ones! With ten yearsâ hindsight! You all want to stay squeaky clean. Motherfuckers! You donât even know the way a bullet flies. Youâve never shot anybody ⦠Iâm notscared of anything. I donât give a damn about your New Testament or your so-called truth. I brought my truth back in a plastic bag ⦠Head, arms, legs, all skinned ⦠Go to hell!â
He slammed down the phone; it sounded like a distant explosion.
All the same, Iâm sorry we didnât talk. He might have become the main character of this book, a man wounded to his very heart.
âJust leave it alone! Itâs ours!â he had shouted.
All of it?
Private, Grenadier Battalion
I could hear voices, but the voices had no faces attached, however hard I tried to make them out. They faded away, came back, faded again ⦠I remember thinking, Iâm dying â and then opening my eyes.
I came to in Tashkent sixteen days after I was wounded. My head hurt when I whispered â I couldnât speak out loud. In the hospital in Kabul theyâd opened up my skull, found a lot of porridge and taken out a few bits of bone. They put my left hand back together, but with screws instead of knuckles. The first thing I felt was sad. Sad Iâd never be going back there, never see my friends, never work out on those horizontal bars again.
I spent two years less fifteen days in various hospitals. Eighteen operations, four under general anaesthetic. Medical students wrote essays about me â what I had and didnât have. I couldnât shave myself, so the lads did it for me. The first time, they poured a bottle of eau-de-Cologne over me, but I screamed at them to do it again because I couldnât smell a thing. They took every damn thing from my bedside table, sausage, gherkins, honey, sweets and left me with nothing. I could see colours and I could taste all right, but Iâd lost my sense of smell. I nearly went crazy. When Spring came, and the trees blossomed, I could see but not smell it. They removed one and a half cubic centimetres of my brain, including some kind of nerve centre connected with the sense of smell. Even now, five years later, I canât smell flowers, or tobacco smoke, or a womanâs perfume. I can make out eaude-Cologne if itâs crude and strong, but only if I shove the bottle right under my nose. I suppose some other bit of my brain has taken the job on as best it can.
In hospital I got a letter from a friend of mine. He told me that our APC got blown up by an Italian land-mine. He saw a guy being blown out together with the motor â that was me.
I was discharged and then given a one-off payment of 300 roubles. * Itâs 150 for minor injuries and 300 for serious. After that, well, itâs your look-out. Live off your parents. My father had his war without going to war. He went grey and got high blood pressure.
I didnât really grow up in Afghanistan. That came later, back home, when I saw my whole life from a different point of view.
I was sent over there in 1981. The war had been going on for two years, but the general public didnât know much about it and kept quiet about what they did know. In our family, for example, we just assumed the government wouldnât be sending forces to another country unless it was necessary. My father thought that way, so did the neighbours. I canât remember anyone thinking different. The women didnât even cry when I left because in those days the war seemed a long way away and not frightening. It was war and yet not war, and, in any case, something remote, without bodies or prisoners.
In those days no one had seen the zinc coffins. Later we found out that coffins were already arriving in the town, with the burials being carried out in secret, at night. The gravestones had âdiedâ rather than âkilled in actionâ engraved on them, but no one asked why all these eighteen-year-olds were dying all