I’m twenty five, I’ve been to war, and over three years ago now, at the end of 1981 I got back from Afghanistan, I still had nine months until full demob, I got blown up by a mine and lost an arm, actually it wasn’t me but a fellow next to me in the chain, we walked in a chain, we were moving towards an afghan village and this place, we had known it before, wasn’t mined, this mine that blew up my friend was accidental, some bastard fixed it there, just in case, for some plonker, and there you are – my friend stepped on it and flew into the air before my eyes, myself being thrown away by the blast, I fell immediately, feeling a cutting pain in my elbow and before passing out managed to raise my head and see how, a few paces away, in a cloud of dust and rocks, were quietly (I went deaf from the blast) falling down to earth human entrails of indistinguishable colour. We hadn’t expected a mine here, how on earth had he managed to step on that stinker, did himself in as well as mutilating me, well whatever, it’s in the past now… I hadn’t really been close to him, not like we had squabbled or something, it just happens like this – we simply hadn’t got on well together from the beginning and later on didn’t get any closer; the guy as I knew him hadn’t been much… well he had been a bit of a coward, though it’s not very nice to say this kind of thing about the deceased, still nice or not but it’s true, quite a few had noticed this in our division. He hadn’t really been trying to be a hero, liked to stay put, sit snug quietly in a safe place, but Afghanistan is not really an amusement park, you won’t sit snug for too long, war is war, and we all were afraid, afraid of getting killed, getting crippled, well becoming invalids because we all knew just too well that if you become an invalid here in Afghan and go back home, that’s it, that’s the end for you, nobody would bother to take care of you, won’t even notice you, as if you didn’t even exist, just like the war in Afghanistan didn’t exist. A simple pension will take all your remaining strength to get it from the state, and in the end all that would drive you crazy. For heroes, obviously, it’s a bit easier, but they’re tight on heroes – it’s not like mushrooms growing after the rain, there’s not enough medals for all of us, though if it was up to me, I would give medals to all the guys who served here with dignity, honestly, because even that is not easy here – to serve with dignity, without fear and cowardice. I for example, tell you the truth, was scared every minute, because in my thoughts I always was at home, and at home, in Baku, I left behind my mother, my father had passed away just recently but I hadn’t been able to go to his funeral, I was in hospital. I also have a brother but he’d been living apart from us for a long time. He lives in Saratov, stayed there after the army, got married and now has his own family, kids and work. He’s much older than me, now he’s over forty and has been living his own life for a long time and almost forgot our mom. Mom doesn’t have anyone else apart from the two of us. Who would take care of her should something happen to me? So I was afraid, how wouldn’t you be afraid of getting killed or wounded at war? That’s it. If something happens to me, how would mom survive on her own? On the pension that she would receive for me even a cat couldn’t survive nowadays. She is old and sick, she’s got to eat and drink, right? Alright, suppose she’ll be eating little, buying cheap foodstuffs, living without fruit and vegetables, but still she needs medication, she constantly has to receive treatment for her diabetes, treat her goitre, treat all her health problems, problems that any elderly person has, and medication – go and try to find it and even if you do our pharmacists – sons of bitches-will rip off such a price from you that you wouldn’t want to live. My older brother, Akram, he doesn’t help mother and almost completely forgot about her, at least before, he would seldom send some money to her, but now he has three children and all of them are at an age when they want fancy, fashionable clothes and that kind of stuff, his wife Lyusa also doesn’t get along well with mom cause mom was against their marriage, she wanted Akram to marry an Azerbaijani girl here in Baku, so Lyusa always kept this in mind and since then did everything to distance Akram from us, though again how can he help mother anyway, they’re not really rolling in money over there, no way, hardly make ends meet, no joke – three kids, feed them, clothe them, provide for them, anyway… That’s why I was afraid that I might die there in Afghanistan, then my mother would be in a very difficult situation, because she doesn’t even receive the state pension, hadn’t made it to pension age – fell ill, and now they are only trying to figure out whether she is entitled to a pension and if so to how much… And there you are, as ill luck would have it, a splinter whacked my arm, got into my elbow, that splinter smashed my whole elbow so badly that the moment the doctor at hospital saw it he had no doubts that only amputation could do