Sin

* * *

…better to make a hole in the snowy
crust with rusty spit,
to whisper with your face in the snow:
“well, you’ve fired your shots, soldier…”,
not to call the ones who have gone
to the height, where our
piece of land was taken and appropriated,

and better, squinting, to see a furious flag,
softening like honey in the sky,
and hear the step of unseen phalanxes,
the phalanx of the finger touching the trigger,

and better to fondle and caress your trouble,
your troublesome, but proper victory,
feeding on nasty anger, and in delirium
to carry into Thursday what repelled
you on Wednesday —

there, Father, there is the Fatherland, that’s all;
there is no more meaning here, no answer,

fallen leaves, weeds of the steppe,
misery baked from age to age.

For you the Empire stinks, and we are the serfs
Of the Empire, we are its dust and smoke,
We are its salt, and every two meters
We sanctify her Highness with ourselves.

There is a salty taste here, here at dawn
rye blood rises up to the heavens,
earthly forgetfulness dances with us
from “so far” to “urgently,”

here the heavens are big-bellied,
their undercoat
is slimy and musty, it does not warm,
but steams,
here every unrepentant teenager
is nastily tongue-tied.

Here our tongues are frozen,
our stomachs, each
eyelash, each hair,
we are all nameless, but every fallen one
sits among us at the gloomy table.

So, it is better — better, as we are,
as we were, and as we will be,
here are the ribs — to protect the heart,
here is the cross,
here are the painful crossroads
of the homeland,

and I would rather have its vastness
than your bending, calculating,
gossip, budgets,
your smirks, nasty lies,
futile words and false victories…

* * *

Forgetfulness. I don’t remember childhood,
the order of numbers, the writing of words…
My softened heart
has outgrown me for good.

I searched for you, looked out for news,
I followed you into the wilderness, and there
the branches that you pushed aside
hit me so sweetly in the eyes.

The Sergeant

He had this conversation with every soldier in the unit, and more than once.

He looked like a normal guy, but you never can tell.

“Every person must determine certain things for themselves,” he said for the umpteenth time, and the Sergeant already guessed what he was talking about. He listened languidly, not without secret irony. “I know what I will never allow myself to do,” he said — his name was Vitka. “And I consider this to be correct. And I know what I’ll never allow my woman, my wife to do. I’ll never use her mouth. And I won’t allow her to do this to herself, even if she wants to. And I’ll never use her…”

“You already said that, Vitya,” the Sergeant interrupted him. “I remember where you won’t do her… I’m even prepared to share your point of view. But why do you keep telling everyone about this?”

“No, you do agree that if you commit such acts, that means that you degrade yourself, and your woman?” Vitka said, getting excited.

The Sergeant realized that he had put his foot in it, and that now he would either have to lie, or argue about a stupid topic.

Should he tell Vitka what he would do right now with his beloved woman…

“Why don’t you tell me, Vitya, why you didn’t charge the walkie-talkies?” the Sergeant changed the subject.

Vitka knitted his brows and tried to go out of the semi-darkness of the post onto the street, where it was just becoming light.

“No, you wait, Vitya,” the Sergeant said, stirring up the already fading mood. “Why did you take half-dead radios? Why didn’t you charge the batteries?”

Vitya was silent.

“I told you three times: ‘Charge them! Check them! Charge them!’ the Sergeant continued, sneering and enjoying himself. You answered three times: ‘I charged them! I checked them! Everything’s fine!’”

“But there was enough to last almost till morning,” Vitya justified himself.

“Almost until morning! They croaked at three a.m.! What if something had happened?”

“What could happen…” Vitya replied quietly, but in a tone that was meant not to irritate: a conciliatory tone.

The Sergeant was not in fact irritated enough to answer. He himself… didn’t really believe…

Their unit had been stationed in this strange, hot place by a mountainous border for a month now. The guys were going mad in their male loneliness and sweaty boredom. There was nowhere to swim. They had driven to the nearest village a few times in a jeep and only seen goats, fat women and a few old people.

But the village shop and the pharmacy looked almost the same way that they did in distant, quiet and secluded Russia. The guys bought all sorts of crunchy and salty rubbish, and spat the shells of nuts and salty saliva out of the window as they drove back.

The base was ten minutes’ drive from the village. It was a strange building… They probably planned to make a club here, but got sick of building it and abandoned it.

They slept there, ate, slept again, then furiously pumped iron, swelling up their crimson backs and blue veins. They resembled invigorated animals, smelt of animals, and laughed like wolves.

They wandered around the area to begin with, with the officers, of course. They looked around.

A guy nicknamed Sluggish stepped on a snake and called everyone over to look it.

“It’s poisonous,” Sluggish said in a satisfied tone.There were pigment marks visible on his cheekbones. The snake angrily hissed and writhed with its nasty little head against the tip of the boot, and Sluggish laughed. He squashed its head with his other boot and cut the snake in half with a fearfully sharp knife. He raised his foot, and the tail danced a finale.

After the guys had fired shots out of the gun slits and the posts, they were forbidden to make noise and fire shots. But they really wanted to shoot a bit more. To imagine an attack of bearded devils from the other side of the mountains, from the border, and repel this attack, disperse it and break it up.

They had three posts, two useless ones and another on a stony and dusty path from that black, strange side, where angry separatists lived.

Today the guys were stationed at the post located by the road. Here there was stationary radar, but the guys on the shift before last had done something stupid: the idiots had probably got drunk, and dropped it, or fallen on it from above. So it didn’t work. The radar operator was supposed to come here first thing in the morning to fix it.

Sluggish looked into the dispersing darkness. The Sergeant was prepared to swear that Sluggish’s nostrils were trembling, and that his pigmented cheek was shaking. Sluggish wants to tear someone to pieces. He came here to kill a person, at least one, and he did not even hide this desire. “It would be great to see a human head flying apart,” he said, smiling.