I glanced at the infantry in the hope that someone else Would wake up. But no-one moved; they were all fast asleep.
‘I can’t get out,’ I thought, despondently eyeing the heap of bodies blocking my route. ‘I’ll have to wait. Bloody hell, I’ve just had a piss. I guess it’s got colder.’
I passed the rest of the night in a state of half delirium I would plunge into a heavy sleep for five minutes and then wake up. There was probably movement in the vehicle all the time: someone coming in from guard duty, another getting out, someone waking and having a smoke, or trying to find a space. But none of this hubbub registered with me. When I woke I too tossed and turned, shifted my position and smoked. My body kept going numb on the sharp corners. It was cold, my wet things wouldn’t dry and I was shivering. And the whole time I was busting for a pee.
And then I woke one more time and realized I couldn’t bear it any longer. Somehow I had to .get out of this frozen vehicle, jump around outside, take a leak and light a fire. I raised myself up on my elbows and looked around. Sitnikov wasn’t there, and light shone in through a small opening in the commander’s hatch.
I clambered over the seat, threw open the hatch and pulled myself out, whimpering like a puppy from the pain in my bladder. For fear of not making it I quickly climbed down to the ground, and groaned a sigh of relief by the wheel.
‘Mother of God that’s good... Aaaah.’
The stream of urine came into two short bouts and petered out. I raised my eyebrows in surprise.
‘Was that it? I really needed to go, I thought I’d pass an ocean, and that’s all there was?!’ And then it dawned on me: ‘Shit, I’ve frozen my bladder to a standstill!’
I grappled with the injustice of it, deeply concerned that my body, which had never let me down before, may have suffered some damage. And my bladder, too - you can’t just fix that as if it were a carrier.
‘What a lousy stroke of luck! The bastard Chechens, it’s all their fault. Just you wait, you sons of bitches!’
It was already light outside and an early morning mist crept across the ground. The infantry sat about ten metres from the vehicle, warming themselves by a meagre fire that they fed with bits of ammo boxes. A pot stood over the flames and gave off an aromatic smell.
Still swearing furiously, I approached the fire. Without looking up, the infantry platoon commander shifted over on his board, making room for me to sit down. No-one else moved - the sleepless cold night had reduced us all to apathy.
‘What are you swearing about?’ asked the platoon commander.
‘I froze my bladder.’
‘Ah. It happens...’ He thriftily broke off another board from a box and threw it into the flames.
I pulled off my boots and placed them close to the heat. The damp leather started to steam. The warmth from the fire gradually defrosted my rigid body and I stretched out my feet and wiggled my toes, savouring the flame.
The pot belched steam into our faces. My head spun with the aroma and my stomach rumbled. I remembered that the last time I had eaten normally was the day before, in the morning. The memory awoke a sharp pang of hunger.
Sucking the air in through my nostrils, I theatrically wrinkled my nose in mock ecstasy and smiled like a clown:
‘So, lads, how can I put this diplomatically... Is there anything to eat?’
No-one stirred, no-one smiled. Someone with his chin tucked into his knees replied without lifting his head:
‘There’s hawthorn brew about to boil.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, where’s the water from?’
‘The marsh.’
‘But it’s rancid. Did you put a water purification tablet in it at least?’
‘What’s the point? You have to let it stand for four hours and we’d all have croaked by then.’
We hardly ever used the tablets that came with our dry rations, only when there was lots of water and we had plenty of time. Mostly we just drank the water as it came, from ditches, puddles or streams. And oddly enough, no-one got sick, even though every mouthful contained a year’s dose of infectious microbes. No-one could afford to get sick. In extreme circumstances the body focuses on just one thing - surviving -and it pays no attention to petty irritations like typhoid. Our empty stomachs digested intestinal bacilli like popcorn, sucking every last calorie out of them. In the winter we were able to sleep in wet clothes on rocks, freezing to them by our hair during the night, and none of us so much as coughed the next day.
