Shershnev could not punish the agent who had set him up. He did not work just for Shershnev. And he wasn’t merely an informant, he was the product of a lengthy period of time spent in the limbo of war, where he had fought for both sides, and he had set up an illicit business—and there could be no other—with the army; and now a good position, albeit not in the top ranks, was in the offing for him in Chechnya’s new administration. The agent naturally said nothing about how he had tricked the captain; he did not want the boy’s family to learn who had turned him in to the federal troops.
So Shershnev was left with blood shed in vain. With fanaticism that had served nothing. With the feeling that he had been stupid in the heat of the hunt, taken down a puppy instead of a wolf, shamed himself before the whole world. He had carried out a heavy and expensive fatal torture on a youth who was worth a kopeck.
There were men in his unit who would not have understood Shershnev’s worries; they would have said, one more, one less, who cares. Shershnev would have forgiven himself for missing the mark. But knowing how to aim, yet not knowing how to distinguish targets, was inexcusable.
Evstifeyev died six months later. He was hit by machine gun fire from a cellar during a search. Mishustin was killed by outsiders or friends when he took a batch of corpses to the cement factory. Shershnev didn’t consider this particularly coincidental. War is war. He did feel a secret relief when he learned from his colleagues that the unwitting witnesses to his mistake were dead—Mishustin was a busybody, he knew everything and everyone, and he must have realized how cleverly the agent had screwed the captain.
A month after his return home, Marina told him she was pregnant.
Shershnev had known various nights with her. He could tell, it seemed to him, what was happening during sex beyond the sex itself, what other meanings carnal love could have.
He especially remembered one night, actually a late summer evening. They had gone mushroom picking in the countryside that morning; people were selling baskets of young agaric by the metro entrance. They found very few, the locals who got up early had cut them all down. Ferns were bruised and trampled around tree stumps and the cut mushroom stems showed white in the moss.
They did have the river, the swaying rope bridge, swimming in the rushing water, unexpectedly warm and silvered from surface to bottom with the flickering schools of fish. The day was bigger, more expansive, more important than other days. When they made love that evening, he sensed that on such days, under a special sign, beloved God-sent children were conceived.
Then Marina skipped a period, a bodily echo, a light flutter of the universe. But the test was negative. Soon after he left on his first mission, which made him forget the bridge and the river and the embrace.
The night of his return was poisoned by the pathetic, sexless nakedness that Shershnev had seen in the container. Without caresses or tenderness. He was desperate to come, as if to pour out into his wife everything that had happened to him; he did not notice that Marina was moaning with pain, not pleasure.
Then Shershnev once again started getting used to his wife’s vulnerable body, given in to his power; they made love over and over, finding themselves as they had been. But he knew that Maxim had been conceived that very first, very dark night.
Yesterday Maxim had turned sixteen. Shershnev offered to take him and his friends to the country, to roast shashlik over a campfire, hoping that Maxim would appreciate it. But his son asked for a paintball match in a location he had selected.
Shershnev said yes and rented a bus. Marina and her new husband were against it, worrying about injuries. That was the only reason why he had agreed. He didn’t like the idea much. Maxim knew that his father was in the army, that he had been in real wars. But they never talked about it; not even the little that Shershnev had the right to tell.
He did not tie his son’s fate with the fate of that now nameless man tossed into the pit at the cement plant. However, the coincidence—one man died and Maxim was called into life—seemed too obvious to be ignored.
And now Maxim wanted to play at war. Why? What for? Shershnev sensed in this request a bad convergence of two worlds that he superstitiously preferred to keep apart. Even if the bullets in the paintball guns were toys. His colleagues, who knew a thing or two about his family problems, were pleased: at last the boy is showing guts, the father’s genes dominating. You’ll play together. But Shershnev was certain that Maxim would ask him to play for the other side.
He had explained everything he had done as being done for Maxim: for the sake of his peaceful life. Shershnev could not admit that his son was important and necessary to him only as a justification. Now he was expecting some vengeful trick, a ricochet from the past.
But he could not refuse.
Seeing the billboard—Territory X, Paintball—Shershnev turned off the highway. He did not have time before the trip to study where exactly they were going. Probably an abandoned warehouse or an old sanatorium turned into the stage set of a battlefield (ridiculous to those who know) or a postnuclear apocalypse world.
Shershnev had seen Grozny after two army attacks. The suburbs of Damascus bombed into rubble. Burned villages. He had the arrogant superiority of a man whose entire biography from school to military service had trained him to see violence as the source of experience, to respect its authenticity, its true and indelible traces.
He looked in the rearview mirror at his son and his son’s friends. Fledglings. Small fry. Tadpoles. He felt the urge to rub their noses in real ash and mud, to turn off the road to find not a suburban, well-trodden park, but an eviscerated village with no life, no transparent neighborly secrets, because all the doors were smashed, curtains torn down, closets emptied, and every crack checked by the eyes of soldiers.
The hassle of the depopulated village elicited, dragged into the light, the mean and persistent feeling of a well-planned raid. How many times had they driven up like this, in the early years only in armored cars and later in buses, checking their weapons, preparing to surround and break in! He had felt the essence, the rhythm of that feeling in a poem that a dedicated old man read to them in their military English classes—a teacher who had known the legendary era of the Cambridge Five. Poetry usually did not interest Shershnev. Poetry had been punishment in school, collapsing in his memory like mush; he couldn’t understand why people wrote it, why they had this bizarre fancy. But this poem—the only one in his life—he memorized without repetition, for it fell so perfectly on the contours of his soul. And now he muttered it, glad that he could find his own feelings in the sounds of a foreign tongue:
He wanted to continue, but stopped. They had arrived.
The paintball grounds were in a former Pioneer camp.
Shershnev hoped that they would not be playing among shipping containers. One time he and his colleagues had gone there to relax and found the paintball grounds had been set up in imitation of a battle in a port. Cheap and easy, you just collect a lot of old containers for the price of scrap metal, set them up in an empty field, and you have your labyrinth. The owners told them that lots of people do this, it’s the cheapest way—the main expense is renting the land. His colleagues, who had been in that war, laughed, banging their rifle butts against the ribbed sides—the containers were hollow, empty; Shershnev enjoyed that feeling of common experience that should not be spoken aloud. But he did not want to play with Maxim in that setting.