Such was the marital bliss of the couple who knew that critical battles were being fought somewhere in the distant mountains.
And then, one day, the chief of the division Major General Konstantin Abramovich Stanislavski summoned Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy.
‘You have a patron, Afanasy,’ the major general said gruffly. ‘I never would have authorised it myself, but Comrade Army General Nursultan Genrikhovich Mitrofanov has ordered it. Get ready, you fly out tomorrow.’
Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy needed no explanations.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Afanasy. ‘May I go?’
‘Forward march!’ commanded Major General Stanislavski, while his eyes followed him out suspiciously.
Afanasy got down to work as soon as he entered his office. There was much to do: he had to prepare graphics for the political lectures, write reports, minutes of the party meeting, personnel evaluations, data on party fees, and so on, for the officer who was to take over his duties. So much to do – enough to make you lose your mind.
Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy looked at the stacks of paper and realised that he would not be able to complete the work by tomorrow without exhausting himself. The work was boring, but the notion that soon he will face the enemy eye to eye gave him strength.
‘I’ve been negligent, yes, negligent,’ he repeated to himself and then he called for the ever-willing praporshchik1* Ekaterina Leblan. She had served in the housekeeping section of the division for many years. The obliging woman never declined a task assigned by the chief of the political branch.
‘Comrade praporshchik, I command you to come to my office at six o’clock,’Afanasy said to Ekaterina Leblan in a peremptory tone.
‘Yes, sir. May I go?’ asked the surprised praporshchik, for it had been quite a while since she’d heard his imperious voice.
‘Dismissed. And don’t be late,’ Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy said in a loud, commanding voice. And suddenly, for some reason, he thought of his wife Nadezhda Pak dressed in her seductive underwear, slinking like a cat toward his sofa with a peacock feather behind her ear.
It lasted but a moment. There was work to be done, and Lieutenant Colonel Pak dismissed the indecent memory without much effort.
Praporshchik Ekaterina Leblan, who was plump and not known for her seductiveness, came into his office at exactly six o’clock in the evening. Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy was exhausted and he had not progressed toward his goal of organising the political division’s paperwork.
He was inefficient; his mind kept wandering to the mountains. As he picked up a paper marked ‘Secret’, he imagined himself again a member of an elite paratroope
r unit, parachuting from a helicopter and raking an enemy encampment with gunfire before hitting the ground. The enemy soldiers run in all directions, the wounded fall. Afanasy lands and disentangles himself from his parachute. He fires again. He pursues. He tosses the AK aside and engages in hand-to-hand combat. He throws his opponent down and pulls out his entrenching tool. He strikes, he strikes again. Or else: Afanasy is crossing a minefield and only Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy knows the route. A step in the wrong direction means instant death. Or yet again: in the aftermath of a battle, Afanasy and his troops sit around a campfire. He talks about Khrushchev, Lenin and Brezhnev and describes the proceedings of the latest Party Congress.
‘Excuse me, comrade Lieutenant Colonel, allow me,’ praporshchik Ekaterina Leblan suddenly interrupted his thoughts and accidentally touched his hand.
Afanasy feels a tingle that, while gentle at first, suddenly resembles a bolt of lightning through his body.
Afanasy glanced at the clock – there was only half an hour left until his departure for the mountains. He felt a stirring manliness.
We’ve worked too long, I won’t have a chance to say goodbye to Nadezhda, he thought and was surprised to see how quickly daybreak had come. And then there’s that mischievous…
The chief of the political branch Afanasy Kazimyrovich Pak raised his eyes, smiled wryly and sighed. Praporshchik Ekaterina Leblan, although she had been a member of Communist party for twenty years, flinched. She stepped back as if anticipating trouble, but she didn’t dare scream.
It’s impossible to say why – the paperwork, the desire to get out to the mountains as quickly as possible, the nearness of the praporshchik and the sudden erection – but Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy’s eyes grew dim.
He swayed and then straightened, growing tight as a bowstring before giving a military click to his heels.
And then suddenly the chief of the political branch Pak howled like a coyote and pulled the retreating praporshchik Ekaterina Leblan into his embrace.
