Often, especially after a long and arduous mission (when I had a ringing in my ears that wouldn’t stop, and everything around me looked like a surrealist painting seen from a speeding train), I would get overwhelmed by strange emotions…
At certain times I would suddenly think I had forgotten something, but I couldn’t work out what. I felt like I didn’t have my rifle, whereas I actually had it in my hands; or I was convinced I was wounded – sometimes all it took was the idea of a wound, and immediately I’d have a phantom pain in some part of my body, which didn’t subside until I was able to make sure that I really was okay.
One time, right in the middle of a battle, for some inexplicable reason I couldn’t find a pair of trainers that I was sure I’d just taken off an enemy’s fresh corpse. I looked for them everywhere. I blamed Deer, insulting him and accusing him of having taken my shoes. ‘You have them on, you dick,’ he said to me. When I looked down and saw them on my feet I was shaken – I really didn’t remember putting them on at all…
Following my comrades, I felt the cold on my face. I couldn’t tell whether my mouth was closed or open, I couldn’t control my muscles too well, it was as if I’d been given partial anaesthesia… It was one of the effects of concussion: your hands start trembling, your eyes start twitching; you need to rest, avoid making sudden movements… but you have to follow through with the rest of the unit all the way to the end of the mission.
Behind us we could hear the sounds of the battle that was still going on as we walked down a very narrow path. The rocks jutted out over our heads; the sunlight hadn’t completely reached us yet. I was last in line, and I felt like I was in one of those dreams where you’re trying to reach a point, but the further you go the more distant it becomes. Soon this will all be over, I kept telling myself in order to keep calm.
We were almost at the end of the path where there was an opening with a thin ray of light coming through. We could feel the cool air coming from the other side. Nosov said that we were to go through the opening and would find a steep slope overlooking a densely wooded area. We just had to go down the slope and we would finally reach the plain.
Zenith and Spoon went first. Then it was Nosov’s turn. After him went Shoe, and last was me. When our captain entered that sort of vortex of light, I thought I saw something strange. For a moment his figure completely blocked the current of damp mountain air, and the rays of sunlight seemed to erase the features of his face, making him look like a kind of luminous ghost… I was about to ask Shoe if he saw the same thing, when a spray of bullets came right through the opening.
I saw Nosov fall on his back, his arms outstretched like Christ on the cross. It was so unexpected that for a few seconds I was paralysed.
Shoe, on the other hand, responded to the fire immediately, shooting madly into the light.
Spoon and Zenith could have been anywhere. Wounded, dead, or in the clear.
‘Get him, take him to shelter!’ Shoe yelled at me while still shooting.
I grabbed the captain by the jacket and dragged him over to a small cave in the mountain that we had passed earlier.
I tried to determine whether he was seriously wounded. I looked on the ground to see if there was a trail of blood, but as I was moving him I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
I remember fearing Nosov’s death almost more than my own. The loss of our captain, for me, would be tantamount to the end of our entire unit. Up to that moment he had been the truest, strongest thing we had encountered in that war. We all knew very well that we risked our lives carrying out his orders, but no one had ever thought that he could be the one to die. Of course, we had been given instructions on how to lead the unit in the event of losing our commander, and maybe we could have got by on our own, but Nosov was the very incarnation of our faith as soldiers, our security, a talisman that we always had with us through the chaos. As long as he was there, nothing could really scare us, nothing could defeat us. The idea that he too, like the rest of us, could lose his life during an operation, was so terrible that none of us had ever dared bring it up. To us Nosov was sacred.
And at that moment I was dragging that sacred person, who was giving no signs of life, away from the battle… We reached the cave; I sat down and caught my breath. In my head, everything was frozen at the instant when that blast came, like when you pause a movie. I couldn’t think or make decisions. I looked at Nosov’s body, dazed, trying to work out what to do. My hand shaking, I put my finger under his nose and felt a light puff of air; I touched his neck and realised that I could feel his pulse. His heart was pumping hard.
‘Thank heavens,’ I said to myself. He had only passed out; his eyes were closed and the muscles on his face were relaxed, like when a person is resting or having a good dream.
I rapidly inspected his vest – it had a pretty big dent in the middle and the central plate was broken in half.
I propped him up against the wall of the cave and then stepped outside. I could hear the bullets coming from both sides – we were caught between two sources of fire.
I rushed over to Shoe, who was still swearing and cursing the entire Islamic community.
‘Is he alive?’ he asked me.
‘He took a blast in the chest… He doesn’t seem hurt. He’s breathing, but he’s still unconscious…’
‘We have to get him out of here, this is a bad spot,’ he said, changing his rifle clip.
‘But where?’ I asked, shooting a couple of times into the opening myself, even though nobody was responding to our fire. ‘If we turn back they’ll kill us for sure. It’s better to try to go this way. Maybe there aren’t that many of them…’
Shoe looked at me without saying a word. I stopped shooting, and for a second we fell silent, trying to guess what the situation beyond that opening was. Everything seemed still; there was just a faint gust of wind, making the same sound as a conch shell when you put it up to your ear.
‘I wonder where those two ended up,’ Shoe said suddenly.
There was no need for him to name them. I too had tried to imagine what happened to Zenith and Spoon after they went through there… Then my thoughts went back to our captain, who was propped up nearby, unconscious, thrown in a corner like a broken toy.
I was desperate. I felt far too close to the ‘end of the line’, as we call the point of no return in war, the moment when a soldier can’t take it anymore and becomes catatonic or goes mad with fear and desperation.
Amongst all the confused thoughts spinning around in my head, there was one that seemed stronger than the others until it became a cement wall that was about to bury me. It was a phrase, simple and definitive, one that could paralyse me completely. It went:
‘This is the end.’
And then I felt a great lightness go through my body, and I thought I had died for real… I didn’t notice that my rifle had slipped out of my hand, nor did I realise that I was lying on my back on the ground, like a real corpse. Even if I was seeing things as a living person for the last time, I wasn’t sad at all – the sensation was like being a body carried away by the current. I could feel everything, the air passing over me, the ground beneath me, but it was as if it had lost all value, had suddenly become invisible, unimportant…
Shoe was shouting at me, but his voice didn’t really reach me; it seemed distant – it was much better to stay down, motionless, dead. I don’t think this episode lasted very long, but I felt as though I had fallen into eternity. I don’t know what that scene looked like from outside; I remember that I wasn’t anxious or worried – on the contrary, I was very calm, if only because by that point I was sure I no longer existed…