Free Fall Read online

  Half an hour went by and then a soldier came in, with three new uniforms. They had the paratroopers’ insignia printed on them, and naturally they came with the blue beret so loved and sought after by every paratrooper. He brought army boots too, which weighed at least a kilo each. Another soldier set down three knapsacks identical to the ones in which they had brought our provisions, and said:

  ‘You have to wear uniforms because during the trip you’ll be with the paratroopers. Put your clothes in these backpacks, and when they leave you to your units you can put your civvies back on.’

  I put on the uniform and looked at my reflection in the window. I didn’t like seeing the gear on me – it seemed unnatural. My comrades, however, were amused by the situation. They adjusted one another’s berets, struck model poses, as if they were getting ready for a party or an award ceremony.

  We had a few hours’ flight to Chechnya. On the plane with us were soldiers who belonged to other units in the paratrooper force. They were joking, laughing, shouting, talking about the political situation and the war. To buck up their courage, they said the Chechens were ‘a bunch of fags – they can’t even keep their guns up’. Another threw out some serious insults towards the Arabs.

  I would soon discover that in this war, for the sake of practicality – and thinking back on it now, it’s a very shameful thing – all our enemies were called ‘Arabs’, whether they were Chechens, Muslims, Afghans, Taliban, terrorists, or fighters who had sided with any political creed. The word ‘Arab’ was the way we indicated the enemy.

  There were two lieutenants next to me who seemed not to give any weight to the ruckus. They let the soldiers talk, and the atmosphere was upbeat, almost party-like.

  We landed at night. They separated me from my comrades and pointed me to the armoured car headed for the mobile immediate-response unit, where the team of saboteurs under Captain Nosov was stationed.

  I sat on top – sitting on the roof was known as riding the armour – along with a group of soldiers I didn’t know. As the car made the long journey in the dark, I realised that the others were speaking to me with some disdain. They were part of a special group from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and evidently I, the newcomer, was not welcome.

  The first thing I noticed when we got to the base – and this would sink in over the days to come – was that everything worked opposite to the way it did at boot camp. There was no light to be seen at the checkpoint, there was no sign of recognition for entering vehicles – I only realised that we had arrived because in the dark I saw three soldiers cupping their hands to try to conceal their cigarettes. Smoking at the checkpoints was prohibited, especially at night – the risk of being spotted, even from a distance, was extremely high.

  They took me to an ugly building, a military container for the transport of supplies that had been turned into a sort of cabin, with a small window and a rough-hewn wooden door. They handed me over to a soldier in civvies carrying a cut Kalashnikov with a folding stock. He put away my papers, and without even glancing at them, handed them back as soon as we were alone.

  ‘My name’s Pasha, but everyone calls me “Moscow”. You’re with us. Come on, put your stuff on the bunk in the back and take off that uniform, I’ll give you a jumpsuit. Have you got trainers?’

  I looked at my papers in disbelief. According to regulation, all documentation regarding soldiers had to be kept in the office of the unit to which we were assigned. Giving them back to a soldier was strictly forbidden. So I introduced myself and immediately asked,

  ‘Hey, what’s the story with the documents, why did you give them to me? Where’s the secretary?’

  He looked at me as if I were from another planet.

  ‘Who am I supposed to give them to, babyface? We haven’t got offices or secretaries, so everyone’s his own secretary around here. We’re saboteurs, a mobile unit. Today we’re in one place, tomorrow in another. We’re independent, get it?’ he said, chewing on a hunk of black bread. The smell of burned grain was overpowering and it reminded me of kvass, a drink that my grandmother made. ‘Follow me,’ Moscow said, before I could respond.

