Chapter Two. Disease
With the coming of the hot weather, the company was hit by diarrhea, everyone running to the can day and night. The path leading from the camp to the latrines was trodden hard as asphalt. Every half hour or less, someone would race from the command barracks to the latrine like a bat out of hell. The rookies, more seasoned soldiers and the grandpas were reduced to a common level by their plight as they sat side by side in the latrine.
There were not enough newspapers. The bound volume of "Red Star" disappeared from the Lenin Room. Nemilov was furious, branding the unknown thieves saboteurs, threatened an investigation by the Third Section but removed the bound volume of "Pravda" just in case. The Political Officer was known for his fastidiousness, washed his hands about seventeen and a half times a day, tried not to touch anything. His thin, pale lips twisted in disgust at the sight of the diarrhea-drained soldiers, his face mirrored distaste toward the illnesses which broke out in the company, his evenly-parted hair, clean fingernails and flawlessly white collars spoke eloquently of his disapproval of the common soldiers and certain non-too-clean officers.
Formerly tanned lads, bursting with rude health would quickly become listless, thin, their faces a greenish hue when they succumbed to amebic dysentery or some other local bug. They lost weight visibly, dehydrated by the dysentery.
Reveille-toilet-physical exercises-toilet-breakfast-toilet-lineup-toilet-political studies-toilet-weapons cleaning-toilet-lunch-toilet-duties-toilet-dinner-toilet-lights out - toilet round the clock kept everyone chained to the vicinity of the latrine, even the sick did not venture from this vital object to a distance from which it would not be possible to reach the latrine faster than a spook's bullet.
The troops forgot everything on earth, took no pleasure in anything. Even the grandpas were so exhausted by constant "shit hemorrhages" that they stopped harassing the rookies. Junior sergeant Titov, who liked to pump lead, flexing his ready for demobilization biceps and triceps, and gunlayer-operator PFC Prokhorov - a bark and troublemaker, and sergeant Panasyuk, spent their days sitting glumly in the smoking room, because it was closest to the latrine. All in all, though, suffering diarrhea was preferable to turning yellow and being shunted off to hospital with hepatitis.
The only officers in the company who did not catch the bug were Chistyakov and Morgultsev. Zhenka was certain that God was looking after him and keeping him safe from illness and death in battle, because he had been carrying a small icon in his pocket for two years now. His mother had sneaked the icon into his case just before he left home. Zhenka discovered the icon en route, did not throw it away but secreted it just in case, with his documents, and thus managed to carry it through customs and across the border unnoticed. Nemilov once caught Zhenka with the icon, read him a homily, but refrained from reporting him. Actually, the God who was supposedly looking after Zhenka slipped up once; Zhenka ate a jar of home-made jam, sharing the same spoon with a KGB officer who hailed from the same parts as he. The KGB man succumbed first, went all yellow, the hepatitis gathered strength, and a week later Zhenka followed him into the infectious diseases hospital. In fact, Zhenka was a dyed-in-the wool atheist, and cursed by God and His Mother so frequently, that the ears of the Holy Family must have burned so much it was a miracle that the wrath of God did not descend on the senior lieutenant's unit.
Morgultsev, company captain, considered himself a total unbeliever. He had never stepped across the threshold of a church and did not believe in miracles. He kept himself safe with garlic. He would eat a whole head of garlic before lunch. Zhenka had nothing against a bit of insurance on the side through garlic, but that made forays into the goods depot a problem. Zhenka went there whenever he could in order to entertain members of the female sex in the Soviet Army. He would play the guitar and sing. Amorous interludes would follow later. He would swear that this was true love, but that he could not stay behind even for her, beautiful though she was. Before going to sleep he would sigh: "A blonde....and not for money, but for real love, with me..."
They never did find out who brought the infection into the company.
"The fuck you'll sort it out," said captain Morgultsev dourly, sweepingly classifying the drooping "elephants" as malingerers.
Any commanding officer would be at his wits' end in such a situation. Is this a company, or what? Are these paratroopers, or what? The troops were issued tablets, some were packed off to hospital.
