‘Get up, Babchenko,’ he says. ‘Muster.’
Good for him. If I had a tail I would definitely be wagging it now.
It is August 1996, and in Grozny it’s hell on earth. The Chechens entered the city from all sides and captured it in a few hours. Fierce fighting is underway and our forces are cut off in isolated pockets of resistance. Those that get surrounded are mercilessly wiped out. Our lads have no food, no ammunition, and death roams this sultry city.
Several burial detachments are formed in our regiment and they stick our company in one of them.
The bodies keep on coming, a steady stream of them, and it seems it will never end. There are no more of the pretty silver bags. Bodies torn to pieces, charred and swollen, are brought to us in any state, in heaps. Some bodies are more than half burnt - we refer to these among ourselves as ‘smoked goods’, to the zinc coffins as ‘cans’, and to morgues as ‘canning factories’. There is no mocking or black humour in these words, and we say them without smiling. These dead soldiers are still our comrades, our brothers. That’s just what we call them, there’s nothing more to it than that. We heal ourselves with cynicism, preserve our sanity this way so as not to go completely out of our minds - we have no vodka to help us.
So we unload bodies, again and again. Our senses are already dulled, and we don’t feel pity or compassion for the dead. We are so used to mutilated bodies by now that we don’t even bother washing our hands before we have a smoke, rolling the tobacco in the Prima cigarettes with our thumbs. We don’t have anywhere to wash them anyway; there’s no water around and it’s a long way to run to the fountain every time.
We stop noticing living people, in fact we hardly see any. Everything that’s living seems temporary to us, everything that leaves this runway, everything that arrives here in columns, and even those who have just been called up into the army, all of them will end up heaped on top of one another in the helicopters. They simply have no other choice. They’ll be starved of food and sleep, tormented by lice and filth, be beaten up, have stools smashed over their heads and be raped in the latrines - so what? Their suffering is of no importance; they’re going to get killed anyway.
They can cry, write letters and beg to be taken away from here, but no-one will come for them, no-one will pay attention to them, and all their problems are just trivia. A busted skull is better than this helicopter, of that we are now certain.
We are also temporary, like everything else on the cursed field. And we will also die.
Along with the soldiers they cart out civilians from Grozny, usually builders, maybe even the same ones who sat with us on the runway four months ago. Now they are dead, those people who treated us to their spirits and pork fat. They died and now I’m unloading their bodies from the helicopter and laying them in a row on the field. Soon a Ural truck should arrive for them.
I remember Marina, the plump girl who plied us with spirits on the airstrip. Loop really took a fancy to her.
One day there is a girl on the helicopter, a Chechen of no more than fifteen. Her face is serene as if she is asleep, no torn-off jaws or rolled-up dead eyes. There’s a hole the size of a fist in the side of her head where a stone hit her, driving her brain out of her skull like a piston.
I can’t tear my eyes away from that round, dry hole in her head. It seems that if you were to tap on the inside of her skull it would make a dull sound, like plastic, as if you were tapping on half of a globe.
Zyuzik is standing in the hatchway. He looks at me and then asks:
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing.’
We lift her out and put her on the ground.
‘Fucking war,’ says Zyuzik. ‘What had the girl done to deserve this, that’s what I’d like to know? What?’
There are dead soldiers, dead women, dead children. Everyone’s dead.
*
One of the tents is used to post-mortem the bodies. There are two conscript medics working in there, and every time a naked body is carried out, having been slit open and crudely sewn up, with no arms or legs, they come out and have a smoke, following the stretcher with their gaze. They stand there in rubber aprons and gloves, spattered with blood up to their eyes, and one of them always has in his hand the knife that he uses to do the autopsy. It’s an ordinary kitchen breadknife, with a wooden handle and a big, wide blade.
They smoke in silence and then go back in to open up the next body
These two are crazed way beyond anything we have experienced. Sometimes they tell us what one of the dead people had for breakfast, or what a bullet did to his insides, how it tore everything up, what colour his intestines were.
