Free Fall

BREATH OF THE DARK

At the end of my second year of military service the saboteur unit transferred to the mountains. Along with some of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ special units (called the OMON), we went through the villages to conduct what in our operation order was called ‘clean-up of residential areas’. Obviously this had nothing to do with maintaining sanitation in the mountain territories; it was a very specific and sensitive phase of the counter-terrorist operation intended to ‘re-establish respect for the laws of the Russian Federation’.

We went through the areas controlled by federal forces in order to ‘ensure the presence of the necessary conditions to enable the recuperation of the Chechen community’. It was May, and it was very hot.

By that time, the Chechen plain had been almost completely liberated of enemy forces, but many terrorist groups had survived in the mountains. They had regrouped into small units and continued to attack our military convoys and put any representative of the law to death. They terrorised civilians, too, but more often found them to be sources of support in the fight against the Russian Army and state power. Many families had lost someone during the war and blamed the army for their losses, which is why they gave provisions to terrorists, harboured them secretly or hid arms and ammunition. To us, the Chechen mentality was incomprehensible – it seemed absurd for them to help foreigners from Africa or the former Yugoslavia but to want nothing to do with us, their neighbours, with whom, for better or worse, they had a shared history. They saw the terrorists as heroes, as people who had sacrificed themselves for the good of the Nation – Muslim Robin Hoods.

Obviously we soldiers knew that both Chechen campaigns had been tainted by political and economic interests. As Captain Nosov had often told us, practically branding it into our minds: ‘Always remember that the feared Shamil Basayev, like many other Chechen Islamic terrorist leaders, was trained by our own secret services – we Russians were the ones who taught him to defend himself.’ We had learned from experience how the terrorists were linked to the corrupt officials working in our Command, but no one ever dared to bring up those stories; no one ever released the findings from the investigations conducted by the FSB. If we found out that there was a mole it was because of his comrades, who had reported him or in some cases simply eliminated him, since accidents happen in war every day anyway. These affairs, even if they didn’t reach the ears of the media, circulated widely among soldiers and officers. They were shared in whispers, during pauses between one battle and the next. Often the whispers were about an officer from Command dying in an accident: ‘He fell from a moving tank,’ they would say, which meant that he had been beaten to death by his own men. These stories were always concluded with a statement full of scorn and malice, spat out with cigarette smoke: ‘He liked shawarma[19] too much…’

It was very difficult to communicate with the local people. Up in the mountains they were especially aggressive; even routine operations in their villages risked ending in bloodshed. We would capture the terrorists who hadn’t been able to escape before our arrival and execute them right in the streets. At that point the entire village would give voice to a single sentiment – the women hurled shouts and curses of all kinds on us, old and young alike sent us promises of Apocalypse… We had to be very careful, because sometimes bullets would come from the mob, where the instigators, who expected nothing less than for us to raise arms against the civilians, would hide. Then the commanders would oblige us to quickly withdraw, to avoid being caught in a fire fight with women and elderly people present. We would shoot a few bullets into the air to scare people and then be on our way.

Often, on the way back from those operations, our columns would be attacked. If we were lucky the attack would be limited to a few machine gun blasts at the men on the carriers. In the worst cases, when our attackers were better equipped, they would torch the carriers with RPGs or scatter homemade mines made from large-calibre cannon rounds along the road.

Some strange and sad things happened too.

One time, as we were returning from a mountain village, an old man planted himself in the middle of the road in order to stop our cars. He pointed a hunting rifle at us: a real antique, all rusty. The old man was desperate; he was crying and shouting something incomprehensible.

According to military regulations, a column of armoured vehicles could not stop for any reason outside the scope of the operation. Even if we went past a person who had been wounded, we had to go on, either evading him or going around him – the important thing was never to stop the cars. It was also prohibited to slow the speed of the convoy, which had to proceed at a minimum of ten kilometres per hour; if we slowed down we could all become easy targets for potential aggressors.

So when we saw that old man, the boys signalled for him to move. But he kept standing in the middle of the road, as if his feet were glued to the ground, making his choked cries and waving his gun, which he kept pointed at us. The column slowed its pace, and one of the men sitting on the first carrier shot a burst of rounds in the air to scare him, but it didn’t work – he refused to move and kept threatening us with his pathetic rifle. I was on the third car in the convoy, and I watched as the old man’s figure grew bigger and bigger.

When the first carrier approached him, the driver manoeuvred, trying to avoid him, to pass by him. But the old man gritted his teeth and placed his rifle to his shoulder, aiming at one of the boys sitting on the car, as if he were going to shoot him. At that instant a series of rounds went off – everyone sitting on that carrier opened fire on the old man, who with one insane act had suddenly turned into an aggressor. I saw scraps of his suit go flying, along with pieces of flesh as the bullets pierced his body. In a second they reduced him to tatters. He fell to the ground next to his rifle.

The column didn’t pause; the cars resumed their course. When my carrier passed the corpse, I saw that on his jacket the old man had a row of medals from the Second World War. As a young man he had fought to defend the Great Soviet Nation against the Nazism of the Third Reich, and here’s how the Nation repaid him for his sacrifices, years later.

This is how, in the complete chaos of post-Soviet history, the power of the Russian Federation was restored in the mountain areas of Chechnya. And we couldn’t do anything to oppose it – our personal stories were worth nothing in that great river of time and fate that mixed wars and men, innocent people and criminals. But the current has always stayed the same. It hasn’t changed in the least…

In late May we received an order that was very unusual: to search a mosque in a mountain village. Apparently, after a mission had been carried out by our artillery, several weapons and the bodies of some wanted terrorists had been found in the ruins of a mosque. The army never set foot in places of worship, but now, suddenly, the operational units were changing their strategy and ordering us to search them. None of us, however, believed the stories anymore.

‘And so, all of a sudden they discover terrorists hiding in mosques,’ Shoe commented sarcastically.

‘It’s obvious,’ Zenith chimed in. ‘The Russian secret service has decided to sacrifice one of their “bridges” with the Islamic world, breaking some old pact that called for the protection of the mosques… And it’s up to us to do the dirty work!’

Before then, none of us would ever have dared to search a sacred site. The Russian military was capable of committing many injustices and of proving itself even crueller than the devil, but they would never dream of sending soldiers to go and fire their weapons in a place of worship.

It wasn’t a question of respect, but a kind of superstition. We believed that profaning what other people venerated, such as the house of their god, would bring us nothing but misfortune. In the course of the war, many of us had become believers. To get through the more difficult moments, we often turned to God; He was a haven for our souls, the only place not regulated by military code. We all thought of our mothers, who went to church every Sunday to light candles by the orthodox icons for their soldier sons; certainly Chechen mothers prayed in the mosques for their children’s survival. Either way, we had always respected those places. Even simple people, or people with little education, can understand the importance of hope, but this is a feeling experienced only by those who fight war – although of course not by those who wage it… As always, however, the only voice our Command wasn’t willing to listen to was ours.

And so we left our base on a mission with five armoured vehicles: one for us, one for the infantry explorers, and the other three for the OMON special teams; all together, there were forty-two of us, including drivers. We also had two dogs, German Shepherds trained to sniff out drugs and find explosives.

It was unbelievably hot, and the wheels of the cars on the dirt roads flung up a clay-like dust that stuck to our faces, mingling with our beards and our hair. That was why we saboteurs all wore sunglasses, shorts and no shirts, our bulletproof vests against our bare chests. As always, we knew we were the envy of the other units because of our freedom in dress, even if amidst the pandemonium of a counter-terrorist operation like the one that awaited us, there was really nothing to envy of anyone.

