The Torn Souls: An Anthology of Prose About the Soviet War in Afghanistan (1979-1989)

Go West!

“Let’s go”, — Alyosha said.

Without any word Vitka got up from his bed and went outside, following Alyosha. They were intently marching along the wall towards the division of supply quarters.

Dzhuma,[1] the driver of the supply division, was already waiting for them, leaning up against a cherry-plum tree. Dzhuma — a skinny fellow — was about to be demobilised. In accordance with an unwritten dress code of the dembel (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor) his uniform had been washed and ironed so many times that it had almost became white.

His bleached shirt was slimmer than permitted by army regulations. His leather belt was loosely buckled with its lower end hung at the exact level of his jacket. His badge was also bent in accordance with this dembel fashion. This debmel fashion look was crowned with a Russian military panama hat, aka “Afghanka”, that was bent at a precise angle giving him a rakish look.

Alyosha and Vitka were wearing the standard winter uniform, obligatory for those who were waiting to be demobbed in the spring. Vitka rather liked this look: it set him sharply apart from the rest of their intake. Alyosha felt the same, so neither had put in for the summer uniform, preferring instead to wear out the uniform they had been issued with in the autumn. Why bother to seek favours from the quartermaster, or relieve the junior soldiers of the summer uniforms and boots? Why go through all that useless effort, when they were so close to going home?

The friends shook hands with Dzhuma, who without any words pulled the keys out of his pocket, unlocked the door and welcomed them into the small storeroom. They entered, went for the heavy paper bag as usual, opened it, pocketed a handful of dried fruit, and left the storeroom. While Dzhuma was locking the storeroom, Alyosha and Vitka were marching towards the opening in the fortress wall, which led to the automotive machinery yard. Passing this opening in the wall, they took the stairs to the yard and went along the row of vehicles which were lined up along the wall.

— Which car shall we take? — asked Alyosha, — The ZiL or the Tabletka? (See “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor).

— The ZiL. — Vitka answered and added quickly. — I’m driving today, it is my turn!

Dzhuma caught up with them near his own vehicle — the ZiL-131. Dzuma was assigned as a driver to ZiL-131, but this car had not moved from the Bakharak valley for five years, since the regiment had left one of its battalions in Badakhshan after a long march over the mountains from the Soviet Union.[2] Most of the other vehicles, such as water tankers, tank transporters, and others ZiL-131s belonged to the supply division, and were equally immobile. There was also a green UAZ-452 van, shaped like a loaf of bread, with a red cross on it: it was the ambulance car, which the soldiers called a “tabletka” (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor). In order to prevent the deterioration of the vehicles, some measures had been taken: wooden beams a metre high had been put under their axles to take the load off their shock absorbers. Written notices were placed on their windscreens to inform that the radiators had been drained. Having decided that the safety of vehicle was ensured, the cars were left alone. The only vehicles still in use were a ZiL-131 model, which was used for delivery of ammunition supplies from the helicopter pad to the storehouse. There was also a model ZiL-130 for use as a dump truck that looked unbelievably civilian with its blue — white colour.

This dump truck was normally parked next to the break in the wall, so the canteen

orderlies could throw directly into the truck empty cans, which had contained meat and condensed milk. When the truck was full, one of the orderlies would drive the truck a kilometre away from the fort to the Saripulsky Bridge and dump the garbage near the road. Polished by wind and sand, the huge pile of cans glistened like gold on the roadside. This is why the First Company preferred to do their firing practice there, using the cans as targets. Of course, it is difficult to hit a can from a distance between a hundred fifty and two hundred metres. But the reflection of the bright Afghan sun was so glistening on the metallic cans that in this light you can spot a rabbit a kilometre away. From his first shot an experienced sharpshooter could make a can fly up into the sky; and the young soldiers were happy, looking at the can’s trajectory that was spinning like a furious cheerful little shooting star. For the younger soldiers it was a great incentive to get them to improve their shooting.

