All That Is Solid Melts into Air (8 page)

Chapter 6

D
awn rises over the plant and the familiar crimson sky reshapes itself. A squadron of helicopters thunder overhead and place themselves daintily on the surrounding countryside. Vygovskiy has decided to dampen the reactor core, using the helicopters to drop boron compounds—clay, dolomite, and lead—onto the site to stabilize the temperature. The substances are to be packaged and attached to small parachutes to avoid dispersion in the wind.

Nesterenko, the commanding officer, looks upwards towards the network of steel cables above the drop site, silently calculating the risks involved. He’s come directly from Afghanistan. Twelve hours earlier he had been stationed in a battleground, and it’s obvious he would rather remain in a tangible conflict than be placed in this alien landscape battling chemical releases. The hazards would make each passing incredibly dangerous for his pilots: navigation through these wires will be intricate. Sheets of lead have been transported in, and these will have to be secured to the underside of the helicopters to protect them from the powerful blasts of radiation. There can be no predicting what effect this would have on the stability of the craft. Had he designed the exercise to test the expertise of his men, he couldn’t have devised anything more difficult.

Soldiers are spread wide across the next field attaching tiny parachutes to the cloth packages that will be dropped. Their uniforms are combat-worn; scuffed and ripped with details such as buttons or badges missing.

Grigory and Vasily ask to be included on one of the initial flights. They have been soldiers too; they know how these men think and they understand that having members of the official delegation on board will serve as an expression of solidarity with the troops, reassuring them and anchoring their leadership through more difficult times to come. The colonel advises against it, but they insist.

When the first helicopter is sent up, the whole field stops and stares, watching it thread its way through the smoke. A cheer rises up when the packages are dropped.

DURING THE SIX
months of their military service, the two friends spent countless nights on their own, supposedly learning battle-simulation tactics but in reality just being cold and wet and more than a little homesick. There were many days when they were sent from the base with a map and compass and a radio with a faulty connection to dig in for a few nights. Vasily called these the filler nights, when the commanding officers obviously hadn’t planned any training activities, so they just sent the recruits out into the wilds to give themselves a break.

Grigory and Vasily carried their Ustavs, making sure the pages never got wet, and they set about memorizing every page, which was more an ideological ambition on the part of their commanding officers, but they were still young men, both eighteen, and they had a burning intention to do this well. They concentrated on the sections they were most often quizzed on: the sections on uniform and dress and appearance. They could both still quote copious amounts of the text—
The fly of the trousers shall hang at a perpendicular angle to the waistband. The teeth of the zip shall remain free of foreign bodies and should be attended to biweekly with a toothbrush. The crease of the trouser should begin at the midpoint of the thigh and not deviate in its line to the end of the leg
—and they indulged in recalling it sometimes, on drunken evenings. Vasily’s wife, Margarita, became so familiar with their incantations that when she heard the first words she’d lift the dishes from the table, carrying them to the sink as an amused rebuke.

When the friends met, they both had a year of medical school behind them and their brains had been attuned to learning difficult Latinate terms, so their Ustav was relatively straightforward by comparison. But all their learning never improved their situation. When they stood to attention, their sergeant would still find flaws or would invent some. And their knowledge, their readiness with an answer, often made them look arrogant, and so after they’d waded through the first sections they skimmed past the rest, happy with a more generalized knowledge, more knowing now, more aware of the absurdities of military practice and decorum. These were all the nuances they’d picked up before their training turned to hand-to-hand combat, and this created a new phase of study where they’d test each other’s technical accuracy by striking the poses captured by the line-drawing figures in the pages, imitating also their facial expressions, the nonchalant gaze or cold-blooded fury of these basic illustrations. Laughing at the earnestness of their former selves.

THEY WERE FRIENDS
immediately. They spoke their first words to each other as they stood in line in the reception yard of the military base, while the attending sergeant shouted to all the newly disembarked recruits through a megaphone. They looked like all the others. They wore rags, just as their cousins and neighbours had told them to, knowing their clothes would be pitched away in a matter of hours, replaced by sharply pressed fatigues. Some men, the kolkhoz boys with their hoary, farm-worn fingers, had traces of cow shit on theirs. Others were wearing woolen sweaters they had long outgrown, the material stretched across the camber of their overdeveloped chests.

The sergeants had boarded the buses and welcomed the men cordially, then screamed at them to get in formation behind the painted lines in the yard. Even though they had all been warned about this transformation, to see it in action was an incredible sight, a man switching effortlessly and immediately from a warm, friendly demeanour to a demonic intensity.

After Grigory and Vasily had collected their uniforms and boots, they were posted together in the same barracks, where they eventually alighted upon the subject of medical school, a link between them that was both a surprise and a consolation, and later, when they realized they were both from Kostroma, their friendship was cemented.

There were many times during those months that Grigory suspected his lungs might explode from the intensity of the running. Times when his muscles couldn’t lift his body to a full push-up position, hours when a small stone would scurry its way inside his boot and lie there, at the bottom of each stride, until his foot swelled up and it took all his strength not to scream with the intensity of the pain.

Bodies were pushed in other ways; beatings were handed out, often in front of the whole battalion. A sergeant would pull someone from ranks, not even inventing a reason for his ire, and beat a man unconscious. It was not the sight of this that Grigory found disturbing—the men accepted their pummelings without complaint, so the sight lacked any pained drama. Even the officers, it was apparent, didn’t have any particular taste for what they were doing. They had to work themselves into the fury. And afterwards they walked away, no desire in them to bask in their positions of total dominance—it was the sound. The dull, weighty impact of flesh meeting flesh. He could still bring it to mind, years later, watching little girls playing their clapping games or listening to a barber apply alcohol to a freshly shaven face.

