The Third Day

Author: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth …

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters …

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so …

And the earth brought forth grass, the herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind …

And the evening and the morning were the third day.’

What am I looking for in the scriptures? Questions, or answers? Which questions and which answers? How much humanity is there in man? A great deal, according to some; very little, say others.

Perhaps my Leading Character will be able to help me. I wait by the phone all day, but it is evening before he calls.

Leading character: ‘So the whole thing was a stupid mistake, was it? Do you realise what that means to me and the rest of us? I went over there an ordinary Soviet bloke, sure the Motherland wouldn’t betray us or lie to us. You can’t stop a madman going mad. Some people say we went through a form of purgatory, others call it a cesspit. A plague on both your houses, is what I say! I want to live! I love life! I’ll soon have a baby son and I’m going to call him Alyoshka, in memory of my friend. To my dying day I won’t forget how I carried him, his head, and his legs, and his arms, all separate, and his flayed skin … If it’s a girl I’ll still call her Alyoshka …

So it was all just a stupid mistake, was it? But we weren’t cowards, and we didn’t betray you, did we? I won’t phone again, I can’t go on living in the past. I’ve forgotten everything, forgotten it all. You can’t stop a madman going mad … No, I won’t shoot myself. I’m going to have a baby son … Alyoskha … I want to live! That’s it! Goodbye! …

Author. He put down the receiver, but I went on talking to him for a long time. Hello, I’m listening …

‘And the evening and the morning … ’

Major commanding a Mountain Infantry Company

A lot of people now claim it was all a waste of time. I suppose they want to carve ‘It Was All In Vain’ on the gravestones.

We did our killing over there but we’re being condemned for it at home. Casualties were flown back to Soviet airports and unloaded in secret so the public wouldn’t find out. You say that’s all in the past now, do you? But your ‘past’ is very recent. I came home on leave in 1986. ‘So you get a nice suntan, go fishing and earn fantastic amounts of money, do you?’ people asked me. How could they be expected to know the truth, when the media kept quiet.

Even the air is different over there. I still smell it in my dreams. ‘We were an occupying force’ — that’s what the newspapers claim now. If so, why did we give them food and medicine? We’d arrive in a village, and they’d all be happy to see us. We’d leave, and they’d be equally happy to see us go. I never understood why they were always so happy.

Once we stopped a bus for a security check. I heard the dry click of a pistol and one of my men fell to the ground. We turned him on his back and saw a bullet had gone through his heart … I felt like mortaring the lot of them. We searched the bus but didn’t find the pistol or anything else, except copper kettles and baskets full of fruit being taken to market. The passengers were all women, but someone killed my man …

Go on! Carve ‘It Was All In Vain!’ on the gravestones …

We were on foot, on a routine patrol. I tried to shout ‘Halt!’ but for some reason I was struck dumb. We carried on and bang! Some moments later I lost consciousness; then I realised I was at the bottom of the crater. I tried to crawl but I didn’t have the strength and the others overtook me. I wasn’t in pain, though. I managed to crawl 40 yards or so, until I heard someone say, ‘Sit! It’s safe now.’ I tried to sit like the others, then I saw my legs were gone. I dragged my gun towards me to shoot myself but someone snatched it out of my hand. ‘The major’s lost his legs!’ I heard him say, and then, ‘I’m sorry for the major.’ When I heard that word ‘sorry’ pain raced through my whole body, such a dreadful pain that I began to howl.

Even now, here at home, I never take the path through the forest — I stick to asphalt and concrete. I’m scared of grass. There’s a soft, springy lawn by our house but it still frightens me.

In hospital we men who’d lost both legs asked to be put together in one ward. There were four of us. Two wooden legs stood by each bed, eight wooden legs in total. On 23 February, Soviet Army Day, some schoolgirls came with their teacher to give us flowers. They stood there crying. None of us ate a thing or said a word for two days afterwards.

Some stupid relative or other came to visit and brought a cake.

‘It was all a waste of time, boys!’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, though, you’ll get a nice pension and sit and watch television all day long!’

‘Get out!’ Four crutches flew at his head.

Some time after that one of the four tried to hang himself in the toilet. He wound one end of a sheet round his neck and tied the other to a window-handle. He’d received a letter from his girlfriend: ‘You know, Afgantsi are out of fashion now,’ she’d written. And he’d lost both his legs …

Go on! Carve ‘It Was All In Vain!’ on the gravestones.

A Nurse

When I got back home all I felt like doing was sitting in front of the mirror, brushing my hair. I wanted to have a baby, wash nappies and listen to baby-talk. The doctors advised against it. ‘Your heart can’t take the strain,’ they said — and my baby girl was born by Caesarean section because I did actually have a heart attack. ‘No one accepts our poor health is the result of Afghanistan,’ a friend wrote to me. ‘They think that if we weren’t wounded we weren’t affected.’

The way I was recruited was quite incredible. In 1982 I was in my third year of a correspondence course in the university philology faculty. I was summoned to the enlistment office:

‘We need nurses in Afghanistan. How do you feel about volunteering? You’d get one and a half times your normal salary, plus foreign currency vouchers.’

‘But I’m a student now.’ After my training I’d worked as a nurse while studying to become a teacher, which was what I discovered I really wanted to be.

‘You’re a member of the Komsomol,* aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Think it over.’

‘I don’t need to. I want to go on studying.’

‘I advise you to think it over a bit longer than that. If you don’t, we’ll give the university a call and tell them what kind of Komsomolka you really are. The Motherland demands … ’

My neighbour on the flight from Tashkent to Kabul was a girl returning from leave. ‘Have you brought an iron and a hot-plate with you?’ she asked.

‘I thought I was going to a war … ’

Oh God! Another romantic idiot! I suppose you like reading war-stories?’

‘I hate them.’

‘Why are you here, then?’

That bloody ‘Why?’ followed me for my whole two years out there.

The clearing-centre was a long row of tents. In the canteen tent they served buckwheat porridge and handed out vitamin tablets you couldn’t buy for love or money in the Soviet Union.

‘You’re a pretty little thing. What are you doing here?’ a middle-aged officer asked me.

I burst into tears.

‘Who’s been upsetting you?’

‘You!’

‘Me?’

‘You’re the fourth person today to ask me what I’m doing here.’

I flew from Kabul to Kunduz by plane, and from Kunduz to Faizabad by helicopter. Whenever I mentioned Faizabad the reaction was, ‘What? It’s all shooting and killing there — you’re a dead duck!’ I saw Afghanistan from the air. It’s a big and beautiful country, with mountains, and mountain rivers, which reminded me of the Caucasus, and vast open spaces like so much of our own country. I fell in love with it.

In Faizabad I was the theatre sister and also put in charge of the surgical ward. The field-hospital consisted entirely of tents. My very first operation there was on an old Afghan woman with a damaged subclavian artery. When I looked for surgical clamps I discovered there weren’t any, so we had to hold the wound together with our fingers. When you touched the surgical thread it crumbled into dust — it hadn’t been replaced since the end of the last war hi 1945.

All the same, we saved the old woman. That evening I looked into the post-op ward with the surgeon to find out how she was feeling. She was lying there with her eyes open, and when she saw us her lips started moving. I thought she was trying to say something — until she spat a gob of phlegm at us. I couldn’t understand what right she had to hate us. I went rigid with shock: we’d saved her life and she …

The wounded were brought in by helicopter. You heard it and started running.

The temperature in the operating theatre rose to 40° Celsius. It was so hot you could hardly breathe; the cloth you wiped away the surgeons’ sweat with was itself dripping into the open wound. A non-sterile orderly gave them drinks through a straw inserted through the mask. There was a shortage of plasma, so a soldier was called to donate some. He lay down right there in the theatre and gave blood. The medical orderlies knew nothing about sterile conditions. Once I was racing back and forth between two tables when the lamp over one of them suddenly flickered off. An orderly changed the bulb with his sterile gloves and started to put his hands back into the wound.

‘Get out!’

‘What’s the problem?’

Out! This patient has an open rib-cage! Out!’

Sometimes we were operating for 24 or even 48 hours at a stretch. If it wasn’t the war-wounded, it was the self-mutilators, soldiers who shot themselves in the knee or fingers. A sea of blood and a shortage of cotton-wool …

Such men were generally despised, even by us medics. ‘There are lads getting killed out there, and you want to go home to Mummy? You think you’ll be sent back home? Why didn’t you shoot yourself in the head? I would, if I were you!’ That was the sort of thing I used to say, I promise you. At the time they seemed the most contemptible of cowards; now I’m beginning to realise that perhaps it was a protest as well, and an unwillingness to kill other people.

I came home in 1984.

‘Do you think we should be out there?’ I was asked, rather hesitantly, by a boy I knew.

‘If we weren’t, the Americans would be!’ I answered furiously. As if that proved anything!

At the time we thought about such questions amazingly little. We kept our eyes shut. Or rather, all we saw were our wounded, mutilated and horribly burnt patients, and we learnt how to hate, but not to think. I’d look out of the helicopter and see the mountain-sides covered with red poppies and other flowers whose names I never found out, and I realised I no longer loved all that beauty. In May, with its scorching heat, I’d look at the empty, dry earth with a kind of spiteful pleasure. ‘That’s what you deserve! We’re suffering and being killed because of you!’ I thought I hated it.

Injuries from fire-arms, mines … The helicopters never stopped coming, or the boys being carried in on stretchers, some covered with a sheet.

‘Dead or wounded?’

‘Well, not wounded … ’

‘What, then?’ I turn down the edge of the sheet and see a skeleton held together by skin. We often had such cases from the remote outposts.

‘What happened to you?’

‘I gave him his tea and it had a fly in it.’

‘Who’s “him”?’

‘I took a “grandad” his tea, and a fly flew out of it. They beat me up and didn’t let me eat for a fortnight.’

Christ! So much blood being spilt, and they do this to a young soldier far from home.

In Kunduz two ‘grandads’ forced a new recruit to dig a hole one night and stand in it. They buried him up to his neck, with only his head sticking out of the ground, and urinated over him all night long. When they dug him out in the morning he shot them both dead. The case was the subject of a special Order of the Day, which was published throughout the army.

Christ! So much blood, and they do this.

The things I’m telling you are all horrible, but I wonder why it’s only the horror I seem to remember? There was a lot of friendship and mutual support out there, and heroism too. Do you think I was too prejudiced by that old Afghan woman who spat at us? There’s more to that story, in fact … She was brought in from a village which our Spetsnaz had dealt with. She was the only one left alive. And if you want to go right back to the beginning, it all started when two of our helicopters were destroyed by machine-gunfire from that same village, and the pilots were finished off with pitch-forks. Who started it, and why, and when? We didn’t try and work it all out, we were just so sorry for our own people.