  The cabin was full of men in everyday clothes – some were sleeping, others eating or chatting. I was surprised by the number of weapons lying around – there was a Kalashnikov at the foot of every bunk, and there must have been at least twenty more stacked against the wall, not counting the rifles that some of the men were holding. On the ground lay crates full of new cartridges, still covered with a thin coat of grease, and a crate with several hand grenades. Other ammunition was scattered around, along with a couple of rounds for RPG-7 grenade launchers. In one corner there was a stack of bulletproof vests, modified just like Zabelin had taught us in boot camp; they were short, with the bottom cut off in front so you could move your legs more easily and use the sides as pockets for ammunition. From two normal jackets you could make one good one, and at chest height, in the hand-sewn pockets, you would always insert a double set of iron plates.

  I would soon learn that the saboteur base never stayed in the same place for long, and from time to time they would put us with units that needed our assistance. In the intervals between one operation and another we would sleep in the place we called ‘home’, that is, the temporary barracks, where the only things we never ran out of were weapons and ammunition, which were scattered everywhere and even got mixed up with our food.

  Moscow led me to the back of the base. Next to a tumbledown wood cabin, there was a steel vat filled with water, and a pole with the flag of the Russian Federation, just like the one I had seen in the propaganda video, was attached to it. From the vat, you could see a man’s head, half-submerged, making bubbles as he breathed out of his nose.

  ‘Ivanisch, the new guy’s here…’

  The head in the water lifted and I saw the face of a man in his forties, clean-shaven and with the expression of someone who wants to steal something. It was Captain Nosov, and in a very calm, low voice, one of those voices that can frighten you, he asked me:

  ‘So, you’re the hotshot delinquent? Zabelin has told me a lot of things about you…’

  I was surprised, because I had no idea what Zabelin could have written about me, but I gave an affirmative response all the same.

  ‘That’s me, Comrade Captain!’

  Nosov looked me straight in the eye.

  ‘Forget all that “Comrade Captain” crap. Here, we’re just one big family, call me Ivanisch.’

  ‘All right, Ivanisch…’

  ‘How is that old Zabelin?’ he asked me, as he kept working in the vat. ‘Has he gone completely deaf yet?’

  I didn’t know what he meant; it was as if we were talking about two different people. ‘Deaf?’ I asked, confused. ‘He hears everything just fine. He’s good, actually. He said to tell you hello.’

  The captain gave me a serious look.

  ‘Boy, I was side by side with Zabelin in Afghanistan for a long time. In Kabul they tried hard to destroy us, and after a bomb went off he nearly lost his hearing. As the years have gone by it’s got worse. Shit, don’t tell me you didn’t notice!’ he concluded, smiling.

  Images of Zabelin as I had seen him in the three months spent in training camp flashed through my head.

  ‘I really didn’t, I didn’t notice. I’d never have thought,’ I replied. Only then did I realise what a tough guy Zabelin was. He had been able to hide from all of us something that should have been so obvious.

  ‘You think that if he were all in one piece they’d keep him in that shithole? Zabelin’s a professional saboteur. If he were completely fit he’d be here with us right now.’ Nosov said this with anger. Then he stood up and stepped out of the vat, resting his feet on an empty wooden crate, the kind they use to transport Kalashnikovs.

  ‘Soldier, towel!’ he thrust out his arm, waiting for Moscow to pass him the green rag that he’d already been brandishing for a while, almost like a votive offering, the ones they would put at the statues of pag
an gods in ancient temples. Just then I realised that it wasn’t a towel but a flag; it was green, with different-coloured stripes and some Arabic writing in white. Nosov took the flag and started drying himself, making the strangest faces.

  I couldn’t help laughing. His face turned serious and he asked:

  ‘What the fuck are you laughing at, delinquent? I put my skin on the line every blessed day to conquer these shit flags – I have the right to use them to wipe my ass, since they’re no good for anything else.’

  Moscow laughed too, and bit off another hunk of black bread.

  Nosov cut us short:

  ‘Listen, boy, this is how things work around here; until you’ve had some experience in the clean-up crew, our family won’t accept you for military operations. Now go and eat, rest, and starting tomorrow you’ll go and clear the fields. Just the other day we finished a mission close by, so you’ll have some work to do. Then, we’ll see.’

