The exhausted pilots make no exceptions for anyone and indifferently shout out the names on the flight roster, ticking people off list by list. They are beyond caring much about anything any more. Right now they’re making up passenger lists for flights to Rostov and Moscow, which might leave the day after tomorrow if they aren’t cancelled.
Any remaining places are filled with the wounded. Apart from cargo, each flight can only take about ten people, and the seriously wounded get priority. Lying on stretchers, they are packed in between crates, rested on sacks or simply set on the floor, crammed in any old how just as long as they’re sent off. people trip over them and knock them off their stretchers. Someone’s foot catches a captain with a stomach injury and pulls out the drain tube, letting blood and slime run out of the hatch and onto the concrete. The captain screams, while flies descend instantly on the puddle.
There aren’t enough flights into Chechnya either. Some journalists have been waiting almost a week, and builders sunbathe here for the third day. But we sense that we will be sent today, before sunset. We aren’t journalists or builders, we are fresh cannon fodder, and they won’t keep us waiting around for long.
‘Funny old life, isn’t it?’ muses Kisel. ‘I'm sure those journalists would pay any money to get on the next flight to Chechnya, but no-one takes them, while I would pay any money to stay here, where it’s better by a mile. Better still would be to get as far away from here as possible, but they’ll put me on the next flight. Why is that?’
A ‘Cow’ Mi-26 cargo helicopter lands. Our lot stormed some village and all day long they have been evacuating dead and wounded from Chechnya. They unload five silvery sacks onto the runway, one after the other. The shining bags gleam in the sun like sweets, the wrappers are so bright and pretty that it’s hard to believe they are filled with pieces of human bodies.
At first we couldn’t work out what they were.
‘Probably humanitarian aid,’ Vovka guesses when he sees the bags on the concrete, until Kisel points out that they take aid in there, they don’t bring it back.
It finally dawned on us when a canvas-backed Ural truck drove up on the runway, and two soldiers jumped out and started loading the sacks. They grabbed them by the corners and when the sacks sagged in the middle, we realized that there were corpses inside.
But this time the Ural doesn’t come and the bodies just lie there on the concrete. No-one pays any attention to them, as if they are a part of the landing strip, as if that’s the way it should be, dead Russian boys lying in the arid steppe in a strange southern town.
Two other soldiers appear in long johns cut off at the knees, carrying a bucket of water. They wipe down the Cow’s floor with rags, and half an hour later the helicopter carries the next group to Chechnya, filled to the gills once again. No-one bothers to spin us any more fairy tales about baking buns in Beslan.
None of us says so, but each time we hear the heavy bee-like droning over the ridge we all think: ‘Is this really it, is it really my turn?’ At this moment we are on our own, every man for himself. Those who remain behind sigh with relief when the Cow carries off a group without them on board. That means another half an hour of life.
Carved into Kisel’s back are the words ‘I LOVE YOU’, each letter the size of a fist. The white scars are thin and neat but you can tell the knife went deep under the skin. For the past six months we have been trying to wheedle the story out of him but he tells us nothing.
But now I sense he will spill the beans. Vovka thinks so too.
‘Go on, Kisel, tell us how you got that,’ he tries again.
‘Come on, out with it,’ I say, backing him up. ‘Don’t take your secret to the grave with you.’
‘Idiot,’ says Kisel. ‘Keep your trap shut.’
He turns over again onto his back and shuts his eyes and his face clouds over. He doesn’t feel like talking but he might be thinking he could really get killed.
‘My Natasha did that,’ he says eventually. ‘Back when we first met and hadn’t yet married. We went to a party together, dancing and stuff, and a lot of drinking of course. I got well tanked up that night, dressed up like a Christmas tree in my best gear. Then I woke up next morning and the bed and sheet were covered in blood. I thought I'd kill her for doing that, but as you see, we got married instead.’
