Read Online Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Svetlana Alexievich
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Why are women so desperate to get here? The short answerâs money. You can buy cassette-recorders, things like that, and sell them when you get home. You can earn more here in two years than in half a lifetime at home.
Look, weâre talking honestly, woman to woman, right? They sell themselves to the local traders right in those little shops of theirs, in the small store-rooms at the back, and they are small , I can tell you! You go to the shops and the kids follow you, shouting âKhanum [woman], jig-jig ⦠â and point you to the store-room. Our officers pay for women with foreign currency cheques, in fact theyâre called chekists â¡â¡
Want to hear a joke? Zmei Gorynych, Kashei Bessmertny and Baba Yaga §§ meet at a transportation centre here. Theyâre all off to defend the revolution. Two years later they meet again on the way home. Zmei Gorynych has only one head left (the others have been shot off), Kashei Bessmertny is alive only because sheâs immortal, but Baba Yaga is looking marvellous in the latest French fashions. Sheâs in a wonderful mood and says sheâs signing on for another year. âYou must be mad, Baba Yaga!â say the others, but she replies: âBack home Iâm Baba Yaga, but over here Iâm Vasilis Prekrasnaya.â ¶¶
Yes, people leave here morally broken, expecially the ordinary soldiers, the eighteen and nineteen-year-olds. They see how everything is for sale here, how a woman will sell herself for a crate, no, for a couple of tins of corned beef. Then they go home, these boys, and look at their wives and sweethearts in the same way. Itâs not surprising they donât behave themselves too well. Theyâre used to deciding things with the barrel of a gun.
Once I saw a local selling melons at 100 Afganis each. Some of our boys reckoned that was too much, but he refused to go down â so one of them shot up the whole pile of melons with his machine-gun. When that boy gets back home just you try to tread on his foot in the bus or not let him push in front of you in the queue â¦
I used to dream that Iâd go home, take the little camp-bed into the garden and lie under the apple-trees, but these days the thought frightens me. You hear that a lot, especially now weâre being withdrawn in large numbers. âIâm scared to go home,â people say. Why? Simple! Weâll get home and everything will have changed in those two years, different fashions, music, different streets even. And a different view of the war. Weâll stick out like a sore thumb.
Sergeant-Major, Medical Instructor in a Reconnaissance Unit
I accepted the official line so completely that even now, after all Iâve read and heard, I still have a minute hope that our lives werenât entirely wasted. Itâs the self-preservation instinct at work. Before I was called up I graduated from an institute of physical culture. I did my final practical and diploma at Artek ## , where I was a group-leader. I was always intoning high-sounding phrases about the Pioneer spirit, the Pioneer sense of duty, and when I was called up I naturally volunteered for Afghanistan. The political officer gave this lecture about the international situation: he toldus that Soviet forces had forestalled the American Green Berets airborne invasion of Afghanistan by just one hour. It was so incessantly drummed into us that this was a sacred âinternational dutyâ that eventually we believed it.
I canât bear to think of the whole process now. âTake off your rose-tinted spectacles!â I tell myself. And donât forget, I didnât go out there in 1980 or 1981, but in 1986, the year after Gorbachev came to power. They were still lying then. In 1987 I was posted to Khost. We took a ridge but lost seven of our boys in the process. A group of journalists arrived from Moscow and were told that the Afghan National Army (the Greens, as
Look, weâre talking honestly, woman to woman, right? They sell themselves to the local traders right in those little shops of theirs, in the small store-rooms at the back, and they are small , I can tell you! You go to the shops and the kids follow you, shouting âKhanum [woman], jig-jig ⦠â and point you to the store-room. Our officers pay for women with foreign currency cheques, in fact theyâre called chekists â¡â¡
Want to hear a joke? Zmei Gorynych, Kashei Bessmertny and Baba Yaga §§ meet at a transportation centre here. Theyâre all off to defend the revolution. Two years later they meet again on the way home. Zmei Gorynych has only one head left (the others have been shot off), Kashei Bessmertny is alive only because sheâs immortal, but Baba Yaga is looking marvellous in the latest French fashions. Sheâs in a wonderful mood and says sheâs signing on for another year. âYou must be mad, Baba Yaga!â say the others, but she replies: âBack home Iâm Baba Yaga, but over here Iâm Vasilis Prekrasnaya.â ¶¶
Yes, people leave here morally broken, expecially the ordinary soldiers, the eighteen and nineteen-year-olds. They see how everything is for sale here, how a woman will sell herself for a crate, no, for a couple of tins of corned beef. Then they go home, these boys, and look at their wives and sweethearts in the same way. Itâs not surprising they donât behave themselves too well. Theyâre used to deciding things with the barrel of a gun.
Once I saw a local selling melons at 100 Afganis each. Some of our boys reckoned that was too much, but he refused to go down â so one of them shot up the whole pile of melons with his machine-gun. When that boy gets back home just you try to tread on his foot in the bus or not let him push in front of you in the queue â¦
I used to dream that Iâd go home, take the little camp-bed into the garden and lie under the apple-trees, but these days the thought frightens me. You hear that a lot, especially now weâre being withdrawn in large numbers. âIâm scared to go home,â people say. Why? Simple! Weâll get home and everything will have changed in those two years, different fashions, music, different streets even. And a different view of the war. Weâll stick out like a sore thumb.
Sergeant-Major, Medical Instructor in a Reconnaissance Unit
I accepted the official line so completely that even now, after all Iâve read and heard, I still have a minute hope that our lives werenât entirely wasted. Itâs the self-preservation instinct at work. Before I was called up I graduated from an institute of physical culture. I did my final practical and diploma at Artek ## , where I was a group-leader. I was always intoning high-sounding phrases about the Pioneer spirit, the Pioneer sense of duty, and when I was called up I naturally volunteered for Afghanistan. The political officer gave this lecture about the international situation: he toldus that Soviet forces had forestalled the American Green Berets airborne invasion of Afghanistan by just one hour. It was so incessantly drummed into us that this was a sacred âinternational dutyâ that eventually we believed it.
I canât bear to think of the whole process now. âTake off your rose-tinted spectacles!â I tell myself. And donât forget, I didnât go out there in 1980 or 1981, but in 1986, the year after Gorbachev came to power. They were still lying then. In 1987 I was posted to Khost. We took a ridge but lost seven of our boys in the process. A group of journalists arrived from Moscow and were told that the Afghan National Army (the Greens, as
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