Sickness starts later, when you get home. Your fear leaves you in screams and insomnia at night, and the tension ebbs. Then war crawls out of you in the form of boils, constant colds, depression and temporary impotence, and you spend six months coughing up the recon’s diesel soot.
The pot came to the boil and bubbled over. Petrovich, a forty-year-old contract soldier who was supervising the cooking, picked it up with a twig and scalded himself Flinching, he put it on the ground and mixed the contents with the same twig.
‘It’s ready. Give me your mess tins.’
We held them out while Petrovich distributed the cloudy, scented liquid. He then handed the pot to a soldier sitting nearby:
‘Go and get some more water for that, and bring more hawthorn.’
There weren’t many mess tins so we passed them round. When my turn came, I cupped the scorching-hot tin in my palms, inhaled the intoxicating aroma of warm nutrition and gulped, realizing that if I didn’t give my stomach something now I would die on the spot.
The hot broth slipped down my gullet with a warm glow and landed heavily in my stomach. All of a sudden I felt sick; the brew was too potent for my hungry belly.
‘Eugh, bloody awful,’ I lowered the mess tin and looked at it suspiciously. ‘But it smells good.’ I sniffed it again and took another gulp. ‘I can’t drink this on an empty stomach - I’ll throw up, it’s too rough.’
But after the hot drink I had an unbearable urge to eat. I stood up and said: ‘I’m going for a walk. Maybe someone has some food left.’
No-one paid any attention to me. The infantry were engrossed with the mess tins, rolling their eyes and downing the hot sustenance.
I set off down the hillock. Now there was no-one near the pipe; the soldiers had scattered and broken up into small groups, and were sitting round fires getting warm. An abandoned machine-gun pointed forlornly into the sky. I turned to look behind me. To the left of the bushes rose another plume of smoke. The machine-gunner sat on the edge of the marsh with a second gunner, who looked familiar. They looked my way and abruptly turned away again, obviously having no need for me. A mess tin was perched on the embers and it gave off the same smell of hawthorn.
‘Hey lads, what’re you cooking?’
‘Hawthorn.’
‘With swamp water?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see. Is that all you’ve got to eat?
‘Yes.’ The gunner pulled out of his boot a dirty spoon with some bits of porridge or clay stuck to it and stirred the tin, signalling that the conversation was over. Oily spots separated on the surface of the brew. The gunner inspected the steaming spoon in the light, his dirty fingers picked off a couple of sodden lumps and he put them in his mouth.
The day started brightly. The sun rose in the sky and lit up the valley. The sun rays reflected on the remaining window panes in Alkhan-Yurt, and even the marsh looked picturesque as the water sparkled. The undergrowth flashed with colour and I stopped in the hollow, studying the low ground and the village.
Very nice, I said to myself. To think there are Chechens down there somewhere, and war and death. The war is lying low, hiding itself in the sun, biding its time. It’s waiting for us, waiting until we relax, and then it will strike. It can’t do without us, without our blood and our lives. It takes its fill from us and, oh boy, is it hungry now. As I looked at this beautiful scene I remembered how once, back in the first war, I had seen a man walking across a field. He was alone, una
rmed, just out by himself. It was so ridiculous. We never went out on our own, only in groups, and with armoured vehicles if possible. And we never crossed a field like this that had been sown with all manner of explosive crap.
I watched the man walking and waited. Any moment now, one more step and there would be a blast, pain and death. I was frozen to the spot, unable to take my eyes off the striding figure, afraid to miss the moment of the explosion and the human suffering. There was nothing I could do to avert the man’s end, no matter how much I wanted to, but nor could I just turn away indifferently. All I could do was watch and wait. Nothing happened in the end - a carrier came round the corner and the walking man disappeared from view.
I dreamed of this scene a few times after that. I dreamed about it a year later, when I was back in civilian life, and then a year after that. About how, in the middle of war, there’s a man going about his business, walking through a minefield, a single lone figure. And oddly, I always remembered this scene in black. It was summer when it happened, the sun flooded the green earth from a bright blue sky, the world brimmed with colour, life, light, birdsong and the smells of the forest and foliage. But I didn’t remember any of that, not the lush green grass, the blue sky or the white sun; I just remembered this black figure on a black field in black Chechnya. And my black expectation that he would get blown apart.