here, so they amputated it, and now I’m without my left arm below the elbow. What I feared the most happened – I became an invalid. Before Afghan I worked in a factory, after school tried to enter university, didn’t pass of course, just had a wish to go to university because almost all kids in our class were from well – off families and everybody was always saying that after school they would definitely go to university so I too decided not to be lagging behind, even though I had been warned: prepare some good dough or at least have some strong pull, I obviously had neither, and to be honest my knowledge after school was such that it wouldn’t be difficult to fail me on the exam, but I could pass, well they give some students an A mark instead of D, so why not give me a C mark instead of C, well no – they failed me; screw them anyway and I went to the factory, that’s called ***– the cobbler should stick to his last, so I would sweat my guts out in the factory until I was called up for the army and sent to Afghan; meaning that before I was standing by a machine on the factory making not bad money and now where would I go without an arm, who needs me like this, whatever… As to our friend, well the one that got blown up on a mine, his name was Vitya, for exploding on an accidental mine and exploding me along the way he was made a hero posthumously, well maybe this is right?.. I’m probably expressing my thoughts in a very confusing, muddled way, writing incoherently, but at school I was very good at literature, basically liked this subject, did a lot of reading, so I thought it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to start something like writings or notes about my life, most obsessively this thought was visiting me after Afghan where I, it seems, had seen everything, but almost immediately on my return, I didn’t even have time to rest properly, I got a sentence, had to do time, and after prison decided to describe everything because I felt that loads of various crap had accumulated in me, I was filled with anger – enough anger for a platoon of soldiers, after what I had to go through I was angry against the whole world: so I thought let me start writing may be it will ease me up a bit, I would feel better. At the same time I met a girl, something turned around inside me, now I had a strong urge to share my feelings with someone, and there was no one there for me to do so, to pour my heart out to: I had no friends left after school, nor had I made any new ones, I had nobody to open my soul to, which sometimes I so desperately needed: so I started writing, as well, I decided to remember and bring up all that happened in the past, prior to my meeting that girl; besides, I had always been sure that when you write, it becomes somehow easier, as if you got rid of some rubbish stuck to your soul, moved it on paper and whatever bad stuff that had happened to you goes away a bit and you can look at it differently, through the eyes of some other person; I had come across this thought in other writers’ works, certainly I read it somewhere, in some book, and believed it very much, so I decided to write down for myself everything that had happened and would happen to me, jot it all down in this notebook, which now I carry with me in my pocket all the time, never part with it, writing down various things where and when I can. I write and it is like I spoke to a close and kind person, shared with him something that was depressing me, and I felt better. Even though, probably, all notes are written with a secret hope that they will be read by someone someday. Well, I don’t know… So, I had my arm cut off at hospital, was lying unconscious, came back to from pain, nearly howled, the damned arm did burn, though it’s not there anymore but it ached so much as if it was still there, and it was so unbearable that in the end I couldn’t take it anymore, I gritted and gritted my teeth and then thought – no, damn I can’t take it, I will scream, so I started screaming. A nurse came running, then left and came back with the doctor, he examined the stump, gave her a nod, she gave me an injection and the pain left a little. I fell asleep, slept like a log and when I woke the pain was weaker, you could bear it and I didn’t complain. Very soon the pain left and my stump was healing up fast, good. From my early childhood all my wounds were healing fast, the doctor was happy that I was getting well, nurses joked with me, everyone was happy, only I was angry and always sombre, nothing gladdened me, the arm was gone, what’s so good about it? Where would I go now? What did I need this stump for? Only to stick it up that bastard who sent us into this mess… Sometimes I thought about Akram, about mom I thought all the time, yes, but about Akram seldom, and once I thought how lucky he had been that he had served in the army before these Afghan events started. Otherwise they would have definitely taken him, he could have been killed or mutilated like me, they definitely would have taken him because our family was rather hard up, and 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.