‘That’s some little lady you have!’ says Vovka, who has a girlfriend three years younger than him. They ripen fast down there in the south, like fruit. ‘You should send her down our way, they’d soon whip her into shape, literally. I’d like to see my girl try something like that. So what, you can’t even come home drunk without getting a rolling pin round the head?’ ‘No, it’s not like that. My wife is actually gentle, she’s great,’ Kisel says. ‘I don’t know what got into her, she never pulled another stunt like that again. She says it was love at first sight for her, and that’s how she wanted to bind me to her. “Who else will want you now I’ve put my stamp on you,” she tells me.’ He plucks another blade of grass and chews it pensively. ‘We’ll have four kids for sure... Yep, when I get home I’ll rustle up four for us,’ Kisel says and then falls quiet.
I look at his back and then think to myself that at least he won’t remain unidentified and lie in those refrigerators we saw today at the station. That’s assuming his back stays in one piece. ‘Kisel, are you afraid to die?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’ He is the oldest and smartest among us.
The sunlight shines through my eyelids and the world becomes orange. The warmth sends goose bumps fluttering across my skin. I can’t get used to this. Only the day before yesterday we were in snowbound Sverdlovsk, and here it’s baking. They brought us from winter straight into summer, packed thirteen at a time into each compartment of the carriages, surrounded by a stinky fug, bare feet dangling from the upper births. There wasn’t enough room for everyone, so we even took it in turns to sleep in pairs under the table, day and night. Wherever you looked there were piles of boots and greatcoats. It was even good that the major didn’t feed us; we rode sitting for a day and a half, doubled up like foetuses, and if we had eaten our fill even once, we’d all have gone down with acute intestinal blockage. In Rostov-on-Don our train stopped opposite the station building. We came to a halt on the first line, right by the main entrance, and people averted their eyes as they passed us.
Here on the field, under a poplar, some lightly wounded soldiers are drinking vodka they got by exchanging goods in the boiler house. They try to drown the fear they experienced over the ridge, their faces grey and eyes wild. An hour ago they were being shot at and some of their mates were being killed and now they are drinking vodka and don’t have to duck any more, and it hasn’t sunk in yet. They shriek and sob as they down the booze by the bucket. We can hardly bear to look at them.
We aren’t the first on this field. There were tens of thousands before us, awaiting their fate just like us, and the steppe has absorbed their fear like sweat. Now this fear oozes from the poisoned ground, flooding our bodies and squirming somewhere in the pit of our stomachs like a slimy worm, chilling us in spite of the burning sun. It hangs over the place like fog, and after the war they will have to purge this field of the fear, like they would radiation.
Not far from us lie little clusters of civilian builders and the nearest ones are drinking pure spirit, helping it down with transparent slices of salted pork fat. There’s a woman with them, young, with a red, woozy face and full lips. We already know she’s called Marina. We have become so unused to civilian life and women, and we steal glances at her. Marina is largebreasted and has an ample bottom, which gets Loop very excited, groaning and murmuring through his own pudgy lips. You aren’t a real soldier if you don’t letch at the girls, so we all act like veteran skirt-chasers, although in reality few of us had even kissed a girl properly before the army, and only Kisel had actually been with a woman. Marina offers Loop a drink. He accepts, full of bravado, and knocks back a mug of spirit. Five minutes later he is sprawled un
conscious on the ground and we carry him off into the shade. She offers us a drink too but we politely decline.
‘I wonder why they’re here?’ says Vovka.
‘They’re going to rebuild Grozny,’ answers Kisel. ‘They called a truce and the fighting will soon be over.’
‘But they’re still bombing the place, look at those attack planes,’ says Ginger, nodding at another pair of SU-25 taxiing onto the strip.
As they stop and flex their ailerons up and down, Vovka says they look like the rear end of a worm taking a dump. Now, I don’t know where he ever saw a worm doing that, but he had us convinced.
‘What makes you think the planes are heading for Grozny?’ Kisel asks Ginger loudly. ‘And what do the builders care; the more the place gets bombed, the more work for them, and on triple time, too. There’s an armistice on now, no fighting, so they take them in to do a bit of building while the going’s good.’
