Beck was transferred to the reserve in the Soviet Union, and he never came back to us.
The commander was posthumously awarded the “Order of Wartime Red Banner”, although he was recommended for the “Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union”.
Five men in the company were awarded the “Red Star” for that battle: Soul, the wounded driver and Beck among them. Seven others were awarded the “Medal for Bravery”.
The day before my departure I prepared presents for Soul, having shown great diligence and care in their choice. He had become a kind of special person to me. I had become attached to him, spending all my free time with him, describing, at his request, different events of our friendship. I wanted to say goodbye to Soul before the departure, and I was going to invite him for dinner. I felt sad — I was short of parting words.
The receptionist, who always knew everything in the boarding house, stopped me:
— Sorry, but he left. He checked out of his room, packed and left.
— I saw him an hour ago, and we arranged the meeting.
— Are you from Room 301? He asked me to hand over an envelope to you.
Taking the envelope, I went back to my room. I found a photo inside. It was a picture of our company, all together in our smoking-room. There was a little question mark above almost everyone’s head, put by Soul’s hand. But the marks above my head, the heads of the commander, Beck and Soul himself were crossed out. On the back side there was a recent inscription: “If I forget you — forget me”.
And finally I got it. He said no good-byes, while expressing so much at the same time. For Soul the picture was a symbol of his lost past, and the search for it made sense of his life. Slowly, piece by piece, he collected a mosaic of fragmentary memories, patching the flaws created in his mind by war. Memory about the past was disappearing, but my stories about it helped him to clarify the present.
His life was arranged as a game, in which the war set terms for several figures on the playing board. A figure continued to live, to participate in the game, if there were at least two or three other ones next to it. If there were fewer of them, the figure would die because of solitude. If there were more, it would die because of the overcrowded board. And another move, which could give some sense to the present figure’s state, was possible only for a few, limited to three sides of the square. Before time stopped for Soul, the figures of Beck and the commander were swept off the board, although they were the ones that marked his position on it.
Soul was slowly dying until I filled empty squares around him, giving us a chance to continue his violent game. And, in reward for this, having sensed my pre-farewell embarrassment and all I suffered at that moment, he left my life in the same manner he came into it: occasionally, and all of a sudden.
All of this going back in time tired me. I suddenly woke up with the feeling that there was someone next to me. I quickly turned on the light, but there was no one in the room. I was not able to fall asleep again: the fever of memories held me captive again.
The Unfinished Letter
“Hello, my dear brother,
As I promised, I am writing this letter to you to let you know that I am okay. I do not work but receive my pension. My health is not failing me so far…”
The page with squared lines from a student’s notebook was covered with child-like letters: some letters were big, some were uneven and roundish, but it seemed all of them accumulated energy and diligence in each stroke of the author’s pen. I wanted to see who was the author, but forgot where I placed the envelope; and the sender’s name was also absent in the end of the letter. The author of this letter was definitely relying on my memory, but… after some guesses as to his identity, I decided that the author eventually might turn up in my life some day; this is why the letter was placed in a drawer of my desk.
A week later, my life had a rapid turn. Then every 3–4 months, I had several unexpected transformations in my life resulting in changes to addresses and places to live. This letter followed me in all the changes that occurred in my life, moving from one notebook to another until it found its rest in a folder with my personal documents, adding another puzzle for my memory.
Now, five years later, flipping through the pages of my diaries and looking at documents, I unexpectedly remembered the sender. My memory had played a cruel joke with me — I should have immediately guessed who was the author of this letter.
Feverishly scanning the page written in unsettled childishly looking handwriting, I scold myself for the impassiveness with which this little message from the past was treated. I was still hoping to find an address…
…It is Sunday, November 20, 1983, Leningrad, 442nd District Clinical Military Hospital. Our ward has only a window from which we see a trolleybus stop and some part of the street’s intersection.
Looking at us through the window, the peaceful bustle of Suvorovsky Prospekt, with its 3 colored traffic lights and the hissing doors of trolley buses, drives us mad with its inaccessibility for us.
Our ward looks like a pencil case with six people in it. We all ended up here after flying from one district hospital to another, we arrived in the same airplane — it was the flight from Tashkent.
Between us — six people in the ward — we have only one set of legs: Sanych — the ensign of the 345th separate parachute Bagram regiment — has the right leg, and Boris — a young lieutenant from Kunduz — has the left one.
The four other patients are not mobile. Two of us — Serega and myself from 177th regiment — have no legs. The third one — Lesha from the 180th regiment — can move only his head because everything else is encased in a plaster cast. The fourth one — Vitya from Anava — has no problems with his legs, but has big troubles with his hands and head — this is why we do not consider him as a walking man. So, this is a valuation of the “healthy” people in our ward…
Sanych and Boris, both have crutches and their hands are constantly occupied. How much can you carry in your teeth? Not much, I guess. For them it is difficult enough to hold themselves on these crunches; on top of this difficulty, Sanych’s left leg is shrouded with the Ilizarov’s apparatus which is also tied to his neck — this is why he hops forward with an awkwardly, and I would say, a kind of indecently protruding leg.
For us, recumbent patients, the internal news has been delivered by the passing patients. Usually, we ask the same question “How are things?” and we always get the same answer — “As usual”. As for the sources of the news from outside of the world, we have newspapers and grumblings of baba Polya (baba refers to an old age of women — Editor) who comes twice a day to do cleaning in our ward.
Vitya is always cooking something in his “birdhouse” (a head — Editor). He has a real hole in his head that has been fixed with a metal plate together with a piece of his own scalp. He has a weird habit — he likes to pronounce, suddenly and loudly, some shocking thoughts cooked up in his head. This is a result of his concussion. It is better to support him at such moments by asking questions on the topic, otherwise he starts to get nervous and will be running around the hospital in search for any communication until he will be caught and brought back to the ward. To be honest, Vitya, should be placed in another, more suitable for him, special place, but the reason for not signing him into a psychiatric hospital is related to the problem with his hands, or to be exact, stumps of his hands.