we didn’t have anything to pay off to free him from the army. I’m not joking, people did pay for their kids, and instead of some boy from a rich, well connected family they would take someone else and send him to war in Afghanistan. I served with one chap like this myself. He came from the same city as me, and once he told me that first he had been told he would be serving in Kazakhstan only to, so to say, be notified the very last day that he was being sent to Afghanistan. He was a shrewd chap and later found out that the guy whose place he had taken simply had been paid off for. And there are plenty of similar incidents, otherwise how would one explain that as long as I fought there I had never come across say one son of a minister, or deputy minister, or Central Committee person, or council of ministers, or at least a son of some big boss among our soldiers in Afghan, I met none of that kind. Whoever you asked – their fathers were workers, kolkhoz peasants, miners and so on, none of them was the offspring of some big wheel parents. How come? What happened? What, high – ranking people do not have sons? Of course they have, it’s just what would they do there under the bullets? Being thrown into the air like poor sod Vitya? Blown into bits? Wounded, and falling in to ravines under pressing fire? Being taken prisoner and asked for ransom, and in the event of inability to pay being tortured, burned, cut, humiliated and at last, after defiling with excrements a hardly breathing body, have their heads cut off? What did they have to do on this alien land when there were more than enough guys like me? They’d be better off pawing girls at their institute lectures, smoking fancy cigarettes, and taking hundreds of rubles for pocket money from their parents. Well, what can you say…Of course what would they be doing here, what had they lost on this foreign land? And what have we lost on this foreign land? Or is it foreign for some and not so much for the others, it turns out that it’s not so foreign for the ones like me? What have tens of guys that were killed under fire in front of my eyes in a little more than a year lost in Afghan? What have I lost in Afghan? Now I can give a definite answer to this question – my arm, yes and also the faith in the wisdom of our leaders, not that this faith was very strong before, but still… In hospital, I remember, one bed across from me there was young lieutenant. He had both his legs amputated – they had been torn apart by a shell, or rather shell splinters got him. His legs were so much stuffed with those splinters that there was no bone left intact, therefore keeping his legs was not possible. A young guy, a bit older than me. We spoke a few times, even though he wasn’t very talkative, you wouldn’t want to talk much in such a condition. He once told me that he had never wanted to be a soldier, but in their family they insisted on it because all men in their family had been in the military, his grandfather and his father, but he himself always dreamt of becoming an actor, and he was a handsome guy too, that you could say, with such an inspired face. His father still serves, and it was him who insisted on the military career of his son. The guy didn’t like being a soldier, but still he had studied and got his lieutenant stripes and a ticket to Afghanistan, with his father’s blessing to boot. And that’s how it turned out. The man became a disabled invalid. Once I was woken up at night by a strange mumbling over my head. I turned around quietly and saw on the windowsill, a couple of steps away from me, the legless lieutenant sitting on the windowsill and quietly whispering something. Automatically, not yet understanding what’s going on, I started listening… The bedside table, I recollect, was by the windowsill… He must have moved it from the bed to the window and climbed on the bedside table and from it onto the window… So he’s sitting on the windowsill, whispering something as if praying, sort of monotonously, like a man who hasn’t got enough spirit to read properly, just waves his hand with his index finger pointed like someone telling off a misbehaving child. So I listened up. “Your mother this and that, and I wish bad luck to you, and your half – witted father, him decorated with orders, and all your orders, and your mother, and all your decorations, and all your stinking lives in this world” – was he saying in foul language wildly gritting his teeth. That’s roughly what I heard and at first didn’t understand anything but then it struck me – the window is open, he’s sitting on the windowsill in front of the open window! I involuntarily yelled, he was startled and looked at me, said something through his clenched teeth, turned around on his hands, quickly leaned back, and that moment the windowsill became empty. I shouted, louder now, calling for the nurse on duty. My weird, animal kind of scream woke everybody up and I, it seems, kept screaming for some time, with my hand pointed to the window. I went to the window, the nurse was already in the room, lights came back on, I glanced outside – the lieutenant was lying down there in his underwear that completely covered the stumps of his legs. He lay there with his head somehow unnaturally popped out, his arms stretched… Our hospital was in Kabul, the ward – on the fourth floor, the top one, and the lad hit, probably how he had anticipated, the ground with his head down. When we rushed downstairs I approached him and clearly saw how his head had been smashed, the scull was cracked open and some darkish matter was appearing inside in the gap. One eye had dropped out and was lying on the lieutenant’s collar bone. The eye socket was dead, scary, and creepy for me because I clearly remembered these lively, moving and full of sorrow, light – blue eyes of this young guy. What only recently was so alive and now dead seems doubly dead and somewhat sinister like death itself. The body was immediately covered with a bed linen. Well, thanks for that. He left behind a wife and a little girl. A day after this incident I got checked out of hospital.
And having checked out of hospital, without an arm I went straight home, still having ten months to go until full demobilization. In some sense, it comes out, I was lucky. Well, every cloud has a silver lining, so to say, even without one arm but I’m still alive and coming back home on my feet and not in a zinc coffin. So I went to Baku, my home, where else would I go? I thought let’s make mom happy with my stump. She was happy of course, with arm or without; at least her son was back home alive. She roughly knew what was going on there where I had just come back from, I had written to her, though in the letters I tried not tell the whole truth about it, so that she wouldn’t have worried too much. I never described that war in dismal colours, never wrote about any dangers, well not the whole truth, in other words like our media covers these events – they probably also don’t want to disturb the public with some petty issues, like me not wanting to disturb my mom. She clung to me, hugged me, wouldn’t let go for sometime, literally shed tears on my stump. “Thank you for coming back alive sonny, – she said through her tears – so many families in Baku have lost their sons there, I trembled with fear every day, thought… thank God you’re back alive… Thank you.” “Thank me?! What are you thanking me for? – I said, – say thank you to the party and the government for my coming back alive. The winter has gone and summer’s here, we thank our party for this beautiful year. Something like this.” “Oh”, – mom gave me a faint smile and slapped me on the back, – even after having been to war you haven’t become more serious.” “Never mind – said mom – we’ll survive, now that you’re back we’ll survive. Just don’t say things like that, be careful, for a hasty word you can pay with your youth.” That fear of the old times repressions still lives in mother. “Well – I said – don’t you worry about paying for it, we paid for it a long time ago, I have become disabled at my age, let’s see now how they pay us back.” And as if I knew it about this payment. I was entitled to a pension as a disabled war veteran, but I nearly dropped dead while I was trying to get it. It’s disgusting to even remember how many thresholds I had to haunt, references to get, applications to write, decorations to show, sort of, here they are, everything is in order, all by the rule, not only our wise leader has them, I also have them, don’t you worry, and my stump is also real, dear comrades from the military medical commission, not a fake, you can touch it if you like… Eventually I got so disgusted by all this stuff that I wanted to scream, to get a knife and stab all these bastards from whom this miserable pension of mine depended, or stab myself like some Japanese samurai, with a hope that for the rest of their lives they will be conscience stricken… Then I went to my factory, even though I knew in advance that it would not do any good. And so it happened. Some bastard in the personnel department – with a well fed mug – declared at the end of our conversation that, well, I didn’t send you to that war and you can’t have any grudges against me because we can take you back at the factory – and then this bastard smirks like all them bastards smirk – only if your hand grows back again. He didn’t manage to hold himself and chuckled at his own wit. Yes – I said and felt that my kettle was boiling over,