Going up the mountains, we came to the little town where we were supposed to conduct our search. There was a wonderful peace; old men sat on the benches chatting, children ran through the streets, women were doing housework in their yards… It seemed impossible that there was anything threatening there. When faced with situations like this I felt uneasy; we were there to ruin the lives of people who had nothing to do with the war, or with the dirty business in which we were immersed.

My group and I hopped off the cars and marched ten metres in front of the vehicles, which advanced slowly, at walking pace. We walked in the middle of the street with our weapons in hand, prepared for the worst. As soon as they spotted us, the women grabbed the children and all the civilians ran inside. They were used to military operations; they knew they had to leave their gates and front doors open, come out into the yard, keep their hands in full view and have their papers ready. We went down the road without stopping to do any checks, but we glanced at the yards anyway. When they left a house quickly to avoid a search many terrorists would leave something behind – a clip or a grenade might fall out of their jacket – so it was necessary to look carefully at everything on the ground and search for any clue that might reveal the presence of an enemy. The terrorists had learned to comb every corner, to find out where the deeply worn foot paths led. Often civilians hid terrorists in underground pits they had dug; sometimes the entrance to a hiding spot was concealed by a kennel or a tool shed. Regulations stated that it was also necessary to inspect people’s hands, to check for traces of gunpowder, calluses or unusual burns, to see if they had ever shot a gun or done so recently.

On this occasion, though, we didn’t have time to look for these things. We were headed for the mosque, a large building in the centre of town, surrounded by a white stone wall. There was a high green gate at the entrance, with yellow writing in Arabic at the top. According to the operational orders, we had to conduct a raid, which meant that one of our cars was supposed to break down the gate, bursting through at full speed, and once inside the building we were supposed to inspect every room, first with polite requests and then, if the people didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand, with a nice fusillade. Usually a raid lasts a few seconds – the enemy shouldn’t have enough time to react. If he has the chance to organise himself and start shooting, it’s common for soldiers to say ‘the ping-pong game has begun’ – and it’s a game that’s hard to win.

Our car approached the boundary wall, and we saboteurs jumped up on it with ease. The white stones were nice and wide, and after running a few metres along it, we leapt down to the other side, into the courtyard of the mosque. Everything was calm. There were well-manicured trees, freshly varnished benches and whitewashed walls with mosaics depicting religious scenes; the human figures were disproportionate, as if they’d been drawn by a child’s hand. From the spout of the fountain in the middle of the yard water dripped, a sign that someone had taken a drink not long before. There was no one around the mosque, but the doors were open.

Our captain signalled to us to position ourselves along the wall under the windows. Then he took a stone and threw it at the gate, by the road; that was the sign to alert our men. The infantry explorers’ carrier charged full speed ahead, levelling the gate and knocking down part of the wall. Behind them ran the explorers and the OMON.

At that same moment we smashed in the windows. Moscow and I were the first to enter, and in a few seconds we were all inside.

The building was even bigger than it had seemed from outside, with high ceilings and decorated rooms. On the walls hung photos of holy places, other mosques and portraits of Islamic clerics. On the floor there were some valuable rugs yet there were fake plastic flowers in the corners. Arranged among the flowers were photos of armed men; evidently these were the dead terrorists, stuck amidst that plastic green that symbolised their eternal life in Islamic heaven.

When we reached the hallway, we ran into a group of men, who were simply dressed, with long beards.

‘Lie down, on the floor,’ Moscow said, curtly. ‘Arms open wide.’

They obeyed the order without opposition. We could hear the first interrogations beginning in the courtyard; it was the OMON trying to get as much information as possible.

We inspected the rest of the rooms without finding anything of interest. There was the same stuff everywhere: rugs, fake flowers and potted plants, photos and a few books in Arabic.

Nosov came out into the hallway and took an old imam aside.

‘Where is the kitchen?’ he asked him politely.

The old man lifted an arm, indicating a small structure on the other side of the courtyard.

‘Kolima, Moscow,’ the captain said to us, ‘come with me.’

We took a young man with us who must have been a mullah. He was wearing a tunic and he was well fed, too, with a nice round belly and jowls like a bulldog. Nosov took him by the elbow and, in a friendly voice, like a curious tourist, he asked for information about the mosque’s activities, the people who attended it, and many other questions that had little to do with our operation. The man tried to respond calmly, but he was nervous. He spoke very slowly in Russian, attempting to pronounce the words in the most correct way possible – he must have been educated.

We went into the kitchen. There were foodstuffs piled along the walls: bags of cereal and sugar, tins, plastic plates and cups, and some small camp stoves. On the table there were several pots, oil lamps, and bags full of American, Turkish, Swiss and German medicines.

Nosov examined the pots, grazing them with his finger-tips; he almost seemed to be measuring them. He waited a little, as if he knew that sooner or later the man would begin to talk. But he was silent, with a slight, innocent smile stamped on his face.

Nosov looked the mullah straight in the eye and, in that tone we all knew well, the one he used when he didn’t feel like playing anymore, he asked:

‘Where are your wounded?’

The man suddenly went pale, and his hands began to tremble. Trying to keep calm, he raised his hands to the sky, as if he were asking for divine forgiveness, and addressed the captain in a humble voice:

‘What wounded, commander? Perhaps I do not understand the meaning of your words. We are only servants of God. We help the people of the village…’

Nosov smiled with the politeness of an English nobleman, went up to him, and without removing his gloves – he was wearing the tactical Kevlar ones, which are stiff and heavy – gave him a hard slap in the face. The man let out a cry and then crumpled to the floor, sliding down the wall as if his muscles could no longer support the weight of his body. His nose immediately swelled up and started to bleed; his eyes filled with tears.

Nosov pulled out his gun from under his vest and pointed it at the man’s head.

‘I need your wounded, now. If you prefer, I can find them myself, but by that point everyone will be dead: old, young, women, cats, dogs…’

The man started to whimper, hugging his knees to his chest. Breathing hard, big reddish bubbles came out of his mouth, saliva mixed with blood.

Nosov took a lamp from the table, broke it apart and poured the kerosene over the man, who started to squeal like a pig at the sight of an executioner’s knife, while trying desperately to unwind his kerosene-soaked turban. His dirty hair poked out from the strips of cloth.

Our captain took a box of matches and lit one, holding it over the man.

‘If you don’t tell me where you keep the wounded I’ll burn you alive,’ he said cruelly, holding the match in one hand and the gun in the other. ‘I don’t give a shit about your fucking religion; I think you should all be killed…’

Sobbing, the man sputtered out a storm of incomprehensible words, among which we could just make out:

‘In the garden… around the back… under the tent…’

Nosov pushed the point of the pistol into the cloth of the turban hanging off the man’s head and fired; the bullet was muffled, as though he had used a silencer; a cloud of gunpowder spread all around. The man’s head had been pierced by the bullet from one side to the other; the wall he had been leaning against a moment earlier was covered in blood and bits of brain. For a few seconds the dead man’s left foot kept moving over the kitchen’s rough floor, scraping the cement with his fake leather shoe.

Nosov spat on the ground and pointed us to the exit.

‘I’ll be right there,’ he said.

As I stood by the door, I saw the captain dropping the lit match on the corpse, which immediately caught fire.

At that point Nosov looked right at me:

‘I’m really fucking sick of these Muslims…’

When we went out into the courtyard everyone was staring at us with curiosity. One of the OMON men ran up to give Nosov a report:

‘With the dogs’ help we found three hiding places,’ the man stated. ‘Crammed full of—’

‘Very good,’ Nosov cut him off. ‘There should be a tent somewhere – find it.’