One of our doctors was sent into action, to actually fight. The first time he came back he was crying. ‘All my life I’ve been trained to heal people, but today I killed them. How could I do that?’ Within a month he was analysing his feelings quite calmly: ‘You start firing and suddenly it’s exciting. Take that, and that, and that!’

Rats used to drop on to us at night, so we put muslin netting round our beds. The flies were as big as tea-spoons but we got used to them. Man is the most adaptable creature on earth.

The girls used to dry out scorpions and use them as jewellery. They chose big fat ones, and either stuck them on a pin or threaded them on to cotton. I spent my spare time ‘weaving’, as I called it, unravelling the thread from parachute shroud-lines and sterilising it ready for stitching up wounds. When I came back from leave I brought with me a suitcase full of surgical needles, clamps and thread. Crazy! And this time I remembered to bring a hot-plate and my iron — so I wouldn’t have to dry my wet gown with my body-heat.

At night we’d sit together, preparing cotton-wool balls and washing and drying the used gauze bandages. We were one big family and we guessed, even then, that when we got home we’d be a lost and unwanted generation. There was the eternal question, for example, of why so many women were drafted into Afghanistan for the duration? To begin with we were just a bit puzzled when dozens of ‘cleaners’, ‘librarians’ and ‘hotel workers’ started arriving, often one cleaner for two or three prefabs, or one librarian for a few shelves of shabby old books? Well, why do you think? We professionals kept away from such women, although they didn’t bother us personally.

I fell in love with a man there and we became lovers. He’s still alive, although I’ve lied to my husband and told him he was killed.

‘Did you ever meet a live muj?’ my younger brother asked me when I got home. ‘Did he look like a bandit and have a dagger between his teeth?’

‘I did. But he was a good-looking boy with a degree from Moscow University.’ My brother imagined a mixture of a basmach and a mountain tribesman straight out of Tolstoy’s ‘Hadji-Murat’.†

Another question: ‘But why did you work two or three days and nights at a stretch? You were earning good pay for your eight hours’ work. Why didn’t you just go off duty?’

‘You don’t understand a thing!’ I’d say.

They didn’t. But I know I’ll never be needed the way I was needed there.

I saw the most incredible rainbows there, great high columns of colour all over the sky. I’ll never see rainbows like those again, covering the whole sky.

A Mother

I was a happy young woman with two lovely boys. Yura was twelve years old when Sasha went into the army at eighteen.

‘I wonder where you’ll be sent, Sasha?’

‘I’ll go wherever the Motherland needs me.’

‘You see what a fine boy your brother is, Yura!’ I said proudly. When Sasha’s call-up papers came Yura ran to me:

‘Will Sasha be going to the war, Mum?’

‘Wars kill, my love,’ I told him.

‘Just you see, Mum, he’ll come back with a medal, the one “For Valour”,’ and off he went to play with his friends, ‘fighting the mujahedin’. Rat-ta-ta-tat … Rat-ta-ta-tat … That evening he came home. ‘Do you think the war will be over before I’m eighteen, Mum?’

‘I hope so.’

Our Sasha’s lucky — he’ll be a hero. You should have had me first and then him.’

When we got Sasha’s suitcase back all it had in it was a pair of blue underpants, a toothbrush, half a bar of soap and a soap dish. We were given a certificate of identification.

‘Your son died in hospital.’

One phrase goes round and round in my brain like a gramophone record: ‘I’ll go wherever the Motherland needs me.’

They carried the coffin in and then out again as if it were empty.

When they were little, whether I called ‘Sasha!’ or ‘Yura!’ they’d both come running. Now I called: ‘Sasha!’, but the coffin was silent. ‘Where have you been, Yurochka?’

‘When you call him like that, Mum, I want to run to the other end of the world.’

He ran away from the cemetery, too, and we had a job finding him.

They sent us Sasha’s four decorations, including his medal ‘For Valour’.

‘Look at this medal, Yura!’

‘I see it, Mum, but our Sasha can’t.’

It’s three years now since my son died and I haven’t dreamt about him once. I go to sleep with his vest and trousers under my pillow. ‘Come to me in my dreams, Sasha. Come and see me!’

But he never does. I wonder what I’ve done to offend him.

I can see the school and the playground from my window, and Yura playing with his friends, fighting the mujahedin. But all I can hear is: Rat-ta-ta-tat … rat-ta-ta-tat …

1st Lieutenant, Interpreter

Two years were enough … I just want to forget the whole stupid nightmare. I never went there.

But the truth is, I did.

In 1986 I graduated from the military academy, took my accumulated leave and that summer went to Moscow to report for duty at the HQ of a certain important military organisation. It wasn’t easy to locate. I eventually found the reception desk and dialled the three-figure number I’d been given.

‘Hello? Colonel Sazonov speaking.’

‘Good morning, Comrade Colonel! I am at your disposal. At the moment I’m down at reception.’

‘Ah, yes, I know … Do you know where you’re being posted?’

‘To the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan]. Kabul.’

‘Didn’t expect it, eh?’

On the contrary, Comrade Colonel!’ And I was being completely honest, because for the previous five years it had been drummed into us that we would be going over there.

You know the movie image of an officer departing for war? The hurried preparations after an urgent phone call, the stiff-upper lip farewell to his wife and children before he strides to the waiting aeroplane, its engines roaring in the pre-dawn shadows? Well, it wasn’t quite like that. My road to war was paved with bureaucratic documents. First I had to get my orders, my gun and my dry rations. Then, in addition to a certificate that said I had a ‘correct understanding of Party and Government policy’, I required a service passport, visa, testimonials, instructions, vaccination certificates, customs declarations and ration cards. Eventually, however, I boarded my plane, settled down in my seat and heard a drunken major exclaim, ‘Forward! To the mines!’

The newspapers informed us that the ‘military and political situation in the DRA remains complex and contradictory’. Military opinion maintained that the withdrawal of the first six regiments was pure propaganda — there was no question of a total withdrawal of Soviet forces in the foreseeable future, and none of my fellow passengers doubted that the war would last out our tour of duty. ‘Forward! To the mines!’ as the drunken major, already asleep, shouted again.

Well, I was a paratrooper and the army, as I soon found out, was divided into paras and the rest, known as solyari (a term whose etymology I never discovered). Many of our soldiers and NCOs, as well as some officers, had their arms tattooed. These tattoos were mostly rather similar, usually featuring an Ilyushin-76 with a parachute beneath it, but there were some variations: one I saw was a romantic scene with clouds, birds, a para hanging from his ’chute and the touching inscription ‘Love the sky!’ Among the unwritten rules of the paras was the following: ‘A para kneels for two reasons only — to drink water with his hands, and to pay his respects to his dead friend.’

My war …

‘Atten-shun! Your route will take you from your camp here, via the district party offices in Bagram, to the village of Shevan. Speed of the convoy will be dictated by the leading vehicle. Distance between vehicles to be dependent on speed. Code-words: I’ll be known as Freza, the rest of you by the numbers on the sides of your vehicles. Stand at ease!’ This was the normal routine before the departure of one of our agitprop expeditions. The CO might add, ‘You are forbidden to remove your helmets or flak jackets. Keep your gun in your hands at all times.’

I jump into my vehicle, a small, lightly armoured and easily manoeuvrable affair known over there as a bali-bali. ‘Bal’ is Afghani for ‘Yes’; when Afghans test their microphones they always say ‘bali-bali’ instead of our One two three four testing’. As an interpreter I’m interested in anything to do with language.

‘Salto, Salto, this is Freza. Let’s get this show on the road!’

Behind a low stone wall we find a single-storey building of brick and plaster. A red sign proclaims, ‘District Party Committee’. There to greet us on the porch stands Comrade Lagmaan, dressed in Soviet khaki.

‘’Salaam Alekum, raik Lagmaan!’

‘Salaam Alekum. Tchetour asti! Khud astil Dzhor astil Khair asti? He intones the familiar phrases of traditional Afghan welcome, thereby indicating his intense concern with our state of health. No reply to these questions is required, although the identical phrases may be repeated.

The CO doesn’t miss the opportunity to utter his favourite phrase: ‘Tchetour asti? Khub asti? Afghan’s nasty.’

Comrade Lagmaan doesn’t understand and, bewildered, looks at me. ‘It’s a Russian proverb,’ I explain.

We are invited into his study. Tea is brought in metal teapots on a tray. Tea is an indispensable aspect of Afghan hospitality. Without tea work cannot begin and discussion is unthinkable. To decline a cup of tea is no less a snub than to refuse to shake hands on meeting.

In the village we are met by the elders and the eternally dirty kids (the youngest are never washed at all, in accordance with the Sheriat, their faith, which maintains that a layer of dirt protects them from evil influences). They are dressed in whatever rags they can find. Since I speak Farsi they all insist on testing my knowledge of the language. The test, as ever, is in the form of the question, ‘What’s the time?’ My reply evokes a storm of pleasure: I really do speak Farsi, after all!

‘Are you a Muslim?’

‘I am,’ I lie.

Proof is required. ‘Do you know the kalema?’ The kaletna is the special formulation one utters to become a Muslim.

‘La ilyakh illya miakh va Mukhamed rasul allakh’, I declare. ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.’

‘Dost! Dost! (A friend!),’ the kids mutter, stretching out their skinny hands as a sign of acceptance.

They often ask me to repeat these words, and bring their friends, who also admiringly whisper, ‘He knows the kalema!’ Afghan songs blare out from the loudspeakers, which even the Afghans call ‘Alla Pugacheva’ [a universally popular Russian singer]. We soldiers hang out visual propaganda materials from our vehicles — flags, posters, slogans — and unfurl a screen for the film show. The medics put up tables and unpack their crates of medicines.

The meeting opens. A mullah in a long white robe and a white turban comes forward to read a sura from the Koran. Then he turns to Allah, begging him to protect believers from all the evils of the universe. Bending his arm at the elbow he raises his palms to Allah and we all copy his movements. Now Comrade Lagmaan begins to speak. His is a very long speech, a characteristic feature of Afghan life. They are all capable of making speeches and love to do so. There’s a phenomenon known in linguistic jargon as ‘emotional colour’. Well, an Afghan speech is not only coloured but highly decorated — with metaphors, epithets and elaborate comparisons …

(Afghan officers frequently expressed their surprise that our political workers used notes in their talks and discussions. At party meetings and political seminars our lecturers and propagandists relied on the same stiff and tired old phraseology and vocabulary learnt from countless books and pamphlets; for example, ‘in the avant-garde of the wider communist movement’, ‘the importance of setting an example at all times’, ‘ceaselessly to put into practice’, ‘as well as successes there will be setbacks’ and even the sinister ‘some Comrades do not understand’.)

