Alyosha took his two puffs, passed the cigarette to Vitka, laid back and closed his eyes. Vitka followed suit, and passed the cigarette to Dzhuma. He felt that the time had come to hit the road. He turned the imaginary key in the ignition, and imitated first the noise of the starter turning over, and then the smooth sound of an idling engine.
— Let’s go! — Alyosha shouted cheerfully.
Dzhuma smiled and nodded. Vitka let out the clutch, confidently shifted into first gear and turned the wheel to drive out into the road. All three lurched from side to side in their seats, as if they were on the bumpy country road which led to the highway.
— Which way? — asked Vitka, stepping on the gas so that the lorry could negotiate the steep bank of the roadside. Spinning the wheel, he drove out onto the asphalt.
— Let’s go west, go home! — said Alyosha.
— Go west! — Vitka agreed, and put his foot down.
By now all three of them were imitating the noise of the engine, helping it drive the lorry along the flat asphalt road, only rarely breaking off for another drag. The kilometres flashed past, the wheels devoured the road beneath the lorry, as the red sun in the west beckoned the three soldiers onwards towards their homes. Vitka narrowed his eyes and looked only at the ground, so that he should not see the mountains which blocked the horizon. The few kilometres which separated them from the nearest mountain spurs became the endless plains of Russia. The sun shone straight into their eyes, the poplars become Russian birch-trees, and the young fields of wheat became the fresh Russian grassland. Only the smells were wrong: in Russia you don’t get that unbearable smell you get in an Afghan village of overheated stone, smoke, sheep manure, and ancient wooden buildings.
— We’ll soon be home, said Alyosha.
— Yeah, there’s not long to go. Home, Dzhuma! We’re going home! — Vitka suddenly shouted with enthusiasm.
— Why don’t we stop at my place in Ferghana? — Dzhuma suddenly asked. — Vitya, let’s go to my place. We can kill a sheep, cook rice pilaf, eat the fruit, take a week’s rest. My mother will be delighted. Shall we go to Ferghana? What do you say? OK, Alyosha? Shall we go?
— Hey, hang on, Dzhuma. Let’s not go to your Ferghana yet. For me Ferghana is just as lousy as Badakhshan: if that’s the choice we might as well stay here. What we need is to go home, to Russia. We’re sick to death of the East. I can’t bear to look at another piece of mutton or another rice pilaf. I’m fed up with the lot of it! I want to go home. So does Vitka. You let us get back to our forests and rivers! I want to see the plains around me, and not a single mountain for a thousand kilometres! I’ve got so sick of them in the last two years that I doubt if I’ll ever want to see any mountain again. You’ve got used to all this, this place is pretty much like your home, so it’s as if you’ve never been away. But for us, you know… No, sorry, brother. Maybe in a year we’ll come to you on holiday. But just now it would be better if you came with us: there we can really rest up.
Vitka was goggle-eyed. Alyosha, a man of few words, now broke into a tirade. At first Vitka could not work out why his friend was so excited, but then he realised: they were both trapped. He could not follow Alyosha’s line of thought. Probably Alyosha himself couldn’t either. He kept forgetting what he had just said. He was intoxicated with the sound of his own voice, his own miraculous and marvellous phrases that seemed so full of mysterious meaning. They caressed the ear, nourished the mind, and conjured up bright pictures which to Vitka seemed like a whole movie.
So as Alyosha talked, Vitka could see himself in Moscow, roaming its streets, visiting relatives and friends. He could see himself in his dacha, walking through the forest, swimming in the lake. He could see beyond that. He saw himself taking a job in the autumn after his holiday. By then a year had passed and his nostalgic plan to visit Dzhuma in Ferghana was coming true. It was not a disjointed flight of imagination. No, the feelings, the emotions, the happiness and the sadness, the passage of a whole year, were all quite genuine.
Suddenly he was overwhelmed with the need to convey his impressions to his friends, to let them share in the movie unrolling in his head: the chilly August evenings in Moscow, the lake in the forest not far from his dacha. Alyosha and Dzhuma listened fascinated, as he was carried away with his own story yet again. But then he understood that they were listening to him without understanding. Their faces lit up with interest and a kind of foolish joy, but their eyes were turned inward, and his words found no reflection there. He tried hard to make his story clearer and more logical, to convey the idea that now seemed to be of overwhelming importance to him. The effort was too much for him. He paused for a second, lost the thread, forgot what he had been talking about, failed to recover, and started to talk rubbish. He feared that the boys would be upset if they did not hear the end of the story, but they seemed to notice nothing, and he continued his disjointed story until he realised that his tongue was running away with him, missing out whole words and phrases.
He tried to speak slowly and precisely. But they were not listening, although they did not interrupt him. Now all three of them started to talk, pursuing their own line without being annoyed or bothered by the others: they wanted to listen to one another even while they were speaking themselves. Then suddenly they burst out laughing. Dzhuma was talking nonsense, giggling, winking his eyes. Alyosha was shaking with laughter in his seat, tied up in his own tangled story without beginning or end. Vitka could take no more. He brought the lorry to a halt hauled on the handbrake, and with his head on the steering wheel started to shriek with laughter. The truck shook all over.
Alyosha was laughing so hard that he sank down from his seat in convulsions. Vitka wondered if his friend was dying but his thoughts suddenly switched involuntarily to some different event that had happened two months earlier. The laughter suddenly stopped.
They had been smoking ganga behind a mud brick wall outside the fort, hidden from prying eyes by the First Company’s armoured personnel carriers. Their pleasure had reached its height when Vitka heard something clang on the armour plating of one of the carriers, and the long coughing sound of a ricochet. The sound of the shot followed from the mountains a few seconds later. Without even realising what he was doing, Vitka leapt to the shelter of the wall, knocking Alyosha over as he did so, and dragging him to shelter. Alyosha gave his friend a questioning look: but he got his answer when another bullet showered dust over the place where they had just been standing. Huddled at the foot of a stone wall, all serious now, the friends tried to work out how to get from the vehicle park into the shelter of the fortress wall. First they needed to get from the mud wall to the APCs. But unfortunately the sniper on the mountain did not let up, and prevented any attempt to cross the three metres of open space which divided them from the nearest vehicle. Their drug-induced ecstasy was transformed into that terrible tormenting state of wild unreasoning fear familiar to any soldier who has been interrupted in the middle of a smoke. When a man is frightened, he loses his willpower entirely. However hard he tries he cannot escape the real and imaginary terrors which assail him from all sides. There was no question of being able to make a dash to reach the APCs before the sniper could react. Even if they did, they could not hope to cross the next thirty metres dividing the vehicles from the high wall of the fort. In a few minutes Vitka started to come to his senses. He wondered if it might be possible to get to his own APC, dive into the turret, try to identify the sniper on the hill through the optical sight, and suppress him with a few well-chosen shells.