  He started getting dressed, throwing the green flag to the ground. It was soaking wet; it had become a useless scrap of fabric, destined to be buried in the mud.

  Moscow and I went back to the barracks, and on the way he told me how things worked in the unit. From what I understood, the two most important rules were: don’t try to escape, and eat at every opportunity.

  ‘What’s this business about the clean-up crew?’ I asked impatiently. ‘What fields am I supposed to clear? It’s not like I have to go pick tomatoes, right?’

  ‘Really? You haven’t figured it out?’ he said, giving me a sad look. ‘You have to collect the bodies. They make you do it so you get used to contact with dead bodies, so you won’t have a hard time at the crucial moments. We’ve all been there, friend – you’ll be on clean-up duty for a couple of weeks.’

  The next morning, following Moscow’s directions, I reported for duty at a big military truck. There, on the wooden benches placed along the walls, sat ten others. I said hello and took my place.

  The clean-up crew was composed of twenty people or so. Calling them ‘soldiers’ didn’t really seem right; they were like gravediggers, except they wore uniforms and drank a lot of alcohol.

  Our job was very simple. We would go wherever battles had taken place, often major clashes, and gather all the bodies – human and animal – that we saw on the ground. We would toss the bodies into the truck, then jump in with them and take a pleasant ride back to camp.

  My first ‘pick’, as we called them, was in a half-destroyed and long abandoned village.

  They gave me a pair of thick rubber gloves that went all the way up to my armpits, typically used in the chemical protection units. Then they gave me a long rope with a slipknot at the top, like the kind people hang themselves with. One guy explained succinctly how to move the bodies:

  ‘You take two of them, tie their legs together with the rope and then drag them to the truck. Don’t go through their pockets and don’t take anything from the bodies, otherwise you’ll be in deep shit. If you find any weapons, take them to the sergeant.’

  The battle had taken place a few days earlier. There were bullet holes everywhere, and the streets were filled with craters from the explosions from mortar fire and hand grenades. At the entrance to the village there was a Russian armoured car, gutted and burned. The wheels didn’t have tyres anymore, the back doors were slightly ajar and you could see a leg dangling out and an army boot. It was strange, like looking at a painting. I had the impression that I was entering a dimension where time had stopped: everything was dead, nothing living could pass there.

  I took a few steps in the direction my new comrade had pointed and I saw a corpse in a ditch near the main road that led to the centre of the town. It was striking, because it didn’t resemble any corpse I’d ever seen before – and I’ve seen quite a few dead people in my day. The ones I’d found the most revolting had been the bodies of the drowned that I’d pulled out of the river – unfortunately, some of them had even been friends – and the thing that had struck me most was the smell. When they were still in the water you didn’t notice at all, but once they were brought to shore they started to stink so badly just being near them made you want to vomit. The bodies of the drowned get terribly deformed; they swell up, full of rotting parts and leaking fluids, until they look like a big ball of gelatin. When I was a boy, in the summer of 1992, after the war between Transnistria and Moldavia, I saw many war corpses in the streets, but I’d been almost indifferent to those bodies. I was too occupied with trying to find the weapons and ammunition, and I hadn’t given the dead much thought.

  My first body in Chechnya, however, made a different impression on me. I felt pity, because it seemed like he’d been taken by surprise, at a moment when he hadn’t expected anything bad to happen. He lay straight, his legs extended, his hands joined over his heart, as though before dying he had tried to keep his soul from coming out. His face was completely white; his skin looked like marble, all taut over his bones, but the veins on his neck and temples were black. His eyes were wide open, so dark you couldn’t tell their colour. His mouth was slightly open and you could see his teeth, stained with blood.