Long before I arrived in Afghanistan such meetings as ours in the village had become meaningless obligations; the villagers came for their medical check-ups and a free packet of flour each. The ovations and friendly shouts of ‘zaido bod!’ — ‘Hail to the April Revolution’ — were a thing of the past, as were the raised fists which invariably accompanied every speech in the early days, when the people still believed in our aims — the splendid ideals of the April Revolution and the brilliant future that it seemed to promise.

The children do not listen to the speech — they’re waiting for the film. As usual, we have cartoons in English followed by two documentaries in Farsi and Pushtu. Their favourite movies are sentimental Indian love stories and adventures with lots of guns and violence.

After the film-show we distribute presents — today, toys and bags of flour. In fact we hand them over to the village headman who is meant to share them out among the poor and the families of war-victims. As he swears publicly that all will be done honestly and properly his son begins to carry the gifts to their house.

‘Do you think he’ll share things out fairly?’ the CO worries.

‘I doubt it. The locals have already warned us he’s a grafter. Tomorrow it’ll all be for sale in the shops.’

Command: ‘Prepare to move off!’

‘Vehicle number 112 ready, 305 ready, 307, 308 … ’ The children see us off with a hail of stones. One hits me. ‘“From the grateful Afghan people”, as they say,’ I observe.

We return to our unit via Kabul. The shop-windows are hung with signs in Russian: ‘Cheapest vodka’; ‘Any goods at any price’ and ‘Russian Friends, Come to Bratishka [brother] for All Your Purchases!’ The merchants call out in Russian: ‘T-shirts!’, ‘Jeans!’, ‘A Grey Count dinner service for six places!’, ‘Trainers with velcro!’, ‘Lurex with blue and white stripes!’ We pass barrows laden with our condensed milk, cans of peas, thermoses, electric kettles, mattresses, blankets … It’s all so utterly, totally different from home.

Private

I don’t recall any particular scenes from my life in Afghanistan. There were 200 of us in the plane; 200, all men. A person on his own and the same person in a group are two different people.

During the flight I wondered what I’d have to go through in the months to come.

I remember a piece of advice from our CO’s farewell talk. ‘If you’re in the mountains and have a fall, don’t shout! Fall as silently as a stone. It’s the only way to protect your comrades.’

When you look up at the sky from a high crag the sun seems so close you could catch it in your hands.

Before I went into the army I read a book by Aleksandr Fersman called My Memories of Stone. I remember being struck by some of the expressions he used, such as ‘the life of stone’, ‘the memory of stone’, ‘the voice of stone’, ‘the soul of stone’, ‘the body of stone’, ‘the name of stone’. I’d never realised that you could speak about stone as though it were alive. Over there I learnt that stone was as fascinating to look at as water or fire.

One of our instructions:

‘When shooting an animal you should fire slightly in front of it so that it runs into your bullet. The same applies to a running man.’

We are in the mountains from early morning until late at night. You literally vomit from tiredness. First your legs, then your arms turn to lead, then they start to shake at the joints.

One of the lads had a fall. ‘Shoot me! I can’t walk!’

Three of us grab him and drag him with us.

‘Leave me, you guys! Shoot me!’

‘We’d shoot you all right, you fucker, but you’ve got your Mum waiting at home.’

‘Shoot me!’

Thirst was a torture. You drink your water-bottle dry before you’re half-way to wherever you’re meant to be going. Your tongue is so swollen it sticks out of your mouth and won’t go back — but you still manage to smoke. You get to the snow-line and look for melted water. You drink from a puddle, crunching the muddy ice between your teeth, forgetting about all those chlorine tablets and manganese ampoules you’re supposed to take, oblivious of anything but crawling and licking the snow. A machine-gun’s clattering away behind you but you go on lapping up your puddle. You gulp it down so as not to die thirsty! There’s a body, lying face down in the water — it looks as though it’s drinking too.

Now I look at the whole thing from a distance. What sort of person was I over there? I never answered your first question: how did I come to be in Afghanistan? I volunteered to ‘go to the aid of the Afghan people’. Radio, TV and the press kept telling us about the Revolution, and that it was our duty to help. I got myself ready for war by learning karate — it’s not easy, the first time you hit someone in the face, and hear the bone crunch. You have to step over a certain boundary inside yourself — then smash!

The first body I saw was an Afghan boy aged about seven. He was lying there with his arms out as though asleep. Next to him was his horse, completely frozen and with its stomach split wide open. What had the kid done — or the animal, for that matter — to deserve that?

A couple of lines from one of our Afgantsi songs:

‘Why, and for whom, did they give their lives

Cut down by bullets and mines and knives?’

Two years after I got home I was still dreaming I was at my own funeral … or else waking up in a panic because I had no ammo to shoot myself with.

‘Any medals? Were you wounded?’ my friends asked. ‘Did you kill anyone?’ I tried to explain what I’d been through but no one was interested in that. I started drinking, on my own, to ‘absent friends,’ to Yarka, for example. I might have saved him. We were together in hospital in Kabul. I had a shoulder wound and shell shock, but he’d lost both legs. There were a lot of lads there with legs and arms missing. They’d smoke and crack jokes. They were OK there, but they didn’t want to go home. They’d beg to stay until the last possible moment. Going home was the hardest thing of all, starting a new life. The day he was due to fly home Yurka cut his wrists in the toilet …

I’d tried to cheer him up a bit while we played chess of an evening.

‘Look on the bright side, Yurka,’ I’d say. ‘What about Alexei Meresyev in “A True Story”?‡ You’ve read it, haven’t you?’

‘I’ve got a beautiful girl waiting for me,’ he’d say.

Some days I just hate everyone I meet in the street or see through the window. I can hardly stop myself … well, let’s say it’s just as well those customs officers confiscated our guns and grenades. We did what we had to do, and are we now going to be forgotten about? Yurka, too?

I wake up at night and don’t know whether I’m here or back there. Who was it described the insane as ‘those whom life has taken by surprise’? I see my own life with an objective eye now. I’ve got a wife and a kid. I used to love pigeons, and early morning. Yeah, an objective eye. But I’d do anything to find happiness again.

NCO in the Security Service

My daughter comes home from school and said, ‘Mama, no one believes me when I tell them you were in Afghanistan.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re just amazed. They ask me who sent you there.’

I’m still not used to this sense of safety and I’m enjoying it. I’m not used to not being shot at and bombed, to being able to turn on a tap and drink a glass of water which doesn’t stink of chlorine. Over there everything — bread, macaroni, porridge, meat, stewed fruit — tastes of chlorine.

I can hardly recall a thing about these two years I’ve been home. I do remember meeting my daughter again, but the rest just escapes me. It all seems so petty and trivial and irrelevant compared with what I went through there. OK, so someone bought a new kitchen table and a TV, so what? But that’s the height of excitement here.

My daughter’s growing up. She wrote to the CO of my unit in Afghanistan. ‘Please send my Mummy back to me as soon as possible, I miss her very much.’ Apart from her I can’t get interested in anything now.

The rivers there are incredibly blue. I never realised water could be such a heavenly colour. Red poppies grow there like daisies do here, the mountainsides are like bonfires. Big camels gaze at everything like old men, and they never get frightened. A donkey got blown up by an anti-personnel mine — I used to see him in the market, pulling a cart full of oranges.

Damn you, Afghanistan!

I can’t live at peace with myself any more. I feel different from everyone else. When I came home my friends and neighbours — all women — were forever inviting themselves over. ‘Valya, we’ll only pop in for a moment,’ they’d say. ‘Tell us, what kind of china can you buy there? What about carpets? Are there really lots of clothes and videos available? What did you bring back? Anything you want to sell?’

More coffins came over than cassette-recorders, I can tell you, but that’s all been forgotten about …

Damn you, Afghanistan!

My daughter’s growing up. We share a single room in a communal flat, although I was promised that when I got home we’d get a place of our own. I went to the housing committee with my documents.

‘Were you wounded?’ they asked.

‘No, I came home in one piece. I may look OK, but that doesn’t mean I’m not damaged inside.’

‘Aren’t we all? It wasn’t us that sent you there.’

I was queuing for sugar one day and heard someone say, ‘They brought suitcases full of stuff back with them and now they want special privileges … ’

Once I saw six coffins laid side by side: Major Yashenko, his lieutenant and soldiers. The coffins were open, and they lay there with sheets over them; you couldn’t see their faces. I never thought to hear men cry, even howl, the way they did there.

Big stone obelisks were put up where men were killed in action, with their names engraved on them, but the mujahedin threw them into the ravines or blew them up to wipe out every last trace.

Damn you Afghanistan!

My daughter’s grown up without me. She spent those two years at boarding-school. When I went there her teacher complained about her bad marks. She wasn’t doing well for her age.

‘What did you do over there, Mummy?’

The women helped the men, I told her. There was a woman who told a man, ‘You’re going to live.’ And he did. ‘You’re going to walk.’ And he did. She wouldn’t let him send a letter he’d written to his wife. ‘Who needs me, now I’ve lost my legs?’ he’d written. ‘Forget about me!’

‘I’ll tell you what to write,’ she said. ‘My dearest wife, my dearest Alenka and Alyosha … ’

You want to know how I came to be there? The CO called me in. ‘You’re needed over there,’ he told me. ‘It’s your duty!’ We were brought up on that word, it’s second nature to us.

At the clearing centre I came across a young girl lying on a bare mattress, crying. ‘I’ve got everything I could possibly want at home — a four-room flat, a fiancé and loving parents.’

‘Why are you here, then?’

‘I was told things were going badly here, that it was my duty.’

I didn’t take anything home with me — except my memories.

Damn you, Afghanistan.

This war will never be finished — our children will go on fighting it.

‘Mummy, no one believes you were in Afghanistan,’ my daughter said to me again last night.

Private

Don’t try and tell me we were victims of a mistake. I can’t stand those two words and I won’t hear them spoken.

We fought well and bravely. Why are we being treated like this? I knelt to kiss the flag and took the military oath. We were brought up to believe these things were sacred, to love and trust the Motherland. And I do trust her, in spite of everything. I’m still at war, really, although it’s thousands of miles away. If a car exhaust goes off outside my window or I hear the sound of breaking glass I’ll go through a moment of animal terror. My head is a complete void, a great ringing emptiness, like the long-distance telephone§ or a burst of automatic fire. I can’t and I won’t just stamp out all that part of my life, or my sleepless nights, or my horrors.

Sometimes we’d drive around singing at the tops of our voices, calling out to the girls and teasing them. From the back of a lorry they all look great! That was fun!

There were a few cowards. ‘I won’t go!’ they’d say. ‘Even prison’s better than war.’

‘Take that!’ We’d make their lives a misery and beat them up. Some of them deserted.

