The Matiushin Case (8 page)

Out in the yard, relaxing after the steam, the new recruits smoked a bit and the officers and sergeants mingled with them as if they were soldiers already, telling them what was in store for them: they would be marching to Dorbaz, the military field camp. The officers complained drearily about the crowds of non-Russians that had colonised the regiment. One officer told them confidentially that there was an order to change the situation that had arisen, and that was why they were drafting Russians and Ukrainians to serve in the regiment for the second year in succession, since the commanders had no one else they could rely on
–
it was enough to make you weep. They all listened to the officer, thinking they were being entrusted with a secret. For a brief moment, this prideful, rather foolish feeling actually made them feel united, which none of them had felt on the journey, when all they'd done was yell and drink, unable even to make out each other's faces. They were in a festive, jolly mood. They all had red shoulder straps. But the officers had smarter ones
–
velvety, still brand new, with curly yellow letters. The sergeants who were loitering beside them turned out to be newcomers to the regiment as well and they didn't know what fate had in store for them either. They'd only just arrived from some place called Karakemir, from a boot camp far off in the mountains, way off on the other side of the world, where they'd been pounded into shape as sergeants. They tried to look tough, putting on a brave face, but it was clear they were having a hard time in the regiment. The officers asked confidentially if they had any complaints and did anyone want to go to the jakes. Then suddenly a little officer came running up and announced that he was the regiment's Communist Youth League organiser, collected the League members' cards, still panting, and ran off again.

They walked through the Tashkent regiment's desert base in a now fresh, green, brand-new army column, trying to look like soldiers. Acting as its guards, the sergeants strode along at the sides with little flags, and two officers strode briskly at the head of the column, chatting chummily. At the checkpoint, a grubby, tattered, downcast-looking sentry opened the gates for the column, then shouted and pulled threatening faces as they left. The humpbacked roofs of the barracks and the camp's fences fell further and further behind. The column crushed the silence beneath the clatter of its boots. They strode along a shady street that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Kids they guessed were homeless ran about freely here, playing in the roadside dust. Women who looked like Gypsies gazed out from warm, blossoming yards with little low fences in which the gates were flung wide-open. White-bearded old men emerged from their homes, while behind them the lavish gardens, like bright trimmings round their calm, ramshackle mud houses, exploded brightly into the hot air, resting their light, fragrant branches on the old men's shoulders. Soon the old town disappeared in the haze and the blueness of the steppe, with its greyish tint of grass and plants, opened up to its full extent
–
and they strode across that steppeland, scattered, each man on his own, towards some point on the horizon, towards which a line of immense, wide-branching metal pylons retreated, pulling their high-voltage black threads across the
sky.

Flasks were supposed to be issued to them at Dorbaz, so they walked without water and as evening came on they crept into the camp dirty right up to their necks and panting with thirst. Dorbaz was three long, spindly, freshly painted plywood barracks huts. A patchy puddle of rolled asphalt, withered in the dry steppe, was the camp parade ground in front of the barracks huts. The place was empty and dead, but it turned out that the camp was having supper. The new arrivals lined up on the parade ground, and the sergeants came out after supper to join their buddies who had been away for a day. Here in the camp they were more important than the officers, who immediately disappeared. The senior sergeant, whom everyone called ‘the Moldavian', even to his face, walked about in flip-flops, undershorts and an army hat, as if he was on the beach. He held a knapsack check.

The sergeants stood and looked on good-naturedly to see what various bits and pieces had arrived in Dorbaz with the knapsacks, but they didn't attempt to take anything. They would filch it all that night, which was why they were so genial now. The senior sergeant just confiscated a can-opener from someone and strolled along the line-up, toying with it, tossing it from one hand to the other and explaining his laws
–
and he was affable, because he was explaining those laws for the first and last time. Matiushin didn't hear a thing. His feet were on fire with a pain so bad, it felt as if they'd been shoved into a furnace. Standing was even more unbearable than walking. Matiushin thought he had to endure this pain
–
that was what he believed every other day too, as he re-bound his blister-tortured feet in their blood-soaked wrappings during a moment's break when they were allowed off the parade ground, and then the Moldavian's favourite command would ring out smartly:

‘Co-o-o-mp-a-a-any, fall in! A-a-at the dou-ou-ouble!'