The strange appellation "elephants" caught on among the troops long ago and for a rather unusual reason. It arose from their training in case of chemical warfare, before Afghanistan. The officer would shout: "Masks!" and the men would drag gas masks out of the green bags on their backs, shove them over shaven and unshaven heads: their eyes would stare out from behind the glass, which would soon mist over, and long tubes extended like trunks from the masks to the filter in the bag. Very soon, a joke started doing the rounds about a commander of unit X whose small, capricious daughter demanded that Daddy show her some elephants running around outside, otherwise she won't go to sleep, or eat, and stood there stamping her tiny feet angrily. Anything for peace! So Daddy issued an order: "Company, ten-hut! Gas masks! On the double!" And the "elephants" had to run around and work up a sweat, choking and cursing everything on earth until ordered to stand down.
Maybe someone picked up the bug in the mess hall, or drank unboiled water, or ate an unwashed fruit from the town. Or maybe the disease had come from the nearby village, brought in by flies, or a cloud of dust, which would hang in the air for a long time after the passage of any vehicle.
The regiment had long shielded itself from the Afghans and anything connected with them. Fenced itself off with barbed wire, minefields, trip-wires, flares, machine gun nests, trenches, parapets, watchtowers, tank armor, mortar and artillery positions. Sentries kept a sharp lookout to ensure that the enemy or some Afghan from the neighboring village could not come close. But the enemy did not come, made no move to attack the regiment. Dysentery, hepatitis, amebic dysentery and typhoid struck instead.
"Go take a rope and hang yourself!" joked the company commander watching senior warrant officer Pashkov's diarrhea-induced sufferings. "At least you'll die like a man and not a shit fountain!"
Pashkov was the first to fall ill, and for some time it was suspected that he had been the vector. However, it turned out that three soldiers from the last contingent of newcomers had been afflicted for several days now. Rookies Myshkovsky, Sychev and Chirikov had simply kept their mouths shut out of military stupidity and ignorance of local diseases.
From their arrival in Fergana, efforts were made to instill elementary rules of basic personal hygiene into the thick workers-and-peasant skulls of the recruits but as a rule, with meager results. Only after having gone through the furnace of hepatitis, typhoid and dysentery does the rookie understand that hands must be washed with soap, and not just once a day, that only boiled water should be drunk - and if that's not available, it is better to remain thirsty. That it is not advisable to use someone else's spoon, that mess tins should be scrubbed until they shine, that if an Afghan fly settles on your miserable portion of yellow, runny butter, you should think a dozen times before sticking it down your throat, that you should not eat anything that comes to hand however hungry you might be. Young soldiers are always hungry. They will gape at the fruits and vegetables displayed on Afghan stalls, they will pick up a fallen unripe tomato from a puddle and eat it after a cursory wipe against their sleeve, eat their fill of free water-melon, they will drink from a mountain stream without a second thought if they're thirsty.
PFC Prokhorov saw private Chirikov hanging around near the latrine, and called him over:
"Hey! 'Buchenwald strongman'! Come here!"
"What?" asked Chirikov listlessly.
"Not 'what', but report properly!"
"Comrade PFC, private Chirikov reporting as ordered."
"Go get me a bottle of soda."
"What about money?"
"Don't you have any of your own?! What are you gaping at?! I'll square up with you later." Prokhorov was a small man, but very agile. He took up a karate stance and landed Chirikov a shrewd blow on the neck with the edge of his palm. Chirikov yelped and shuffled off in the direction of the store. Junior sergeant Titov gave a snort of laughter.
"Think you're a regular Bruce Lee, don't you?"
"If I wasn't sick, I'd show you the meaning of sparring!"
"You already have." Titov waved dismissively. "While you're flinging your fucking feet around in the air, I'll give you such a whack on the head you won't know what hit you."
Myshkovsky and Sychev emerged from the latrine. Myshkovsky had been nicknamed "Virgin" because his parents had conceived him somewhere in the steppes of Kazakhstan, while they were turning up its virgin soil. They must have been overcome with joy at their own inhuman efforts. The mother died soon after giving birth, and the father took to drink. So Myshkovsky had been called "the orphan" in his time, but eventually "Myshara" was the nickname that stuck. The other one, Sychev, freckle-faced and with prominent ears, gloried in the nickname "Odessa" in honor of the fine Black Sea city in which he was born.
