Zinky Boys Read Free Page A

he’s dumb. I can see hospital pyjamas under his army jacket. I ask him something but he just writes his name: ‘Vanechka, Vanechka … ’ I remember that name, Vanechka, so clearly. His face reminds me of a young lad I’d talked to that afternoon, who kept saying over and over again: ‘Mum’s waiting for me at home.’
    For the last time we drive through Kabul’s dead little streets, past the familiar posters adorning the city centre: ‘Communism — Our Bright Future’: ‘Kabul — City of Peace’; ‘People and Party United’. Our posters, printed on our presses, and our Lenin standing here with his hand raised …
    At the airport we came across a film-crew we knew. They’d been filming the loading of the ‘black tulips’, as they’re knownhere. They wouldn’t look into our eyes as they described how the dead ‘sometimes have to be dressed in ancient uniforms, even jodhpurs and so on from the last century; sometimes, when there aren’t even enough old uniforms available, they’re put in their coffins completely naked. The coffins are made of shabby old wood, held together with rusty nails. Casualties waiting to be shipped are put in cold storage, where they give off a stench of rotting wild boar.’
    Who’ll believe me if I write of such things.
    15 May 1988
    My calling as a writer involves me in talking to many people and examining many documents. Nothing is more fantastic than reality. I want to evoke a world not bound by the laws of ordinary verisimilitude but fashioned in my own image. My aim is to describe feelings about the war, rather than the war itself. What are people thinking? What do they want, or fear? What makes them happy? What do they remember?
    All we know about this war, which has already lasted twice as long as World War II, is what ‘they’ consider safe for us to know. We have been protected from seeing ourselves as we really are, and from the fear that such understanding would bring. ‘Russian writers have always been more interested in truth than beauty,’ wrote Nikolai Berdyaev. Our whole life is spent in the search for truth, especially nowadays, whether at our desks, or on the streets, at demos, even at dinner parties. And what is it we literary people cogitate upon so interminably? It all comes down to the question, Who are we, and where are we going? And it dawns on us that nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves. We’ve come to believe the message, drummed into us for so long, that we are superlative in every way, the finest, the most just, the most honest. And whoever dares express the slightest doubt is guilty of treachery, the one unforgivable sin!
    From a history book I’ve been reading:
    â€˜On 20 January 1801 a Cossack expeditionary force, under the command of Vassily Orlov, was ordered to spearhead the conquestof India. They were given one month to reach Orenburg [in the Urals], and a further three to gain the Indus River via Bukhara and Khiva. These 30,000 Cossacks crossed the Volga and penetrated deep into the Kazakh steppes.’ †
    From Pravda, 7 February 1989:
    â€˜The almond trees were in blossom in Termez [a Soviet town on the Afghan border]; but even without so generous a gift from Nature the inhabitants of this ancient town could never forget these February days as the most joyful and splendid of their lives.
    â€˜An orchestra played as the Nation welcomed the return of her sons. Our boys were coming home after fulfilling their international obligations. For ten years Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan repaired, rebuilt and constructed hundreds of schools, technical colleges, over thirty hospitals and a similar number of nursery schools, some 400 blocks of flats and 35 mosques. They sank dozens of wells and dug nearly 150 kilometres of irrigation ditches and canals. They were also engaged in guarding