My first fatality was a chap we pulled out of a tank. ‘I want to live!’ he said — and died. It’s unbearable to look at anything beautiful, like the mountains, or a lilac-covered canyon, straight after you’ve been in battle. You just want to blow it all up. Or else you go all soft and quiet. Another lad had a slow death. He lay on the ground and started to name everything he could see, and repeat it, like a child who’s just learning to talk: ‘Mountains … tree … bird … sky … ’ Until the end.

A young Tsarandui (that’s Afghani for policeman) said to me once, ‘Allah will take me to heaven when I die, but where will you end up?’

Where I ended up was hospital. My father came to see me there in Tashkent.

‘You’ve got the right to stay in the Soviet Union if you’ve been wounded,’ he told me.

‘How can I stay here when my friends are over there?’

He’s a communist, a party member, but he went to church and lit a candle.

‘What did you do that for, Dad?’

‘I need something to put my faith in. Who else can I pray to for your safe return?’

The lad in the bed next to mine was from Dushanbe [Soviet Tadjikistan]. His mother came to visit him with cognac and baskets of fruit.

‘I want you home, son. Who do I have to go and see?’

‘Look, Mum, let’s just drink to our health and leave it at that.’

A Mother

Perhaps she’s alive, my daughter, somewhere far away from here … I’d be happy wherever she was, just as long as she’s alive. I want it so much it’s all I ever think of.

I dreamt she came home, took a chair and sat in the middle of the room. She had lovely long hair falling to her shoulders. She pushed it out of her face. ‘Mama, why do you keep calling me over and over again, you know I can’t come to you. I have a husband now, and two children … I have a family.’

Even in my dream I remembered that about a month after we buried her I started thinking she’d been kidnapped, not killed. Whenever we went for a walk people used to turn round and look at her, she was so tall and lovely, and her hair just poured. Anyway, no one took me seriously, but I had a sign that she was alive …

I’m a medic and I’ve always thought of it as a sacred profession. I loved my daughter and pushed her in the same direction. Now I blame myself — if she’d been in some other line of work she’d have stayed at home and be alive now. It’s just the two of us now, my husband and I, no other children. It’s a completely empty existence. We sit at home in the evening and watch television. Sometimes we don’t say a word to each other all night. When I start singing, and crying, my husband groans and goes out for a walk. You can’t imagine the pain in my heart. In the morning I don’t want to get up but I have to go to work. Sometimes I think I’ll just stay in bed and wait until they come and take me to her.

I’ve got a dreadfully vivid imagination. I feel I’m constantly with her and she’s changing all the time. We even read together although now I prefer books about plants and animals, anything but people.

I thought nature would help me, and springtime … We went for walks, my husband and I, saw the violets in bloom and the tiny leaves unfurling on the trees, but I began to cry. The beauty of nature and the joy of life hit me so hard. I was frightened by the passing of time. I knew it would take her, and the memory of her, away from me. Some things about her are receding already, the things she used to say, the way she smiled. I collected the stray hairs from her suit and kept them in a matchbox.

‘What are you doing that for?’ my husband wanted to know.

‘Let me do it. It’s all there is left of her.’

I’ll be sitting at home sometimes and I’ll hear her voice, suddenly and clearly: ‘Don’t cry, Mama.’ I look round but there’s no one there. So I go on thinking about her. I see her lying there, the grave already dug and the earth ready to receive her. I kneel next to her: ‘My darling little girl, my darling little girl. What’s happened to you? Where are you? Where have you gone?’ But we’re still together, as if I were lying in the coffin with her.

I remember that day so well. She came home from work and told me, ‘The medical director called me in today.’

‘And?’ Even before she answered I knew something was wrong.

‘He’s had an order to send one member of staff to Afghanistan.’

‘And?’

‘What they actually want is a theatre sister.’ She was theatre sister on the cardiology ward.

‘And?’ I couldn’t think of anything to say, I just repeated that one word.

‘I said I’d go.’

‘And?’

‘Someone’s got to. And I’d like to be somewhere I’m really needed.’

We knew there was a war on, blood was being spilt, and nurses were needed. I burst into tears, but I couldn’t say no to her. She looked at me sternly. ‘We’ve both taken the Hippocratic oath, Mama,’ she said.

It took her several months to get her papers ready. She came and showed me her references, including one which proclaimed she had a ‘correct understanding of Party and Government policy’, but I still didn’t believe she was going.

Talking to you like this makes me feel better, as though she’s here with us, and I’m going to bury her tomorrow. The coffin’s here in the room. She’s still with me. Perhaps she’s still alive … All I want to know is — where is she now? Does she still have her long hair? And what blouse is she wearing? I need to know everything.

To tell you the honest truth, I don’t want to see anyone. I prefer to be alone with Svetochka and talk to her. If someone comes in it spoils everything. I don’t want to let anyone into this world of mine. I don’t want to share her with anyone. One woman did come to see me once, from work. I wouldn’t let her go, we sat together until it was so late we thought she’d miss the last bus; her husband phoned, he was worried about her too. Her son had been in Afghanistan, but he’d come back totally different from the boy they’d known. ‘I’ll stay home and help you with the baking, Mum,’ or ‘I’ll go with you to the launderette, Mum.’ He was scared of men and only got on with girls. She asked the doctor about it and he told her to be patient and everything would get better. I feel closer to people like her now. I understand them. I could have made friends with her, but she never came to see me again. She saw Svetochka’s picture on the wall and cried the whole evening …

But I was trying to remember something … What was I going to tell you … ? Oh yes, the first time she came home on leave? No, how we saw her off when she first left? Her school-friends and colleagues came to the station to say goodbye, and an old surgeon bowed and kissed her hands. ‘I’ll never come across hands like these again,’ he said.

She did come home on leave. She was thin and small and slept for three days. Got up, ate and slept. And again. And again.

‘How are you getting on out there, Svetochka?’

‘Fine, Mama. Everything’s fine.’ She sat there quietly smiling to herself.

‘What’s happened to your hands, Svetochka?’ I hardly recognised them, they were like a fifty-year-old’s.

‘There’s too much work out there for me to worry about my hands, Mama. Before an operation I wash my hands with antacid. “Aren’t you worried about your kidneys?” one doctor asked me. Men dying, and he’s worrying about his kidneys. But don’t you worry, I’m happy there, it’s where I’m really needed.’

She went back three days early:

‘Forgive me, Mama, but there are only two nurses left for the whole field-hospital. Enough doctors but a shortage of nurses. The girls are exhausted. I’ve just got to go.’

She was terribly fond of her grandmother, who was nearly ninety. We went to see her in the country. She was standing by a big rose-bush and Svetochka told her, ‘Don’t go and die on me, Grandma. Wait for me!’ Grandma cut all the roses and gave them to her …

We had to get up at five in the morning. ‘I haven’t had enough sleep, Mama,’ she said when I woke her. ‘I don’t think I’ll have enough sleep again.’ In the taxi she opened her bag and gasped. ‘I’ve forgotten the key to the flat. What happens if I get home and you’re not here?’ I found her key in an old skirt and was going to send it to her, so she wouldn’t worry about opening the door.

Suddenly she’s alive. She’s walking somewhere, laughing, enjoying the flowers — she loved roses. I still go to Grandma’s, she’s still alive. “Don’t go and die on me. Wait till I get home!” Grandma still remembers that. Once I got up at night. On the table was a bunch of roses she’d cut that evening, and two cups of tea …

‘Why aren’t you asleep?’

‘I’m having a cup of tea with Svetlanka’. She always called her Svetlanka.

I dream about her and in my dream I tell myself, ‘I’ll go and kiss her now. If she’s warm it means she’s alive.’ I go to her, kiss her, she’s warm — she’s alive!

Suddenly she’s alive, in another place.

Once I was sitting by her grave in the cemetery and two soldiers passed by. One of them stopped. Oh! That’s our Sveta. Look!’ He noticed me. ‘Are you her mother?’

I threw myself at him. ‘Did you know Svetochka?’

He turned to his friend. ‘She had both her legs blown off during a bombardment, and died.’

I burst into tears. He was shocked: ‘Didn’t you know? Forgive me.’ And he ran away.

I never saw him again. Or tried to find him.

Another time I was sitting near the grave and a mother came by with her children. ‘What kind of a mother would let her only daughter go off to war at a time like this?’ I heard her tell them. ‘Just give away her daughter?’ The gravestone had ‘To My Only Daughter’ carved on it.

How dare they. How can they? She took the Hippocratic Oath. She was a nurse whose hands were kissed by a surgeon. She went to save their sons’ lives.

‘People!’ I cry inside me. ‘Don’t turn away from me! Stand by the grave with me for a little while. Don’t leave me alone … ’

Sergeant, Intelligence Corps

I assumed people would become kinder and gentler after all the bloodshed. Surely they wouldn’t want even more killing?

But this friend of mine picks up the paper. ‘They have returned from captivity,’ he reads, and starts swearing.

‘What’s up with you?’ I ask.

‘I’d put ’em all up against the wall and shoot them myself!’

‘Haven’t you seen enough blood already?’

‘They make me sick, those traitors. We were getting our arms and legs blown off while they were going round New York looking at skyscrapers.’¶

Over there we were so close I never wanted to be away from him. Now I’d rather be alone. Loneliness is my salvation. I enjoy talking to myself.

‘I hate that man. I hate him.’

‘Who?’

‘Me!’

I’m scared to go out of the house. I’m scared to touch a woman. I’d be better off dead, then they’d have put up a memorial plaque at my old school and make a hero out of me …

How we do go on about heroes and heroism! Everyone wants to be a hero. Well, I didn’t. I didn’t even know there were Soviet forces in Afghanistan. I wasn’t interested — I was in love for the first time. Now I’m scared to touch a woman, even when I’m jammed against one in a crowded trolley-bus. I’ve never admitted that to anyone. I can’t relate to women now. My wife left me. It was strange, the way that happened. I burnt the kettle. It was smouldering away on the gas and I sat and watched it getting blacker and blacker. My wife came home from work.

‘What have you burnt this time?’ she asked.

‘The kettle.’

‘That’s the third one … ’

‘I like the smell of burning.’

She slammed the door and left, two years ago now, which is when I started being afraid of women. A man should never let a woman know too much about him. They’ll listen kindly to what you have to say and condemn you later, behind your back …

‘What a night! You were shouting again, killing someone all night long.’ That’s what my wife used to say.

I never got round to telling her about the sheer joy of our helicopter pilots when they were dropping their bombs. It was ecstasy in the presence of death.

‘What a night! You were shouting again … ’

I never told her how our lieutenant was killed. On patrol one day we came to a stretch of water and stopped the vehicles.

‘Halt!’ he shouted and pointed to a dirty bundle lying near the water-line. ‘Is it a mine?’

