Quick nervous glances flicked between us. Kolya looked as though he was about to protest but as he opened his mouth Yuri, a pale young Uzbeki conscript, broke in.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said.
Ivanovich glared around at us. ‘Good,’ he said, and a thin sarcastic smile twisted his lips. He reached beneath a seat and pulled out a bottle of vodka. From the back of the truck he took a stool and wandered away from the road.
‘What the fuck?’ Kolya said, making sure Ivanovich was well out of earshot. He turned on the young Uzbeki boy. ‘You stupid little fucker. If you’re so keen, you can go dig the hole yourself.’
‘Leave him alone, Kolya,’ I said. ‘It’s not his fault Ivanovich is such an arsehole.’
‘I was just keeping you out of trouble,’ Yuri protested. ‘If you go shooting your mouth off, he’ll be on your back again.’
‘I don’t need your help,’ Kolya snarled.
We drove a kilometre down the road and the driver pulled off into the low scrub. We took the shovels from the back of the truck and Yuri measured a large rectangle in the firm, dry earth. He subdivided the rectangle and apportioned each of us an area to dig. Kolya glowered at him. The earth was cracked and hard. The shovel bounced from the dusty surface, jarring my arm. Using the edge, it was possible to lever up small clods, which we tossed over our shoulders. Beneath the baked surface the earth was less resistant. We worked hard, dispensing with our jackets, feeling the sun beat heavily on our backs, charring the skin on our necks. We worked until every muscle strained and it seemed impossible to continue gripping the shovel, the finger muscles cramping, raw blisters rising and tearing, until our hands were pink with blood and split flesh. We dug down into the parched Uzbeki earth, and felt it rise around us like a grave, dug until all we desired was to lie on the cool earth and give ourselves to eternal rest.
When we had dug so deep the sinking sun could no longer torture us, there was a cry. We stopped and clambered out on to the sloping mounds of earth, lay on our backs and gazed into the cool blue sky. We heard the engine of the KamaZ fire, but did not look up. Yuri trotted away across the sand, turned one hundred metres away and waved the driver on. The truck rolled down the slope into the hole and we lay and waited on Yuri’s verdict.
‘I ain’t moving. I don’t give a shit, I’m not digging any more,’ Kolya said.
Yuri stood by the road, shimmering in the light of the sun, which was setting. We watched him. He did not call or indicate whether he could see the top of the truck, which was close to the edge of the hole, but came trotting slowly back across the sand towards us. We sat up and watched him approach. His pace slowed as he came close and he slouched wearily across the last twenty metres of sand, his shoulders drooping.
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘You can’t see anything.’
Kolya stood up. His face was set like concrete and his eyes flickered with fury. He slipped down the slope to where Yuri was standing, and grabbed the young Uzbeki’s dirty vest.
‘You fucker!’ Kolya spat.
‘What?’
‘Why didn’t you just call from over there?’
‘What do you mean?’
Kolya pushed Yuri back. Yuri looked at him, fearfully.
‘You know what I mean, you little arsehole.’
He jabbed Yuri hard with his fist. Yuri stumbled, raising his arms to defend himself. We watched in silence from the low mound of earth. No one had the energy to move and intervene. As Yuri fell to the ground Kolya kicked him viciously. Yuri screeched, a shrill, fearful protest.
At that moment the figure of Oleg lvanovich staggered into view, black against the setting sun. He approached slowly, weaving from side to side, stumbling occasionally in the brush. His face, we could see when he drew closer, was scarlet. He stopped when he was close to us and gazed around with an irritated but bewildered look on his face.
‘Where’s the fucking truck?’ he yelled, gaping distractedly from one face to another. ‘What the fuck have you done with it?’
‘He’s sunburnt,’ someone whispered.
‘And pissed.’
‘He must have fallen asleep in the sun.’
‘He’s probably got sunstroke.’
lvanovich staggered forward towards Kolya, who was still standing over the cowering figure of the Uzbeki conscript. He raised a finger and stabbed it against Kolya’s chest.
‘Where’s the truck?’ he snarled, and bent over and vomited on Kolya’s boots. He straightened up, but his eyeballs were floating loosely around the whites of his small eyes and a few moments later his legs gave way and he crumpled to the ground with a thud. We gathered around his supine figure, a silent, bemused crowd.
‘Is he dead?’ Yuri whispered, his voice shaking.
‘Don’t be so stupid.’
‘Better get him back to base as quick as we can.’
We loaded Ivanovich on to the back of the KamaZ and drove back to base. The sun had already set and it was dark by the time we dragged his unconscious body into the medical wing.
Word of our posting came through at the end of our period of training. All of us had heard whispered stories about Afghanistan. For the first years of the conflict the reality of the situation was kept secret by the government. Even when the zinc coffins began coming home on the planes they called black tulips, the silence was maintained. There was no suggestion on the gravestones of those first young men that they had died in battle. But as the years passed and conscripts returned to their homes after service, rumours fluttered like dark angels from ear to ear, with stories told in hushed voices of soldiers flayed, of limbs chopped from bodies, of coffins filled with earth because there was nobody left to fill the uniform of dead sons sent home.
In the faces of some the panic was visible◦– tight, pale lips and eyes that flickered rapidly from one object to the next, as if searching for something. Others disguised their fear with coarse jokes and laughter that was a little too loud.
I received a letter from Liuba the week before we left. ‘We all miss you,’ it read, ‘please take care of Kolya for me, I don’t know what I will do if anything happens to him.’ I sat on my bunk and felt dark, lonely arms enfold me. There was nobody, I thought, who would miss me if I returned home in a zinc coffin. Nevertheless, I took a pen and wrote, ‘My dear Liuba, I miss you and your laughter. Kolya is with me still and we have been posted together to Afghanistan. Do not worry about us, we are strong. I will look after Kolya and bring him home to you.’
The political instruction we received increased as the day of our departure drew nearer. Grigov, our Political Officer, harangued us in hour-long sermons about our ‘International Duty’, about the need to secure the Union’s southern border, the need to defend the peace in the territory of our friends, to defend the citizens of Afghanistan against the bandits and counter revolutionaries funded and armed by America, to build houses and hospitals, schools and roads, to build mosques and sink wells to provide clean water supplies for our friends across the border. To continue, in other words, the brave and noble work of the soldiers who had gone before us, who had begun the struggle to bring peace and revolution to Afghanistan.
‘In the kishlaks, the villages, they had no clean water. We have dug them wells,’ Grigov told us. His uniform was the neatest I had ever seen; everything about Grigov seemed well cut, neatly tailored, smart. A little thrill passed down my spine as I listened to him. The idea of giving myself wholly to some greater enterprise was exhilarating. ‘Before, the girls in Afghanistan were allowed no education,’ Grigov continued, extolling the benefits of our international aid, ‘but in the spirit of the revolution they are now allowed to go to school. The women in the villages are given medical care by our army doctors. It is your patriotic duty to build the way forward for our comrades in Afghanistan.’