“But what’s wrong?” I ask. “Is it an ambush?”
I’m joking, of course.
“We mustn’t make him angry,” Rinat says softly, continuing his distracting maneuver. Like well-trained spies, we quickly, deftly, and without fuss change direction.
“Whom mustn’t we annoy?” I inquire when Rinat raises his head with a sigh of relief, indicating that the danger has passed.
“Petrov, the deputy commanding officer.”
Our maneuvering is explained by the fact that Petrov had been driving toward us. His car had pulled up to the fine new block of apartments because that is where Petrov lives. Only after he had disappeared inside did Rinat relax and continue our stroll around the compound. We kept ending up back at the fine building, which Rinat gazed upon with longing and envy.
To tell the truth, I am perplexed. I know a little about Rinat’s combat record, his fearlessness, and I am amazed. What is it, I wonder, that he fears most? Death?
“No, I have learned to live with death. I don’t mean to boast.”
“Being captured?”
“Yes, I am afraid of that, of course, because I know I would be tortured. I have seen it happen. But I am not all that afraid of being captured.”
“What then?”
“Probably peace, civilian life. It’s something I know nothing about. I am not prepared for it.”
Rinat is thirty-seven. All he has done in his life is to take part in wars. His body is covered in wounds. He has peptic and duodenal ulcers, and his nerves are in tatters. He has constant, agonizing pain in his joints and cerebral spasms after several injuries to the head.
Recently, the major decided it was time to settle down, to come back from the wars to our ordinary world. He found he knew absolutely nothing about it. For example, who would give him a place to live? Surely he deserved a flat for all he had been through defending the interests of the state. Or some money?
As soon as Rinat started asking Petrov about such things, it became apparent that he could expect nothing. Rinat concluded that while he had been carrying out special government missions across mountains, countries, and continents, his state had needed him and had rewarded him with medals and orders. As soon as the major’s health gave out and he decided to try to settle down, though, he found there was nothing waiting for him, and the military hierarchy was simply going to turn him out on the street. The army was even going to expel him from the squalid nook in the officers’ barracks where he and his son were presently sleeping.
Rinat has a son, Edik, whom he is bringing up on his own. The boy’s mother died several years ago, and for a long time Edik lived alone in the officers’ barracks, waiting for his father to come back from numerous wars and important combat missions.
“I know how to kill an enemy so he doesn’t make a sound,” Rinat tells me. “I can climb a mountain swiftly and silently and take out those who are occupying it. I am an excellent rock climber and mountaineer. I can ‘read’ mountains from twigs and bushes and tell who is there and where they are hiding. I have a feel for mountains—they say it is a natural gift—but I am incapable of getting an apartment. I am incapable of getting anything at all in civilian life.”
Before me is a helpless professional killer trained by the state. There are many like him now. The state sends people off to yet another war; they live in the midst of war for years, return and do not know what peaceful life is with its law and order. They take to drinking, join gangs, become hit men, and their new masters pay them big money to take out those they say need to be murdered in the interests of the state.
And the state? It doesn’t give a damn. Under Putin it has effectively ceased to interest itself in officers who have returned from the wars. It seems as if the state is actively engaged in ensuring that there are as many highly trained professional killers in criminal gangs as possible.
“Is that what you are thinking of going into, Rinat?”
“No, I don’t want to, but if Edik and I find ourselves on the street, I can’t rule it out. I can only do what I am trained to do.”
Rinat and I finally squelch through the mud and slush to a dismal shack. Called the “three-story building,” it is the officers’ barracks. We go up to the second floor, and behind a peeling door is a squalid, spartan room.
In his entire life the major has never had a home to call his own. First there was the orphanage in the Urals. Then there was the barracks of the military college he enrolled in from the orphanage. Later still, garrison hostels alternating with tents when he was on active service. He has been in the army sixteen years, a rolling stone under military oath. For the last eleven years, Rinat has moved constantly from one combat mission to the next. It is not a life that has led him to acquire possessions.
“But I was happy,” the major says. “I never wanted to stop fighting. I thought it would last forever.”
All that Rinat has acquired is now stored in one parachute bag. The major opens his standard-issue cupboard with an inventory number on its pathetic, battered side and shows me the bag.
“Sling it over your shoulder and go off on your next mission,” he succinctly summarizes his values.
A boy is sitting on the divan and looking at us sorrowfully: this is Edik.
I interrupt the major. “You were married, though, so you must have had a household of some kind.”
“No, we had nothing. We didn’t have time.”
While Rinat was fighting in Tadjikistan, helping President Rakhmonov to take power, he slipped away and got married in Kirghizia. The newlyweds had met during Rinat’s previous combat mission, in the city of Osh, where the young woman lived and where Rinat had been sent because a bloody conflict had broken out there between ethnic groups.
They got married right there, their passion and love flaring up amid the butchery and the pain. Rinat then presented his young wife to his commanding officer. The commanding officer shrugged and asked him to leave his wife in Osh, because, for a spy, a sweetheart was an Achilles’ heel. Rinat left his wife behind and went back to Tadjikistan to join an armed group on the frontier.
One day his commanding officer told him that he had a son and that his wife had named him Edik. Later still, in June 1995, Rinat’s young wife, a student at the local conservatory, was killed by people who had discovered who she was married to. She had just turned twenty-one that day and had been on her way to take her second-year exams.
At first, Edik lived with his grandmother in Kirghizia. The boy was too little to live in officers’ hostels, and in any case Rinat rarely spent the night even in the grim, unswept rooms the state provided for him. He was still engaged in secret operations and was at large in the mountains of our country. He was severely wounded twice more and spent periods in various hospitals.
“Even so, I did not want a different life,” Rinat says, “but Edik was growing up.”
The time finally came when he decided to collect his sons, and, after that, Edik stayed with his grandmother only when Rinat was away on six-month military missions.
We are sitting in their cold, dismal little room. Edik is a quiet boy with bright eyes that see everything. He is very grown up. He talks only when his father goes out and only when he is asked a question: the son of a spy, in a word. He understands that his father is going through a difficult period now, and that this is why, in the next school year, he wants to send Edik to the cadet officers’ college. But the boy does not like this idea.
“I want to live at home,” he says calmly and in a very manly way, without any suggestion of whining. Nevertheless he repeats it several times: “I want to live at home, at home.”