The sappers came and picked it up: the ‘mine’ began to cry. It was a baby.

What to do with it? Leave it? Take it with us? ‘We can’t abandon him,’ the lieutenant decided. ‘He’ll die of cold. I’ll take him to the village. It’s just nearby.’

We waited an hour. The village was 20 minutes away there and back.

We found them lying in the village square. The lieutenant and his driver. The women had killed them with their hoes …

‘What a night! You were shouting and killing someone all night long!’

Sometimes I even forget my name and address, or what I’m meant to be doing. You pull yourself together, try and start living again …

I leave home and immediately start worrying. Have I locked the door or haven’t I? Did I turn the gas off? I go to sleep and wake up wondering if I set the alarm-clock. When I go to work in the morning and meet my neighbour, I can’t remember if I’ve said Good Morning to him or not?

As Kipling said:

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!’

When she married me my wife said: ‘You’ve come back from Hell, from Purgatory, I shall save you.’ In fact I’d crawled out of a dung-heap. And now I’m afraid to touch a woman. When I went to Afghanistan the girls here were in long dresses — now they’re all in short ones. I can’t get used to it. I asked her to wear a long dress, but first she laughed, then she got angry. That’s when I began hating myself.

What was I talking about? Oh yes. About my wife’s long dresses. They’re still hanging in the cupboard. She never bothered to come and fetch them.

And I still haven’t told her about …

Major, Battalion Commander

I’ve been an army man all my life. True soldiers think in a particular way, which doesn’t include asking questions like whether this or that war is just or unjust. If we were sent to fight, that in itself meant it was both just and necessary. I always made a point of personally explaining to my men how important the defence of our southern borders was. I gave them my own ideological grounding, you could say, in addition to their twice-weekly political education lectures. How could I admit to doubts? The army won’t tolerate free-thinking; once you’re in harness you live by command. From morning to night.

I never once saw a portrait of Tsiolkovsky [a Russian philosopher, scientist, and pioneer of the Soviet space programme], for example, or Tolstoy, on the barracks walls. What you’d find were pictures of people like Nikolai Gastrello and Alexandr Matrosov, heroes of our Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. Once, when I was a young lieutenant I hung up a picture of Romain Rolland in my room — I’d cut it out of some magazine or other. The CO came round.

‘Who’s that?’ he said.

‘Romain Rolland, a French writer, Comrade Colonel.’

‘Well, take your Frenchman down, and be quick about it! Haven’t we got enough heroes of our own?’

‘But Comrade Colonel … ’

‘Dismiss! You’ll go straight to the depot and come back with Karl Marx.’

‘But he was a German.’

‘Silence! 48 hours’ arrest!’

Who cares about Marx? I myself used to point out to my men how useless foreign machinery was. ‘What good is this foreign car? It’ll fall to bits on our roads! Our industry and our cars and our people are the best!’ It’s only now — and I’m in my fifties — I’m beginning to realise that Japan might make a higher-quality machine-tool, the French might be better at producing nylon stockings, and Taiwan has the prettiest girls.

I dream I’ve killed a man. He’s down on all fours, he won’t lift his head. I can’t see his face (and yet, however often I have this dream he always has the same face). Calmly I shoot him. I see his blood. I shout out, wake up and remember the dream …

The war is now being described as a ‘political mistake’, a ‘crime’, and ‘Brezhnevite adventurism’. That doesn’t alter the fact that we had to fight, kill and be killed. ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged!’ What were we there to defend? Was it the April Revolution? No, even at the time I didn’t think so, although I was terribly torn inside. So I tried to convince myself we were defending our garrisons and our own people there.

I remember paddy-fields on fire — war is the ally of fire — and peasants running away. You never see Afghan children crying. They’re skinny and small and you can never guess how old they are, with their little legs sticking out of those wide trousers they wear.

You always had the feeling that someone was trying to kill you. It’s something you never get used to like the melons and watermelons, which are enormous there, and so ripe they burst if you poke them with a bayonet. Dying is simple, killing is much harder. We never spoke of our dead. That was one of the rules of the game, if I can put it like that.

I always put a letter to my wife in my pocket before I went into action. A goodbye letter. ‘Drill a hole in my revolver and give it to our son,’ I wrote. And I had to take letters out of the pockets of my lads, and photos: Tanya from Chernigov, or Mashenka from Pskov, taken in provincial studios, all very similar, with those well-worn phrases painstakingly written on them: ‘Write soon, my love, to your waiting dove’, or ‘Sent with a kiss for the darling I miss’. Sometimes they lay on my desk like playing-cards, the faces of those simple Russian girls …

I can’t adjust to this world. I tried, but it didn’t work. My blood pressure shot up — I need the stress, the edge, that contempt for life which sends the adrenalin racing round my veins. I need that fast pace, the excitement of going into attack … The doctors diagnosed clogged-up arteries.

I’d like to go back there, but I don’t know how I’d feel about it all now. The broken-down and burnt-out old tanks and APCs — is that really all that’s left of us there now?

I went to the cemetery, to walk round the Afgantsi graves. I met one of the mothers there.

Go away, major! You’re old and grey. You’re alive. My son’s lying here, he died too young to shave.’

A friend of mine died not long ago. He’d served in Ethiopia and the heat ruined his kidneys. All his experiences over there died with him, but another friend told me what went on in Vietnam, and I knew others who served in Angola, Egypt, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968. Now we go fishing, look after our gardens and live comfortably on our pensions …

I had one lung removed in Kabul. Near Khmelnitsky, though, there’s a hospital for long-term casualties who’ve been rejected by their families or who just can’t face going home. One of them still writes to me. I had a letter from him not long ago. ‘I’m lying here with my arms and legs gone. When I wake up in the morning I don’t know if I’m a man or an animal. Sometimes I want to mew or bark. I have to bite my tongue.’

I need that pace, the excitement of going into battle. But who’s the enemy now? I couldn’t stand up in front of my lads nowadays and lecture them about how we’re the finest and fairest in the world. But I still maintain that that was what we were aiming at. We failed. But why?

Private, Artillery Regiment

We didn’t betray our Motherland. I did my duty as a soldier as honestly as I could. Nowadays it’s called a ‘dirty war’, but how does that fit in with ideas like Patriotism, the People and Duty? Is the word ‘Motherland’ just a meaningless term to you? We did what the Motherland asked of us.

Nowadays they say we were an occupying force. But what did we take away with us, except for our comrades’ coffins? What did we get out of it, apart from hepatitis and cholera, injuries and lives crippled in all senses of the word? I’ve got nothing to apologise for: I came to the aid of our brothers, the Afghan people. And I mean that. The lads out there with me were sincere and honest. They believed they’d gone to do good — they didn’t see themselves as ‘misguided fighters in a misguided war’, as I saw it described recently. And what good does it do, trying to make out we were simply naïve idiots and cannon-fodder? Who does that help? The so-called ‘truth-seekers’? Well, remember what Jesus said when he was examined by Pontius Pilate:

‘“To this end was I born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.’”

‘Pilate asked, “What is truth?’”

A question which is still waiting for an answer.

I have my own truth and it’s this: that we were innocent, however naïve our faith may have been. We thought the new government would give the land they had taken from the old feudal barons to the peasants, and the peasants would accept it with joy — but they never did accept it! We thought the tractors, combines and mowers we gave them would change their lives, but they destroyed the lot! We thought that in the space age it was absurd to think about God — we even sent an Afghan lad into space: ‘Look, there he is, up there where your Allah lives!’ we said.

But Islam was totally unshaken by our modem civilisation. It was all illusion, but that’s the way it was, and it was a special part of our lives which I treasure and don’t want destroyed or tarnished.

We protected each other in battle, threw ourselves between our friend and the mortar coming straight at him. You don’t forget something like that.

I wanted my homecoming to be a ‘surprise’ but worried about the shock to my mother, so I phoned: ‘Mum, I’m alive, I’m at the airport!’, and heard the receiver crash to the ground.

Who says we lost the war? Here’s where we lost it, here, back home, in our own country. We could have won a great victory here too. We came back as strong as steel forged in the fire, but we weren’t given the chance — or the power. Every day someone or other scrawls the same protest over the war memorial: ‘Put it in your Army HQ where it belongs!’ And my eighteen-year-old cousin doesn’t want to go into the army ‘to obey a lot of stupid or criminal orders’.

What is truth?

There’s an old woman doctor living in our block of flats. She’s seventy. As a result of all these articles nowadays, the revelations, exposes, speeches, the avalanche of truth crashing down on us, she’s gone mad. She opens her ground-floor window and shouts: ‘Long live Stalin! Long live communism — the glorious future of all Mankind!’ I see her every morning, no one bothers her because she’s quite harmless, but sometimes I’m terrified.

Still, we didn’t betray the Motherland …

A Mother

The door-bell rings. I rush to open it but there’s no one there, I’d thought it might be my son, home unexpectedly …

Two days later there’s a knock at the door. Two soldiers.

‘Is my son with you?’

‘Well, no … ’

It got very quiet. I fell to my knees in the hall, by the mirror. ‘My God! My God! Oh my God!’ I cried.

There was an unfinished letter on the table:

‘My dearest son, I read your last letter and was very pleased with it. There’s not a single grammatical error, but two punctuation mistakes, like last time. “I think” and “I did” are subsidiary clauses which are not followed by a comma. You should have written: “I think you’ll be proud of me” and “I did what Dad told me”. Now, don’t be cross with your old Mum!

‘It’s hot in Afghanistan, dear, so do be careful. You catch cold so easily.’

A lot of people came to the funeral but they kept silent. I stood there with a screw-driver and wouldn’t let anyone take it away from me. ‘Let me see my son! Let me see my son!’ I demanded. I wanted to open the zinc coffin.

My husband tried to commit suicide. ‘I can’t go on. Forgive me, mother, but I can’t go on living.’

I tried to talk him out of it. ‘We must put up a gravestone to him,’ I said.

He couldn’t sleep: ‘The boy comes to me when I go to bed. He kisses me, puts his arms round me … ’

By tradition we keep a loaf of bread for forty days after the funeral. It crumbled into little pieces within three weeks. That was a sign that the family would crumble away, too …

We hung our son’s photographs everywhere in the flat. It helped me, but made it worse for my husband:

‘Take them down. He’s looking at me,’ he would say.

We put up the stone, a good one, of expensive marble, and spent all the money we’d been saving for his wedding on the memorial. We adorned the grave with red tiles and planted red flowers. Dahlias. My husband painted the railings round the grave.

‘I’ve done all I can. The boy will be pleased with it.’

The next morning he took me to work. He said goodbye. When I came back from my shift I found him hanging from a towel in the kitchen, opposite a photograph of our beloved son.