When they had been out marching around the parade ground for hours and the weaker soldiers
–
who weren't even soldiers yet but half-soldiers who still hadn't sworn the oath
–
were dropping with sunstroke, unable to take the forty-degree Asiatic furnace, they were got up on their feet and back into line with the help of sal ammoniac supplied to the sergeants by the army doctor. Drinking water was trucked in. A cauldron of water was boiled up with desert acacia collected out on the steppe, and everyone was given a flask of this sticky, nauseating tea to drink every day. It wasn't possible to drink much of it: only a swallow, and besides that, the boiling water had only cooled off a bit and no one felt like drinking something hot. A tank of water for technical use was moored behind one hut, by the kitchen. This water was taken from wells in the steppe and it was tainted with infection, dangerous to drink but, either because they wanted to get infected and end up in hospital or because they didn't understand, at night many of the men would sneak over to the tank and drink from
it.

In addition to the Russian draft, there were Armenian, Georgian and Ukrainian drafts in training, or ‘quarantine' here: about a hundred men. During the day the officers walked to the village (its name was also Dorbaz) and filled themselves so full of tea in the
chaikhana
that when they got back to the camp in the evening, they just flopped onto their beds and slept like dead men. For them the month of quarantine was penal servitude in exile from their families, from a better life. At night the sergeants went to the village. They bought hashish and moonshine from the locals and had a high time in the barracks until dawn. After getting stoned, some spent half the night trying to extort money for a hangover cure, while others spent half the night torturing and passing judgement on those guilty of offences under their law, allowing those to whom they took a liking to smoke hash and drink moonshine with them for the rest of the night. To amuse themselves they held battles in the passageway that ran in a broad strip between the beds. Young Russian, Georgian, Kazakh and Armenian guys
–
some intimidated and some plain terrorised
–
fought tooth and nail while the bombed sergeants giggled.

The most brutal atrocity was the safety tax imposed on the half-soldiers by the Moldavian. They all had to line up and then the Moldavian would punch every one of them on the left side
–
on the heart.

The sergeants told them that this blow had long ago made the Moldavian famous in the regiment. After his punch your heart might stop, and only another blow from him could make it start working again. Even if that didn't happen, the Moldavian's brand would be there on your chest
–
and he was very proud of it, that bluish mark left by his fist. He was also fond of saying that that was what the heart was like
–
the size of a fist. But one night something happened that everyone saw, and Matiushin saw it
too.

The Moldavian reached the middle of the line, where the Georgians were standing, when suddenly, after taking a punch, a man dropped dead. There was a horrified hush. Already stepping on to the next man, the Moldavian flung himself at the crumpled body, roaring and bellowing, no longer a man or even an animal, and started working away so furiously with his fist that in an instant he'd turned crimson and was running with sweat. Who can tell how many men prayed at that moment that the Georgian wouldn't come back to life and that would put an end to the Moldavian's amusement? But suddenly the little Georgian jerked and started breathing ferociously, his eyes already wide open, and the Moldavian ordered the frightened sergeants to pour him a glass of moonshine and walked on, drunk on what he'd just experienced, to pound all the others anywhere he fancied, working off his fear. Matiushin would suffer ten of those blows, over ten nights … They made everything go dark in front of his
eyes.