I wondered whether I would remember these colours. Would my memory just retain the cold, filth and the emptiness of my stomach? I suddenly felt saddened, saddened by this wondrous day that I would have to spend racked with hunger in a stinking bog.
The ducks awoke in the rushes and began their chorus of quacking, splashing around in the water.
It would be good to shoot one, I thought, then there’d be something for breakfast. That bastard Kombat - nothing for lunch, supper, or breakfast. It’s just like they say, breakfast at lunchtime, lunch at supper and why don’t we skip supper?
Sitnikov appeared over the hillock and stood next to me for a while, squinting at the sun and surveying the village from beneath the shade of his palm. Then he broke off a branch of hawthorn and shook the water from it. A few large, frozen berries thudded onto the ground along with the drops. Sitnikov looked at them thoughtfully, and then slowly, as if feeling awkward that he, an officer, should also want to eat, he began to pick the berries off the branch and put them in his mouth.
I went over to him, picked a berry too and took it between my lips. The heavy, sweet juice of the frozen hawthorn filled my mouth, tasting much better than the cloudy brew I’d tried. I swallowed. The lone berry seemed to clang into my empty stomach, bouncing between the folds. I felt it quite clearly, all alone in my belly, cold, and incredibly tasty and juicy. I picked another, then a third, then slung my rifle over my shoulder and began to pluck off bunches of them, ignoring the cold twigs with their long thorns, seeing only the berries as I tore at the bush.
After a while someone from the infantry joined us, first one guy, then another, until the whole platoon gradually drifted over from the fires to the bushes and stretched out in a chain along the hillock.
We ate like moose, plucking the berries from the branches with our teeth, snorting and batting last year’s cobwebs out of the way with our heads. We ceased to be soldiers and forgot about the war; our rifles lay beside us on the ground, and we ravenously tore off these cold, tasty berries with our lips, moving from one grazing spot to another, leaving bare branches behind us. We felt our stomachs fill and how, after this dead night, our bodies began to bloom with life again, how we became warm and the blood started to pump through our veins.
Our teeth went black, our tongues tingled from the tartness but we kept tearing at the hawthorn, hurrying, afraid that something would prevent us from eating the lot, swallowing the berries whole without chewing. But it was still too little, we could never eat enough to feel full.
We grazed like this for a long time, until we had stripped the bushes and tired ourselves. Everyone returned to their fires and silently lit cigarettes as we digested this low-calorie food.
A duck flew low overhead, maybe just ten metres above us, its wings beating the air. I unslung my rifle to shoot but got tangled in the sling. While I was untangling myself, the duck flew off.
‘Shit, it got away!’
‘Don’t worry about it, you wouldn’t have hit it anyway,’ said Petrovich, stroking his moustache and narrowing his eyes craftily. His face assumed the expression of a hunter telling tales about big game.
‘I tried shooting at them yesterday. They were flying really low, just like that, even lower than that one,’ he said, showing how the ducks flew with his hand. ‘I let off a whole magazine and didn’t hit a bloody thing. They look plump enough and you fire and fire, but they’re just a rush of feathers. Now if I had buck-shot it would be a different matter.’
‘Yes, a duck would be pretty good right now. We’ve been here a day without food and water. When are we going to be relieved?’ Igor said, looking at me. ‘You spoke with headquarters - what does the Kombat say?’
‘He doesn’t say anything. Maybe we’ll be relieved by evening, although that’s unlikely, right before nightfall. It’s more likely to be tomorrow morning.’
‘Uh-huh, that means another day here. They could at least send us water.’
The air stirred once again and I grabbed at my rifle, thinking it was a duck. I realized my mistake as a heavy-calibre shell rushed high over our heads in the direction of Alkhan-Kala.