The journey over the mountains with their pinnacles four thousand metres high had left Dzhuma’s ZiL-131 pretty battered. Despite its helpless look, it was the favourite place for the boys’ ritual evening gathering,

Vitka jumped straight on the footboard of the car, opened the door and flopped down into the seat. Alyosha and Dzhuma got into the cabin from the other side. Whilst Dzhuma crumbled up some ganja (see “Terminology and Glossary”) with his finger nails, Alyosha took from his pocket the “Donskie” cigarette paper and tore a strip. After that he rolled it into a filter, blew some tobacco onto his hand and joined the filter to the cigarette. Dzhuma carefully poured the ganja onto Alyosha’s palm. Alyosha quickly got rid of the excess tobacco, mixed what was left with the ganja and started to roll the joint. Vitka lay back comfortably in the driver’s seat and observed his friends’ actions out of the corner of his eye.

They had been repeating this daily ritual for the last two months. They worked in silence, neither larking about nor cracking jokes: so that there would be more to talk about after the second joint.

Alyosha carefully tied the end of the joint with a piece of string so that nothing would fall out, and handed it to Vitka.

— Let’s get going, — he said carelessly, to hide his impatience.

Dzhuma struck a match, shaded the flame with his hands, and brought it up to Vitka’s face. Vitka quickly lit the joint, inhaled, drew the aromatic smoke into his lungs, held his breath for several seconds, and slowly breathed out. He inhaled again, then passed the cigarette to Dzhuma. Frowning, Alyosha patiently waited his turn. As he watched Dzhuma’s face relax and melt into a blissful smile, Vitka felt that those first puffs were beginning to hit him as well. The slight pressure on his temples was beginning to grow, to squeeze his forehead, and to press down upon his eyelids: as if the visor of a knight’s helmet had fallen over his eyes. They closed for a second of their own accord, and when he opened them again, the world seemed to be quite different. It was as if, long ago in his childhood, his mother had delicately removed the translucent wet backing paper from a decal, so that instead of a colourless, barely visible shape, the little Vitka could see part of a fantastically bright picture on the warped page of the album, with sharp lines and remarkably bright colours. Every little leaf on the poplars facing the windscreen swelled up, and the play of the shadows transformed the intimately familiar shapes of the treetops into a miraculous green country of a mysterious fairytale beast. The mountain slopes you could see through the trees began to quiver in rich shades of brown and violet. But the most beautiful thing of all was the setting sun, its red changing to crimson as it sank through the soft blue sky towards the western mountain range.

Alyosha took his two puffs, passed the cigarette to Vitka, laid back and closed his eyes. Vitka followed suit, and passed the cigarette to Dzhuma. He felt that the time had come to hit the road. He turned the imaginary key in the ignition, and imitated first the noise of the starter turning over, and then the smooth sound of an idling engine.

— Let’s go! — Alyosha shouted cheerfully.

Dzhuma smiled and nodded. Vitka let out the clutch, confidently shifted into first gear and turned the wheel to drive out into the road. All three lurched from side to side in their seats, as if they were on the bumpy country road which led to the highway.

— Which way? — asked Vitka, stepping on the gas so that the lorry could negotiate the steep bank of the roadside. Spinning the wheel, he drove out onto the asphalt.

— Let’s go west, go home! — said Alyosha.

— Go west! — Vitka agreed, and put his foot down.

By now all three of them were imitating the noise of the engine, helping it drive the lorry along the flat asphalt road, only rarely breaking off for another drag. The kilometres flashed past, the wheels devoured the road beneath the lorry, as the red sun in the west beckoned the three soldiers onwards towards their homes. Vitka narrowed his eyes and looked only at the ground, so that he should not see the mountains which blocked the horizon. The few kilometres which separated them from the nearest mountain spurs became the endless plains of Russia. The sun shone straight into their eyes, the poplars become Russian birch-trees, and the young fields of wheat became the fresh Russian grassland. Only the smells were wrong: in Russia you don’t get that unbearable smell you get in an Afghan village of overheated stone, smoke, sheep manure, and ancient wooden buildings.

— We’ll soon be home, said Alyosha.

