As Is

One of us, named Vanya, seeing the humane attitude of the senior in rank, asked with a fawning smile, 'Comrade sergeant major, can they discharge me for this?' He bowed his head pressing his index finger against the wide scar on his crown, visible through the stubble of his shaved hair.

'You fucking smartass, you found a way to avoid the draft?' the sergeant major replied. 'Some fucking professor!' — A broad, thick palm slapped approvingly Vanya between the shoulder blades.

The resounding spank bent Vanya’s spine in a backward arch twisting his mouth in pain, 'Ouch!'

The personnel readily laughed at the superior's witticism…

And as for the tactical exercises, I even enjoyed them.

All three platoons of the 'training' formed into a single column and marched from the unit's location to a field near the MCU-11 pigsty.

The sergeants explained that the 'flash' meant the detonation of an atomic bomb, and the personnel who chooses to survive were to drop down, head toward the announced flash.

After the command 'Run, march!' the entire column broke into an awkward trot, till one of the sergeants yelled, 'Flash on the right!'

With animated exclamations and addressless curses, we all fell to the grass in disarray. The drilled column repeated this prone position several times.

(… an eternity later, when we ourselves had already become 'grandpas', and the guys drafted with me recalled those 'flash on the left!', 'flash on the right!' as an ordeal and mockery of innocent 'greenhorns', I didn't understand them… And I still don't. Running across a summer field, tumbling in the green grass, when you have the desire and strength for it—it's pure joy!

'How young we were!

How young we were!')

~ ~ ~

After tireless, intensive training, which demanded the selfless dedication of all physical, moral, and mental strength over the course of four unforgettable days, we took the Military Oath. Although I still don't know from whom, but the Ministry of Defense knows best. Anyway, we became an indisputable part of the Armed Forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

No, our hands weren't trembling in the grip on any automatic or melee weapon, such a traditional attribute of the most solemn ritual in the Soviet Army. We simply took turns stepping out of line in the trampled grass to approach the table on the path of black, crumbly asphalt. There, we pick up a sheet of paper with the Military Oath from the tabletop, read it aloud, and put it back.

Then we signed another sheet (the lieutenant would indicate the exact spot), returned to line, turned about (no, not waiting for the command, so as not to disrupt anyone's pace), and stood facing the long wall of the barracks, made of white sand-lime brick laid in shiner style.

Behind the table, facing us, with their backs to the wall, stood a pair of officers. If someone wasn't quite comfortable with the printed text while taking the Military Oath (from whom?!), they didn't bother with it, just mumble something and put your shaky tick where indicated.

At the end of the ceremony, the lieutenant asked if anyone present had a medical degree. After a few seconds of subdued misunderstanding and confusion in the ranks, a young soldier stepped forward and reported that he had been assisting a paramedic at his village's medical center. He had been assigned to serve in the fourth company, along with three professional drivers from our draft.

(… oh, how many times over the next two years I cursed myself in the most unambiguous terms for not stepping forward in response to the senior lieutenant's question and reporting three years of rigorous preparation for admission to a medical institute's neurosurgery department!…)

Then they told us who would serve where. I was assigned to the first company, a company of bricklayers. The plasterers were assigned to the second and third companies. The fourth was where drivers and other personnel with tricky assignments served.

We were led to the barracks according to our assignments and handed over to the commanders of our 'young' platoons. Those showed us vacant beds in the quarters of an empty, quiet barracks, as at that time of day, the company's personnel were busy at construction sites in the city…

~ ~ ~

In all of nature, there are hardly any sounds more disgusting than the thousand-fold cursed command 'Company! Reveille!'

(… looking ahead, I must confess—as an on-duty private, I waited until the hands of the large glass square clock above the nightstand formed a perfectly vertical line, so as to take a deep breath and scream in the most vile voice I could muster:

‘Company-ee! Reveille!’

An eye for an eye. An ear for a raped ear…)

After my first night in the first company barracks, of all my personal belongings, the only thing left in the nightstand of the quarters where I slept was a half-opened pack of Neva razor blades, worth 25 kopecks when untouched.

The loss of my toothbrush, and toothpaste, and my safety razor didn't plunge me into the same depression as the disappearance of 30 kopecks from my pants pocket, which had been sleeping on a stool in the central aisle—those kopecks would have been enough for two packs of Prima cigarettes… I recollected the Dnepropetrovsk guys picking cigarette butts in the gazebo pit of the 'training barracks'…

Having carefully and tightly wrapped the mattress of my bed with the blanket (otherwise the on-duty sergeant would yank it off and demand to make the bed better), I hanged an army waffle towel around my neck, like everybody else, and left the barracks in the general stream of khaki-colored soldiers heading to the latrine.

Over each of the ten holes in the floor, someone was straining in a deep squat before a queue of two or three fellows in wait, and even reaching the wall-length urethral trough foresaw a bit of a push-and-shove. The assembly filled the crowded space with mingled sounds of gurgling, farts, and the exchange of news from the previous day.