Along with the explorers we scattered across the yard. Behind the mosque there was a garden that looked out to a view of the mountains. In the middle of the garden there was a wooden gazebo; it didn’t seem very sturdy. Underneath, in the shade, was a small table and chairs. An infantryman took down the structure with a shove of the shoulder, and cleared away the table and chairs. When the gazebo collapsed, we could see an iron trapdoor poking out from underneath. It was the entrance to a transport truck container. The Arabs had buried it, turning it into a refuge for the wounded.

The soldier lifted the door and then jumped back immediately – a blast of machine gun fire had come from inside. The head of an armed man with long hair peered out. We didn’t give him time to emerge – we shot him on the spot, and he fell back down. We threw two hand grenades into the container; the explosions spread scraps of human flesh, supplies and cloth everywhere. After an operation like that, the officers back at base would write in their reports: ‘A secret refuge harbouring terrorists was discovered and liquidated. Due to the nature of the injuries sustained, the bodies are not fit for identification.’

The OMON guys found many items of interest in the three hideouts: arms, ammo, money, drugs (almost a hundred kilos of heroin in brick-sized blocks, which we all called ‘Afghan bricks’; I had never seen so many drugs in one place before, and I definitely hadn’t imagined I’d be seeing them at a religious site), books on Islamic extremism, flags and other materials intended as propaganda for the holy war against the infidels, plus instructions for making explosives.

There were some videocassettes and DVDs showing torture being inflicted on our soldiers who had been taken prisoner, along with clips of attacks on Russian military convoys. They also had lots of identification papers belonging to dead or missing terrorists, and they had an entire archive (from the Chechen capital, as we later discovered) with the names of the heads of the various terrorist movements in the country.

We piled it all into our cars and then began loading the prisoners on one by one, among them the old imam and his companion, and a woman in her fifties who wouldn’t speak to any of us. To get her into the car an explorer had to hit her on the back with the barrel of a rifle. To begin with, the prisoners resisted, but after the first blows they gave in. There were three young Arabs in particular who kept on shouting, threatening us and refusing to get in the car. One of them grazed an infantryman on the neck with a kitchen knife. The cut wasn’t serious, but the act was: we had to shoot him and his two friends.

We had taken seven prisoners. We tied everyone’s hands and legs together for security, and to keep them from moving we cut the men’s trousers at the waistband. Then we left for our base.

Alerted by the shooting, the local inhabitants gathered around the three corpses. To them, the men on the ground were martyrs.

As our vehicles passed through the village, the streets filled with people, and many inhabitants peered out from behind their front doors – the eyes of the women and the old men, full of hate and a desire for vengeance, were more piercing than plated bullets. No one dared to shoot us, because they knew that if there were even one attack on representatives of the Russian Federation Army, the next day the residents would be awakened by cannon blasts from the artillery or, even worse, by the sound of helicopters, ready to generously drop their surface-to-air missiles. In just a few hours, the entire place would be swept away like the wind scatters leaves in the autumn, without even a memory left behind.

Once we left the village we took the road that led down from the mountains. Our convoy was slowly snaking through the woods along a steep, narrow path, when the terrorists showed up. Usually they would attack the head and the tail of a column, trying to trap the cars in the middle. A few bullets hit the first carrier, where the infantry explorers were; that was the car on ‘detachment’, or further ahead compared to the rest of the line.

The enemy was hiding among the trees of the forest, and by taking that path we had offered ourselves up on a silver platter to their bullets. When we heard the first shots we jumped to the ground, to the opposite side from where the shots were coming. The drivers came out of the carriers too, rolling along with us to the edge of the road, the only place where the Arabs couldn’t see us. According to military regulations, at times like these leaving the car is prohibited – the unit is supposed to defend the vehicle, using their personal weapons as well as the ones the car is equipped with. But in reality, none of us ever followed this rule. An RPG shell travels very fast and can destroy an armoured car in three seconds. In just a few minutes a marksman can torch up to five standing vehicles, and if there are three or more marksmen, the crew doesn’t stand a chance. That’s why active units led by good officers who knew what they were doing would leave the vehicle immediately, to try to organise a counterattack.

The Arabs were shooting with three light machine guns and about ten Kalashnikovs; once in a while, like cracks of a whip, the sound of two precision rifles could also be heard. The car that had been hit was in flames, but the enemy continued to fire an impressive number of projectiles into it, trying to blow it up. Usually the Arabs would shoot a grenade launcher shell under a car, between the tracks. The explosion would break the transmission and the vehicle wouldn’t be able to move; that way, after the battle, the car could quickly be repaired and used as if it were new. But it was a different story with the armoured cars that had wheels, like our BTRs – they couldn’t easily be disabled, so the enemies were forced to burn them or blow them up.

Every so often a few long blasts of machine gun fire came near us; when the car finally exploded, the terrorists moved, probably to take care of the last one in the line.

The fact that they were changing positions was positive; it meant that there were only a few of them, so few that they couldn’t handle more than one point of attack at a time. While the majority of their group was going through the woods above us – covered by a few single shots that tried to keep us under the effect of fear – Nosov gave the order to move out of the road towards the hill.

‘Let’s go past the burned car, cross the road and get into the woods,’ our captain said, amid the pandemonium. ‘We’ll take those bastards by surprise, while they’re on the move…’

Nosov hadn’t quite finished his plan when one of our prisoners jumped out of a carrier. The plastic bands we used to bind prisoners were occasionally defective; the man had evidently managed to free at least his feet. He ran for the woods as best he could, holding up his trousers, which kept falling down, with his bound hands. Suddenly the terrorists stopped shooting. In fact, we could hear their shouts of encouragement – it almost felt like we were watching a sack race. But one of the OMON officers shot a powerful blast into his back, putting an end to the show. The prisoner fell face down on the ground, his trousers around his ankles, and one of his arms – riddled with bullets in the shoulder – came away from his body yet remained hooked to the other arm with the plastic band.

‘Shit, just when I was starting to have fun…’ Shoe commented.

We set off down the hill. It was very steep and at some points we were in danger of slipping. To keep our balance we went almost on all fours, hanging on to every stone, every patch of grass, every little root poking out of the ground. Some of the OMON team came with us, while the others stayed behind; their task was to respond to the fire, to make the enemy think that all of us were still there, following the classic army tactic of protecting the vehicles.

When we got to the first car, we heard not only the sound of ammo exploding inside it but also the voices of our explorers, cursing. So they were alive! Somehow they had managed to get out of the car before it caught fire.

‘Come on, strays, let’s get to this fucking forest…’ Nosov had his own way of encouraging us.

An infantryman rushed up to us, and stopped in front of our captain. I glanced at his uniform; he was a lieutenant major.

‘They got my machine gun and two drivers. Fuck…’ he said, breathing hard. ‘And my radio man has a hole in his stomach… What are you guys doing?’

He didn’t seem scared or worried, but he was angry, and somehow surprised, as often happens to people taken body and soul by war.

‘Bring the wounded down here away from the vehicle and the road. Leave three men with them, get the rest of your guys and follow us – we’re going into the wood…’ Nosov gave him a light shoulder tap, to demonstrate his support at that difficult moment.

‘All right, Captain,’ he replied. Then he pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and took in a long drag of smoke. ‘Just give me a moment!’

He went back onto the path. You could hear his shouts amidst the shooting, then gradually his soldiers joined us, transporting the wounded and the dead. The radio man had just died – the mask of suffering was still plastered all over his face; they say that stomach wounds are some of the most painful. He was very young. He had delicate features; he looked like a young girl.

