‘You thankless bastard! You want to rot in shit? Then you can rot in shit! I’ll send you to a place where you won’t even have time to pull your trousers down you’ll be shitting in them so much, and every time you do, think of me, you ungrateful bastard! You want to go home? Then from now on your home will be the saboteur base! They’ll teach you what life is really like!’
He was screaming at me, and I stood there, completely drained.
‘Out! Out of here!’ He pointed at the door.
Without a word I turned on my heel and left the office. Outside the door a soldier was waiting, and he saluted me.
‘Sergeant Glasunov! Follow me, comrade!’ he said, with a voice that sounded like a Kalashnikov when it sends a cartridge into the barrel.
Your comrade is a mangy dog, I thought, but said humbly:
‘Excuse me, Sergeant, may I use the toilet?’
He gave me a strange look, but didn’t refuse.
‘Certainly. Down the hall and to the right!’
I walked down the corridor; he followed, and when I entered the bathroom he stayed and waited for me outside.
I was able to reach a small, high window, and since it had no bars I jumped down without any problem. Out in the yard behind the office, there was no one around.
‘To hell with this madhouse, I’m going home…’
With this and similar thoughts in my head I headed for the exit of the base. There, the guard stopped me. The soldier was young, maybe my age, very thin and a little cross-eyed.
‘Papers!’
‘I don’t have them on me, I came here to visit a friend…’
The soldier gave me a suspicious look.
‘Show your permit to leave the base!’
At that my heart sank into my boots. I decided to play stupid:
‘What permit? What are you talking about? Open the gate, I have to get out…’ I moved towards the gate, going past the soldier, and he pointed his machine gun at me, shouting:
‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’
‘Get out of the way!’ I replied, grabbing the gun by the barrel and ripping it out of his hands.
The soldier tried to punch me in the face, but I blocked him with the butt of the rifle. Suddenly someone hit me on the head from behind, hard. I felt my legs wobble and my mouth went dry. I took two deep breaths, and at the third I passed out.
I came round a few minutes later. I was lying on the ground, surrounded by soldiers. The sergeant who was supposed to be watching me was there too, looking worried and telling everyone in a conspiratorial tone:
‘Nothing happened, everything’s fine. Listen, nobody saw anything, I’ll take care of him.’
It was clear that he was afraid of being punished for his carelessness.
He came over and kicked me in the ribs.
‘Do that again, you bastard, and I’ll kill you myself!’
He gave me a few more kicks, then gave me his hand and helped me up. He took me to a kind of house with barred windows and a steel-clad door. It looked just like a prison.
We went inside. There wasn’t much light and everything seemed dirty and grey, neglected, abandoned. There was a small, narrow hallway, with three steel-clad doors. At the end of the hall a soldier appeared, who looked about twenty and a little thin, but with a kind face. He was holding a big set of keys of various sizes and kept shaking them, making a strange noise that under the circumstances almost made me cry out of sadness and desperation. With one of his keys the young soldier opened a door, and the sergeant ushered me into a very small, narrow room, with a little barred window. There was a wooden bunk attached to the wall.
I looked around and I couldn’t believe it. Just like that, I’d ended up in a cell.
The sergeant looked me in the eye and said:
‘Stay here and wait!’
I looked right back at him, without concealing my hatred.
‘What the fuck am I waiting for? What’s the meaning of all this?’
‘For the end of the world, you piece of shit! If I tell you to wait, you wait and don’t ask questions. I’m the one who decides what you have to wait for!’
With that, the sergeant gestured to the soldier to close the door and marched off triumphantly.
Before locking me up, the soldier came closer and asked me:
‘What’s your name, kid?’
His voice seemed calm and not mean.
‘Nicolay,’ I replied softly.
‘Don’t worry, Nicolay, you’re safer in here than with them… Rest up; in a few days they’ll take you to the train that will take you to Russia, to your future unit… Have they told you where you’re going yet?’
‘The colonel said he’s assigning me to the saboteurs…’ I replied in an exhausted voice.
There was a pause, and then he asked excitedly:
‘The saboteurs? Holy Christ, what happened? What did you do to deserve that?’
‘I had a Siberian education,’ I replied, as he closed the door.
I was locked in that cell for three days.
There were lots of other people in the temporary prison, and every now and then I could hear them. Some would groan; many were silent; one was always begging for food. They passed us our rations, horrible stuff, in vacuum-packed bags. You couldn’t tell what was in them; the biscuits were all crumbs, probably smashed by something heavy. As the guard later confessed, the people ‘waiting for the train’ like me got the packs that had been damaged in transit.
‘But this food is disgusting, my friend, give me something better, just once. I don’t know – a piece of fruit?’ I was always asking the guard for extras, and once in a while he’d get me an apple, a peach, a couple of prunes.
‘Don’t be picky, kid. You have to get used to eating whatever’s around… Those dogs, in the place you’re going, they definitely won’t be waiting for you with piping hot dinners! You’ll see, the day will come when you’ll remember these biscuits as being the best thing in the world…’ He wasn’t being mean, although it was obvious that he was a little scared of me.
Every so often he’d open the little window and chat with me for a while. He asked me where I was from, about my family, and why my parents hadn’t paid the recruitment office to get me exempted from service. I was honest with him; I told him about my life and about my neighbourhood, Low River, and before long a sort of trust had been established between us.
I took care of my business in the latrine in the corner by the window. I was already familiar with the smell – it was the same as jail – but here I had no cellmates who smoked who could give me a match to burn some paper.
I asked the guard if he could give me anything and through the window he tossed me a bag of white powder, a bathroom disinfectant. I used it, but within half an hour the chemical odour became so strong it hurt to breathe – it was as if they’d thrown me into a vat of ammonia. I nearly passed out and I cursed with every breath.
On the evening of the third day, the guard told me that our train had arrived and would take us away that night.
I had decided to try to escape during transit.
I thought that if they put me in a jeep, I could jump out as it left the base.
At about midnight I heard a great racket, a car engine, and some voices. They started to open the cell doors one by one, calling out our names. Soon they opened the door to my cell, and in the corridor I saw a young officer staring at me. From the little stars on his epaulettes I could tell that he was a lieutenant. He called my name, his voice calm. When I replied, ‘Yes, that’s me!’ he responded in a tired but amicable tone:
‘From now on, boy, it’s better if you learn to reply like a real soldier. When you hear your name called, you should only say “Yes, Sir!” You understand?’ He looked at me with humility; it almost seemed as if he were asking me to do him a favour. Since I was thinking of escape, I decided to play along. I stood up nice and straight, like I thought soldiers were supposed to stand in front of a superior, and with a voice full of energy I said: