Read Online Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich - Free Book Online Page A

it was like an electric shock. I fired a burst, then went to look and saw this strong, goodlooking bloke lying there. ‘You can come with us on recce patrol!’ the lads said. That was the highest compliment they knew and I was as pleased as Punch. They also liked the fact that I didn’t loot the body, except for the gun. On the way back, though, they kept an eye on me, because I started retching and vomiting. But I felt OK. When I got home I went to the fridge and ate as much as I’d normally get through in a week. Then I broke down. They gave me a bottle of vodka — which I drank down without getting drunk — and realised with horror that if I hadn’t shot straight my mother would have been sent a ‘200’.
    I wanted to be in a war, but not like this one. Heroic World War II, that’s what I wanted.
    Where did all the hatred come from? There’s a simple answer to that. They killed your mate. You’d shared a bowl of chow, and there he was, lying next to you, burnt to a cinder. So you shot back like crazy. We stopped thinking about the big questions, like who started it all and who was to blame? That reminds me of ourfavourite joke on the subject. Question to Radio Armenia: †† ‘What is the definition of politics?’ Radio Armenia replies: ‘Have you heard a mosquito piss? That’s the definition, except politics is even thinner.’
    The government’s busy with politics while here you see blood all around you and you go crazy. You see burnt skin roll up like a laddered nylon stocking. It’s especially horrible when they kill the animals. Once they ambushed a weapons caravan. The humans and mules were shot separately. Both lots kept quiet and waited for death — except one wounded mule, which screeched like metal scratching metal …
    This place has changed the way I look and speak. The other day some of us girls were talking about a bloke we knew and one of us said: ‘Silly idiot! He had a row with his sergeant and deserted. He should have shot him and they’d have put it down as killed in action.’ That just shows how life here coarsens us all, even the women.
    The fact is many officers assumed it was the same here as back home, that they could hit and insult their men as much as they liked. Quite a few who thought that way have been found dead in battle, with a bullet in the back. The perfect murder!
    Some of the boys in the mountain outposts don’t see anybody for months at a time, except a helicopter three times a week. I went to visit one once. A captain came up to me. ‘Miss, would you take off your cap? I haven’t seen a woman for a whole year.’ All the men came out of the trenches, just to have a look at my long hair. Later, during a bombardment, one of them protected me with his own body. I’ll remember him as long as I live. He didn’t know me, but he risked his life simply because I was a woman. How could you ever forget something like that? In ordinary life you’d never find out if a man was prepared to give his life for yours.
    In these conditions good men get better and the bad get even worse. During that same bombardment one soldier shouted some obscenity at me and a few minutes later he was dead, his brainblown to bits before my eyes. I started shaking like in an attack of malaria. Even though I’d seen plenty of body-bags, and bodies wrapped in foil like big toys, I never shook as much as I did at that moment. In fact, I couldn’t calm down all the time I was up there.
    I never saw any of us girls wearing military medals, even when we’d won them honestly. Once someone wore the one ‘for Military Merit’ but everyone laughed and said, ‘For sexual merit’, because they knew you could win a medal for a night with the battalion CO.
    Why are there so many women here? Do you think they could do without them? Certain officers I can think of would simply go mad.