— Yeah, there’s not long to go. Home, Dzhuma! We’re going home! — Vitka suddenly shouted with enthusiasm.

— Why don’t we stop at my place in Ferghana? — Dzhuma suddenly asked. — Vitya, let’s go to my place. We can kill a sheep, cook rice pilaf, eat the fruit, take a week’s rest. My mother will be delighted. Shall we go to Ferghana? What do you say? OK, Alyosha? Shall we go?

— Hey, hang on, Dzhuma. Let’s not go to your Ferghana yet. For me Ferghana is just as lousy as Badakhshan: if that’s the choice we might as well stay here. What we need is to go home, to Russia. We’re sick to death of the East. I can’t bear to look at another piece of mutton or another rice pilaf. I’m fed up with the lot of it! I want to go home. So does Vitka. You let us get back to our forests and rivers! I want to see the plains around me, and not a single mountain for a thousand kilometres! I’ve got so sick of them in the last two years that I doubt if I’ll ever want to see any mountain again. You’ve got used to all this, this place is pretty much like your home, so it’s as if you’ve never been away. But for us, you know… No, sorry, brother. Maybe in a year we’ll come to you on holiday. But just now it would be better if you came with us: there we can really rest up.

Vitka was goggle-eyed. Alyosha, a man of few words, now broke into a tirade. At first Vitka could not work out why his friend was so excited, but then he realised: they were both trapped. He could not follow Alyosha’s line of thought. Probably Alyosha himself couldn’t either. He kept forgetting what he had just said. He was intoxicated with the sound of his own voice, his own miraculous and marvellous phrases that seemed so full of mysterious meaning. They caressed the ear, nourished the mind, and conjured up bright pictures which to Vitka seemed like a whole movie.

So as Alyosha talked, Vitka could see himself in Moscow, roaming its streets, visiting relatives and friends. He could see himself in his dacha, walking through the forest, swimming in the lake. He could see beyond that. He saw himself taking a job in the autumn after his holiday. By then a year had passed and his nostalgic plan to visit Dzhuma in Ferghana was coming true. It was not a disjointed flight of imagination. No, the feelings, the emotions, the happiness and the sadness, the passage of a whole year, were all quite genuine.

Suddenly he was overwhelmed with the need to convey his impressions to his friends, to let them share in the movie unrolling in his head: the chilly August evenings in Moscow, the lake in the forest not far from his dacha. Alyosha and Dzhuma listened fascinated, as he was carried away with his own story yet again. But then he understood that they were listening to him without understanding. Their faces lit up with interest and a kind of foolish joy, but their eyes were turned inward, and his words found no reflection there. He tried hard to make his story clearer and more logical, to convey the idea that now seemed to be of overwhelming importance to him. The effort was too much for him. He paused for a second, lost the thread, forgot what he had been talking about, failed to recover, and started to talk rubbish. He feared that the boys would be upset if they did not hear the end of the story, but they seemed to notice nothing, and he continued his disjointed story until he realised that his tongue was running away with him, missing out whole words and phrases.

He tried to speak slowly and precisely. But they were not listening, although they did not interrupt him. Now all three of them started to talk, pursuing their own line without being annoyed or bothered by the others: they wanted to listen to one another even while they were speaking themselves. Then suddenly they burst out laughing. Dzhuma was talking nonsense, giggling, winking his eyes. Alyosha was shaking with laughter in his seat, tied up in his own tangled story without beginning or end. Vitka could take no more. He brought the lorry to a halt hauled on the handbrake, and with his head on the steering wheel started to shriek with laughter. The truck shook all over.

Alyosha was laughing so hard that he sank down from his seat in convulsions. Vitka wondered if his friend was dying but his thoughts suddenly switched involuntarily to some different event that had happened two months earlier. The laughter suddenly stopped.