‘My God! My God! Oh my God!’

You tell me — were they heroes or not? Why must I bear all this grief? Sometimes I think, yes, he is a hero, and there are so many of them lying there in the cemetery, and at other times I curse the Government and the Party. And yet I myself taught him that ‘duty is duty, my dear. We must do our duty.’ At night I curse the lot of them, but in the morning I run to the cemetery and kneel by his grave and beg him to forgive me.

‘Forgive me, dearest, for talking like that. Forgive me,’ I say.

A Widow

I got a letter. ‘Don’t worry if you don’t get any letters for a while. Write to the old address,’ it said. Then I heard nothing for two months. It didn’t occur to me that he might be in Afghanistan. In fact I was getting ready to go and visit him at his new posting.

In his next letter he didn’t say a word about war, just that he was getting a tan and going fishing. He sent a photograph of himself on a donkey kneeling in the sand. I didn’t realise they were being killed out there.

He’d never bothered much with our little daughter. He didn’t seem to have any fatherly feelings, perhaps because she was too little. Then he came home on leave and spent hours sitting and watching her, but there was a sadness in his eyes which terrified me. Every morning he got up and took her to nursery school — he loved to carry her on his shoulders — and picked her up in the afternoon. We went to the cinema and theatre but most of all he enjoyed staying at home.

He was greedy for love. He resented me going to work, or even into the kitchen to do some cooking. ‘Stay with me’, he would say. ‘Go and ask them for leave while I’m here. And we can do without stew today.’ On his last day he deliberately missed the plane so we could have another two days together.

That last night … it was so good I burst into tears. I was crying, and he wasn’t saying a word, just looking, looking … Then he said:

‘Tamarka, if you have another man, don’t forget this.’

‘You must be mad! You’re not going to be killed! I love you so much you’ll never be killed.’

He laughed.

He didn’t want me to get pregnant. ‘When, if, I come back, we’ll have another baby,’ he said. ‘How would you manage with two of them on your own?’

I learnt to wait. But I felt ill if I saw a hearse go by, and wanted to scream. I’d go home and wish we had an icon. I would have gone down on my knees and prayed, ‘Keep him safe for me! Keep him safe!’

The day it happened I’d gone to the cinema, for some reason. I stared at the screen but saw nothing. I felt very agitated inside but without understanding why; I had a strong sense that people were waiting for me, that there was somewhere I had to go. I could hardly sit the film out. Later I learnt that it was then the battle was at its height.

I heard nothing for a week, and even had two letters from him. Usually I was overjoyed and kissed them, but this time I felt angry and frustrated. How much longer do I have to wait for you? I thought.

On the ninth day a telegram was pushed under the door. It was from his parents: ‘Come. Petya deaa.’ I started screaming, which woke the child. What to do? Where to go? I had no money. Petya’s salary cheque wasn’t due until tomorrow. I wrapped my little girl in a red blanket, I remember, and went out. The buses weren’t running yet.

I stopped a taxi. ‘The airport.’

‘I’m going to the park.’

‘My husband has been killed in Afghanistan.’

Without a word he got out of the car and helped me in. First I went to my friend to borrow money. At the airport I couldn’t get tickets for Moscow and I was frightened to show them the telegram. Suppose it was a mistake? If I believed he was alive he would be alive. I was crying, everyone was looking at me. Eventually they found us two seats in an old cargo plane.

That night I flew to Minsk. I had to get to the Stariye Dorogy district but the taxis didn’t want to do the 150 kilometre journey. I begged and pleaded until one finally agreed: ‘Give me 50 roubles and I’ll take you.’

I got to the house at two in the morning. Everyone was in tears. ‘It’s true, Tamara. It’s true.’

In the morning we went to the local enlistment office and got a typical military explanation: ‘You will be informed when it arrives.’

We waited for two days and then phoned Minsk. ‘You can come and fetch it yourselves,’ they told us. We got to the district office. ‘It’s been taken to Baranovichi by mistake,’ they told us there. That was another 100 kilometres away, and we hadn’t enough petrol for the minibus we’d hired. By the time we got to Baranovichi Airport it was the end of the day and there was no one about. Eventually we found a watchman sitting in a hut.

‘We’ve come to … ’

‘There’s a crate of some sort over there. Go and have a look at it. If it’s yours you can take it.’

We found a dirty box lying on the airfield, with 1st Lieutenant Dovnar’ scrawled over it in chalk. I tore open a board where the little window was let into the side of the coffin. His face was uninjured but he was unshaven, he hadn’t been washed and the coffin was too short. And the smell … I couldn’t bend down and kiss him. That’s how my husband was returned to me.

I knelt by the man who had been my love.

This was the first Afghan coffin to come to Yazyl, his parents’ village. I saw the horror in everyone’s eyes. No one had any idea what was going on out there. The coffin was still being lowered into the grave when a tremendous hailstorm began. The hailstones, like white gravel thrown over the budding lilac, crunched underfoot as we stood there. Nature itself was protesting.

I could hardly bear to be in his parents’ home because his presence was so strong there, with his mother and father.

We talked very little. I felt his mother hating me because I was alive and he was dead: I would get married again but she had lost her son for ever. Nowadays she tells me, ‘Tamara, get married.’ But at the time I couldn’t look her in the eyes. His father almost went mad. ‘Such a wonderful boy … dead,’ he said, over and over again. We tried to rally him, Petya’s mother and I, saying Petya had won medals, that Afghanistan had needed him, he’d died defending our southern borders, and so on. He didn’t listen. ‘Bastards!’ he shouted. ‘Bastards! Bastards!’

For me the worst time came later. The most terrible thing was getting used to the thought that I must stop waiting, because there was no one to wait for. I’d wake up wet with horror: Petya was coming home and little Olesha and I were living somewhere else. It took me a long time to realise that I was and would be alone now. I looked at the post-box after every delivery. All ‘Addressee is a casualty’. I hated holidays and special occasions, and stopped going out. I had only my memories … and of course you only remember what was good.

We went dancing the first time we met. Next day we walked in the park. On the third day he asked me to marry him. I was already engaged — we’d even applied for the licence. When I told my fiancé he went away and wrote me a letter in huge capitals covering the whole page: ‘A-A-A-A-A-A!!’ Petya decided he’d come home on leave in January and we’d get married. I didn’t want to get married in January: I fancied a spring wedding! In the Minsk Palace of Weddings, with music and flowers.

Well, we had a winter wedding, in my home village. It was funny and quick. At Epiphany, when they say that your dreams foretell the future, I had a dream and told my mother about it.

‘There was this handsome boy in soldier’s uniform, Mum, standing on a bridge calling to me. But as I went towards him he moved further and further away until he’d disappeared altogether.’

‘If you marry a soldier you’ll be left on your own,’ she said.

Two days afterwards he turned up.

‘Let’s go to the registry office!’ he said on the doorstep.

There they took one look at us and said, ‘Why bother to wait the two months? Go and fetch a bottle of cognac and we’ll do it for you now!’

We were man and wife within the hour. There was a snowstorm outside.

‘Where’s the taxi you ordered to carry your young bride home?’ I demanded.

‘Here it is!’ He raised his hand and stopped a passing tractor.

For years I went on dreaming of those early days, that old tractor … He’s been dead for eight years now and I still dream about him often.

‘Marry me again!’ I beg him.

But he pushes me away. ‘No! No!’

I grieve for him not just because he was my husband but because he was a real man, with a big strong body. I’m so sorry I never gave him a son. The last time he came home on leave I wasn’t at home. He hadn’t sent a telegram and I wasn’t expecting him; in fact, I was at my girl-friend’s birthday party next door. He opened the door there, heard the loud music and laughter, sat down on a kitchen stool and started crying.

Every day he met me from work. ‘When I’m walking to meet you my legs start shaking, as though we’re going to say goodbye.’

Once, when we went swimming, we sat on the riverbank and lit a bonfire. ‘I hate the idea of dying on foreign soil,’ he said.

‘Don’t get married again, Tamarka,’ he begged me that night.

‘Why do you say such things?’

‘Because I love you so much. I just don’t want to think of you with someone else.’

Sometimes I feel I’ve been alive for ever, and yet my memories are so few.

Once, when my daughter was still tiny, she came home from nursery school. ‘We had to tell about our Daddies today and I said mine was a soldier.’

‘Why?’

‘The teacher didn’t ask if he was alive, just what his job was.’

She’s growing up now. ‘Get married again, Mum,’ she advises me when I’m irritable with her.

‘What kind of Dad would you prefer?’

‘I’d prefer my own Daddy.’

‘And if you can’t have him?’

‘Someone like him.’

I became a widow at twenty-four. In those first few months I’d have married the first man who came along. I was going out of my mind and had no idea how to look after myself. All around me life was going on as usual: someone was building himself a dacha, or buying a car, or had a new flat and was looking for a carpet or some nice red tiles for the kitchen. Other people’s normal lives simply showed up the fact that I had none. It’s only very recently that I’ve begun to buy a bit of furniture or bake a cake. How could we celebrate any special occasion in this flat?

In the last war everyone was in mourning, there wasn’t a family in the land that hadn’t lost some loved one. Women wept together then. There’s a staff of 100 in the catering college where I work, and I’m the only one who had a husband killed in a war which all the rest have only read about in the papers. I wanted to smash the screen the first time I heard someone on television say that Afghanistan was our shame. That was the day I buried my husband a second time.

Private, Intelligence Corps

We arrived at the Samarkand conscript reception-centre. There were two tents: in one we had to get out of our civvies (those of us with any sense had already sold our jackets and sweater and bought a bottle of wine with the proceeds); in the other we were issued with well-used uniforms, including shirts dating from 1945, kirzachi and foot-bindings.# Show those kirzachi to an African, who’s lived with heat all his life, and he’d faint! Yes, even in Third World African countries soldiers are issued with lightweight boots, trousers and caps, but we were expected to do heavy building work — and sing as we worked! — in 40 degrees Celsius while our feet were literally cooking.

The first week we worked in a refrigeration plant, loading and unloading bottles of lemonade. Then we were sent to work on officers’ homes — I did all the bricklaying for one of them. We spent a fortnight putting a roof on a pigsty. For every three slates we used we exchanged two others for vodka; the timber we sold by length, at a rouble a metre.

In that Samarkand training-camp we had just two periods on the firing-range: the first time, we were issued with nine rounds, the second, we got to throw a grenade each. Then we were lined up on the parade-ground and read the Order of the Day: we were being sent to the DRA ‘in the execution of our international duty’. Anybody who doesn’t wish to go — two paces forward — march! Three boys stepped out, but the CO kicked them back again. ‘I was just testing your battle-readiness,’ he said. We were issued with two days’ dry rations and a leather belt — and off we went, all of us.

