Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich Read Free Book Online Page A

ideals but not real life. And, after living for so many years away from the Fatherland, I too thought that life was a matter of ideals. Well, we went back to live in our old home town, Chernovtsi, and Yura attended Army College. At two o’clock one night the door-bell rang — and there was Yura on the door step.
    â€˜Is it you, son? Do you know how late it is?’ He was standing there in the rain, wet through.
    â€˜Mum, I just wanted to tell you — I’m finding life hard. Allthose high ideals you taught me, they just don’t exist. Where did you get them all from? How can I carry on living?’
    I sat with him all night in the kitchen. What could I tell him? I told him yet again that our Soviet life was wonderful and our people were good. I believed it. He listened to me in silence and in the morning went back to college.
    I often told him: ‘Yura, give up the army. Go to university. That’s where you belong. I don’t understand why you have to torture yourself like this.’
    He wasn’t happy with his choice of career, which had been a bit of an accident. He’d have made a good historian — he was a natural scholar and lived for his books. ‘What a wonderful country Ancient Greece must have been’, I remember him saying once. However, in his last year at school he went to Moscow for a few days in the winter holidays to stay with my brother, a retired colonel. Yura told him that he wanted to go to university to read philosophy. His uncle’s reaction was this: ‘You’re an honest lad, Yura. It’s hard to be a philosopher in Russia at this time. You’ll have to lie to yourself and to others. If you try to tell the truth you’ll end up behind bars or in a lunatic asylum.’
    The following spring Yura decided to become a soldier. ‘Mum, I’ve made up my mind so don’t try to change it, I’m going into the army,’ he said.
    I’d seen the zinc coffins in the army compound, but that was when Yura was thirteen and my other son, Gena, just a little boy. I hoped the war would be over by the time they were grown up. Could it possibly drag on that long? But, as someone said at Yura’s wake: ‘It lasted ten years, as long as his schooldays.’
    It seemed no time at all before it was the evening of the graduation ball, and my son was an officer. I still hadn’t taken it in that Yura would have to go away. I couldn’t imagine life without him. ‘Where will you be sent?’ I asked him.
    â€˜I’m putting in for Afghanistan.’
    â€˜Yura! How could you?’
    â€˜Mum, that’s the way you brought me up, so don’t try and rewrite history now. You were right: all these degenerates I’ve come across recently — they’re nothing to do with me or mycountry, I’m going to Afghanistan to show them that there are higher things in life than a fridge full of meat.’
    He wasn’t the only one. Many other boys applied to go to Afghanistan, all from the best families — their fathers were heads of collective farms, teachers and so on …
    What could I tell my own son? That the Fatherland didn’t need him? That those people he was trying to ‘show’ assumed, and would go on assuming, that he was going to Afghanistan because he was after imported goods, foreign currency, medals and promotion? For people like that Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was a fanatic rather than an ideal; they couldn’t conceive that a human being could be capable of such heroism.
    I can’t remember everything I said and did. I admitted what I’d been afraid to admit to myself; I don’t know whether to think of it as abject surrender or the beginning of wisdom.
    â€˜Listen, Yurochka, life isn’t the way I’ve always told you it is. If you tell me you’re going to Afghanistan I’ll go to the middle of Red Square, pour petrol over myself and set myself on fire.