They had been smoking ganga behind a mud brick wall outside the fort, hidden from prying eyes by the First Company’s armoured personnel carriers. Their pleasure had reached its height when Vitka heard something clang on the armour plating of one of the carriers, and the long coughing sound of a ricochet. The sound of the shot followed from the mountains a few seconds later. Without even realising what he was doing, Vitka leapt to the shelter of the wall, knocking Alyosha over as he did so, and dragging him to shelter. Alyosha gave his friend a questioning look: but he got his answer when another bullet showered dust over the place where they had just been standing. Huddled at the foot of a stone wall, all serious now, the friends tried to work out how to get from the vehicle park into the shelter of the fortress wall. First they needed to get from the mud wall to the APCs. But unfortunately the sniper on the mountain did not let up, and prevented any attempt to cross the three metres of open space which divided them from the nearest vehicle. Their drug-induced ecstasy was transformed into that terrible tormenting state of wild unreasoning fear familiar to any soldier who has been interrupted in the middle of a smoke. When a man is frightened, he loses his willpower entirely. However hard he tries he cannot escape the real and imaginary terrors which assail him from all sides. There was no question of being able to make a dash to reach the APCs before the sniper could react. Even if they did, they could not hope to cross the next thirty metres dividing the vehicles from the high wall of the fort. In a few minutes Vitka started to come to his senses. He wondered if it might be possible to get to his own APC, dive into the turret, try to identify the sniper on the hill through the optical sight, and suppress him with a few well-chosen shells.

He was already about to crawl on hands and knees along the mud wall to his APC, when Alyosha gripped his shoulder and stopped him: “How are you going to operate it?”

Vitka had not thought about that. The vehicle had been powered down. Neither the revolving turret, nor the aiming mechanism, nor the triggers of the cannon and machine gun would be working. They would have to get the driver-mechanic from the fort to get them going, and the sniper would certainly not give them the time to do that. So all they could do was sit and wait for the shooting to stop.

It could not go on for long. If the sniper got too carried away by his game, he would be spotted by the lookout, the message would go through to the battalion commander, who would not miss the opportunity to punish at least one bearded rebel. In a few minutes the gunners would be standing by their howitzers. If by then the sniper had not taken cover behind the mountain, he would have almost no chance of escaping. The howitzers would open up, shell splinters would cover the hills, and nothing would be left alive for hundreds of metres around. The shells would be set to explode high in the air, showering large areas with flechettes (see “terminology and Glossary” — Editor), so that anyone who was hit would look like a hedgehog with its spines pointing inward. The rebels knew that, and never stayed in the field for long.

And indeed the shooting soon stopped. The friends went around the vehicle park hiding behind the mud wall just to be safe, then through the woods and into the fort by the main entrance. Vitka could not rid himself of the thought that Alyosha could have been cut down by the sniper’s bullet. For a while the image of such a terrible and senseless death had put him off wanting to smoke ganga. But only a few days later Alyosha thought up the idea of having a smoke in the shelter of Dzhuma’s lorry cabin.

But now, looking at Alyosha convulsed with laughter, Vitka was once again overwhelmed by the same terrible vision. He wanted to drop out of the cabin, to crawl and run under cover past the mud wall, back to his bunk in the platoon hut, which now seemed to him to be the safest place in the world.

— Just like the three little piggies! — he said, following a sudden new train of thought.

— What, bacha (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor), what’s got into you? — said Alyosha, who had by now come to his senses.

— I don’t know, — Vitka admitted honestly, realising that there was no way he could explain his thinking to Alyosha.

— Let’s eat. — Dzhuma suggested.

For a few minutes the three of them chewed dried fruit in silence.

The laughter was over, the three men fell into a gloomy reverie. It was time to go, back to their bunks to relax on their beds, to let their thoughts arise unbidden, to watch events unroll at random in their imagination.