"Myshara! Odessa! Get your asses over here! Going to the can a bit too often, aren't you?" Hounding the youngsters was a favorite pastime of Prokhorov's. He used Chirikov as a target for his karate tricks, but did not try that with Sychev, who was strongly built and quite up to taking on Titov. However, there was nothing to stop Prokhorov from having his fun verbally. "What the hell do you do in there? Read the papers?"
"What does everyone usually do there?" snarled Sychev.
"Jerking off?!"
"No!" chorused the recruits indignantly.
"Don't wait for policemen in the night!" quoted Prokhorov aggressively. "How does the rest of the rhyme go?"
"Jerking off you'll feel all right," replied Myshkovsky and Sychev obediently. "Dismissed!" Prokhorov ended the lesson - warrant officer Pashkov was trotting purposefully toward the latrine.
Like any warrant officer, Pashkov was convinced that he was craftier than everyone else. His craftiness was expressed in his refusal to accept medical methods of treatment. Having done his share of dashes to the latrine, Pashkov realized that the microbe would not just go away but had taken up firm residence in his guts. So Pashkov acquired a three-litre jar of pure alcohol, locked himself in the store-room and did not emerge for three whole days. Drinking himself stupid, he would snore like a pig, whistling, snorting and grunting.
Nobody dreamed of bothering him, simply every so often they would knock on the door and offer to bring him some tea. True, some of the soldiers maintained, and lieutenant Sharagin personally attested that, at night, when everyone else was asleep, Pashkov would emerge from the seclusion of the store-room and wander around the camp like the ghost from "Hamlet", heading in the general direction of the latrine. He didn't recognize or even seem to see anybody, did not react to human speech, and bore no resemblance to the real senior warrant officer Pashkov, the terror of the troops.
Everybody felt sorry for Pashkov except the company commander. Morgultsev knew Pashkov from service back home, so when lieutenant Sharagin, suffering dysentery himself, remarked that it was a pity about poor old Pashkov, looks as though the bug could kill him and wasn't it time for him to be shipped off to hospital, Morgultsev snapped:
"The fuck he's sick! He's just gone on a bender with the booze! Happens with him regularly, once every quarter! " Calming down, he added:
"Still, it happens even more frequently with some of the warrant officers - just like women's monthlies..." Morgultsev left Pashkov alone - he knew that he would come around and cure himself soon. Just like a wounded animal going off alone to hide in the forest, Pashkov had hidden himself on the store-room and closed himself off from anyone, fighting the illness or depression.
On the third day, an explosion shook the store-room. The explosion was not all that big, it sounded rather like the detonation of a fuse, but the whole company took fright, thinking that maybe Pashkov had gone off his head from too much drink and had decided to finish off not just the germs in his intestines or the depression which tortured his mysterious Russian soul, but himself as well.
The door was broken down. Inside they found the senior warrant officer in the grip of dementia tremens and an empty three-litre jar.
Pashkov was half-sitting, half-lying on a pile of kit-bags and greatcoats, whiskers quivering and his eyes rolling around madly. He was pointing at a small crack in the floor from which, he maintained, scorpions, phalanges and snakes were crawling out to get him, and that he had disposed of some of them by throwing a lighted grenade fuse down the hole. Just in case, he was gripping a Makarov pistol in his hands to shoot down any "creeping bastards" that might venture near him.
"Take the gun away, and get him out of here! Cured himself, has, he, stupid moron!" rapped out Morgultsev.
By some miraculous means the raw alcohol helped Pashkov get rid of the Afghan bug and depression, so that a week later he was vainly trying to convince his commanding officer that he had not been malingering, that he really had been ill and -God forbid! - should comrade captain succumb to the same curse he, Pashkov, bore no ill will and would help and explain, as a specialist in the field, how and where to get a three-litre jar of the necessary medicine. A smaller dose, according to him, was insufficient to kill the offending microbes.
Unlike Pashkov, lieutenant Sharagin suffered longer, but resorted to tablets instead of downing spirit. As an educated man, he did not believe that the disease could be expunged by alcohol alone. Rising for the umpteenth time in the middle of the night, sweating and sleepy, he hurried outside.