‘How do you know there’s an armistice?’
‘I saw it on TV.'
‘So what, they show a lot of stuff on TV.’
‘There won’t be any more fighting,’ Kisel carries on, but now he’s poking fun. ‘The rebel forces have been broken up, constitutional law has been restored, and peace with all its bounty has descended on this long-suffering Caucasus soil.’
‘Amen,’ I add.
‘So why are they taking us there if there’s an armistice?’ Ginger asks in puzzlement. ‘And there are tanks back at the station, a whole column, I saw them myself. And they’ll all get killed there,’ he says, nodding towards the builders.
‘I don’t get it either,’ I say. ‘If there’s an armistice, why are they bringing out bodies? As far as I know there are either bodies or peace, you don’t get both at the same time.’
‘Sometimes you do,’ replies Kisel. ‘Anything can happen in our country.’
The next Cow sets down heavily on the concrete. Once again they unload the wounded, put them on stretchers and run them off to the field hospital set up right by the camouflaged helicopter pens.
They carry one past us, a fair-headed boy. His leg below the knee is dangling on the tatters of his trouser and on threads of calf muscle, his foot still in a cut-off army boot. Bone protrudes from the flesh and light shines through the hole in his leg. The strides of the soldiers jerk the stretcher around, and every time it lurches upwards, the dangling leg jerks downwards, up, down, looking as if it will rip off at any moment. I even reach out to catch it if it should fall beside me. The flesh is turned inside out and dotted with bits of earth.
The wounded man is pumped full of promedol and doesn’t feel a thing. He stinks of smoking cloth and puttees and freshly butchered meat.
From time to time inarticulate inhuman screams rise from the field hospital. Sometimes they carry out bloody, pus-covered bandages and chuck them on a rubbish tip, and fat flies immediately rise from the refuse in a thick cloud.
After the wounded they start lifting those pretty silver sacks from the chopper. Two half-naked soldiers add eight more sacks to the five still lying there. A Ural truck drives up. It’s hot and they are wearing only long johns and slippers as they go about their business, just another day’s work for them. Heat, a runway piled up with corpses, and two soldiers in cut-off long johns loading dead people in sacks, like potatoes.
They lay out the bodies on the back of the truck, starting from the sides, and when there is no more room on the floor they stack them in a second layer. They plonk the last one down in the middle, jump in with it, and the truck sets off for the station. This morning we saw refrigerator cars in the sidings. Now we know what those are for.
The sacks lurch with the Ural as it jolts across the ruts and the soldiers use their feet to keep them pressed to the floor.
Meanwhile, they fill the helicopter with a fresh load of cannon fodder, still dressed in crisp new winter uniforms. The young soldiers run into the Cow’s cargo bay in close file, getting tangled in the flaps of their greatcoats. One bloke’s backpack comes undone, scattering packets of cigarettes on the ground. The last thing I see in the chopper’s dark belly are the soldiers’ dismayed eyes looking straight at me.
The helicopter blades howl, it takes off, heads towards the ridge and flies on into the war. This conveyer belt works from the early morning, for as long as we are here, bringing bodies out of there and taking in soldiers in new greatcoats. Everything runs smooth as clockwork and we realize that the choppers have been doing this run for more than a day, and probably more than a month.
‘Wankers,’ says Kisel. ‘Wankers, the whole lot of them.’
‘Yep.’ I say.
‘Wankers,’ agrees Vovka.
I scrounge another smoke off Kisel, one of those vile Primas made in Kremenchug that hardly burn. Vovka says the tobacco is mixed with horse dung. The packet and his stable back home stink the same and his horse craps out the same clumps of straw we find in the cigarettes, he tells us. My mouth dries up after two puffs. Vovka stubs his out on the ground and winds on his puttees.
‘I’m going to get some water. Give me your flasks.’
We hand him seven water bottles, including the spare one I stole from the storage shed in Sverdlovsk.
Vovka is away for half an hour; there’s a crowd at the water fountain and a long queue to get a drink.