We kept moving. Three explorers and their lieutenant had joined our group. The OMON guys passed a cigarette around, each taking a drag and then handing it to his neighbour, like people do with joints. Despite everything, some even managed to joke around. One man asked, ‘How’s it going, little brother?’ and the other replied, ‘Great, just like when you have diarrhoea. Be careful not to sneeze or else you’ll end up with your arse in the shit!’

We had got far enough away. Nosov jumped up onto the road and we followed his lead, running across with our weapons in hand, keeping far apart from each other, to avoid being hit as a group by likely enemy fire. Before us were the forest and a hostile, rocky hill, wet with all the humidity.

Once we were all in a huddle, Nosov reminded us of the tactics to employ in forest battles.

‘We’ll take that route,’ he said, pointing to a spot on the mountain. ‘It’s important to maintain visual contact, otherwise we risk killing each other if some of us arrive at the battle site early… When you see an enemy do not wait for a command, fire immediately. Just make sure your position is safe. Don’t shoot in the open – conceal yourself behind a tree or lie on a rock, and remember that your primary objectives are the terrorists armed with optic rifles or RPGs. If someone gets wounded, don’t all jump on him, only his neighbour helps him. The others must continue fighting. If you decide to retreat, don’t shoot behind you while running, you could hit one of your comrades…’

Nosov went into detail because he knew that the OMON guys weren’t used to fighting in operations like this one – lots of them had come to Chechnya directly from their local police force. They didn’t have any experience of war – they shot badly and they weren’t trained, but they were good men, courageous and full of a great desire to serve the Motherland. Many of them would later become career soldiers, joining the FSB or special counter-terrorism teams.

‘If you decide to use hand grenades, never throw them upward. They can bounce off a branch and fall back onto you or your comrades. Only throw them from high to low, or at human height. Try to shoot single rounds – in the woods, the more chaos there is, the more confusing it can be, and often under violent fire it’s easier for the enemy to retreat. Shoot one or two rounds and then correct your aim, but if you can’t see your targets anymore save your ammo, change position instead, watch carefully for the enemies to come back into your field of vision. Don’t trust any sounds. Don’t believe everything you see or hear – the woods can play tricks on your senses, don’t forget… Are you ready?’

We all nodded, and so Nosov added:

‘Come on, let’s waste those monkeys…’

We climbed up the hill following a tactic called the ‘avalanche’, which was used in patrolling mountain areas, when it was necessary to keep watch over a very steep incline. This is how it works: everyone moves at a distance of five to ten metres apart, but the ones who are up higher move slightly to the right while the ones down lower slightly to the left, in relation to the vertical line of the mountain. That way everyone can fire in the same direction. The ones up higher shoot lower and lower, down to the last person in the line. No one shoots upward, because he knows that there’s someone covering him above; that way they avoid the risk of getting caught in friendly fire or more than one of them shooting at the same target without being aware of the others. The avalanche works well if everyone follows the rules, forming a chain of soldiers who have one another covered.

I was one of the first to go up, as the upper position is more useful for precision shooting. To be honest, it’s the least dangerous part of the avalanche – the risk is much higher if you’re in the middle, where my other comrades and the explorers were that day. Above and below them were the OMON guys. I stood next to one of their snipers; he was probably about five years older than me. He was armed with a brand new Dragunov, but it worried me that he held it to his shoulder as you would with any old assault rifle. I could tell he was nervous; at every little sound, his finger leapt to the trigger like a crazed grasshopper. There was a risk that he would reveal our position.

I went over to him and said:

‘You don’t need to hold this like an AK. Put it in front of you. Bend your left arm, so you can use it as support. When you need to shoot, you just straighten your arm and the gun will bounce onto your shoulder by itself, like this…’ I showed him what I meant. ‘When we hear the first shots we have to be ready to move forward and set up a well-concealed position to fire from. Our bullets have to be in the background of the gunfire…’

The kid was all ears.

‘Is this your first time in Chechnya?’ I asked, in a tone of solidarity.

‘Yes… Shit, I’ve fired a few bullets at the range, but I’m not sure I can aim well here, in the middle of all these trees…’

He was being sincere; he cared about doing his part but didn’t feel confident enough of his ability. A man who finds himself in the middle of a war for the first time suddenly has the realisation that human lives depend on his actions, and every personal failing takes on the magnitude of real tragedy. These men need to be talked to, they need to be helped and kept under watch, otherwise in the middle of combat there could be a bad surprise.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, smiling. ‘When we get started, stay with me. I’ll tell you who, how and when to shoot. You just need to aim, breathe slow and stay calm…’

When he moved I couldn’t help but hear all the noise the metal hooks on his rifle sling made, or the thousand other sounds coming from various parts of his jacket, or the poorly attached ammo… This was something that we saboteurs couldn’t stand – we would rather be on our own than in the company of people who made more noise when they walked than the tracks of an armoured car. Fortunately, it was loud as hell – the enemy was shooting wildly at the last car in our convoy, so they wouldn’t have noticed if an elephant had come up behind them.

The bullets were getting closer and closer – it seemed like they were shooting right in our ears. And then I realised that we could also hear the enemy’s voices. I went down to the ground and motioned to the sniper to follow my lead.

We crawled over to an enormous tree that had grown next to a wide, jutting rock that formed a kind of terrace. I stopped a few metres below, in the bushes. My observation point had an excellent view down below. Between the trees I had a clear sight of part of the road – there was our car and the other two OMON cars which hadn’t yet been attacked. I couldn’t see the last car in the column, but it must have been hit too because black smoke was rising into the air.

I focused on a cluster of bushes that was moving strangely. Since there wasn’t much wind that day and all the animals of the forest had certainly run away already, it was obvious that there were enemies hiding in there. When our comrades shot a few rounds, further down, a young man leapt out from one of the bushes I had been watching, armed with a machine gun and an empty RPG around his shoulder. There were fewer than a hundred metres between us; I aimed at his chest and fired. He grimaced with pain and, bringing both hands to his chest, he tumbled to the ground, as if he had lost his balance. I aimed a second round at his head, and he fell backwards, vanishing into the grass.

I showed my neighbour a well-protected spot between the roots of the tree.

‘Go and lie flat over there. Hide so that you can’t see the barrel of the rifle poking out from the other side. Stay low, don’t move and observe everything carefully. I’ll cover the right side, you do the left. If you see a target, take a nice deep breath before shooting. Pull the trigger slowly, almost gently, and when you let go don’t close your eyes. Can you handle that?’

He nodded, then went over to the position I had pointed out to him.

We could hear shots and the explosions of the hand grenades below, interspersed with the shouting of our men and the enemies – the violence of the battle was increasing at light speed.

‘Down here, down here! Help!’ one of the OMON boys shouted, from the group that was the furthest down, almost at the foot of the mountain. ‘They’re pushing, trying to come out into the road!’

‘Zenith, Deer, Moscow!’ Nosov’s voice was agitated, but filled with the desire to win. ‘Get down there, stop those arseholes – don’t let them come out otherwise they’ll be right on top of us!’

As usual, even at the most difficult moments, our captain showed the gusto for danger that a pirate might have.

From somewhere behind the trees the enemy shot an RPG round.

‘Oh God, they shot my leg off, they shot my leg off!’ one of the OMON boys started screaming in desperation. His screams were so loud and high-pitched that they almost drowned out the sound of the shooting.

I tried to spot the place where the Arab with the grenade launcher was hiding, but the trees were obstructing my view. So I fired a few shots at random, near a clump of bushes that seemed to be moving. I immediately heard a bullet fly over my head – they had a sniper too.

