Zinky Boys Read Online Free PDF Page B

yourself, but you force your fear back into your subconscious. And you try not to think that you may end up lying here, small and insignificant, thousands of kilometres from home. There are men flying around in space but down here we go on killing each other as we have done for a thousand years, with bullets, knivesand stones. In the villages they killed our soldiers with pitchforks …
    I came home in 1981. The atmosphere was one big hurrah. We’d done our ‘international duty’, hadn’t we? I got to Moscow very early one morning, by train. I couldn’t wait to get home so I didn’t use my army travel warrant for the evening train. I got to Mozhaisk by local train, from there to Gagarin by long-distance bus, hitch-hiked to Smolensk, then got a truck-ride to Vitebsk. Six hundred kilometres altogether and no one asked me to pay a kopeck when they realised I was back from Afghan. I walked the last two kilometres.
    Home was the smell of poplars, the tram-driver sounding his bell, a little girl eating ice-cream. God, the smell of those poplars! There’s so much green there. In Afghanistan green spells danger from snipers. I was longing to see our birch-trees and tom-tits. Still now, when I approach a corner my insides tighten — who’s round it?
    For a whole year I was frightened to go out — no flak-jacket or helmet, no gun, I felt naked. I have nightmares. There’s a gun pressed against my brow, big enough to blow my brains out. I used to scream at night, throw myself at the walls. When the phone crackles sweat breaks out on my brow, it sounds like gunfire …
    The newspapers went on announcing that helicopter-pilot X had completed his training etc, etc, had been awarded the Red Star etc, etc. That’s what really opened my eyes. Afghan cured me of the illusion that everything’s OK here, and that the press and television tell the truth. ‘What should I do?’ I wondered. I wanted to do something specific — go somewhere, speak out, tell the truth, but my mother stopped me. ‘We’ve lived like this all our lives,’ she said.
    Nurse
    â€˜You’re a fool, an utter fool to have come here,’ I told myself every day, or rather, every night: in the daytime I was just too busy working.
    I was so shocked by the injuries, by the bullets, by the realisation that such weapons had actually been invented. The entry wound would be small but the intestines, liver and spleen a terrible twisted mess. Apparently it wasn’t enough to kill or wound, there had to be torture, too. ‘Mum!’ they screamed, ‘Mum!’ when they were frightened and in pain. Always, always for their mothers.
    I’d just wanted to get away from Leningrad for a year or two, I didn’t care where. My child had died, and then my husband. There was nothing to keep me there — on the contrary everything just reminded me horribly of the past. It was where we’d met, had our first kiss, had the baby …
    â€˜Do you want to go to Afghanistan?’ the consultant asked me.
    â€˜OK,’ I said. To be honest, I wanted to see people worse off than I was. I certainly did that.
    We were told that this was a just war, that we were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a wonderful socialist society. There was a conspiracy of silence about our casualties; it was somehow implied that there were an awful lot of infectious diseases over there — malaria, typhus, hepatitis, etc.
    We flew to Kabul in early 1980. The hospital was the former English stables. There was no equipment: one syringe for all the patients, and the officers drank the surgical spirit so we had to use petrol to clean the wounds. They healed badly for lack of oxygen, but the hot sun helped to kill microbes. I saw my first wounded patients in their underwear and boots. For a long time there were no pyjamas, or slippers, or even blankets.
    That first March a pile grew up