We all mechanically turned our heads skyward and listened When the rushing noise died down we turned towards the village. There was a moment’s silence, then the first white house on the edge of the village distended and disappeared in a huge explosion, sending debris flying in all directions and roof beams twirling in the air. A moment later the sound of the blast echoed across the marsh with a roar, and another second after that came the report of the heavy gun that fired the shell from the regiment in the woods.
‘Direct hit!’
‘Self-propelled guns, big sods. One shell and the house is gone.’
‘Here we go, we definitely won’t get relieved now.’
A heavy bombardment began and the shells fell one after another. Behind the woods and to the right, self-propelled guns were firing from somewhere in the mountains. The howl of the Grad missiles that then carpeted Alkhan-Kala came from the same place. Just off to the left of the hillock, a mortar battery piped up too, its reports distinguishable from the overall shelling. The ground underfoot trembled with every round fired.
Alkhan-Kala seemed to vanish, swept by the bombardment from the precipice on which it had stood, just as an unsatisfactory toy brick house is swept from a table by a child. In its place, dust billowed up in thick black clouds, bits of earth flew and fell and whole roofs, planks and walls hung in the air. The air shook as it was palpably torn apart by the metal, so much metal that the air and space became denser as every shard that flew into the village displaced molecules of oxygen before it and left a warm trail on your face. The blasts and shots fused in one roar that filled the air with its density, giving it a weight that pressed our heads down into our shoulders.
We stood there watching the bombardment in silence. It’s at these times, when houses whirl among tons of earth in the air, fly apart in fragments and leave behind craters the size of ponds, and the ground trembles for three kilometres around from the impact of the massive shells, that you are especially aware of the frailty of the human body, the softness of bones and flesh and their defencelessness against metal. Heavens above, is this whole inferno just meant to kill people, or will it split the earth in two? You realize how brittle you are and that there is no way you can resist this avalanche that is tearing a whole village to shreds. And the realization of how easy it is to kill a person paralyses you and leaves you speechless.
‘Now they’ll come swarming out of there, the bastards...’
We came to our senses and ran to our positions. Over the marsh you could hear t
he drawn-out, terrifying call: ‘Battle stations!’ I raced to the carrier, grabbed my radio and ran to join Sitnikov.
I found the captain near the concrete beam from the day before. He was lying with his elbows resting on it as he watched Alkhan-Kala through his binoculars.
Ventus sat next to him, smoking. They were both tense but showed no sign of nervousness. Sitnikov didn’t turn round to me, but said: ‘Call up the Kombat.’
I raised Pioneer and once again got Sabbit on the other end of the line.
‘Pioneer receiving you. I’m passing you over to the commander.’
The Kombat spoke.
‘Poker, this is command. OK, remain in your positions and keep both villages under observation. If the Chechens head your way you will correct the shelling. I’ll be there towards evening. Do you receive, over?’
‘Roger that Pioneer.’ I took off the headphones as Sitnikov looked at me expectantly. ‘We are to remain here and watch the Chechens, sir,’ I told him.
The bombardment continued for about another hour and then began to die down. The self-propelled guns now fired one at a time, a single shell landing every couple of minutes. As the dust settled, the houses appeared through the thick swirls. I was amazed: after they had pounded Alkhan-Kala I’d expected to see a crater-filled wasteland, but the village looked almost intact. At least it seemed that way at first glance, but it was hard to say. We’d been wrong plenty of times before when we’d chosen a house in which to spend the night; often they looked undamaged, but when we entered the yard, the walls were all that was left standing.
Only the right edge of the village showed heavy damage -Alkhan-Kala had taken a serious pounding there. Evidently they had only fired on this area, which was probably where Basayev and his men were, right opposite our group. If they were flushed out, our lot would have to meet them.
We lay low in our hollows, merging with the ground, staying flush with it and viewing the village along the barrels of our rifles, shifting and getting ready for battle, taking note of the landmarks in advance. We lay a long time, not making a sound that might give away our positions, waiting for the Chechens.
One Soldier's War In Chechnya Page 20