Once safely inside his billet in the fort, Vitka was overcome with joy. He almost died laughing as he looked at the young soldiers with their cropped hair and their absurdly protruding ears. He clambered onto the top bunk to relax, lay on his back and stared at the boards of the ceiling just above him. It was all so familiar, so pleasant, so homely, that he was filled with carefree happiness. Filled with emotion, he put his hands behind his head and imagined himself on the edge of a forest. He lay on the soft grass and looked at the distant sky. It was so beautiful that Vitka arched his back with pleasure. Unexpectedly his hands touched cool metal. It was the headboard, and he clutched automatically at its thin metal tubes. One of them spun in his fingers with a short metallic creak. For anyone else it would have been no more that an unpleasant screech. But for Vitka it filled in the missing link in his imaginary forest. It was the cry of a bird! Vitka began to spin the metal tubes slowly and his forest was filled with the singing of birds. With his eyes closed he savoured the unrestrained concert: the trilling of a nightingale, the song of thrushes and finches, orioles and waxwings. Vitka did not know one bird from another, but he did not care: all he wanted was for the singing to go on.

The nearby sound of irritated voices — too far away to distract him — ruffled the edge of his dream, which covered him like a web. But then harsh reality broke in on his idyllic Russian forest. Something rough landed on his face, The birds flew off in all directions. Vitka threw off the pillow which had been thrown at him, and jumped upright on his bunk.

— Come on, pull yourself together! Let’s roll a joint, — said Kolya.

— Push off, you wanker! I was on a high and you’ve ruined it. — Vitka groaned.

He threw his head back on the pillow, and tried to doze off again, but was soon awakened by loud laughter from some of the men from the bottom bunks. Kolya noisily continued his story, of which Vitka had missed the beginning.

— … and I said to Yakub that I won’t share another joint with him. And don’t you dare either! Do you hear me, you drivers? Don’t you dare smoke with Babay.

For nearly a year Kolya had supervised the company’s drivers. He had handed over his duty a month earlier, but even though he was now waiting to be demobbed, he still issued orders to them all.

— Why are you buggering me about? — said the offended Babay. — Just because you are the guy who thinks he can mess with everyone?

— I’m not messing you about, Yakub… You’re such a midget I’m really afraid for you. A couple more little puffs and you’ll be so stoned we won’t be able to bring you back down to earth. When our replacements arrive we’re all supposed to go home together. How could I go home without you? No one would be able to hold you down once we’d gone. Without us you’d be flying around here forever. — Kolya answered in all seriousness.

Those who were waiting to be demobbed roared with laughter. Looking down from the upper bunk Vitya saw Alyosha trying to hold Babay down.

He realised that the others were also half stoned.

— Guys, look! Viktor’s woken up. Come down, Vitka, let’s hear some of your usual bullshit! — Alyosha called him, — I’m sick of these lorry drivers, talking so big that you would think they were helicopter pilots.

— Hang on, Vitka will tell you something about flying. Remember how he flew with Sinitsky! — yelled Kolya cheerfully, — Come on, Viktor, tell us about that war.

Vitka smacked his lips, and gave his best imitation of Leonid Brezhnev (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor) television, reciting in his nasal voice from his wartime memoir “Malaya Zemlya: “I didn’t keep a diary during the war, but I still remember clearly every one of those 1458 days”… No! To hell with him! I’d rather tell you a joke! Listen!

— Once upon a time there was a bear who grew cannabis in a clearing in the middle of a forest…

He didn’t finish. The whole barrack room broke into hysterical laughter:

— A bear growing cannabis!… Hold Babay down, or he’ll fly away!!!

Vitka waited for about a minute until the audience calmed down, then continued: “Every day the bear came to the clearing, to see how his plants were growing. When they were nearly ripe, he saw that someone had cut down some of the plants. Holding a cudgel, he set an ambush to catch the thief. A hare trotted into the clearing, cut down some cannabis, took a quick drag, got stoned, and started to leave. The bear bashed him over the head, the hare shook himself and said: Wow, that was something else! I’d better nick the whole crop straight away!”

Vitka was met with a resounding silence, which lasted for several seconds. He thought that his joke had fallen flat. Then Kolya suddenly doubled up with laughter, then Sultan, then Alex, then Oleg. The young soldiers at the other end of the barrack room, expecting trouble, panicked and jumped off their creaking bunks.

— That was something else! Wow, that was something else. Ha-ha-ha!

— Nick the whole crop! I’m going to kill myself laughing!

— Think, guys — a bear growing cannabis!!