The flight seemed long, and we were subdued. I looked out of the window and saw those beautiful mountains. I’d never seen mountains before — I’m from Pskov, which is all meadows and forest. We landed at Shindanta: I still remember the date: 19 December 1980.

They looked me up and down: ‘Six foot four, eh? Reconnaissance can do with boys like you.’

From Shindanta we drove to Gerat. We were put to work building again. We built a firing-range from scratch, digging the earth and clearing it of rocks. I built a slate roof and did some carpentry. Some of the boys never got to fire a weapon before their first taste of action.

We were hungry every minute of the day. There were two 20gallon drums in the kitchen, one for the first course, a watery cabbage-soup without a scrap of meat, and one for the second course, a gooey paste of dried potato mash or pearl barley, also without meat. Oh, and canned mackerel, one tin between four of us. The label said: ‘Year of manufacture: 1956. Consume within 18 months.’ In my year and a half in Afghanistan I stopped being hungry only once, when I was wounded. You were looking for ways to get or steal food the whole time. We climbed into the Afghans’ orchards and gardens, even though they shot at us and laid mines to blow us up with. We were desperate for apples, pears, fruit of any kind. I asked my parents to send me citric acid, which they did. We dissolved it in water and drank it. It was nice and sour and burnt your stomach.

We sang the Soviet national anthem before we went into action for the first time. I was a speed-cyclist before the army, and built up such big muscles that people were scared of me and left me alone. I’d never even seen a fight, or a knife used in anger, or blood. Suddenly there we were, going into battle in an APC. We’d driven from Shindanta to Gerat by bus, and been out of barracks once, in a truck. Now, riding on top of this armoured carrier, weapon in hand, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, well, it was a completely new and strange feeling. A sense of power and strength, and a certainty that no one and nothing could hurt us.

The villages seemed so low, the irrigation canals looked tiny, the trees few and far between. In half an hour we were so confident we felt like tourists. It all seemed so exotic — the birds, the trees, the flowers. I saw those thornbushes for the first time in my life. We forgot all about war.

We crossed a canal by a mud bridge which I was amazed could take all those tons of metal. Suddenly — BANG! The leading APC had caught a direct hit from a grenade-launcher. Pals of mine were being carried away, their heads blown off like cardboard targets, hands hanging down lifelessly. My mind couldn’t take in this new and terrible world.

Command: ‘Deploy mortars!’ — with their 120 shells a minute. We fired every one of them into the village where the attack had come from, which meant several into every single house. After it was all over we collected up our boys in bits and pieces, even scraping them from the sides of the APC. We spread out a tarpaulin, their common grave, to try and sort out which leg or fragment of skull belonged to whom. We weren’t issued with identification tags because of the ‘danger’ of them falling into enemy hands. This was an undeclared war, you see — we were fighting a war which wasn’t happening.

We were very quiet on the way home from this new world. We had something to eat and cleaned our weapons.

‘Want a joint?’ one of the older guys asked me.

‘No thanks.’

I didn’t want to start on all that in case I didn’t have the will-power to give it up. After a while, though, we all smoked — it was the only way to keep going. They should have let us have a quarter of a pint of vodka a day, like in World War II, but this was a ‘dry’ country. Somehow or other you had to unwind, to blot it all out. We’d put it in the rice or porridge. Your pupils got as big as saucers, you could see like a cat in the dark and you felt as light as a bat.

Recce men kill at close quarters rather than in set-piece battles, and silently, with a stiletto or bayonet, almost never a gun. I soon got used to it.

My first? You mean the first guy I killed close up? We’d approached a village, I looked through the night-vision binoculars and saw a little lantern, and a rifle, and this guy digging something up. I handed my gun to my mate and got up close enough to jump him to the ground. I stuffed his turban in his mouth to stop him shouting out. The only knife I had on me was a pen-knife I used to cut bread and open cans with, an ordinary little knife. As he lay there on the ground I grabbed him by the beard, pulled it up and slit his throat. The skin of his neck went taut, which made it a lot easier. There was a lot of blood.

I was usually put in charge of our night raids. We’d crouch behind a tree, knives at the ready, watching as they went past, with a scout in front. It was our job to kill him. We took turns to do it. If it was my turn I’d let him get a little bit past me and then jump him from behind. The main thing is to grab the throat with your left hand and throttle him to keep him quiet as you stick the knife into him with your right. Right through, under his liver. I used a knife I picked up from one of them, a Japanese job with a blade over a foot long which cut like it was going through butter. There’d be a quick twitch and he’d be dead without a squeak.

You soon got used to it. It was less a psychological problem than the technical challenge of actually finding the upper vertebrae, heart or liver. We learnt karate, immobilisation techniques and how to kill with our bare hands.

Only once something snapped inside me and I was struck by the horror of what we were doing. We were combing through a village. You fling open the door and throw in a grenade in case there’s a machine-gun waiting for you. Why take a risk if a grenade can sort it out for you? I threw the grenade, went in and saw women, two little boys and a baby in some kind of box making do for a cot.

You have to find some kind of justification to stop yourself going mad. Suppose it’s true that the souls of the dead look down on us from above?

I got back home and tried to be good, but sometimes I have a desire to cut the odd throat. I came home blind. A bullet went in one temple, came out the other and destroyed both retinas. I can only distinguish light and dark but that doesn’t stop me recognising the people whose throats I’d like to cut: the ones who won’t pay for gravestones for our lads, the ones who won’t give us flats (‘It wasn’t us who sent you to Afghanistan’), the ones who try and wash their hands of us. What happened to me is still boiling inside. Do I want to have my past taken away from me? No! It’s what I live by.

I learnt to walk without my eyes. I get around the city, using the metro and the pedestrian crossings, on my own. I do the cooking — in fact my wife admits I cook better than she does. I’ve never seen my wife but I know what she looks like, the colour of her hair, the shape of her nose and her lips. I feel everything with my hands and body, which see everything. I know what my son looks like. I used to change his nappies, did his washing, and now I carry him around on my shoulders.

Sometimes I think we don’t need our eyes — after all, you close them anyhow when the most important things are going on, and when you’re feeling really good. A painter needs his eyes because that’s the way he earns his living, but I’ve learnt to live without them. I sense my world now, and words mean more to me than they do to you sighted people.

A lot of people seem to think I’m a man with a great future behind me. ‘You’ve had it, boy!’ Like Yuri Gagarin after that first space flight. But they’re wrong: the most important part of my life is still to come. I’m convinced of it.

Your body is no more important than a bicycle, say, and I should know — I was a professional cyclist. Your body’s an instrument, a machine to work with, that’s all. I realise now I can find happiness and freedom without my eyes. Look how many sighted people can’t see. I was more blind when I had my sight.

I’d like to cleanse myself of everything that’s happened, of all the dirt they shoved us into. It’s only our mothers who can understand and protect us now.

You don’t know how terrified I get at night, jumping a man with my knife, over and over again. And yet it’s only in my dreams I can be a child again, a child who isn’t afraid of blood because he doesn’t know what it means and thinks it’s just red water. Children are natural experimenters, they want to take everything to bits to find out how it’s made. But blood frightens me, even in my dreams.

A Mother

I rush to the cemetery as though I’m meeting someone here — and I am, I’m going to meet my son. I spent die first few nights here on my own and never felt a moment’s fear. I know all the birds’ little habits, and how the grass moves in the wind. In spring I wait for his flowers to grow up, out of the earth, towards me. I planted snowdrops, so that I’d have an early hello from my son to look forward to. They come to me from down there, from him …

I sit with him until nightfall. Sometimes I give a sort of scream, which I don’t hear until the birds fly up around me. A storm of crows swirls and flaps over my head until I fall silent. I’ve come here every day for four years, morning or evening, except when I had my heart attack and couldn’t come for eleven days. I wasn’t allowed to get up, but eventually I did anyway. I managed to get to the toilet on my own, which meant I could escape to my son, even if I collapsed on his grave. I ran away in my hospital nightie.

Before that I had a dream in which Valera said to me, ‘Don’t come to the cemetery tomorrow, Mama. It isn’t necessary.’

But I raced here and found the grave as silent as if he weren’t here. He’d gone, I felt in my heart. The crows sat quietly on the gravestone and railing instead of flying away from me as they usually did. I got up from the bench and they flew up in front of me, agitated, stopping me from going to the grave. What was going on? What were they trying to warn me about? They settled down and flew up to the trees; only then did I feel myself drawn to the graveside once again. A sense of deep peace descended and the turbulence left my soul. His spirit had returned. ‘Thank you, my little birds, for telling me not to go away. I waited until he came back.’

I feel ill at ease and alone when I’m with other people. I don’t belong any more. People talk to me and pester me with this and that. I feel better here with my son. If I’m not at work I’m usually here. To me it’s not a grave but his home.

I worked out where his head is; I sit nearby and tell him everything about my everyday life. We share our memories. I look at his photograph. If I stare at it deep and long he either smiles at me or frowns a little bit crossly. We’re still together, you see. If I buy a new dress it’s only for me to come and see him in and for him to see me in. He used to kneel in front of me and now I kneel in front of him.

I always open this little gate in the railing here and get down on my knees. ‘Good morning, my dear … Good evening, dear … ’ I say. I’m always with him.

I wanted to adopt a little boy from the children’s home, someone like Valera, but my heart isn’t strong enough.

I force myself to keep busy; it’s like pushing myself into a dark tunnel. I’d go mad if I let myself sit in the kitchen and gaze out of the window. Only my own suffering can save me from madness. I haven’t been to the cinema once in these four years. I sold the colour television and spent the money on the gravestone. I haven’t switched the radio on. When my son was killed everything changed, my face, my eyes, even my hands.

I fell madly in love with my husband and just leapt into marriage! He was a pilot, tall and handsome in his leather jacket and flying boots. Was this beautiful bear of a man really my husband? The other girls sighed with envy! I was so tiny next to him, and I got so cross that our great shoe industry couldn’t produce a smart pair of high-heels to fit me! I used to long for him to get a cough or cold so I could have him at home and look after him all day.

I desperately wanted a son, a son like him, with the same eyes, the same ears and the same nose. And heaven must have heard my prayer — the baby was the spitting image of his father. I couldn’t believe I had two such wonderful men, I just couldn’t believe it. I loved my home, even the washing and ironing. I was so in love with everything that I wouldn’t step on a spider or a ladybird or a fly, but carry them gently to the window and let them fly away. I wanted everything to live and love as joyfully as I did. When I came home from work I’d ring the bell and turn the light on in the hall so that Valera could see my happiness.

‘Lerunka!’ I’d call. (That was my name for him when he was a boy.) ‘I’m home! I’ve miiiissed youououou!’ Out of breath from running back from work or the shops.