Trying to breathe as infrequently as possible he studied a scrap of "Red Star", then crushed it up in order to soften it a little. The central Soviet press and the regional paper "Frunzevets" were frequently read in the regiment, and not only during painful sessions in the latrine. They read about events in the capitalist world, in countries where socialism reigned triumphant, about Party and Komsomol congresses, laughed at the writers of reports on Afghanistan. But should any outsider say the same, they would all rise up as one in defense and swear that every word written about international help was God's truth, and how, for example, that APC got blown up because the lieutenant spared the Afghans' crops because he remembered his own collective farm and the fields of home, the hard labor of the peasants, how he had once dreamed of becoming a tractor driver but went to military school instead, knowing that there is such a profession as the defense of one's motherland: recalling all this, the lieutenant chose to travel along the road rather than across fields, a road which the spooks had mined, of course....
In any case, if you look at things squarely, it's not right to criticize the Soviet Army; any story, any garbage in the press, any feat of courage, be it true or invented, raises morale.
...let the inventions continue to appear in the press...let people remember that there is a war on... thought Sharagin.
... one must pretend that the concoctions in the papers are true ... reporters come here on tours of duty in order to make a name for themselves ... like that one, what's his name? Lobanov ... some writer! ... made up a truckload of malarkey ... made himself famous but mentioned us paratroopers, too...
The night, dressed in a myriad of spiky stars, unfolded itself above the regiment. The paras slept quietly, if you did not count the humming of the diesel generators located on the edge of the camp, and to which everyone had grown accustomed.
Sharagin stopped to clear his lungs of the acrid smell of human excrement and lit a cigarette, enjoying the silky moon and the scattered multitude of stars. His insides squirmed, he felt like a limp dish rag which had been thoroughly wrung, no strength at all, he felt weakness filling him. From time to time, tracers would rise into the sky - one of the sentries must be relieving the boredom of standing watch.
...like the overburdened souls of people who were sick of war, the tracers shot silently skyward in order to lose themselves in the skies above Kabul, hoping to flee this city and this country...
It also seemed as if
...the distant stars were fragments of broken souls, scattered throughout the cosmos; winking in the moonlight, still hoping for something...
Back in the command barracks, he spent a long time turning from side to side, bed springs creaking. When drowsiness finally began to muddle his thoughts about family and slide into sleep, a shot sounded practically under the window and broken glass seemed to cry out.
Zhenka Chistyakov was off his bunk and on the floor even before the bullet which smashed the window became embedded in the wall.
Guessing at once that this was no enemy shot and that there would be no more, he raced outside as he was, in sateen drawers, hastily shoving his feet into sneakers.
"Bastards!" he yelled. "They want to kill me!"
By the time Sharagin and the other officers emerged and a mob of soldiers, also awakened by the shot gathered nearby, Zhenka had managed to give the sentry a good thrashing. The unsuccessful suicide did nothing to shield himself from the blows. Dressed in helmet and bullet-proof vest, he tried to explain between punches that it had been an accident, he hadn't been intending to fire, but simply tripped. He lied, sweated, and tried to justify himself.
...probably decided to shoot himself in the hand, then got scared at the last moment...
Muddled thought reflected on the army-tried features of the soldier.
"Far as I'm concerned, it would be better if you'd killed yourself!" grated Chistyakov, continuing to beat up the soldier. "Only quietly and further from the barracks. But no, you had to go and do it under my window, you sonofabitch! `'
...the "grandpas" must have really gotten at him...or he doesn't want to serve in Afghanistan...
thought Sharagin, yawning.
...hope they don't drive Myshkovsky over the line ... I'll have to answer for him, after all...
whispered a voice in his head.
The sentry looked very much like Myshkovsky, and Sharagin experienced an ambivalent feeling of pity and irritation. The soldier looked awkward, was obviously not too bright and clumsy.
The helmet had fallen off his head, and his ears stuck out funnily - like two halves of a broken plate, which someone had pasted to his head. He wore his uniform badly, but then nothing would have looked a good fit on a body like that.
...anger arises from a desire to gain revenge ... the weaker the man, the more he is oppressed, and when one who has been slighted gets a chance to rise, he takes his revenge on the new boys - a vicious circle...
... time to sleep ... let others sort out this mess... after all, he's not from our company...
"Let's go back to bed, Zhenka," suggested Sharagin after they both smoked a cigarette,
"How can anyone sleep after that?"