‘Let’s go down lower,’ I told the other man.

It was an inferno down below. The soldier who’d been hit by the grenade kept screaming, while Nosov let out a string of curses, trying to call back one of the OMON boys who had gone out of formation and had started shooting uphill:

‘Come back here, you fucking idiot, get back here now… or stop shooting! Fuck, you’re going to hit us!’

‘Reznyak, you filthy bastard, take your position or I will kill you myself!’ the OMON officer commanded. ‘Either come back here or I’ll shoot you in the face!’

We went a few metres further down. I positioned myself next to a brook and sent my comrade a little further ahead. From that position the area could be surveyed more easily – I saw a man armed with an RPG almost immediately – but I couldn’t locate their sniper.

My comrade aimed at the man with the RPG, getting him with the first shot, full in the chest. But the Arab fired as he fell, and hit a tree in front of him.

After the explosion, a young man with a Dragunov on his arm emerged from one of the nearby bushes. He was covering one of his ears and was making strange movements with his head, as if he had a bug stuck in his hair and was trying to get rid of it by shaking his head wildly. He must have taken a hit; the shell had exploded too close to him.

Without a second thought I shot a few rounds and he fell to the ground; the rifle came out of his hands and sailed through the air like a feather carried by the wind. Two other men came out behind him, one with a machine gun and the other with a Kalashnikov. I aimed at the one with the machine gun and fired, and then he leaned against a tree and responded with such a long blast in our direction that his weapon started to smoke. He was shouting like a madman, but his voice was drowned out by the sound of his own weapon. I fired again, twice, because I couldn’t tell if I had hit him. He dropped to his knees, but didn’t stop shooting, even though his bullets were going too high – he was probably wearing a bulletproof vest. I pinpointed his head in my sight; he kept shaking it like a wounded animal that senses the end is near. Without pity, I planted a bullet in his face. The tree behind him was splattered with blood; through my scope I could see a dark stain spreading over the bark like a moving, living substance.

The young sniper took out the guy with the Kalashnikov, landing two bullets in his back as he was trying to run away. The enemies hadn’t expected this kind of attack.

‘Excellent work, friend,’ I whispered.

He flashed me a big bright smile, like a little kid.

We moved again – we needed to move together to push the enemy further down and surround him. And we had to be quick, so as not to give the Arabs the chance to flee in the other direction.

‘Close in on the area, don’t let them get away!’ Nosov ordered.

Our avalanche began turning towards the road. We went downward, inspecting every tree in search of hidden terrorists. The air smelled of freshly cut grass, newly split logs, mould and burned flesh.

‘Don’t touch the corpses – they could be hiding some nasty surprises!’

We knew exactly what our captain was alluding to – often enemies would leave hastily made traps as they fled. They would put bombs under bodies, hiding them between the legs or beneath the backs of their dead, so that if anyone moved them to take a weapon he would get blown up.

‘If you see anything on the ground that attracts your attention, do not go near it!’ Nosov yelled, continuing the accelerated survival course for the OMON team.

The enemies resumed shooting at us. It didn’t seem like they wanted to flee; they were really trying to wipe us out. We dropped down, sticking as close to the ground as possible. When someone shoots at you from that close and you don’t have anywhere to hide, you start to see the ground as a magical substance, ready to change its form just for you, as if it were a blanket that could mould itself to your shape to protect you. A hole, a small pit, becomes a world.

Nosov shot a blast in response to the enemies and hit one; a few metres away from me I heard a short moan, the kind we called ‘the last breath’ – the unmistakable sound someone makes just before he dies.

I stood up and took cover behind a tree, followed by my comrade from the OMON. The enemy fired a series of short blasts, and a few bullets hit our tree – I could see the wood exploding all around.

‘Christ, what do we do now?’ the kid asked.

‘We can’t do anything but kill them… They feel trapped and they’re trying to come out, but there aren’t many left and we can crush them… Now, let’s move ahead and get them from the side…’ I tried to give him a little faith in himself, even if in that situation I needed it just as much.

We scrambled further down and positioned ourselves behind a tree from which we could see three terrorists trying to get to the road. Two of them carried a wounded man on their shoulders. The man had lost consciousness – his head dangled forward, his trousers were completely soaked with blood.

I pointed out the targets to my comrade:

‘You take care of the lone one; I’ll handle the two carrying the wounded guy.’

In seconds we had taken out the entire group. One man, however, didn’t die right away – he was on his knees, screaming. Nosov threw a hand grenade to finish him off. As soon as the bomb went off we raced down.

Our captain, Moscow, and my other comrades were getting closer and closer, the ring was tightening. For an instant I felt like the fight was over – it was a sensation I felt when a moment of calm suddenly occurred during a battle. You don’t hear anyone else shooting around you and you feel as though you’re the only agitated, vengeful person left in the whole universe. Everyone else is calm and peaceful… It only lasts a few seconds, but it’s enough to make you feel a sort of shame, as if the blame for everything that was happening lies on you alone – and that’s the moment when you’re most in danger of losing touch with reality. That’s what happened to me. As I ran I began to overthink the situation, and I passed a live terrorist without even noticing.

He was a young Chechen armed with a Kalashnikov, with a shadow of a beard on his face and a strip of green cloth affixed to his wool cap. He was sitting against a tree, and when I passed beside him he decided to shoot me in the back. Unlike me, my comrade had seen him and stopped to shoot him. But the Chechen moved faster, and emptied his clip into him.

I turned, and without hesitation fired my entire magazine at him, keeping the rifle at my right side. He tried to respond but the rifle fell from his hand. His face was white, his eyes startlingly open, and his mouth kept opening and closing – he looked like a fish that had flopped out of the water. He tried to remove the heavy jacket he had on, as if it were suffocating him. I kept shooting, and as I shot him he tried to shield himself – he put a hand in front of his body, as if to protect himself from the bullets, but his arm immediately lost its strength and his hand flailed, groping in mid-air. At last a bullet crushed his chin and part of his jaw; his head whipped to the side and froze in a surreal position. The broken bones of his face, the shattered teeth, the blood pulsing from his open veins and uprooted tongue: all these details made the wound look like a flower. Seeing that macabre botanical composition above a man’s shoulders had a strange effect; it seemed as though he had not died but had transformed into something new, something that, for those of us still in this world, was impossible to comprehend.

‘Kolima, that’s enough,’ Moscow said, placing a hand on the rifle to make me stop. I hadn’t noticed that he had approached. ‘He’s dead.’

Only then did I look at the OMON officer. He was lying on the ground next to his rifle. His eyes were still open, but he was no longer breathing – he’d taken a bad hit directly to his chest. His mouth was full of dark blood; his stomach and lungs must have been pierced by the bullets. I bent over and checked his vest; the iron plates weren’t there. He had probably removed them so as not to carry any extra weight.

It was terrible to discover that the boy had died in such a stupid way, because of my mistake – one moment of inattention had cost another man his life. A man who was now a piece of motionless flesh at my feet, without wants, fears, loves… everything that had connected him to this world. Who knows what his last thought had been before dying, or what words had died on his lips, caught in that mouth filled with black blood.

Moscow ran off towards the others. I told him I would be right there.

I inspected the corpse. I found four rifle magazines, and I took his gun. I hadn’t even had the time to ask him what his name was.

The fire fight was still raging. I could hear Nosov giving orders while someone from OMON was busy talking on the radio. None of us had been carrying a field radio, so that meant we had finally made it back to the road.