Once we went into their tent. The bodies lay on the ground on rubber stretchers and on two tall zinc-coated tables where they work on them. Thick, dark blood oozes from the bodies onto the grass where it collects in little puddles. There is an awful stench - blood has not only its own colour, but its own smell too. And this is worse than the sight of it.
Shorn-headed boys, sometimes morose, sometimes laughing, beaten up in our barracks, with broken jaws and ruptured lungs, we were herded into this war and killed by the hundred. We didn’t even know how to shoot; we couldn’t kill anyone, we didn’t know how. All that we were capable of was crying and dying. And die we did. We called the rebels ‘uncle’, and when our boys’ throats were cut at the block posts, they’d beg the rebels, ‘Please, uncle, don’t kill me, what did I ever do to you?’ We so wanted to live. Get that into your heads, you fat, smug generals who sent us off to this slaughter. We hadn’t yet seen life or even tasted its scent, but we had already seen death. We knew the smell of congealed blood on the floor of a helicopter in a forty-degree heat, knew that the flesh of a torn-off leg turns black, and that a person can burn up entirely in lit petrol, leaving just the bones. We knew that bodies swell up in the heat and we listened every night to the crazed dogs howling in the ruins. Then we started to howl ourselves, because to die at the age of eighteen is a terrifying prospect.
We were betrayed by everyone and we died in a manner befitting real cannon fodder - silently and unfairly.
Each night when we come back to the barracks we still get beaten up. The recon are now continually drunk; there are no officers in the barracks, only Yelin comes by occasionally but he drinks all the time too. He gathers his gang in the storeroom and they drink relentlessly until they no longer resemble human beings. Nobody watches the soldiers any more and the bullying exceeds all imaginable bounds. Several jaws get broken every night and the young soldiers are beaten with stools and rifle butts. The new boys desert the barracks by the hundred, running straight from their beds barefoot into the steppe. They don’t even manage to form whole companies for the front. There are only four guys in our company; the rest have all scarpered, including the college graduate lieutenant.
Zyuzik and I don’t run. We are now beyond caring. We are used to this regiment, used to the beatings and the corpses, and we don’t want to go anywhere. We have been consumed by some kind of apathy and it’s all the same to us now, live or die. Things are so bad now that they can’t get worse. Whatever happens, even if it’s death, it can only be an improvement. We are waiting for just one thing, to be sent to the front line.
By night they kick the living crap out of us, by day we unload corpses.
We start to spend more and more nights on the runway and even sleep in the tent where the two soldiers chop up the bodies. They were called up at the same time as us and so they let us spend the night there out of solidarity. I have no dreams in this tent, and no charred bodies chase me at night. I just plunge into a dark pit where there is nothing, not even war, and I open my eyes when it gets light.
Sometimes there are cigarettes in the pockets of the dead, or money or something else. We never search them deliberately, but if we find cigarettes we keep them simply because the guy is dead and no longer needs anything.
A person changes very quickly in war. He may be scared by a dead bo
dy on the first day, but a week later he can be eating from a can while leaning on human remains to be more comfortable. The bodies that lie with us in the tent are just dead people, that’s all. But there is still a line between necessity and cynicism, and it can never be crossed. I still don’t have any dreams, nor does Zyuzik - I asked him.
In Mozdok, mothers start to descend on us in their droves. They are looking for their lost sons, and before setting off on foot to Chechnya with their photos they have to look through a mountain of corpses in the refrigerators at the station and in the tents. Constant shrieks and moans can be heard from there and the women have aged ten years when they are led out. Many of them are unable to speak for some time.
I watched an inspection like that once. A relatively young, cultured-looking woman, a bit like a teacher in a grey cape, with a black scarf round her head, stood near the tent and they carried bodies out to her. I remember how they brought one of them, burnt to death in a tank, nothing left but bones and a left leg still in a boot. The medic took off the boot in case the woman could identify the body from the toes, and a brown foot slithered out.