I loved my son to distraction, just as I do now. I was brought photographs of the funeral but I wouldn’t take them, I couldn’t believe it. I was like a faithful dog, dying on his master’s grave. I always was a loyal friend.

One time I remember, when I was still breast-feeding him, my breasts were bursting with milk, but I’d arranged to meet a friend of mine to give her a book she wanted. I waited for an hour and a half in the snow but she never came. Something must have happened, I thought, you don’t just promise to come and simply not turn up. I ran to her home and found her asleep. She couldn’t understand why I burst into tears. I loved her, too — I gave her my favourite dress, the light blue. That’s the way I am.

I was very shy when I was young and never believed anyone could love me, and if a boy said I was beautiful I didn’t believe that either. But when I did finally launch myself into life I brimmed over with excitement and enthusiasm. After Yuri Gagarin made that first flight into space Lerunka and I were shouting and jumping for sheer joy in the street. I was ready to love and embrace everyone on earth at that moment …

I loved my son to distraction. And he loved me back the same way. His grave draws me as though I hear him calling.

‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ his army pals asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said, and showed them my old student card with a photo of me in long, long curls.

He loved waltzing. He asked me to dance the first waltz at his graduation ball. I didn’t even know he could dance — he’d had lessons without telling me. We went round and round and round …

I used to sit by the window in the evening, knitting and waiting for him. I’d hear steps … no, not him. Then more steps, yes, ‘mine’ this time, my son was home. I never guessed wrong, not once. We’d sit down in the kitchen and chat until four in the morning. What did we talk about? About everything people do talk about when they’re happy, serious matters and nonsense too. We’d laugh and he’d sing and play the piano for me.

I’d look at the clock.

‘Time for bed, Valera.’

‘Let’s sit here a bit longer, mother of mine,’ he’d say. That’s what he called me, ‘mother of mine’, or ‘golden mother of mine’.

‘Well, mother of mine, your son has got in to the Smolensk Military Academy. Are you pleased?’ he told me one day.

He’d sit at the piano and sing:

‘My fellow officers — my lords!

I shan’t be the first or the last

To perish on enemy swords.’

My father was a professional officer who was killed in the siege of Leningrad, and my grandfather was an officer, too, so in his height, strength and bearing my son was born to be a soldier. He’d have made a wonderful hussar, playing bridge in his white gloves. ‘My old soldier’ I used to call him. If only I’d had the tiniest hint from heaven …

Everyone copied him, me included. I’d sit at the piano just like him, sometimes I even caught myself walking like him, especially after his death. I so desperately wanted him to live on inside me.

‘Well, mother of mine, your son will soon be off!’

‘Where to?’ He said nothing. I started to cry. ‘Where are you being sent, my darling?’

‘What do you mean “where”? We know very well where. Now then, golden mother of mine, to work! Into the kitchen — the guests’ll soon be here!’

I guessed immediately: ‘Afghanistan?’

‘Correct,’ he said, and his look warned me to go no further. An iron curtain fell between us.

His friend Kolka Romanov rushed in soon after. Kolka, who could never keep anything to himself, told me that they’d applied to be posted to Afghanistan even though they were only in their third year.

The first toast: ‘Nothing venture, nothing gain!’

All evening Valera sang my favourite song:

‘My fellow officers — my lords!

I shan’t be the first or the last

To perish on enemy swords.’

There were four weeks left. Every morning I’d go to his room and sit and watch him while he slept. Even asleep he was beautiful.

I had a dream, a warning as clear as a knock at the door. I was in a long black dress, holding on to a black cross carried by an angel. I began to lose my grip and looked down to see whether I would fall into the sea or on to dry land, and saw a sunlit crater.

I waited for him to come home on leave. For a long time he didn’t write, then one day the phone rang at work.

‘I’m back, mother of mine! Don’t be late home! I’ve made some soup.’

‘My darling boy!’ I shouted. ‘You’re not phoning from Tashkent, are you? You’re home? Your favourite bortsch is in the fridge!’

‘Oh no! I saw the saucepan but didn’t lift the lid.’

‘What soup have you made, then?’

‘It’s called “idiot’s delight”! Come home now and I’ll meet you at the bus stop!’

He’d gone grey. He wouldn’t admit that he was home on hospital leave. ‘I just wanted to see that golden mother of mine for a couple of days,’ he insisted. My daughter told me later how she’d seen him rolling on the carpet, sobbing with pain. He had malaria, hepatitis and other things, too, but he ordered his sister not to say a word to me.

I started going to his room in the morning again, to watch him sleeping.

Once he opened his eyes: ‘What’s up, mother of mine?’

‘Go back to sleep, darling, it’s still early.’

‘I had a nightmare.’

‘Just turn over, go back to sleep, and you’ll have a good dream. And if you never tell your bad ones they won’t come true.’

When his leave was over we went with him as far as Moscow. They were lovely sunny days with the marigolds in bloom.

‘What’s it like out there, Valera?’

‘Afghanistan, mother of mine, is something we should definitely not be doing.’ He looked at me and at no one else as he said it. He wiped the sweat from his brow and embraced me. ‘I don’t want to go back to that hell, I really don’t,’ he said, and moved away. He looked round one last time. ‘That’s all, Mama.’

He had never, ever called me ‘Mama’, always ‘mother of mine’. As I say, it was a beautiful sunny day and the marigolds were in bloom. The girl at the airport desk was watching us and started crying.

On the 7th of July I woke up dry-eyed. I stared sightlessly at the ceiling. He’d woken me, he’d come to say goodbye. It was eight o’clock and I had to go to work. I wandered round the flat, I couldn’t find my white dress for some reason. I felt dizzy and couldn’t see a thing. It wasn’t until lunchtime that I calmed down.

On the 7th of July … Seven cigarettes and seven matches in my pocket, seven pictures taken on the film in my camera. He’d written seven letters to me, and seven to his fiancée. The book on my bedside table, open at page seven, was Kobo Abe’s Containers of Death …

He had three or four seconds to save his life as his APC was crashing into a ravine: Out you jump, boys! I’ll go last’. He could never have put himself first.

‘From Major S. R. Sinelnikov: In execution of my military duty I am obliged to inform you that 1st Lieutenant Valery Gennadevich Volovich was killed today at 10.45 a.m. … ’

The whole town knew. His photograph in the Officers’ Club was already hung with black crêpe, and the aeroplane would soon be landing with his coffin. But no one told me, no one dared … At work everyone around me seemed to be in tears and gave me various excuses when I asked what was wrong. My friend looked in at me through my door. Then our doctor came in.

It was like suddenly waking from a deep sleep. ‘Are you mad, all of you? Boys like him don’t get killed!’ I protested. I started hitting the table with my hand, then ran to the window and beat the glass. They gave me an injection. ‘Are you mad, all of you? Have you gone crazy?’

Another injection. Neither of them had any effect. Apparently I shouted, ‘I want to see him. Take me to my son!’

‘Take her, take her, or she won’t survive the shock.’

It was a long coffin, with VOLOVICH painted in yellow on the rough wood. I tried to lift the coffin to take it home with me. My bladder ruptured.

I wanted a good dry plot in the cemetery. Fifty roubles? I’ll pay the 50 roubles. Just make sure it’s a nice dry plot. I knew it was a swindle but I couldn’t object. I spent the first few nights here with him. I was taken home but came back again. It was harvest time and I remember the whole town, and the cemetery too, smelt of hay.

In the morning a soldier came up to me. ‘Good morning, mother.’ Yes, he called me ‘mother’. ‘Your son was my commanding officer. I would like to tell you about him.’

‘Come home, with me, son.’

He sat in Valera’s chair, opened his mouth and changed his mind. ‘I can’t, mother.’

When I come to the grave I always bow to him, and I bow to him again when I leave. I’m only home if people are coming. I feel fine here with my son. Ice and snow don’t bother me. I write letters here. I go home when it’s dark. I like the street-lights and the car headlights. I’m not frightened of man or beast. I feel strong.

‘I don’t want to go back to that heil.’ I can’t get those words of his out of my mind. Who is to answer for all this? Should anyone be made to? I’m going to do my best to live as long as possible. There’s nothing more vulnerable about a person than his grave. It’s his name. I shall protect my son for ever …

His comrades come to visit him. One of them went on his knees. ‘Valera, I’m covered in blood. I killed with my bare hands. Is it better to be alive or dead? I don’t know any more … ’

I want to know who is to answer for all this. Why do they keep silent? Why don’t they name names and take them to court?

‘My fellow officers — my lords!

I shan’t be the first or the last

To perish on enemy swords’

I went to church to speak to the priest. ‘My son has been killed. He was unique and I loved him. What should I do now? Tell me our old Russian traditions. We’ve forgotten them and now I need to know.’

‘Was he baptised?’

‘I so much wish I could say he was, Father, but I cannot. I was a young officer’s wife. We were stationed in Kamchatka, surrounded by snow all year round — our home was a snow dugout. Here the snow is white, but there it’s blue and green and mother-of-pearl. Endless empty space where every sound travels for miles. Do you understand me, Father?’

‘It is not good that he wasn’t baptised, mother Victoria. Our prayers will not reach him.’

‘Then I’ll baptise him now!’ I burst out. ‘With my love and my pain. Yes, I’ll baptise him in pain.’

He took my shaking hand.

‘You must not upset yourself, mother Victoria. How often do you go to your son?’

‘Every day. Why not? If he were alive we’d see each other every day.’

‘Mother Victoria, you must not disturb him after five o’clock in the afternoon. They go to their rest at that time.’

‘But I’m at work until five, and after that I have a part-time job. I had to borrow 2,500 roubles for a new gravestone and I’ve got to pay it back.’

‘Listen to me, mother Victoria. You must go to him every day at noon, for the midday service. Then he will hear your prayers.’

Send me the worst imaginable pain and torture, only let my prayers reach my dearest love. I greet every little flower, every tiny stem growing from his grave: ‘Are you from there? Are you from him? Are you from my son?’

* Communist Union of Youth. Until recently, membership was almost unavoidable.

† Basmach: A Central Asian partisan fighting for independence in the Civil War after the Revolution. Tolstoy’s story deals with a similar war of resistance to Tsarist rule in the Caucasus.

‡ Meresyev was a World War II pilot who lost both his legs in action but, equipped with artificial limbs, returned to the front to perform further acts of heroism.

§ In the Soviet Union a trunk call is signalled by a longer and harsher ringing tone than that of a local call.

¶ A reference to a few well-publicised cases of Soviet Army deserters who were taken from Afghanistan to the USA and other Western countries (where they were much feted) but who later returned voluntarily to the USSR.

# Kirzachi: heavy, multi-layered waterproof boots of substitute leather. Foot-bindings are used in the Soviet Army instead of socks.