The demobees (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor) heaved, groaned and scrambled down from their bunks. Even Vitka was affected and joined the general hysteria. He peered over the top bunk and nearly fell off. Only Babay looked blank, turning his head from side to side with a dazed smile. When Kolya saw that Babay had entirely missed the point, he whispered through his tears:

— Bash him too: then he’ll be as stoned as the hare!

Something clicked in Babay’s head. He too began to laugh, panting and yelping and repeating: Nick the crop! Nick the crop!

The laughter went on and on. We gradually calmed down a bit, and Vitka tried to tell another long-drawn-out joke about the Lilliputian who picked up a bit of hash on Gulliver’s hand. But just when he got to the point where Gulliver, tired of waiting for the idiot to get enough together for a proper smoke, tells him to sort himself out somewhere else and rolls the cigarette for himself, someone else burst out: “Nick the crop right now!I” and the boys collapsed with laughter all over again.

It took them at least half an hour before they finally calmed down a bit.

— How about some music, guys? — said Kolya. Alyosha backed him: — Why not? Come on Vitka, give us one of our tunes!

Vitka himself had already been feeling for some time that he needed to play. He jumped off the bed, picked up the guitar standing at its head, and began to tune it up. The ancient instrument was past its prime and hard to tune. The tuning pegs kept sticking, the strings kept cutting into his finger pads. Nevertheless, even an inadequate instrument made a great difference to their boring life. Only five men from the entire troop could strum out even a few chords, so Vitka, who did have a certain skill, was regarded for a long time as the only capable guitarist around. But then he was displaced by a young soldier from the Second Company who had a genuine musical education, He was a professional, he could play the accordion as well as the guitar, he knew many songs, both funny and sad; for three months he had been giving concerts every evening for the benefit of the senior soldiers. All those months Vitka had been resting, waiting for his finger pads to heal. Then people got sick of the new musician’s songs, which were all about civilian life, and demanded a return to their old favourites, the ones which Vitka had learned from tapes of the “Cascade” (see Terminology and Glossary” — Editor) ensemble.

— What shall we sing, Kolya? — Viktor asked as he picked out the first chords and flexed his fingers.

— What about “Tracer” to get us going? — suggested Soltan: it was Kolya’s favourite song.

Without waiting for any other ideas, Vitka started to play:

Several voices joined the chorus. Kolya, carried away, shouted out:

Then Vitka went straight into “Dawn”: slow and sad. No one objected. Most of the boys fell quiet, some joined in gently. Yakubzhon screwed up his narrow eyes, whispering the strange Russian words:

Suddenly Alyosha broke in forcefully. The words of the song had bitten into him for two long years: now they struck a chord with what he was thinking at that moment, and he poured out all his frustration at the endless waiting:

Vitka realised that he had hit the mark. All the demobees in the corner had been hooked by the music. Sometimes a musician catches the mood of his audience and instinctively plays what they want to hear. Then each feels as if he is part of the music. Each takes part in creating the song, whether or not he has a good voice or a good ear, whether he remembers the words or not, even if he does no more than accompany the simple tune with a primitive mumbling. That’s just what happened now. Stimulated by the drug, their minds could produce ready answers to barely formulated questions: there was no need to think, to analyse, to ask where the song should go next. His eyes on his listeners, his hands and fingers functioning automatically, his voice reproducing the practised words, the player could guide the disorganised chorus into the right pitch, and pin down the outburst of emotion called up by the song. When they came to the last verse, Vitka could see tears in the corners of the eyes of the listeners, and he put his whole soul into the final phrases.

He saw the faces of his friends changing as he sang. The coarse soldier’s faces that had got on his nerves for two whole years suddenly became the faces of twenty year old boys. Their shorn heads made them look particularly young and naОve. Could you call them warriors? Hell, they were no more than schoolboys, greenhorns who still know nothing about life. They were merely pretending to be grown up: behind their coarseness and cruelty they hid half-formed young souls, pining for their distant homes, their families and their homeland. What did they know of the realities of adult life, these boys who had been torn from their everyday life at the age of eighteen and hurled into a strange and incomprehensible land? How would they live when they got home and came up against the realities of civilian life? Now they only thought of one thing: how they would soon be out of this crazy Afghanistan, of which they were so heartily sick. They would forget everything they had learned here. In no more than a few days, a couple of weeks at most, they would be back in the Soviet Union, face to face with an incomprehensible new life. How would they live there? How would he be received?