I was heading in the direction of the gunfire when I came upon Shoe. He was lying on the ground behind a tree, looking at the sky, oblivious to everything that was happening around him.

‘Hey, what are you doing over there, taking a nap?’ I positioned myself not far from him, trying to inspect the area below us.

‘There are four spirits. I’m waiting for Nosov’s signal to throw the hand grenades, then they’ll hit them again with the machine guns…’ Shoe was relaxed; he seemed far away from the war, like a tourist who’d dropped in from some Caribbean beach, sunbathing and sipping on a nice cold drink.

‘There’s the body of an OMON guy in the woods, their sniper…’ I said, peering out a little to observe the situation better. ‘An enemy shot an entire clip into him. We have to take him down to his men…’

‘Hey, quit sticking your damn head out,’ he scolded me with a little kick on the leg. ‘In a few days you’ll be discharged, isn’t that enough for you? You want to leave the army in a coffin with the band behind you?’

‘Relax, brother, I see them.’ I took my rifle and got into a comfortable position. ‘I’ll take care of them; there’s no need to pollute the wilderness with your bombs…’

The men were hidden in a deep pit, with their backs to us, about fifty metres away. I shot an entire clip at them. Three fell immediately. One managed to move in time and began to fire in my direction, but I shot him in the forehead.

We heard shots coming from the other side – our men were attacking the same enemy position, which no longer contained any live Arabs.

‘We already handled it, Ivanisch!’ I yelled.

‘Why do you always have to do things your way?’ Shoe asked me, smiling. ‘So, where’s this kid’s body?’

We went back up to get it. Shoe took his rifle; I took the young Chechen’s. I inspected the enemy’s body and found army documents, a plastic card and a piece of paper covered in Arabic handwriting and various stamps. I took everything, because our commanders and secret service agents loved playing with the paperwork – when it came to tracking down our soldiers killed or gone missing in the war they’d beat around the bush, but when it came to terrorists they were always at the ready. They would even send entire investigative teams to find the body of some Islamic extremist.

Shoe and I picked up the sniper’s corpse, and, holding him by the jacket and feet, we went down to the road.

When we arrived the fighting was over. Our men stood beside ten or so enemy corpses piled up at the edge of the road, while the OMON dogs ran in circles, agitated, sniffing the air and growling in the direction of the dead.

One of the OMON men sat on the ground; Spoon was treating a hole just above the knee on his right leg. Another was already on a stretcher; his comrades were trying to make room for him inside their car. The driver stood next to them, and he kept repeating, like a prayer, the phrase:

‘Put him in feet first, remember, feet first…’

This had to do with an old Russian custom, according to which only the dead should be transported with their heads towards the front, so that they come out feet first. Drivers and pilots always made sure the wounded were loaded feet first, so that when they reached their destination they would come out like the living, head first – this was a kind of insurance, a good luck charm that prevented the wounded from dying during the trip.

An OMON soldier was fiddling with the radio while Nosov spoke on the handset. Before going into the woods, Nosov had given the order to call in reinforcements to ensure the transport of the wounded and the prisoners, since two of our vehicles had been attacked. The reinforcements had started on their way, but they had run into enemy fire on the road. It sounded as though they were still in the middle of a battle; you could hear shots and explosions through the radio.

‘Comrade Captain, we’ve been hit… On the rise at the twentieth kilometre from the inhabited area…’ In a weak, shaky voice a young soldier was trying to provide useful information.

‘Let me speak with your commanding officer, private!’ Nosov yelled.

‘I think Lieutenant Kuznecov is dead, sir. I think…’

‘Son, you think so or you know your lieutenant is dead?’ The captain tried to enunciate his words. ‘Can you confirm his death for me?’

‘Yes, sir, I confirm; he has a hole in his chest and he’s not breathing…’

‘Then find me the highest ranking soldier among you. I need to speak with him immediately!’

The sound of confused voices amidst gunfire came through the handset of the radio. The soldiers were calling to each other; all signs indicated that chaos had taken over.

Then an awful voice, raspy and low, came on:

‘Sergeant Major Kopchik, at your service!’

‘Sergeant, gather your men and get the fuck out of there, now,’ Nosov growled. ‘If you can’t respond to the attack get down to the road. If your vehicles are still intact, take them and return!’

‘But I’m not authorised to give the unit orders, sir! Lieutenant Kuznecov is in command here!’

‘Well, it appears that you are not very well informed, Sergeant. Your lieutenant died in battle. If you take a look around, his body should be somewhere nearby…’

There was a long pause at the other end, then in the distance you could hear the sergeant spit out a vile epithet, cursing everyone and everything. Then he picked up the handset again:

‘I confirm, sir, our commander has fallen in battle! What do I do?’

‘Take your unit to safety, Sergeant. Clear the road – we’ll come down to you, but make sure we don’t have anyone in our way!’

‘But the terrorists in the woods have…’ the sergeant tried to protest.

‘You have no chance of sustaining a fire fight against the terrorists… Get out of there while your cars are still in one piece. Retreat immediately, that’s an order!’

‘Yes, sir, I’ll initiate retreat!’

‘And hurry up, otherwise they’ll get all of you!’ Nosov replaced the handset, looked at us in desperation and said:

‘Someone explain to me… Trapped by four fucking shepherds shooting a bullet or two… I mean, they don’t even have an RPG to hit the cars. But our heroes are already in trouble – they don’t know what to do and they’ve even lost their lieutenant… How the fuck are we fighting this war?’

Nosov ordered us into the cars. We had lost six men; five others were wounded. We loaded everything into the three functioning vehicles: the wounded, our dead, the ammo, the drugs and everything else we had found in the mosque. We put the prisoners, however, on top of the cars, binding them to the side hooks on the armour – that way, we hoped, nobody would try to attack us again.

We left quickly, watching the surrounding woods and mountains with suspicion, as if we were expecting them to start moving at any second.

Once we were back on base we realised that one of the prisoners had died; it was the old imam, who hadn’t been able to endure the discomforts of the trip. The others weren’t doing so well either, but they still gave signs of life.

The OMON guy who’d been hit by a grenade during the avalanche had fainted, and the helicopter whisked him off to the military hospital that was set up for the most serious cases – he had lost a lot of blood.

We saboteurs shut ourselves up in our container to rest.

I took a long bath in the iron vat behind the kitchen, and then I climbed into the bunk next to Spoon, who had already been snoring for a while.

I slept for a long time, and when I woke up Nosov was sitting at the table, eating out of a pot and drinking cognac straight from the bottle. Moscow was next to him, chewing on a piece of bread. He looked like a little homeless kid.

I got up, opened a jar and, using my fork, pulled a hunk of stewed meat from the pan, where it was mixed with fat and God knows what else. I dunked it into my jar before taking a bite.

I was standing up, enjoying my food, when Nosov looked me in the eyes, serious, and said:

‘Today the order from the division commander came: you’re fired, criminal…’

I set the jar on the table and sat down with them, unable to say a word. I felt soft, as if I were made of cotton inside.

‘Starting today you’re free again. Live, do whatever you want…’ Moscow smiled. ‘But never forget your brothers…’

Just then Zenith came in. He was walking with an arm over his stomach; it was obvious that he had something hidden under his jacket.

‘So, you’re abandoning us, I hear. Well, how about one last bender first?’ He opened his jacket and pulled out some bottles of vodka, uncorked one with his teeth and took a long drink.

‘Hey, leave some for me too!’ Spoon shouted, leaping up from his bunk.

Shoe and Deer came over too, laughing like a couple of fools.

‘What’s so funny, soldiers?’ Nosov asked, pretending to be angry, still chewing.