  I studied his body for a moment and then I grabbed him by his bulletproof vest near his neck, and tried to pull him to the road. At first glance he had seemed hefty, but when I pulled him up out of the ditch I was shocked. He weighed almost nothing; it was like moving a wet rag. I carefully examined his uniform, which in certain spots was paper thin, as if beneath it there were no longer a body but only the impression of a human being, the depth of a piece of cardboard. Standing there, motionless, with that poor man in my arms, I felt a sudden hard, violent tug coming from inside his body. Terrified, I instinctively slackened my grip.

  The body dropped, and from the vest – where, a second before, my hand had been – came a giant sewer rat. His tail was greasy and disgustingly hairless, the skin glistening. As he came into the light of day, the rat gave me a look full of hatred, and then slowly crept back down into the ditch. Frozen, I tried to comprehend what I had just seen. Behind me, I heard the voice of someone else on the clean-up crew:

  ‘Never grab them by the vest, they’re full of rats. They’re dangerous, those beasts – they eat human flesh, so they’re strong and aggressive. Last year a rat almost tore three fingers off one guy in a single bite. Follow my advice; just grab the bodies by the legs and before you tie them, tap them with your foot a couple times, and those pests will run away.’

  I couldn’t tell whether the man was messing with me or telling the truth. Either way, from that day on I did as he said.

  When the truck was full, we climbed in and sat on the benches at the sides. The corpses were piled on top of one another in front of us. They made us eat in front of the bodies so we would get used to their presence. Sometimes, when the truck went around a corner on the trip back, the corpses fell on top of us. It bothered me the first few times, but after a while I got used to it. I’d shove them off and put them back on the pile. I learned to treat bodies like objects of no importance.

  After two weeks of corpses and rats, they told me that I could officially become one of the saboteurs.

  Everything in the saboteur unit seemed chaotic. At first glance one might think that we were a group of regular guys, people who had nothing to do with military life and had somehow ended up in the middle of a war. In reality, we had our own philosophy, a series of very precise rules and most importantly our own way of understanding war. The only thing the superiors really cared about was the outcome of a sabotage operation or the continual patrol of the territory. Other than that we could act however we liked. We were autonomous – we just had to do our job well.

  The group was very close knit; we were more like a family than a military unit. This happens with people who have to be together no matter what – when you share tough times you develop a sort of collective brain, an ability to understand the world by putting aside your personal point of view and using the mentality of the group.

  Of
ten the drafted soldiers – especially the younger ones – were really angry, because they felt trapped, exploited by the regime. These feelings formed a wall of hatred between people, and made day-to-day life difficult. Especially in the large army units, where hazing was very common, there was no communication between the soldiers and none with the officers. This is why internal disputes were so frequent, and when disciplinary measures were taken many soldiers became deserters – and some committed suicide.

  The effects could clearly be seen during war operations. Many units weren’t able to carry out their assigned tasks because the soldiers didn’t know one another or were afraid of their comrades. They were subject to frequent breakdowns; they felt alone and they didn’t trust anyone.

  Among the saboteurs, on the other hand, hazing didn’t exist. We were like brothers, because each of us knew that in hard times it’s always better to have a brother by your side than an enemy.

  I had been with my team for just a few days when I witnessed the tragic end of a group of infantrymen. Ten young soldiers were killed by one of their own, a machine-gunner who lost his mind during a mission and started shooting at everyone who tried to come near him.

  When war gets tough, and emotions run very high, the stress can push you over the edge. It happens to everyone sooner or later, and it happened to me too. In times like that it’s important to have the support of people who will stand by you. You need someone who will give you a word of encouragement, listen to you, or keep you from feeling alone and abandoned. If there’s not a solid bond among your comrades, the person in trouble can become very dangerous – then everything ends in tragedy, just as it did with that machine-gunner.

  I remember that for an instant I had him in the crosshairs of my rifle. I could see his face, he was desperate, his eyes were crazed and he kept on shouting something incomprehensible, shooting and crying. I followed him with my scope but I couldn’t bring myself to kill him – it seemed unnatural to shoot one of my own. In the end, since he wasn’t responding to our requests to stop fire, the paras were forced to shoot him down.