“No”, — thought Vitka. It was not a matter of “they” and “I”, but “we”, all of us! Here we had all become to resemble one another, regardless of where we came from, our upbringing, our way of life and our education. Now we all know the same things, and are ignorant of the same things. We know how to place our feet carefully on the stones as we climb a hillside in the dark. We can march for dozens of kilometres over the mountains carrying thirty kilograms of weapons and ammunition. We know how to apply a tourniquet to stop the blood, how to dress a wound and inject a painkiller. We know how to kill a man! But we don’t know anything about how people live outside the army, what they think about, how they talk, how they sing. Our former life is an unreal dream. Will our present life also seem like a dream one day?

Vitka struck the final chord, slowly ran his fingers over the strings, and ended the song. All fell silent, not wishing to break the mood of sadness. So he decided to continue in the same mood and began to play “The Cuckoo” by Cascade, assuming that someone would pick up the words “I often remember my home”. But Alyosha put his fingers on the strings and asked:

— Vitya, how about the one about the cigarette, eh?

It was an old joke. The first time Alyosha made the request, Vitka spent twenty minute trying out one song after another with him, but could not find one which even mentioned a cigarette. Alyosha could not remember what the song was about, nor the tune, nor even a single line of the verse. He could only click his fingers and repeat: “Well, that one… There’s something about a cigarette in it.”

In the end, after much trial and error, Vitka wormed out of Alyosha the information that the song was about a friend who did not return from battle. It was the well-known song by Vysotsky (“Terminology and Glossary” — Editor), and cigarettes barely figured in it: but for some reason it was just those words that Alyosha remembered, and when Vitka got to them, Alyosha shook his head in embarrassment and began to join in. So now, as he began to perform the song “about a cigarette” for his friend’s benefit, Vitka waited for Alyosha to join in. Alyosha was not much good at singing, but he waited patiently, looking into Vitka’s eyes. When Vitka arrived at the verse Alyosha was interested in, he nodded, stopped singing himself, and Alyosha took over:

The others listened in silence. Now Vitka was launched on his favourite hobbyhorse. He played the songs by Vysotsky that were closest to him: “In the mountains you can’t trust the rocks, nor the ice or the cliffs”, “The sunset glittered like a shining blade”, and his favourite, about stars falling from the sky:

The last chord died away in the silent barracks. Vitka slowly laid the guitar aside, unable to sing any more. All sat with their eyes cast down, not looking at one another. It was Kolya who broke the mood. He shook his big head with its dark hair and its crude crew cut, rose in a businesslike way and gave the order:

— Stop snivelling! Stand up! Follow me, quick march!

They all got off beds, stamped off to the door past the now silent younger soldiers. Outside they rolled a couple of joints, handed them round and afterwards returned to their barracks in a more cheerful mood.

— Come on, Sultan, — said Oleg, — put your tape recorder on.

— Yes, don’t put on “Cascade”, put on the tape with the various songs, and Jakub will sing us his song about the fly with one wing.

Yakub drew his head into his shoulders in embarrassment. He loved singing Russian songs, but barely understood the words, and made up his own versions, such a muddle of more or less similar words that he made his listeners fall about laughing. With his Tajik accent he would mangle the Pugacheva’s (“Terminology and Glossary” — Editor) song by: “Without mine you me love, me fly with one wing”.

Sultan rummaged for his tape recorder in his bedside table, rewound the tape, and started it from the beginning, where the “Jolly Fellows” (“Terminology and Glossary” — Editor) are singing a song about their aunt: “Oh, auntie, you’re wasting your time, Looking out of the window in tears.”