‘I think we won’t be alone at Kolima’s goodbye party,’ Shoe said. ‘Our Deer has made quite an impression on the cook!’ and he shouldered Deer so hard he fell down. Everyone burst out laughing.

I really didn’t know how to act. It was the last time I would be with my team; the last time I would see all the men together. Over the months I had often thought about the fact that my discharge day would come, but I had never imagined what it would be like. Sure, I had seen it happen other times, when friends or other people I knew only by sight left, but I’d never believed that one day I would be in their place. I seldom thought of the future; maybe somewhere inside I believed that I was never going back. I had expected to die in that war… And yet here I was with my friends, celebrating the end of my military service.

It didn’t occur to me that it was a special occasion, the last chance I would have to ask my comrades about their lives, or to tell them the stories I’d always wanted to… Thinking back on it now I realise that, like an idiot, I wasted that moment, as if I didn’t know that the next day I was going to be far away, far from my comrades with whom – because of the war – I had formed an intense bond. I don’t know why, but at that moment I didn’t have any of these thoughts in my head; I drank, I got drunk and I watched my friends’ faces grow blurry and distant until I passed out.

At five in the morning a military car would take me to another camp, and from there I would get on the plane that was finally going to take me back home. That was the last thing I remembered from the night before…

At five in the morning, however, I was still so drunk that I couldn’t drag myself from one bunk to another. My head was spinning like a giant propeller, my comrades’ voices, shouting and joking, throbbed in my ears. The moment a thought appeared in my head, vomit lurched into my throat, as if the workings of my brain somehow irritated my stomach.

I could hear Nosov describing yet another of his adventures in one of the many wars he had been in, while a few bunks away Deer was making love to the young cook, and Shoe and Spoon were teasing him, throwing empty clips at him, for a few laughs… I was in an endless delirium, like a sudden fall off a precipice, like a feast in a time of plague.

I remember that at some point two soldiers I’d never seen before lifted me up from the bed; one of them took my papers, the other my bag, and they carefully dragged me to the door of the container. One of them suddenly dropped me – I fell to the ground and hit my head. I didn’t know if he’d done it on purpose or not, but either way I didn’t feel any pain.

The captain got up from the table, where he was still sitting with Zenith and Moscow, took a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes and gave them to the soldier with these words:

‘Be careful, boys, make sure you don’t harm this soldier. He has saved many lives. He’s a good sniper…’

One of the soldiers took the offering from Nosov’s hands and slipped it under his jacket. He and the other guy lifted me to my feet, made a show of dusting off my uniform and addressed Nosov in a pleasant voice:

‘Don’t worry, Comrade Captain. Your sniper will reach his destination safe and sound, I will see to it personally. May we be dismissed?’ He asked Nosov’s permission before leaving, as military regulation demands. My captain looked me in the face and said:

‘Have yourself a peaceful life, Nicolay, without too many worries…’

Then he turned to the two who were holding me up and saluted:

‘Soldiers, you are dismissed!’

They saluted back and I tried to as well, but my arm wouldn’t hear of travelling all the way to my head, so I must have just jerked it awkwardly. I was a mess.

I remember Nosov’s words and the look he gave me perfectly, and I often find myself thinking about it. But I can’t remember if or how I said goodbye to the guys in the group before leaving, what I said to them or what they said to me. All I remember is that phrase of the captain’s, the last thing I ever heard him say: ‘Have yourself a peaceful life…’

Then I had a surreal ride in the car. I wavered on the border between sleep and waking, each time thinking that I was in a thousand different places – at first I felt as though I was on the armoured car with the rest of the team on our way to a mission; then I thought I was wounded; finally, I was sure I’d been captured by the enemy – I looked for my rifle and despaired when I couldn’t find it… Then I realised I wasn’t wearing my bulletproof vest, and I got so scared I started shaking. I was on the verge of tears. I don’t remember if I was delirious or not, but when we got to the camp I heard one of my escorts who was smoking outside the car say to the other that it would have been better if I’d been shot in the war, because returning a person like me to society was a real crime.

There was no plane waiting when we stopped, so I thought that it was just a break and we hadn’t yet reached our destination. But I was wrong – I was taking the train home, not a plane. At that point even if they had told me I had to ride a donkey home, I’d still have been happy – without arms or ammo, without my precious vest, I felt naked. I wanted to go home as soon as possible, in peace.

They showed me to a barracks, where I had to have a physical examination. A military bureaucrat, without asking me a single question, without even looking me in the eyes, filled out a few forms and wished me luck. The examination was already over. Then they asked me to take off all my clothes, and gave me a chance to take a hot shower, in a barracks-cum-bathroom. Then they gave me a new uniform, which stank of mustiness; it was the typical smell of military depots. All the army stuff smelled like that.

I got dressed, took my bag and left for the station, accompanied by the same two soldiers. In the car with me were three other soldiers, who had just been discharged: an infantryman, a paratrooper and an artilleryman. None of them had any desire to talk or joke around; they were as desolate as I was, lost in thought, wearing the signs of their farewell celebrations from the night before. For the whole trip my three companions smoked like it was their last, and so I arrived at the station half-cured, pissed off and with a pounding headache.

The train trip was long and boring. The carriages were full of other discharged soldiers, officers on temporary leave and OMON officers who had finished their war service and were returning to their police precincts. As the wheels of the train ate through the kilometres of tracks people gathered in small groups to drink, tell stories and complain about everything and everyone… There was a lot of anger, but it was softened by the fact that we were alive, returning home in one piece, thinking of the future. I for one couldn’t wait to lie down in my bed and sleep in peace for as long as I wanted, without anyone interrupting my rest.

As soon as I stepped off the train I took a walk around my home town, and I realised that I had an inexplicable impulse to shoot everyone I saw on the street. I felt a lethal charge of hatred: it was eating me up inside, making me scorn everything that represented peaceful life.

I ate an ice cream but the feeling didn’t go away, so I bought a bottle of vodka and once I got home I started to drink. But even drowned in alcohol, my state of mind stayed the same – it was as if peace bothered me, as if I sensed something false, something wrong with people, and their polite behaviour. I left the house; it was hard for me to stay in one place for too long.

I looked at the houses, searching obsessively for signs of destruction, but everything was too nice. The window frames and panes were intact, and behind the glass, signs of a life of comfort and peace. Everything was in order: the light bulbs in their places, the brightly-coloured curtains, the flowers on the windowsills… it all seemed horrible to me. At night people would drink tea and watch television, laugh at some comedian’s idiotic jokes, listen to pop songs by singers decked out like living Christmas trees… And as the star machine cloned new idols, everyone wanted to be like the famous figures. Young people competed to see who was the most ignorant, because ignorance is something that’s always in fashion – running to the nightclubs to dance at desperate parties that went on until dawn, finally feeling like they were the stars of something. If you’re rich, you can do anything; if you’re beautiful, you should exploit your beauty to manipulate everyone – this seemed to be the only valid rule, besides unwarranted, limitless violence, because being violent is fashionable too.

The chaos of war seemed more ordinary and comprehensible than the so-called morality of peaceful society. I thought back to everyone I had seen die in the name of peace, and I was increasingly convinced that this kind of peace didn’t deserve to exist. Better the bloodbath I’d known, where at least we knew what the enemy’s face looked like and there was no chance of getting it wrong, where everything was as simple as a bullet. But now I had been returned to a peace that enabled me to be a consumer of the beauties of the universe, making me believe that they had been chosen just for me, even prepaid: packaged food and virtual sex, and after those fake orgasms you’re left with nothing but contempt for yourself and for the world.

