We were coming out of the room when the sergeant said:
‘Hear that?’
He turned back, and reaching out his gigantic hand he went over to a sofa where there was a blanket that, in fact, was shaking. With an indifferent face and pointed weapon, he tore off the sheet as if he were doing a magic trick. On the sofa lay a woman dressed in a military uniform, with the insignia of a group of Islamic fundamentalists sewn on the sleeve. The sergeant lowered his weapon and we moved closer.
She stared at us wide-eyed and mumbled something in an accent similar to that of the Chechens, Georgians and everyone who we disdainfully called chernozhopiy – ‘black arses’, or members of the Asian races of the Caucasus. She was speaking Russian, but what she was saying was completely incomprehensible. She was afraid to die, that much was clear.
The explorer sergeant extracted a huge knife from his right boot. It looked like something a butcher would use, very thick and with a wide blade. The woman went even paler, if that was possible, and without trying to get up from the sofa kept spitting out bursts of words that didn’t make any sense.
‘She must be their medic,’ the sergeant said, for no particular reason.
None of us was able to say a word. We were all curious to find out how this romantic little encounter was going to end.
Shoe was behind me, and with a voice weakened by the cold he said:
‘Come on, brother, shove the blade between this Muslim bitch’s legs. Now we’ll show you how real operations are done, we’ll teach you what surgery is…’
Shoe was scaring me, but I was frightened of myself too. All of us were worked up, yet at the same time disgusted at what was happening.
The explorer sergeant grabbed the woman’s neck with one of his huge hands, and held her still. She tried to scratch his face, she struggled, but he was smiling, as if she were his daughter and they were play-wrestling on their couch at home. Without any sudden movements he stuck the knife into her chest, at the left breast. The blade went in easily, and he pushed it in slowly. It seemed like he was enjoying every moment.
With his other hand he kept hold of her neck. She tried to free herself while foam started to trickle out of her mouth, and it quickly turned red. The woman’s face was purple, swollen; she made a sort of deep, guttural moan, kicking and shaking as if she were having an epileptic fit.
When the handle of the knife hit the woman’s uniform, I tried to picture the blade sunk all the way through her flesh; the knife was so long that it must have impaled her, its tip touching the fabric of the sofa. The sergeant lifted her and sat her down. She looked like a broken doll. Her eyes were empty, her arms hung limp, blood oozed from her slightly open mouth, but it was light – perhaps she had bitten her tongue as she was dying. She had the typical face of women from the Caucasus: small, barely pronounced eyes, a long and disproportionate nose. She was young, she couldn’t have been over thirty.
The sergeant, in a calm and almost affectionate tone, as if he were addressing a lover, said to her:
‘There, good girl… See, it was all fast, no suffering…’
Shoe laughed behind me.
The sergeant pulled the knife out of the woman’s body and wiped the blade on her uniform. Then he tore the insignia off her sleeve and put it in his pocket.
We all left the room without saying a word.
Nosov and the others were in the hall. They had captured an Arab. Zenith was holding him down on his knees, on the floor. Moscow kept hitting him on the head with the handle of his combat knife. His entire face was covered in blood. Nosov asked him something in Arabic, repeated the same thing a few times, then turned to Moscow:
‘Sergeant, this warrior of Islam is clearly suffering from a concussion, give him first aid!’
Moscow responded by slitting the Arab’s throat, blood spraying on the opposite wall, then he pressed the prisoner’s head against the floor with his boot, bent down and drove his knife into his left side several times. He was dead; all you could hear was the air, pushed by the blood, coming out of the holes in his lungs.
We went out of the house. Nosov was pleased.
‘We took an important position in their defence, they almost ran out of ammo,’ he said, looking at us seriously. ‘Whoever was here before must have gone to help the others against our assault units…’
‘And what now, Ivanisch?’ I asked. The fog around us had not dispersed.
‘We have to cross the main street, get rid of the other reinforced positions and signal to our tanks where to meet us…’
‘Let’s take this fucking town apart,’ Shoe said, striking his chest with his fist.
We left. The houses were empty. We found a mine here and there, but from the way they had been planted it was clear that they hadn’t had time to lay the traps carefully. We moved slowly through the fog; the real battle was on the other side of the city – no one would notice us.
We ran into a group of five Arabs in the yard of a house. Two of them were wounded; one had lost an arm. We took them out with a few blasts of gunfire; they hadn’t been expecting it, they didn’t even have time to lay a finger on their weapons. We inspected the bodies – they had some nice pistols on them. There was an American clone of the Colt 1911 with a few clips.
‘I’ll take this one,’ the explorers’ lieutenant major said, his eyes sparkling in that scar-ravaged face.
Nosov agreed. We divided up the Kalashnikov clips, and hid the weapons in an old kennel. The bodies, on the other hand, we laid along the walls of the house, so as not to leave them in the middle of the street.
The fog had become translucent and we could see much better now; we could make out human figures from a distance of about twenty metres. We went through the yards, one after another, until we reached the main street. The road was wide, with a long row of trees, many of which were broken or uprooted. There was almost no asphalt left; everywhere there were holes caused by bomb explosions. In the middle of several crossroads they had put the wrecked civilian cars, a few carcasses of burned-out armoured vehicles and some old tractors – tall piles of big truck tyres, like mountains, poked out from every angle. Everything had been arranged to keep our units from travelling quickly through the streets, even if a couple of tanks could have cleared the way in a couple of minutes.
We started to move along the walls of the houses, hunched over and not making a sound. By one crossroads there was a house with another enemy position. We were heading there from the opposite side, because as Nosov always said, before throwing yourself onto the enemy, you have to get a head start in order to make a good jump. This metaphor meant that he knew the way the Arabs prepared their defences and positioned their guards, thus he always tried to plan our strategy based on the enemy’s habits. Even though in that conflict everything was so chaotic that the enemy often didn’t follow a pattern, he just acted however seemed best at the time.
Having come within twenty metres of the crossroads, we went across the way and hid behind a wrecked armoured vehicle riddled with bullet holes. In the air was the strong scent of burnt, rusted metal, which came from inside the cars. It made an impression on me whenever I smelled it, because it reminded me that inside that car there had been soldiers my age who had died like mice in a trap.
It’s a smell that anyone who has never smelled it can’t understand, a smell that hits you like a bullet in the heart.
The only things those soldiers must have known were mud, filth, cold, a few scraps of disgusting food, military disorder and injustice, battles, blood, disfigured human bodies, souls devoured and emptied, and then death. Maybe after that, death might even be a blessing, but of course that wasn’t enough to justify it… When I had a moment to stop and really look at what was left of our fallen boys, the sadness of their lifeless bodies, I thought about how no one would worry about them anymore – they were dead, full stop. The military operations would go on, and soon someone else would come and take their place, their bodies would be put into coffins, then in zinc cases and finally sent home, where their parents could bury them with the money generously offered to them by the government. At the funeral a handful of soldiers, on loan from the nearest recruitment office, would fire three blank rounds next to the fresh grave and the story would end there.