The lively rhythm of the music cheered everyone up, and they soon started to stamp their feet in time as they sat on their bunks, and swayed from side to side. Vitka kept himself under control, sprawled back against the bed head and looking sideways at his friends. He already knew what would happen next: the dope would take over, and all the pent up emotions would break out. He did not have to wait long. The “Jolly Fellows” began a new song, and Kolya suddenly jumped into the aisle between the bunks and began dancing to the music and singing:

Sultan was the next to break out. Picking up the guitar, he followed Kolya out, stood beside him, and now they both stamped their boots on the floor together. Sultan pretended to play the guitar. Alyosha grabbed a gun off a sentry coming off duty, lengthened the strap, and hung the gun over his shoulder as if he were a musician with an electric guitar, holding it low down as if it were a bass instrument. He picked out chords with his left hand on the barrel of the gun, and drummed with his right hand on the body of the gun. Babay appeared beside him, rattling away with imaginary drumsticks. The four of them were imitating the “Jolly Fellows” whom they had seen a couple of times on television. They shouted out the words of their favourite song, assaulted the non-existent strings of their imaginary instruments in a frenzy and stamped their feet in time:

The music was beginning to make them weep a little. Vitya looked at the bowed heads of his friends, their eyes turned in upon themselves, and understood that they were feeling much the same as he was. It was true: the words of the song applied to him too. They were the strolling artists, travelling the mountain roads day after day! What was their armoured personnel carrier if not a little wagon in which they bedded down for the night wherever they happened to find themselves? They ate well enough if they were not too lazy to lug an extra few tins of food.

Vitka suddenly felt very sad. He felt with every fibre of his being that he was surrounded by real friends, such as he would never in his life find again, that once he had got over the first intoxication of homecoming he would miss these guys, with whom he had shared so many bad times and so much happiness. Demobilisation — they had wanted it, they had dreamed of it for ages, they had waited for it passionately. Suddenly it took on a different aspect: demobilisation meant the inevitable parting with friends.

In a few days they would have to say goodbye. Some would go off in the first contingent, leaving the others to await the next draft, and they would say goodbye to their friends beside the helicopter. Some of them — Kolya perhaps, or Sultan, or Oleg, would go aboard, turn round on the ramp, wave goodbye, and disappear forever. Even if they all set off at once, somewhere along the way — at the airport, at the station — the moment would arrive when they had to part! They would embrace one another, turn round, and go off. Of course one could glance back, wave, and realise that one would not see many of them again in this life. “Jolly Fellows” continued meanwhile:

Vitka was finally overcome by his emotions. The boys were stamping their feet and shouting at the top of their voices, and he sat on his bunk, his head drooping lower and lower.

Our tour is coming to an end, he thought. None of the locals, especially not the children, are going to dream of our little green wagons. But we will certainly dream of this savage incomprehensible country, the high mountains, the green valleys, the clean fast-flowing rivers, the flowering gardens of Bakharak, the summer heat, the dusty roads, the autumn winds, the dust storms, the cold of winter. We’ll have much to talk about back home, about the exotic beauty of this country. Perhaps we will even remember it with affection.

But for the moment he wanted one thing only: to get out, never to see all that beauty ever again. He did not need money, or jeans, or souvenirs! To hell with the photo albums, the home-made tie pins, the dress uniforms specially stitched and ironed, the remodelled forage caps, the ballpoint pens, the Japanese watches that could play seven different tunes, the shiny souvenir cartridges, all of these stupid things which the soldiers prepared for the ritual of demobilisation. It was all superfluous. If you still had your arms and your legs, if you had not gone too far off your head — that was enough to be thankful for. I will make my way home in my worn out uniform and my worn out boots, and I certainly won’t ever ask to come back. All I need is to get a few photos through the frontier, and hope to see some of these guys again, who are stifling their homesickness by fooling about, stamping their feet in time to “The Jolly Fellows”!

Viktor lay back on the pillow on someone else’s bunk, closed his eyes, and collapsed into sleep as if he had jumped off a high cliff into the unknown emptiness on a mountain slope.

“Home!” he thought as he fell asleep.

“Home!!! Go West! Home…”