And still they ran, and swung and climbed and leaped.

So many of them talked to themselves. So many times Grigory had watched a man on the brink of collapse and witnessed a full and involved conversation being played out through the twitching of their lips, the physical battle taking on a dialogue of its own. He knew he did the same, in his own moments of desperation. A few cried uncontrollably. Others shut down completely, unable to focus their pupils upon whatever was placed in front of them. When a man was gripped with this kind of torpor, he was treated as though mentally diseased. Within a few days his mattress would be stolen and he would find himself sleeping in the corner of the dirt floor, swept there like the cigarette butts and the mashed leaves or bits of grass that were brought in by weary feet at dusk. If the recruit was unlucky enough to have his bunk within the small radius of heat given out by the stove in each cabin, he might only be allowed one night of weakness. In such cases their nights would be spent lying in the corner until they cut themselves off completely from their billeting and ended up outside the barracks, frozen to death against the mess hall or hanging off the beams of the watertower, or from the sturdy boughs of the ash tree that stood at the entrance to the expanse of mud that was their recreation yard. The kolkhoz boys called them “crows.” When Grigory asked why, they told him that at home they never used scarecrows to ward off threats to their harvest, they shot offending crows and tied them to poles, which they implanted throughout the crops. Once they did this, there were never any more problems.

Near the end of their training they were stationed in the Troitsko-Pechorsky region of Komi. It was late March and the land was still deep in snow. Their platoon was camped in a forest, performing tactical manoeuvres. They had been in colder conditions, but they were more tired than before. Each man had prominent cheekbones and swollen joints. Throughout the months, their will ebbed and flowed, there were periods of time when they could feel themselves growing harder, stronger, feel their bodies adapting to the demands being placed upon them. But they were at the end of that process, two weeks away from their leave, and they thought of nothing but rest and warmth. They wanted to be in a bed with Natalya or Nina, Irina or Dasha, Olga or Sveta.

They had dug into an ambush position waiting for a rival platoon to make its way into their lair and were under strict orders to keep movements to a minimum by order of their lieutenant, Bykov, a young, shrewd leader whose front teeth were missing, a trait which would have looked comical in other men, but in Bykov’s case it seemed to demand more respect.

Sunlight twirled through the trees with the passing hours, frost blew in glassy sprays. A family of snow foxes lived about twenty metres north of their position and they became fascinating to the listless men; a set of binoculars would be passed around and they’d watch the cubs playing with each other, wrestling and leaping—enchanted by the distinct character of each animal—until their rations wore thin and they set out snares and caught and skinned them for food.

At night, they wore white sheets around their greatcoats, taken from a nearby village, for camouflage, and smoked in their foxholes and talked in hushed tones and improvised chess sets from cigarette packets and rationing tins and pebbles.

The lieutenant sent out regular patrols in anticipation of the progress of their rivals. Grigory and Vasily operated on different shifts, but one night Vasily’s partner was struck down with bronchial coughing, and the lieutenant told Vasily to choose his partner, and he did, and the two men walked uphill through the trees, rifles ready, crunching gently through fresh snow. It took only five minutes of walking for the men to feel abandoned. Looking back to their encampment, there were no traces of life: even their footprints had lost definition and softened into a series of small, almost unrelated, indentations. They checked their maps once more and made certain of their grid references. Getting lost wouldn’t be a total disaster as they knew the area well enough to find their bearings by daylight, but the embarrassment would follow them for the rest of their training: every comment from rifleman to cook would contain some kind of reference to their ineptitude. So they agreed on their position and buttoned their compasses into their breast pockets. Then, as instructed, they split up, approaching the crest of the hill from opposite sides, maximizing the range of their watch.

Grigory walked alone, peering into the night. A concentrated stillness all around. When he paused and listened, he could hear only the boughs of the pine trees adjusting themselves, nodding in repose.

He put some more distance between himself and the camp, then pulled out a cigarette and stepped out of the moonlight and lit up. He was careful to cup his hands around the tip, shielding what little light it gave off, and held the butt between his index finger and thumb. Bringing it deftly to his lips, he dragged deeply at the tobacco. It was good to be out here, to feel the sharp night air and stretch his legs, to do anything other than wait in a hole in the ground. He knew they were almost at the end. Lieutenant Bykov was beginning to get edgy, he couldn’t justify staying put much longer, no matter how strategically smart their position. It was, after all, a training manoeuvre and perhaps the opposing side had already achieved their objective. Maybe they were all freezing their arses off while their comrades were partying a few kilometres away, drinking and packing their cases for home.

Grigory finished his smoke and started up again, walking through the trees, zigzagging his way uphill. It took longer than he expected, almost three quarters of an hour. At the top he heard a movement to his left, and saw a swooping form, flowing close to the ground. Instinctively he raised his gun.

A whispered shout. “Don’t shoot, you bastard.”

“Vasily?”

“Yes.”

Vasily drew closer, the white sheet sweeping behind him like a cape. He held his hands up, mocking his friend.

“Where do you think we are, in a war?”

“You took me by surprise.”

Vasily laughed, a different kind of alertness about him, playful, overcoming his fatigue.

“I found something,” he said.

Grigory stood up, interested now.

“Really? What?”

“Come on, it’s worth it.”

They descended the other side of the slope and passed through a valley, taking turns to lead the way through the trees, bending branches for the other, Vasily stopping occasionally to take out his map and torch and find their bearings.

Grigory wondered if they would be reprimanded when they returned, for taking too long on their watch, but they could make some excuse, say they were following some figures in the trees but they turned out to be a couple of wandering wolves. And, besides, there was the thrill of doing something forbidden. Both friends could feel this. It was nice to claim back a little autonomy after their months of blind obedience.