He could understand Chistyakov. Afghanistan has made him so harsh and fiery.
... who can say what I'll be like at the end ...
Chistyakov had served twenty three months in Afghanistan and for the past eight weeks had been hanging around waiting to be replaced.
He had stopped going to the mess hall and lived off canned food, bread and tea. From time to time the girls in the goods depot would give him a snack out of gratitude for his songs and attentions, especially the mysterious blonde nobody had ever seen but who, according to Zhenka, was crazy about him.
"She though I was going to marry her," confided Zhenka to his friends.
"How's that?" queried Sharagin. "You've already got a family,"
"That's right. That's what I told her, if I didn't have a family, I'd take you to the ends of the earth.
"And what did she say?" chipped in Pashkov.
"She kept crying, damn it..."
"That's a bad sign," warned Morgultsev. "We'll be going into combat soon, and women in war bring bad luck..."
Chistyakov spent the entire following day lying on his bunk. He even refused to go into town when the opportunity came up, just lay there in silence.
"Where's senior lieutenant Chistyakov?" demanded the commander, running his eyes over the troops.
"His lordship's resting.." replied Pashkov, smoothing his luxuriant whiskers.
I see, down for safe keeping..." The captain knew this mood well. This was the state of many awaiting replacements. The Lord helps those who help themselves . Should the spooks start shelling, even the most seasoned and brave soldiers would race for cover without a second thought. Who wants to be killed a few days before going back home?
"Fuck! Where the hell is he?" moaned Chistyakov. "Where is that fucking son of a no-good bitch?"
"Enjoying his leave," replied Pashkov, fueling the flames. "Or maybe he's drunk as a skunk in Tashkent. Putting down one beer after another..."
"Just wait and see," prophesied the commander. "Right now Chistyakov's cursing his replacement with every name he can think of, but the moment the guy arrives he'll treat him like a china doll. We've been through all that..."
Chistyakov did not go to dinner. He threw a tin can against the floor with all his strength:
"... so the microbes inside will drop dead!" Then he polished off a 0.75 bottle of vodka and sat at the table, smoking, blowing smoke through his nostrils and confiding bitterly to the sardines floating in the tin can. Finally, after baring his soul, he declared: "... a cow stands on a bridge and shits, and man lives and dies just like that..." When Sharagin turned up Zhenka, quite drunk, said: "Look, you like writing down all sorts of crap. So I'll tell you the paradox of the Russian soul: steal a crate of vodka, sell it, and then spend the money on drink."
"Lay off." Sharagin stretched out on his bunk, thinking about writing a few lines home.
"What's the date today, Zhenka?"
"The forty-fourth of April."
"There's no such thing."
"Yes there is."
"In April," retorted Sharagin who had not touched a drop of alcohol either yesterday or today, "there are thirty days."
"I was supposed to be replaced in April. And until my replacement arrives, it'll stay fucking April!"
Despite his bad mood and the vodka, despite his avoidance of duty and short-distance sorties from the camp, Chistyakov was the first when it came to combat duty, and infected others with his attitude. Ready for war.
"Now that everyone's run out of shit, it's time to get down to business, " he barked at the "elephants." 'And I don't want to hear another fucking word about someone not feeling well," he bellowed left and right.
Zhenka shone like a lamp in anticipation of battle, the risk, the fury of combat. It's not frightening for an officer to die in battle. What is frightening or, rather, it would be a shame, to catch a bullet or shell fragment from some stupid act.
The soldiers' lot was no bowl of cherries, either. They waited to be demobbed no less keenly, they'd spent a year and a half plugging away without discharge or leave, but, unlike the officers, they had no choice and could not show their displeasure. Chistyakov barked at everyone, testing the livers of the "elephants" with his fist.
"A whack on the liver is as good as a mug of beer!"
Chistyakov was all afire to go to war, went around as if in a haze, forgot all about his replacement, cleaned his rifle, got his gear together, honed his combat knife.
"I sure don't envy the spooks," remarked Pashkov, shaking his head. "Where'd he suddenly get all that energy?" He was checking out the fixings of the machine gun on the turret of an armored vehicle.
"Why are you so glum, Sharagin?"
"I had a bad dream..."
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