Although they called the training centre a concentration camp and a disciplinary battalion, there was a certain bravado in this talk, as if, without even noticing it, they somehow managed to feel proud of themselves and this deathtrap of a place. This was why they squabbled blindly with each other over all that was best there and, if a Russian offended a Georgian or vice versa, a bloody battle would immediately erupt right there in the barracks or on the parade ground, and crowds of men fought frenziedly. Matiushin never had time to understand what made these fights flare up, and many of the others also didn't understand, although they still went rushing off in a crowd to crush the foreigners. But Matiushin always felt his life was coming to an end in the daily torment on the parade ground. His foot wrappings and tarpaulin boots were the same as everyone else's, but once he'd made the first march from Tashkent to Dorbaz, his feet had been transformed into open wounds. Everything had started wrong for him, and Matiushin didn't understand what it was that he'd done and the others hadn't; why were their feet all right? But they had announced at the very beginning that anyone who got bloody feet wouldn't be treated, but punished. The Moldavian had another rule like that: if you wanted to go to the infirmary, then you would pay the price at night before you went back to the regimental barracks. Matiushin endured his suffering. The commander of the infirmary was a tooth doctor from the regiment, sent to Dorbaz for the summer months, and he worked indefatigably
–
day in and day out he bundled off to the regiment men with jaundice and those who couldn't be got back on their feet and into formation even with sal ammoniac. But Matiushin's endurance, or his health, were stronger than the jaundice, stronger than the broiling sun. His suffering deprived him of the desire to eat and he just chewed on his bread ration, three chunks of bread a
day.

One day they were herded off to drill as usual, across the steppe and round the camp. Hard as he was trying, Matiushin fell behind. The sergeants turned the platoon, which had run on a long way ahead, and drove them all back to Matiushin
–
and as soon as he dropped behind by a hundred metres or so, the whole thing was repeated. The soldiers dragged themselves along, the formation groaned and wheezed, but no one dared glance at Matiushin, although he could sense their explosive internal resentment as his gaze crashed painfully into their dirty, mute faces running with sweat and their blank backs swollen up into humps. It seemed to Matiushin that he was running fast, or so he tried to convince himself, and in trying, he suddenly hardened against himself, as if this cruelty to himself was a second wind, bringing him strength out of nowhere. But the truth was that he was barely trudging along, staggering from side to side, slumping onto others' backs, hiding within this group of burnt-out, exhausted men who could still run
–
and they ran and ran … Suddenly he hated them. He imagined that this was their unspoken conspiracy: they were straining themselves to the limit to keep running and so taking their revenge on him. And he mustn't be left on his own or even behind them all, he had to stay with them. Totally burned out, they started swearing and yelling at him, although there was nothing he could do about his feet. The sergeants were amused. Matiushin put up with it, realising that they were running in circles because of him, but suddenly a mysterious surge of strength turned everything in him upside down. It happened when one sergeant who was bored with being amused dashed up and started kicking at his sluggish
feet.

Matiushin had never hit anyone in the face as hard as he hit that young guy: with all his strength, with strength he didn't even know he had, given to him by nature for just such a case as this, so that he could maim, or even kill. The sergeant went flying and crashed to the ground, rolling around in the dust and screaming piercingly, clutching at either his head or his mouth. His fellow sergeants dashed over to him, lifted him up and led him away to the camp. He couldn't speak, but only howl in pain. It was clear that Matiushin had injured him badly, but even so they couldn't start exacting retribution from Matiushin in front of the entire formation, in front of a crowd of witnesses, and anyway they still didn't know what form their retribution would take. They just ordered him to fall in. The command to run rang out again, as if they had decided to finish the drill. But the sergeants bringing up the rear drove the platoon on with their boots, so the men at the back crowded onto the ones in front, driving them on in turn, in order not to be beaten. Matiushin realised what they were doing to him
–
the entire platoon, guys just like him, drove him along, desperately forcing their fists into his back, no longer parting around him. The sergeants didn't tire. At the most terrible moment, when he felt as if he was going to break down and fall, Matiushin suddenly felt someone at his side, preventing him from falling, helping as much as they could, holding him up. It was Rebrov, silently gritting his teeth and lugging Matiushin along, and someone else he didn't remember or didn't know, a little red-haired soldier who was using his body as well as he could to hold back the pressure from the men who were pushing forward as they were beaten by the sergeants. Matiushin held on, but when Rebrov and the redhead had no strength left to drag him along, he broke down and ended up plodding along in the rear of the platoon, where the sergeants in their berserk fury kicked him around like a football all the way back to the
camp.