Back at home, trying to calm down, I turned on the television, but all the news I heard seemed like a joke to me: in some cellar four Azerbaijanis had mixed tap water with a little alcohol and sold it as vodka, for the price of a stabbing during a fight in a nightclub car park; the former attorney general had been filmed doing drugs and having sex with an underage prostitute, later claiming that it was just an evening of fun, his civic right; politicians made lots of promises, then would get into ridiculous arguments that amounted to ‘who’s the more disgusting’, while on another channel the President spoke like a genuine criminal, openly threatening anyone who got in his way but at the same time so charismatic and reasonable that even I wanted to applaud his speeches…

When I saw a news feature about a group of our soldiers who had recently died in a battle in the mountains during a terrorist operation in Chechnya, I unthinkingly grabbed a clock and hurled it at the television, cracking the screen. The piece dedicated to our fallen soldiers had come on after two other stories: one on breeding pigs in southern Russia; the other on some young models who had won international beauty pageants and were ready to take on the world, thus making an enormous contribution to the cause of Mother Russia.

I sat there in front of the broken television all night, thinking of how, like sheep to the slaughter, we had obediently gone to sacrifice our lives in the name of an ideal that the rest of the country cared nothing about. By the time I got up from the chair it was already morning, and something that an Arab prisoner once told me kept going through my head: ‘Our society doesn’t deserve all the effort we’re putting into this war.’ Only at that moment did I comprehend how right he was, this person, this man whom I had continued to call an enemy.

In the subsequent days I wandered around the city, and I saw some absurd scenes. On the streets, groups of police officers, out of their minds on drugs or alcohol – people who were so ignorant they were incapable of reading the information on the passports of the people they stopped – vented their frustrations by beating up anyone that came within range. Even the conversations on the bus scared me – the night before, on a reality show, one of those tarts who enjoy being thrown in a house with a bunch of other idiots had pulled down her pants on live TV, showing the whole country her privates. Some young women sitting next to me were debating whether this girl waxed or not… Nowhere was spared from this lunacy. Even in church, at the door, the first thing they offered you was the chance to donate some money, as if your relationship with God could be condensed into some sort of restaurant menu, just like at a fast food establishment, the church had become a fast faith establishment: ‘Today only, a menu fit for a saint on his way to Heaven. Try it!’ Even love for God had become a privilege…

With every molecule in my body I could feel the hypocrisy of peace, a forced peace, taken to the limit of human possibility; a contest whose prize was the right to get bitten by one of those many chimeras. I had better keep to myself.

Living in a house once again, my house, I decided that the light coming through the windows bothered me, so I covered them up with blankets.

I needed to hold a weapon in my hands; I felt a physical lack, as though I couldn’t breathe properly. I took an AK out of a hiding spot – it had come directly from Chechnya, thanks to some of my driver friends in the army.

At night I couldn’t fall asleep. I stuffed myself with pills and alcohol, trying to get at least a few hours’ rest, but it was futile. After a month of insomnia, I realised what was wrong with my house: silence. There was too much silence, and I wasn’t used to it anymore. So I turned the television up as loud as it could go, and I fell into a sort of trance, a dark, empty space that erased everything, for four or five hours… Every time I woke up I had cold sweat on my face and I felt as though I were in imminent danger, as though I were sitting on a box of explosives about to blow up.

During that period it was very hot and I often went around the house naked, with a Kalashnikov in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other; I wandered the rooms without any particular purpose, just to keep moving. Once in a while I’d sing a song or talk out loud, in an effort not to feel so alone. At night I would gaze out of the window. Turning off the light and aiming my rifle at the nearby houses, I would observe people; frame them in my sight and then shoot, pulling the trigger of my unloaded weapon. This gesture – shooting at real people with a real weapon, even if just in pretence – brought me some serenity and peace, and led me onto the right track. I was able to put my thoughts in order, just as some people relax by doing crossword puzzles.

I had shaved off my beard but grown sideburns, even though seeing my face clean-shaven had a negative effect – a stranger staring back at me from the mirror.

I had a hard time getting reaccustomed to having hot water, being clean – even eating fresh food. Every morning my grandmother came over and prepared the whole day’s worth of food for me, and I would give her a hand in the kitchen. We talked a little, but I got tired very easily, and I would get headaches, as if I were doing work that took great concentration. Then my grandmother would say goodbye, and leave me by myself. The rest of my family was very good to me, very understanding, but I didn’t feel like seeing anyone.

And this was how I spent my days, shuffling back and forth in my apartment, in the dark, with the TV turned all the way up, naked as the day I was born, my Kalashnikov on my arm and my face shorn and sad. I thought of the war, imagined what was happening to my team at that moment, and every one of those thoughts triggered a fit of rage against myself – it was as if by accepting my discharge papers I had betrayed my comrades.

One afternoon I went out on the river. I took my boat and pushed off towards the area where the most affluent residents had their second homes. I took up a position in the woods nearby and started aiming at their flowerpots with my rifle. I went on like that for a few days. Before sundown, I would wipe out the flowerpots at the mansions of the wealthy. It made me feel good.

The following week the weather was bad; it was a good opportunity to go back out in the city. I put on a cap with a brim and some sunglasses so I wouldn’t be recognised – at the time it bothered me to run into old friends. I would pass by people I knew, but usually they seemed to not even see me. Maybe I had changed too much. Once at the market I saw an old friend of mine; when we were teenagers we thought we were in love. She was right in front of me, and I took a step forward to say hello, but she bolted, pushing me away cruelly, with a look of anger on her face. I was taken aback by the malice I had seen in her eyes.

Walking through my city, I stopped at an old shop with a wide window display, which reflected everything like a mirror. When I was a little boy, I often passed by that shop, because I liked the way my reflection would follow me as I walked. A thousand times, growing up, I stood there frozen as if under a spell, studying the details of real life reflected in that window; it was nice to observe things in reverse, as though I wasn’t really able to perceive their true character when I saw them in their actual dimension. I even went to the shop at night. I would sit down in front of the window and watch the reflection of the stars at the top. They seemed so close it took my breath away.

And now there I was again, at that window. I looked at myself and in just a few seconds I knew that I was going crazy. I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly my thoughts became fluid and clear – there was no longer anything stopping them, no obstacles. I observed how I was dressed and I reflected on how I had spent the last few months, as if before, as I was living my life, I hadn’t been able to think. I had the impression that someone had stolen time from me, manipulated my life and reduced me to a zombie. An unpleasant sensation, but powerful and liberating, and it pushed me to start over again…

At the end of that week I was on the train. I was going to my grandfather Nikolay’s home in Siberia. I had a backpack filled with heavy clothes, along with the essential equipment for the woods: a rifle and ammunition.

As the train rattled along, the immense landscapes of Russia flashed by. I imagined the life that awaited me in the forest: my grandfather’s house on the lake, the smell of the wood, the purr of the lazy cat, a pack of dogs who looked like wolves, the dry trees to cut down, their logs stored in the woodshed in preparation for the winter; the days of hunting and walks in the taiga, the game prepared by Grandfather, the evening chats in front of the wood stove fire, the sauna full of boiling steam and the sharp scent that burned your lungs inside, like fire…

The closer I got to Siberia, the more I felt like I was a part of the land. It was as if it were calling out to welcome me, to help me get past all my troubles, to give me strength. I knew that I was going home, to the place where I belonged and where I would be able to find peace.

It was a reawakening, a moment of connection with the real that makes you want to get out of bed, to do something with your day, to live.

Like jumping out of an airplane in flight, and savouring the free fall before you open the parachute.