You won’t find any smart, handsome boys in these tents. They were got out of the war by their rich daddies, leaving it to us ordinary folk to die in Grozny, the ones who didn’t have the money to pay our way out. Heaped in these tents are the sons of labourers, teachers, peasants and blue-collar workers, basically all those who were made penniless by the government’s thieving reforms and then left to waste away. These tents contain the ones who didn’t know how to give a bribe to the right person, or who thought that army service was the duty of every man.
Truth and nobility of heart are no longer virtues in our world - those who believe in them are the first to die.
The Rostov forensic laboratory also has some tents on this airstrip and the soldiers carry the slit-open, naked bodies over to them from the morgue. They don’t even cover them with blankets, and carry them just as they are, bare, the dead arms dangling and jolting in time to their steps, with congealing blood dripping from their sides and bellies onto the grass. Sometimes it takes three people to carry a body in pieces - two holding the trunk and the third holding an arm or a leg.
They don’t hide the dead from anybody, and the soldiers and builders on the field watch them pass by with horrified eyes. Nobody tells them any more stories about baking buns in Beslan and they know what awaits them.
At least that’s honest. It was not so long ago that we were sitting here on this field in our crisp greatcoats watching the bodies. Or maybe it was a thousand years ago?
*
They take Zyuzik to hospital after Boxer broke his finger by beating him with a stool. They say a fair bit of bullying goes on at the hospital too, but at least Timokha and Boxer are not there. And if that’s the case, I imagine the bullying should be tolerable enough.
Zyuzik shows up again in the regiment four days later. He finds me during dinner near the canteen, whistles from the gate to the pilots’ quarters and waves.
I go over.
‘I’ve come for you,’ he says. He has put on some weight in the past few days and his taut dry face has taken on some roundness; he’s even grown some cheeks. ‘Let’s go to the hospital -it’s fantastic there!’ he suggests. ‘All normal blokes and no-one hits you. Let’s go right now, how about it?’
‘What about dinner?’ I ask.
‘Forget about dinner. You haven’t seen dinner yet. Come on. We’ll feed you.’
I am slightly put out by the ‘we’. In the past, when they beat us on the floor of the corridor, ‘we’ was he and I. Now it’s ‘we’ll feed you’. But of course I agree.
We stride along on the dusty grass as Zyuzik tells me about the white pillows, about sleeping on clean sheets, more grub than you can eat and daily hot showers with no time restrictions - it seems he is leading me into a fairy tale.
I’m excited at the prospect of a new stage in my life where everything will be all right. What if I manage to hang about a little longer in the hospital, or even stay there altogether?
The hospital is located at the edge of Mozdok. We take the familiar route through the steppe, cross the highway avoiding the block post, and arrive at two isolation units. The first thing
Zyuzik does is to send me for a shower. I wash with indescribable pleasure; I have almost forgotten that there is such a joy as hot water. Meanwhile, Zyuzik brings food: meat cutlets with potatoes and a handful of dried fruit.
There are a few people sitting around me, and they ask me what it’s like back at the regiment. I tell them about the airstrip, about the bodies and the recon.
Next to me sits a large swarthy lad, and Zyuzik introduces us. It’s Komar. He lost his heel after they shot up his carrier with a heavy machine-gun. Now the bullet wound to his right heel is permanently infected. The doctors have cut his foot open and fitted a drain tube to remove the pus, and Komar leaves a thin, whitish trace wherever he goes.
He offers round his cigarettes and we light up.
‘I was sorting out jackets in the storeroom and, well, I found this letter to you,’ I tell him.
‘Aha! Did you read it?’ he asks, emitting a stream of smoke.
‘Yes.’
‘Great girl, isn’t she? Everyone cries when I read her letters here.’
‘Is she your wife?’
‘Sort of. I’ll probably marry her when I get back.’
In the evening the patients gather round the television. There’s a film on but I don’t watch it. I’m fine just being left in peace, among clean sheets and near a shower. I bask in the pleasure of it all.
