The ignition thrums to life. German make, no doubt. The truck jolts forward.
The seconds unspool and in the dank darkness Kolya finds himself wondering what Danilo’s wife is doing at that moment. Where she is, what she’s wearing, what thoughts are dreaming their way through her mind. Only four men in the unit are married and their wives have become communal. In small Siberian towns, those four wives will never know that in Chechnya they’re polygamous, that soldiers they’ll never meet yearn for and wish after them. Some compose long love letters, never sent. Others rewrite their wills to bequeath their modest possessions — a hunting knife, an ammo belt — to women known only in their imaginations. Danilo’s wife had grown up in Irkutsk as the granddaughter of a barber rumored to have once trimmed Stalin’s mustache. As a child she’d wanted to play the violin, but the violin teacher had taken one look at her cigar-stub fingers and told her to take up the trombone instead, even though she was a girl. That trombone might’ve saved her life when grain shortages hit the city: Party bigwigs wanted a healthy horn section on call for fanfares in case someone from Moscow visited, so she received upgraded ration coupons while the violin teacher went hungry. She has wet-grass green eyes and a Prometheus disco light set. All throughout childhood her father told her that only a mousetrap offers free cheese, but she’d already left home and couldn’t repeat the proverb back to him when he decided to invest his life’s savings in a bank account that promised a five-hundred-percent annual return. She can still perform patriotic fanfares when required, but prefers big-band jazz, and when she plays “When the Saints Go Marching In,” her single trombone sounds like a twelve-piece band. From the raw materials of Danilo’s stories, Kolya has built himself a life with her. Believing in the unconditional love of a woman he’s never seen, never met, is the closest he’s ever felt to God’s grace.
He rolls over and speaks through the two-centimeter gap. “You there?”
Danilo rolls over too. They’re lying side by side, bagged bodies nearly touching, passing a single breath back and forth through the small slit in their zippers. The truck lurches beneath them.
“I guess I am,” Danilo answers. They both know better than to speculate on what’s to come.
“Hum that song about the marching saints for me,” Kolya whispers. But whatever Danilo hums is lost in the wind-whipped velocity of the accelerating truck.
They don’t speak again, but the muggy lightless coffin becomes less oppressive to Kolya when he thinks of Danilo suffering too. Minutes and hours lose their edges inside the body bag, and Kolya has no idea how much time has passed when the truck stops. With a heave, Kolya is carried thirty paces. “One, two, three,” a voice counts in Chechen, and then Kolya is weightless, aloft, and falling. Two seconds later the impact knocks the breath from his lungs and his left shoulder from its socket. His breath finds its way back a few moments before his shoulder. He lies there in the body bag, paralyzed with pain, waiting for the first clump of dirt to scatter over him. A descending scream and a hard thump announces Danilo’s arrival. Kolya goes to work on the zipper with his teeth and eventually pulls it far enough to fit his head through.
“Where are we?” Danilo asks. They’re in a pit, what might have once been a wide well. The stone walls rise six or seven meters to a tight circle of sky. It’s wide for a well, but not wide for a prison, two and a half meters across, he guesses. He squirms out of the body bag and unzips Danilo’s. Sitting back to back, they untie each other’s wrists.
THE weeks shrink from seven days to five, counted first on Kolya’s left hand, then his right, then Danilo’s left hand, then his right. Each morning a pair of sun-browned hands appears at the lip of the pit to lower jugs of water that become latrines by noon. Disks of bread fall from the sky and plop into the dirt with disorienting irregularity. At two weeks, Kolya and Danilo are nearly as bearded as the rebels who tossed them in here. At three weeks, a matchbook-size soap bar drops. It’s from a Saudi hotel. Kolya dips it in a water jug but can’t summon a single bubble from the stupid thing. Danilo grabs it from him. Peeling off his shirt, Danilo shows Kolya the bullet hole in his left shoulder where he’d been shot mid-jerk. It’s hardened to a pink coin of scar tissue. Danilo has six others scattered over his torso and legs and surrounding each are homemade tattoos of irises, lids, and lashes. When Danilo bends to try the bone-dry bar on his feet, his back stares up at Kolya.
On cold nights Kolya climbs into his body bag and zips it to his chin. Although the two body bags are demonstrably identical, Kolya has grown attached to his. He’s tried to personalize it, to tear through the sealed seams, to write his name in mud on the canvas carry handles, all token efforts to inflict enough change on his one possession to convince himself that he’s actually alive, that this isn’t some metaphysical holding pen, because a few days in the bottom of a pit with Danilo has taught him all he needs to know about eternity. Sometimes Kolya thinks of his captain, Feofan, a man who always wears his uniform, even to sleep. Behind his back the soldiers would joke that he’d collapse on the ground like loose straw without his fatigues to give him shape. The body bag has begun to feel to Kolya what the uniform must feel to Feofan.
When he’s exhausted all other memories, he thinks of home. The lake of industrial runoff ringed by gravel where one summer he had sunbathed with his mother and younger brother, pretending they were on a Black Sea vacation. The nickel furnaces blurting endless exclamation marks of smoke. The pollution so dense nickel is extractable from snowdrifts. The raw-fish pinks and reds of dusk, where clouds of sulfur and palladium clot the sky. Here starlight domes the open pit. Kolya was eighteen when he saw stars for the first time. It had been his first night in Chechnya.
He still has the mixtape his brother gave him before his first tour. For Kolya. In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1. Searching for a cassette player down here is as pointless as hoping for an electrical outlet on the moon, but he keeps the gift close, wondering what his brother has spooled on its gears. It’s the only question he has that he might someday answer, his reminder to live long enough to hit play.
One morning the leathery hands appear at the pit lip, this time holding a yellow rope knotted with handholds. In training, Kolya climbed a rope twice its length in thirty seconds. It takes him two minutes to summit this one. The two brown hands that mean to Kolya both captivity and nourishment are attached to a squat elderly man with a ferocious mustache. In one hand he holds a black Makarov, the handgun favored by Kolya’s own superiors. In the other he holds two sets of leg cuffs.
“A gift from one of your generals,” the old man says, eyeing the gun proudly. He tosses the leg cuffs between them. Kolya closes his eyes and focuses on the sun’s saturating warmth. The bottom of the pit receives only a half hour of direct sunlight a day and Kolya feels he has emerged from a long Arctic winter and stepped directly into June’s bright beam.
The old man leads them past a white stone house, past a collapsed toolshed, to a sloping field. Without boots, the field is their best avenue for escape. “Land mines,” the old man says, snuffing Kolya’s dim hope. A blast hole is sunken halfway up the hill. “You’re welcome to try.”