On his way back I watch him pass the major, who is sitting on the ground in the middle of our group, and see him look over his shoulder at the papers he’s holding in his hand. These are our dossiers. The major lays them out in two piles like he is the very Lord of Fate. One pile is large, the other is small, and it’s clear that those in the smaller one will now be loaded into the Cow and flown to Khankala, the main base outside Grozny, or Severny, and the others will stay here. Maybe not for long, possibly a few hours, just until the next flight, but here nonetheless. Each one of us hopes that his own fate lies in the big pile; we all want to stay here a bit longer.
I put out my cigarette, lie on my back and shut my eyes.
‘Kisel,’ I say, ‘You promised to give me the chords for that Aguzarova song, “Old Hotel”.’
‘OK, write them down then.’
I get a pen from my breast pocket and a red, homemade notebook cut from a thick exercise book. Kisel dictates. ‘City swimming in a sea of night light... That’s Am Chord... City alive with its people’s delight - Dm, E, Am - Old hotel, open your doors, Old hotel, at midnight I'm yours... ’
I scribble it down.
The sun is shining brightly, the birds are singing, and the steppe overwhelms with the scent of lush grass and apricots. This is real life, bright, sunny, brimming with vitality, and everything should be just great, wonderful as we begin to wake. It’s inconceivable that on this beautiful day those damned helicopters keep landing on the runway and people unload bodies and lay them out in a row in the sun. You just want this to be a place where people love, have families, and don’t butcher each other. War should happen in rotten places, not where it’s good. War should happen inside the Arctic Circle where life is dark and gloomy and where there’s no sun for half the year. We can’t believe that they brought us to the edge of paradise, with its tang of apricots, only to wrap us in silver sacks.
Vovka comes back, stops with the filled flasks in his hands and looks at me without speaking.
‘What are you standing about for, give us some water then. I’m thirsty as hell,’ I say. He passes me the wet flask without looking at me. The water is warm, foul tasting, and stinks of chlorine. As soon as you drink perspiration breaks out immediately under your arms.
Vovka sits down next to me without catching my eye and digs at the ground with his boot. I understand that something changed over there by the major.
‘They’re taking you,’ he says finally.
‘On my own? What about you - how can I go without you?’ I ask.
‘They’re sending you, and Kisel and I are staying.’
I look at Vovka and think he’s winding me up. Yes, he’s jo
king of course, no-one is going to split us up! We were never on our own, we were always together and we’ll stay together right to the end, until they demobilize us. They can’t separate people on this lousy field, just a step away from the war, because here and now is where we come together as a combat unit, where we become brothers, where we experience fear together for the first time, sadness, uncertainty and waiting. And we start to feel certain that we will survive, despite being faced with the stark finality of death.
But Vovka isn’t joking. Christ, why did I volunteer to come here? What are we doing here anyway? Why do I now have to get up, put on my boots, and go and die, leaving nothing of myself behind except a look of dismay as the Cow’s belly claps shut. This is all wrong - it won’t happen like this, it can’t.
I painstakingly wind on my puttees and try not to look at Kisel, who stands there in just his trousers, wiggling his bare toes, or at Vovka sitting beside him.
We are all thinking the same thing. I’m being taken away and they are staying.
I suddenly feel a surge of anger towards Kisel and his chunky white feet, the scars on his back, his hands stuffed into his pockets, like he’s betrayed or abandoned me. I know it’s not his fault but I’m angry just the same, I can’t help it. He was the oldest among us, the most experienced, he always gave the most sensible advice and made the smartest decisions, and we always felt like he was our elder brother and we were in his care. And now he is staying in the rear while I fly off without him.
We look at each other. We are no longer together. I’m on my own.
‘Well, Kisel, see you then,’ I say, offering my hand.
He suddenly starts to throw his clothes on.
‘I’m coming with you. I’ll go and ask the major to send me too. We should stay together. Wherever you go, I go too. I’m not going to stay here.’
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 4