‘Do you reckon other hospitals are like this?’ I ask.
‘No,’ says a boy with a bandaged arm. ‘Only here. When I was in hospital in Vladikavkaz they used to beat the hell out of us, total lawlessness like in the regiment. But it’s good here, I’ve had two months of it.’
These people seem almost godlike to me. Two months
without being bullied! I look at them with envy, I long to become one of them and live in this Garden of Eden. Jesus, I would do anything, wash the dishes, carry firewood and clean the piss pot if I could just stay here a month. I don’t even dream about being decommissioned, although they talk about it as casually as if they were discussing dinner.
I ask Zyuzik to talk to the doctors to see if there isn’t a place for me here. They don’t discharge the boys if they can help it; they try to keep them here as long as possible, even get them decommissioned. The doctors care for us more than the commanders and they hide us from this war as best they can. They understand very well that to discharge them from the hospital means to send them straight to the front. The healthy ones die, and the sick ones live.
‘I’ll have a word with them about you,’ promises Zyuzik. ‘I’ll definitely talk to them.’
I’m not allowed to stay in the hospital, not even spend the night there. At ten on the dot a young nurse takes me to the gate and closes it behind me. I stand on the street and watch her put the lock on. I am definitely not going back to the regiment tonight.
I go to a building site separated from the hospital by a fence, find a little room without windows and lie down to sleep. Someone has brought a bench in, and I’m clearly not the first poor sod to spend the night here. The bench is narrow and bloody uncomfortable but I can sleep on it.
I live on the building site for a few days. In the evenings I go on forays for food and during the day I sleep. As it goes, it’s not a bad existence and I even think about moving here permanently. What’s the big deal? All I need to do is bring a mattress and a blanket and I can live here until autumn. I’ll scrounge food at the hospital - as long as Zyuzik is there I won’t starve.
One night a litter of kittens appears in my room. They climb up on the bench and cling onto me from all sides, mewing as they burrow into my armpits. Once they have warmed themselves they fall asleep.
I don’t chase them out; the nights have got cold and they give off a f
air bit of warmth. Their mother was probably killed, or at least I never saw her in the days I spent on the site.
One night I am woken by shouts. I carefully make my way to the door so as not to disturb the glass from the broken window. Mozdok is very dangerous at night, when gangs wander the streets with almost no attempt at concealment. But this time it’s our lot, speaking in Russian. That’s good. Some senior conscripts are drinking vodka.
They get settled on the ground floor and show no signs of leaving. I lie down on my bench and cover myself in my jacket, but I can’t fall asleep. I listen to the sounds of their drinking without moving, afraid that if I try to turn over or get up the bench will creak and they’ll find me. I lie like that for several hours, and my side and hip go numb.
They find me anyway. It turns out that they brought a prostitute with them and while they were drinking she ran away. They searched the whole building for her and found me instead. They drag me out of the room. Some drunken Kazakh, barely able to stand, hits me round the face with an empty bottle and shouts, ‘Who are you? I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.’ He splits my lower lip with the bottom of the bottle, while the others wander round the stairwells looking for their prostitute and shouting. The rays of the moon fall obliquely through the windows onto .the concrete floor as drunken,
hazy-eyed soldiers stagger round an unfinished building beside the hospital in Mozdok, looking for their prostitute. I get a beating in a corner on the second floor.
Finally they leave and go down to the first floor. Battered to a pulp, I return to my den and lie down again on the bench. The kittens mew and crawl into my armpits. They probably think I’m their mother. I have no food to give them.
In our company I am the only one left. Ginger and Yakunin did a runner, and Osipov is in Chechnya - he went for a day as a radioman with the commander of an infantry company and stayed there. Zyuzik is in hospital, and Loop’s mother came and took him home for ten days’ leave. I know he won’t return. You’d have to be a complete cretin to come back here. I don’t know what happened to Murky and Pincha, and nor does anyone else. Maybe they are already at home or maybe they had their heads cut off long ago.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 11
