“Sluggish, do you plan to stay at this post long?” the Sergeant asked him sometimes.
“Why not stay here,” Sluggish replied without a question mark, without emotions, and touched the walls, the rough concrete. It seemed to him that the concrete was eternal, that he himself was eternal, and that the game could only be in his favor, because how could it be otherwise.
At seven in the morning, half past seven at the latest, they were supposed to be relieved by the next shift, and the Sergeant, lying on top of the sleeping bag, with a cigarette in his hand, looked at the clock. He felt like a hot meal, there was probably borshch at the base… Today was Wednesday, so there would be borshch.
Smoking made him feel ill, because he was hungry. The smoke dispersed in the semi-darkness.
There were six of them; the others were Ginger, Ridge and Samara.
Samara, the youngest of them, had served in Samara; Ginger was bald, and why he was called Ginger no one remembered, and he didn’t talk about it himself; Ridge was short and had a strange, amazing strength, which he used in unusual ways; he was constantly bending or crushing something, just for fun.
The Sergeant — everyone called him Sergeant — sometimes wished that Ridge would fight Sluggish, it would be interesting to see how it ended up, but they avoided each other. Even when they ate stewed meat out of cans, they sat at a distance from each other, so their elbows wouldn’t hit accidentally.
Sluggish fished through the backpack, looking for something to eat; he was hungry too, and in general was constantly eating, persistently moving his pigmented cheekbones.
Ridge, on the other hand, ate little, as if reluctantly; it seemed as if could go without food altogether.
When Sluggish was hungry, he became aggressive and picky. He would constantly bug someone, and really wanted to make jokes besides, but was not always able to do so.
“Vitya,” he said. “Why did you come here?”
“I love my Homeland,” Vitya replied.
Sluggish choked.
“Fuck me,” he said. “What Homeland?”
Vitya shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, that’s a stupid question.
“You can love your Homeland at home, you understand, Vitya?” Sluggish found a piece of bread and started tearing off pieces of it with his fingers, nibbling on it. “But to come here to love your Homeland — that’s perverse. Worse than taking it in the mouth, you understand?”
“So you’re a pervert?” Vitya asked.
“Of course,” Sluggish agreed. “And Samara’s a pervert. Look at how he sleeps: like a pervert…”
“I’m not asleep,” Samara replied, without opening his eyes.
“You hear what he said: ‘I’m not asleep,’” Sluggish remarked. “But he agrees with the first part of my statement. And the Sergeant’s also a pervert.”
Sluggish looked at the Sergeant, hoping that he would keep up the joke.
The Sergeant stubbed out a cigarette against the wall, and because he had nothing better to do, he immediately lit a second. He didn’t respond to Sluggish’s glance.
He couldn’t remember when he had last pronounced this word — Homeland. There hadn’t been one for a long time. At some point, maybe in his youth, his Homeland had disappeared, and in its place nothing had formed. And nothing was needed.
Sometimes there was a forgotten, crushed, childish, painful feeling beating in his heart. The sergeant didn’t admit it and didn’t respond. Who hadn’t felt this…
And now he thought a little, and then stopped.
The Homeland — people don’t think about it. There are no thoughts about the Homeland. You don’t think about your mother — not chance images from your childhood, but thoughts. In the army, it seemed shameful when other people talked about their mothers, that she… I don’t know what she did… cooked soup, made pies, kissed them on the forehead. Is this something you can say aloud? And in front of these unshaven men. It’s even embarrassing to think it to yourself.
It was only possible to think seriously about what scared Vitya. Although here it was also better to get a grip.
…He’d become nervous again…
Sometimes, the Sergeant recalled, once every few years, he would start to feel a strange nakedness, as though he had shed his skin. Then it was easy to offend him.
The first time, as a teenager, when this feeling seized him, he felt discouraged and humiliated and hid at home, he didn’t go to school, he knew that any idiot could upset him and go unpunished.
Later, when he was grown up, he was so afraid of this intermittent weakness that he started drinking vodka — and barely got out of that.
The last time this morbid feeling came was when his children were born, two boys.
And then the Sergeant fled from this feeling, which suddenly gained new shades and became almost intolerable. He fled here, to the post.
Essentially, the Sergeant now realized, this feeling came down to the fact that he no longer had the right to die when he felt like it.
It turned out that he needed to look after himself. How humiliating this was for a man…
The Sergeant, who had never seriously valued his life, was suddenly surprised by his evident weakness. Humans are such laughable creatures, he thought, looking at the guys pumping iron. This hunk of meat, with so many bones, and it just needed a few grams of lead… why even lead — a thin needle would be enough if it went in deeply…
To live to the full extent of his power, restricting himself in everything, to sleep little and eat almost nothing — the Sergeant could do all of this without difficulty. Furthermore, he never saw any special value in human freedom, rather believing it to be shameful. Various unpleasant people had talked about freedom so often recently, but when he listened to them, the Sergeant was almost certain that when they said freedom, they meant something else. The color of their faces, perhaps…
No one said that the most terrifying lack of freedom was the inability to make the main choice easily, and not a lack of a few indulgences in vulgar trifles, which actually came down to the right to wear stupid rags, go out dancing at night, and then not work during the day, and if you did work, then the devil knew at what, for what and why.
Recently the Sergeant had made a choice: it seemed to him that he had. He had, he believed, managed to claw out the right not to look after himself, and left.
But now he lay there, feeling the cold of the concrete dust with his shoulder, and felt longing — not for anyone, but an empty, sluggish sense of longing without any attachment. Nothing was happening.
No one was even coming to collect them.
“What’s the time, Sergeant?” Samara asked, without opening his eyes.
“It’s after eight,” the Sergeant replied, without looking at the clock.
They lay there, almost calmly until ten, then became worried.
“Come on Vitya, you freak, pray now,” the Sergeant began to pep himself up. “It’s early to bury you yet.”
Vitya didn’t say anything.
“Or go climb a tree and wave your handkerchief, so they notice you from the base,” Sluggish immediately joined in.
Ridge and Ginger were watching the road: they hadn’t changed since they began at four in the morning.
“Sluggish, replace Ginger, it’s time,” the Sergeant said.
“Time for what? I’ve done my own duty,” Sluggish replied. “Vitya can go.”
Sluggish had got some idea in his head, he wanted to make some nasty joke about how Vitya should be “used”, but he didn’t manage to come up with anything.
“Vitya will go with you too,” the Sergeant replied, and got up himself.