The woman, although she had experienced worse in the course of her life, tried to free herself. She bit him, but their strengths were unequal and Afanasy was as quick as a rabbit.
The chief of the political branch Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy, overwhelmed by spontaneous passion, pressed Ekaterina, mother of two children, to him, gnawed at her double chin, tore at her eyelashes with his teeth, ransacked her mouth with his cockade, licked her armpits with his boot tops, scattered the stars from his epaulets upon her neck, pinned his breastpin to her bottom; he became a pervert such as the army had never seen.
The political branch chief’s powerful hands tore praporshchik Ekaterina Leblan’s tunic, ripped off her epaulets and medals, groped at her breasts and kneaded her thighs.
A true beast, and not the chief of the political branch, decided the manhandled praporshchik Ekaterina Leblan, when Afanasy overstepped the bounds by cutting into her nipple with the visor of his cap.
‘Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, stop! We are at work – you’ll be leaving in ten minutes for the front line!’ pleaded the praporshchik but Afanasy, blinded by lust, did not hear her.
‘Katya! Katya!’ he shouted, pushing Ekaterina Leblan onto the table where no less turbulent meetings of the infantry division party had taken place. ‘Nadya! Katya! Nadyusha, I’ve come to say goodbye! Katenka! Nadenka! Nadya, I’m leaving for the mountains! Nadya, so long!’
‘Comrade Lieutenant Colonel,’ wailed the praporshchik, who was being hacked at by the visor of the cap and scratched by the Frunze Military Academy pins. She had served as inspector at the penitentiary for many years. ‘Afonya, it hurts! Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, have mercy, my children, my grandchildren are waiting for me at home…’
‘Nadyusha! Nadyusha! So long!’ shouted the chief of the political branch as he, still wearing his uniform, forced himself into the praporshchik.
No one knows how this would have played out if there had not been several staff officers on duty.
Later, when the military procurator delivered Lieutenant Colonel Afanasy Kazimyrovich Pak’s sentence at the court martial the chief of the division, Major General Konstantin Abramovich Stanislavski, wiped away a tear and testified: ‘Comrades, it is hard to accept the fact that in a few days you will be shot. So does it matter how, where, when and under what circumstances it will be?’
The tribunal judge asked the general not to stray from the matter at hand, and although he understood the subtlety of ‘where, when, and under what circumstances’, he, too, longed for more vivid effects – he had waited for a chance to preside at court martials in the battlefields of Afghanistan for more than a year.
‘Continue, general,’ said the tribunal judge after a while.
‘I have nothing to add,’ admitted General Stanislavski.
Afanasy sat behind bars in the dock, stared at praporshchik Leblan, and bowed his head as if to apologise. Later, he turned toward his weeping wife Nadezhda and thought: I will never go to the mountains… To hell with them. And then Pak finally decided as he stood to listen to the sentence given out by the court martial: I’ll serve my time, and when I get out, I will only hunt for praporshchiks.
Translated by Ada Valaitis from Herkus Kuncius, Isduoti, issizadeti, apsmeizti, Vilnius: Lithuanian Writers’ Union Publishers (2007).
Herkus Kuncius (born 1964) is a prose writer, dramatist and essayist. Having studied art history at the Vilnius Academy of Art, he worked for some time as an art critic and conceptual artist before becoming one of the most prolific authors in post-Soviet Lithuania. He is known for his post-modern style and his prose is distinguished for its erudition, intellectual brilliance, subtle humour and irony. His grotesque charades reveal the absurdity of existence. In his novel Don’t Pity Dushansky (Nepasigaileti Dusanskio, 2006), his short story collection To Betray, To Denounce, To Defame (Isduoti, issizadeti, apsmeizti, 2007) and his play Matthew (Matas, 2005), the absurd logic of the Soviet system is highlighted through explicit sexual scenes, a technique that has annoyed some conservative critics.
* * *
1* Praporshik was originally a rank, equivalent to ensign, attained by junior commissioned officers in the military of the Russian Empire. The rank was restored in the 1970s in the USSR and was used for non-commissioned officers equivalent to the rank of warrant officer.
