Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich Read Free Book Online Page B

You’ll die, not for your country but for God knows what. Can our Fatherland really send our finest sons to death for nothing? What kind of Fatherland is that?’
    Yura lied to me. He told me he’d been sent to Mongolia, but I knew: he was my son and he’d be in Afghanistan.
    While all this was going on my younger son, Gena, was called up. I didn’t worry about him — he’d grown up quite different from Yura. They quarrelled all the time. ‘Hey, Gena, you don’t read much. You never have a book in your hands, just that guitar of yours,’ Yura would say. ‘I don’t want to be like you. I want to be like everyone else,’ Gena would reply.
    They both left home and I moved into their bedroom. I lost interest in everything except their things, their books and their letters. Yura wrote about Mongolia but he muddled up his geography and I knew where he really was. Day after day, night after night, I brooded over the past, and cut myself into little pieces with the knowledge that I myself had sent him there. No words, no music can convey that agony to you.
    Then, one day, strangers came to the door and I knew from their faces that they were bringing bad news. I stepped back intothe flat. There was one last, terrible, hope: ‘Is it Gena?’ They wouldn’t look at me but I was still prepared to give them one son to save the other. ‘Is it Gena?’
    â€˜No, it’s Yura’, one of them said, very quietly.
    I can’t carry on any longer, I just can’t. I’ve been dying for two years now. I’m not ill, but I’m dying. My whole body is dead. I didn’t burn myself on Red Square and my husband didn’t tear up his party card and throw the bits in their faces. I suppose we’re already dead but nobody knows. Even we don’t know …
    A Military Adviser
    â€˜I’ll forget it all … in time.’ That’s what I told myself. It’s a taboo subject in our family. My wife went grey at forty. My daughter used to have long hair but wears it short now. She used to be such a good sleeper we had to pull her pigtails to wake her up during the night bombardments in Kabul but not any more.
    Now, four years later, I’m desperate to talk. Yesterday evening, for example, some friends of ours dropped in, and I couldn’t stop talking. I got out the photo album and showed a few slides. Helicopters hovering over a village, a wounded man being laid on a stretcher, with his leg next to him, still in its trainer, POWs sentenced to death gazing innocently into the camera lens — they were dead ten minutes later … Allah Akbar — Allah is great!
    I looked round and realised the men were having a smoke on the balcony, the women had retreated to the kitchen, and only their children were sitting listening to me. Teenagers. They were interested. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I just want to talk. Why now, suddenly? So that I’ll never forget …
    I can’t describe how things were over there or what I felt about them at the time. Come back in another four years, perhaps I’ll be able to then. And ten years from now everything may look completely different, the picture may have shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.
    I remember a kind of anger. Resentment. Why should I have to go? Why is this happening to me? Still, I coped with the pressure, I didn’t break, and that was satisfying in itself. I remember getting ready to go, worrying about tiny details like what knife to take, which razor … Then I was impatient to be off, to meet the unknown while I was still on a high. I was shaking and sweating. Everybody feels that way, ask anyone who’s been through it. As the plane landed I was hit by a sense of relief and excitement at the same time: this was the real thing, we’d see and touch and live it.
    I recall three Afghans, chatting about something or other, laughing. A dirty