guys who were affected by my brother’s fate spoke reluctantly about themselves. I had to meet with them many times to recreate the picture of what they experienced.
– Give it up, they repeated. Why torment yourself and ourselves? Write better about our hard-working dekhkans. What have we seen? The blood? The broken bodies of friends? With these hands we gathered their bones and pieces of meat from the dust and placed them in the graves. At first, we cried. Then we stopped. Our hearts turned into stone. Day after day we lost human appearance, became angry. We were crushed, killed. The outcast friends gathered our bloody bodies. We returned home without feet, without hands, without eyes. And for all this, the medal "For Courage" and "The Order of the Red Star" were hanged on our chest. We killed completely strangers who were never our enemies, and they killed us. I thought we were doing this for the sake of our country. How about otherwise? After all, we were boys whose mother’s milk still did not dry out on our lips, and we believed what we were beaten in our heads.
What else to say? Please do not remember those days. These memories are too heavy. Again before my eyes is blood, death, horror. Why are you bleeding the hearts of people who have already suffered from this life? My lips trembled when I spoke these words.
The mother of a soldier wounded in the Afghan war with tears in her eyes could not withstand:
– Burn in hell who brought my child to this state! We did not have time to rejoice that our son grew up and became a support for us as this trouble happened. Who to curse, I don’t know, – she recounted, wiping the tears off the edge. Her son hurried to reassure her:
– Do not cry, Mom. I am alive. Think of the mothers whose children have not returned, and then you will understand that you need to thank fate, not curse it, – he said, trying to wipe her tears with his unburned hands. In those moments, I remembered my brother, my mother, my poor, beloved mother.
Over the years, I have visited thousands of people who have returned from Afghanistan. Many times I listened to their short, unimaginable stories. Hundreds of times I looked into the wrinkles on the faces of sedentary mothers who greedily listened to their children. They all seemed to me like my brothers and my mothers. In houses with lining, in poor housekeeping, in the restrained voices of the boys, in the restless gaze of the mothers, in everything I saw similarity to my family. It seemed that the bitter fate hit only children from poor families, destroyed, and returned them to their homeland. Every acquaintance with a new family left a scar in my heart. Then it seemed to me that I experienced something like this myself; I saw it all, experienced it, and became disabled. I have started having nightmares. My legs, my arms, and my broken eyes demanded that I bring them back to my bodies. I fell into this state only from the stories I heard, being a healthy person. And what might then happen to them as eyewitnesses and participants in this nightmare? It was difficult even to watch the boys when they painfully gave details of what happened to them. At such moments I silently lowered my head. These were hard, sad days in my life. It seemed as if I had become a part of their suffering heart.
It was as if my body was infiltrated by electricity when I saw guns in the hands of boys, machine guns and tanks in the toys department of "Children's World". In front of my eyes, the toys turned into real machines, guns, huge tanks. There was a continuous shooting in my ears. I was scratching. It happened, I did not endure and offended in anything innocent girls-sellers. In those days, I came home, trembling with my whole body, inflicting my anger on my relatives.
– Something is happening to your father. Probably found a girlfriend. He was never in such a state, as if he had been replaced, – my wife cried, pressing her children.
But it was more and more difficult for me to get rid of this compulsion, of my obsessive thoughts.
As an obsessed man, in search of Afghan soldiers, I wandered through the distant corners of the country and disappeared for months. I came home shocked from meetings, stories, pressed, like a madman, the button of our apartment.
"Go there where you have been overnight", – I heard the angry voice of my wife, and the door before me closed with a whisper. Not to forget the days when sad and tired, I turned back from the door of my home.
Muhammadrahmat from Khodjent told me that he involuntarily pulled his head into his shoulders and covered his face with his hands when the shells exploded in the cinema. At first I was surprised, but later I realized that there is nothing worse than war and there can be neither winners nor losers. Because both of them and others carry blood, tears, death. I began to understand why so many writers turned to the subject of war. L.Tolstoy, A.Barbus, E.Hemingway and Y.Bondarev… War brings unbelievable trials, countless miseries and suffering to man, and there can be no justification for it.
Now, when I think about war, I see my real heroes with wounded bodies and souls passing by. And once again I assure you: the warriors are those who sacrificed their lives to an unknown monster – to war, are my brothers, my relatives, my friends.
Sabir came to me, my cousin. I was very pleased. I know him from childhood. He was a simple, straightforward guy. With his father Muhammad once in childhood I pasture sheep. Then Muhammad-aka became ill and went to the hospital. He seemed healed, but soon the illness returned. He was treated again, but the disease never receded. He is still in the hospital. The mother was left with ten children in her arms. She raised them for her salary of sixty rubles herself. I brought Sabir to the army from Tashkent. He arrived in Afghanistan. It was not long before I received a letter from him. In the letter a few words: "Rashid-aka, I am in Leningrad. And I am injured. Be healthy". He spent a year in Leningrad. He returned crippled.
When he crossed the threshold of the house, my face was distorted by pain. Those long-standing memories came back to me again, my mother’s bloody shirt, my father’s silent cry in the middle of the night when he was known about his son’s injury, my brother’s whisper at my mom’s grave.
…A year passed.
Sabir said that he entered to the preparatory department of the law faculty of the university. His joy also calmed my heart. I hugged him, greeted him and filled my soul with tenderness.
At the table I asked him:
– Well, Sabir, tell me about it. Was it hard to take the entrance exams?
He strangely smiled:
– You know, Rashid aka, it turns out to be doing that to put your chest under the bullets. I passed literature and history, and at the exam in social sciences the teacher took and asked, "Say the truth, how did you pass the other exams? Who helped you, who asked for you?"
Who can ask for me? I had a stick in my hands, and I pointed to her, "With it, – I say, – I came." Then he "drawed" a deuce on the examination sheet, without changing his face. I look at the exam sheet and hear a teacher at the next table taking the exam from a girl:
– Your knowledge is even worse than your brother warned me, well, I will put you three, – he said in the tone of the debtor.
– Yes, Rashid aka, he had to. At that point, I felt that money was involved. Well, and my couple through the rector turned into a three. Yes, through the rector. Those teachers have neither shame nor conscience.
When in Termez, before sending to Afghanistan, a soldier offered to leave me for a thousand rubles and then I scolded him. And that teacher, who put the pair, stood up on me and said:
–You will come in spring.
Then I calmly, without raising my voice, said:
– Give me your health, I’ll feed the sheep at the village. – He was afraid.
Classes start tomorrow.