The Murmuring Wall
(an excerpt)
Sigitas Parulskis
Martynas stood leaning against the wooden wall and looked forward. He looked, but didn’t see anything. And if he did see something it wasn’t what was in front of his eyes. It was like he was looking at his inner being, at his past. There are those moments when you feel like you’re not here. At the same time you are here and somewhere else, in your past and your memory. You come across a moment that is unbearable, that you need to get rid of, that you should pull out like a painful sliver. That moment can last for eternity. It can last and torture you. And you can’t do anything with it because it is your life.
He had sat on the edge of the stool for a whole hour already. His back ached; his arms and legs hurt. He tried a few times to move his rear end from the edge of the stool without being detected, however he got a smack to the head each time he made an attempt.
The partisan was questioned by two interrogators. They changed every five hours or so, perhaps every six. Martynas didn’t know whether it was day or night anymore. Just sometimes, when they took him back to his cell, he would see wavy light or gloomy nightfall through the little window decorated with two sets of bars. One day the warden came into the cell and closed the little window. However, even through the closed window you could hear the cheering of Soviet citizens on Lenin Square – a revolutionary parade was taking place, processions marched with flags, and you could hear Soviet marches played by a brass band. The Lithuanian people were greeting their great leader. The Lithuanian people rejoiced in the achievements of October – a splendid showpiece for Martynas’ torture.
He was captured in October,
which meant that it was now already November for he had been in Lukiskes Prison for more than two weeks. At first the interrogations were very intense but now they had lessened. The main rule that he found out from a cell mate, who also introduced himself as a figure in the underground, was not to talk with anyone in the cell. He was quickly taken away and never returned, but Martynas made a note of this lesson. Regardless of how hard people of all sorts tried to talk with him later on, he didn’t get into a discussion with any of them.
A farmer, at whose place he wanted to stay for the winter, had informed on him. Martynas remembered very well that on the evening before his arrest he was reading notes from Student, a fellow partisan. He felt very ill – he had a cold, and his throat and head hurt. The farmer, knocking on the hiding place, invited him to come and have dinner with him. They ate mashed potatoes, and then the farmer poured some moonshine. Just one glass, the host said, it will get rid of the headache right away. Another was proffered before he descended down into the hiding place and started to read. He woke up in a lorry, wet; it appeared that they had poured water on him so that he would sober up before wrapping him up in a tarpaulin so he wouldn’t try to jump out of the back of the lorry.
Feeling like he was soon going to lose consciousness, Martynas warned the interrogator watching him through the little window.
‘I’m going to fall,’ and he fell from the stool. He woke up from a blow to his back. His interrogator, standing near him, never let down his guard.
‘That’s enough, take him away,’ the interrogator said without turning around, and they took the partisan to his cell.
After another week of intense interrogation, they stopped. He refused to collaborate and while he was being interrogated, he mentioned only the names of dead partisans and the addresses of those who he knew to be collaborators.
‘You will put me up against the wall sooner or later anyway, so the earlier the better,’ he said. The interrogators were enraged and beat and cursed him, however the partisan felt that a shadow of respect for him was hidden under this hate. The local Soviet militia and NKVD officers in the town of Olandija were worse – just as soon as they caught him they beat him brutally with sticks and ropes. Afterwards, refusing to say anything, they took him near the lake, near the wall of the manor estate storehouse, referred to as the Murmuring Wall by the people of the estate, and ordered him to dig a hole. Having finished digging, Martynas leaned against the wall, closed his eyes and heard the wall making sounds. It didn’t speak, it murmured and it emitted a vague but pleasant vibration that was reassuring and compassionate, which reached his tired, pain-inflicted consciousness, and Martynas smiled for the first time since his captivity began. They placed him next to the hole he himself had dug and pointed their rifles at his chest. But Martynas did not feel afraid, just an unbounded longing, an all-absorbing, all-embracing emptiness near his heart, an emptiness that, it seemed, should swallow him for all eternity. But suddenly that flow of all-encompassing emptiness crashed into something, perhaps the wall, the Murmuring Wall. The NKVD officers threatened him but did not shoot, and they took Martynas to Vilnius.
The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature Page 19