of my things and crossed two fences watched by the sentry. Like a shadow, I crept along the walls, but when I finally emerged outside the base, thinking that I’d made it, there was Zabelin, eating an ice cream.
‘Want one?’ he asked casually.
‘Might as well . . .’
I couldn’t imagine what he had in mind, but something told me he wouldn’t get me into trouble. I followed him to where he’d parked his car. We drove into the city, although it must have been two or three in the morning, and we stopped at the sort of diner frequented by truckers, a place where people would sneak off to their cars with prostitutes.
We sat down at a table and, without exchanging a word, ate a meal together. He washed his meat down with long sips of vodka. He offered me some too, but I declined – I didn’t want to get drunk. After eating in perfect silence, Zabelin ordered two lemon ice creams. Once the obese, exhausted waitress had set them on the table, he finally began to talk.
‘Nicolay, I don’t know what kind of mess you were born into or raised in, but I can assure you that here, in the army, nobody cares who you are. You don’t exist. Here you’re a number, and if you make one mistake they erase you, just as they would erase a number. I’m certain you could become a good saboteur, and I think that this is your only chance to save yourself. You’re going to find yourself in serious trouble, but if you follow my advice you’ll thank me for it one day . . .’ He spoke softly, without a sign of irritation, still calmly eating his ice cream.
I was eating my ice cream too, and I wasn’t thinking about military prison – where, if he wanted, he could have sent me without much difficulty. The only thing that mattered to me at that moment was figuring out how he’d caught me, when I thought I’d been careful and invisible. He kept talking:
‘You running away from my unit makes me look bad. If this story got out I’d have problems with superior command, and I don’t want any problems with them, understood? You know, don’t you, that all deserters get sent to military prison? You know what that means? Well, don’t think that just because you’ve been in juvie a couple of times you’ve seen all there is to see in this world . . . The point, dear Nicolay, is that starting tomorrow I’m going to send you on clean-up duty for three days. You’ll help the team that runs the military prison here, not far from our base. When you return, you can decide whether to run away or stay here and do your duty like the rest of us . . .’
We returned to camp. I went to sleep in the barracks and in the morning a sergeant woke me up with a taunt:
‘Let’s go, Count of Monte Cristo, they’re hauling you off to jail!’
I got dressed while my comrades were still sleeping, and went out to the yard. A car was waiting for me, with three soldiers and a lieutenant. We introduced ourselves, and after the military formalities we left for the prison.
Zabelin hadn’t exaggerated when he’d told me about the prison. In the yard, a few soldiers were walking in a circle, wearing faded old military uniforms; huddled together they looked like an indistinct dark grey blob. They had big white numbers on their backs, and they were frighteningly thin, shuffling around hopelessly, dragging their feet in imitation of a military march. It was the most horrible place I’d ever seen in my life.
A soldier holding a baton stood in the middle of the circle and barked out commands:
‘Left, left, one, two, three!’ He had an iron whistle in his mouth, tied to a little strap around his neck.
When he whistled, everyone immediately dropped to the ground, their bodies straight like logs, their hands on their heads. Yet one of them remained on his feet.
The soldier screamed at him, his voice almost hysterical:
‘You! Did you not hear the whistle?’ Then, seeing that there was no reaction, he moved quickly over to him. The prisoner’s knees shook so hard you could almost hear them knocking, but he kept on his feet. ‘For fuck’s sake, are you deaf?’ the soldier said, standing right in front of him. And without warning, he unleashed a series of blows with the baton, on the man’s back, neck, head. The man fell to his knees and wet his trousers. He was crying, begging the soldier not to beat him anymore. But the soldier’s only response was to laugh in his face.
‘You piece of shit traitor, you pissed all over yourself! How dare you?’ He gave him another volley of blows. The prisoner was on the ground now, the soldier’s boots kicking him.
The most chilling thing was that the whole scene had taken place in absolute silence. No one breathed, as if the yard were completely airless, without oxygen, without anything at all. It was like we were trapped inside a bubble that kept us from understanding what was going on.
My task, along with six other men, was to do the cleaning and take the food to the blocks where the military prisoners were being held. None of them was mentally stable; it was like they were in a catatonic state. They didn’t respond to questions; they behaved like animals, scurrying from one side of the cell to the other and then freezing the moment you looked at them, as if they were afraid to be caught moving. They lived according to the simple orders dictated by the whistle; they would eat in their cells, then march out to the yard, take their blows, undergo humiliation and torture from the guards, and then go to sleep at night only to wake up the following morning and start it all over again. They couldn’t communicate with each other, and any activity that would let them think was prohibited. They were unrecoverable, so deeply traumatised that – as one of the guards later confirmed – once they left prison, they never managed to reintegrate into society again. Many of them committed suicide; some wandered the streets until winter came and the cold killed them.
After three days in that prison, I decided not to tempt fate again, and so I returned to the routine of boot camp.
We saboteurs had an unusual uniform; we wore civilian clothes, things from home. As we would be conducting missions behind the front lines, travelling through territory under enemy control, it was essential that we be able to pass unrecognised. ‘The most important thing,’ Zabelin always said, ‘is your shoes.’ He explained to us that in wartime many soldiers complained of foot pain because of their boots, and he made us wear trainers so we would always be comfortable and light on our feet.
Zabelin had taught us the precious rules of ‘saboteur survival and solidarity’, as he called them. They were like commandments, and each of us had to learn them by heart. The idea was to create a sense of unity, to make us into our own clan within the army. The rules were very precise: saboteurs obey no one outside their commanding officer; under no circumstances may saboteurs be transferred to other units of the armed forces; in armed combat, saboteurs are forbidden to leave their dead on the ground. If a group suffered serious losses and was left isolated from the rest of the unit, they were not allowed to retreat from the line of operations. The only valid alternative was the most drastic: suicide. Each of us carried a personal hand grenade, which we were supposed to use to blow ourselves and the others up should the unit be surrounded by enemies and run out of ammunition. They were extreme rules, and I didn’t like them very much. I didn’t understand why we would have to kill ourselves, just because the saboteur strategy had no retreat plan, unlike every other unit of the Russian army.
What’s more, unlike the rest of the Russian army, we had nothing to do with military law. Every Russian soldier is required to memorise if not the entire military code, at the very least the principal articles. But as for us, we’ve never even touched our books, just as none of us has ever learned to march or salute properly.
Our weaponry, however, was better than the rest of the army’s. The paratroopers were equipped with Kalashnikov assault rifles, models with folding stocks and silencers which were attached in place of flash suppressors. With the silencer fitted we used ammunition with less gunpowder – the bullet would explode with less power so as not to exceed the speed of sound, and thus the weapon effectively turned out to be almost silent compared to the rifles they used in the infantry.
In actual war, I was soon to discover, you would detach the silencers; they were cumbersome, and during a mission it was hard to get the right ammunition. The charges you could