‘So, what he was? Plastered?

‘You know yoursel.’

‘Got caught then?’

‘Who the fuck knows. They're looking for him.’

‘He’ll be caught.’

‘You know yoursel.’

At the wash basin outside, they broadcast the same news, but with more details.

By eight o'clock, the on-duty sergeants herded the 'youngsters' and 'ladles' from their companies onto the parade ground, conducted general exercises, led them for breakfast, and again formed the personnel into loose ranks, five deep, on the parade ground. Except for the 'grandpas,' who didn’t give a fuck about all this hooey and only left the barracks for the mess hall.

~ ~ ~

About eight o'clock, the battalion commander's 'goat' and a small bus carrying officers and accountancy ladies pulled up at the gate. The 'grandpas' formed up in the rear ranks of their companies.

The battalion commander, aka ComBat, his deputy for political affairs, aka DepuPolit, and the chief of staff, aka ChiStaff, walked to the edge of the parade ground, in the middle, the right corner of the mess hall behind their backs.

The arriving officers headed the ranks of their respective companies, while the accountancy ladies rounded the corner of the third company toward the fourth company barracks—half of that barracks was occupied by the MCU-11 headquarters, with the entrance just on the other side.

The morning parade has begun. The on-duty officer—his right elbow raised to shoulder height, the tightly clenched fingers of his straightened hand three centimeters short of the peak of his cap—reports to the senior officer in the commanding triad that no incidents or violations of military discipline have been recorded during his tour of duty at Military Construction Unit No. 11.

The chief of staff orders 'two steps forward!' and 'turn around!' to two soldiers from the third company. Those obeyed the command, to face the formation. Yesterday, these two violated military discipline at their construction sites in the city. The major announces their punishment—ten days of detention in the guardhouse. Each of them.

The gray-haired battalion commander, twitching his horn-rimmed glasses from side to side, delivers a torrid condemnation.

This pearl of oratory, like his other masterpieces, is beyond comprehension due to a chronic brain leak that allows him to stumble no further than the middle of a sentence, from where he leaps to the next, also halfway through.

A scattering of such unique pearls… afucomuzza… will twist the brains of any decoder; they'll have to cart him off to the nearest military hospital, straitjacketed, repeating, 'What the hell was that?' And there, out of compassion, they'll administer sedatives, and the double dose will have an effect, slowing and suppressing the poor man's mutterings, his tongue losing its flexibility: complex subordinate clauses without any main clauses at all?… a lost and found apocrypha of the opening of 'The Tale of Igor's Campaign'?…

Along the asphalt path behind the Battalion Commander, the Separate Company advances to eat its grub in the mess hall. They don’t care a fuck about this morning parade; they're a separate company, reporting directly to higher command. They're plumbers.

Finally, the Political Officer informs the Battalion Commander that enough is enough. The Battalion Commander lets out a couple of muddled final afucamuzzas and goes quiet. The on-duty officer hands over duty to another officer for the next 24 hours. The new assistant to the officer taking over collects the belts from the troublemakers, and they trudge toward the checkpoint to be locked in the 'guardroom'—a 3 m x 3 m x 2 m space with a tin-clad door, no windows or bulbs, yet with a deck for stretching out.

The chief of staff orders the remaining personnel to 'straight ahead!' and march to their stations. We gush through the gates, where trucks are already waiting. The batcom perked up—a fragment of a sentence, slipped out when he wasn't quite there yet, plopped back into the lieutenant colonel's brain neurons: ‘afucamuzza!’

Well, fuck you, motherfucker! The scam is over! We're already loading into the trucks—a kick into the tire, hands grabbing the side, swinging over, and—pushing forward in the truck back, lest the next jumper ram in your behind. Let's go!

The gate’s moved off, and to the left, the white wall runs connecting white masonry pillars. Who cares there's nothing to sit on—we're holding on to the sides and each other, we're going to the city!

~ ~ ~

Actually, it turned out to be the outskirts, and near the construction site where we were taken, the remains of a former forest belt were still present. The construction site turned out to be a nine-story apartment building of two sections with separate entrances. The walls (laid of white sand-lime brick) already reaching half the planned height.

Our squad leader orders pallets to be placed around a white hillock of sand-lime bricks, piled high by dump trucks. We are to stack them on pallets.

Each pallet is simply four pieces of thick lumber, each 1.2 meters long, nailed to two crossbars (90 cm x 6 cm x 6 cm). These serve as the pallet's piers, spaced ten centimeters from the edges to allow the steel slings of a tower crane to be tacked underneath.

However, the pallet must first be stacked. A load of twelve rows of bricks (about 300 bricks, all together) will amount to approximately one cubic meter of masonry. On the pallet, the bricks must be laid in a staggered pattern, bridging the gaps in one row with the bricks of the next. The trick will prevent from the load spilling down when the crane lifts the pallet to the masons on the walls. It's a simple job, but the fine silicate dust eats into the skin of our palms, and the fingertips we use to pull bricks from the pile. They are worn down before we've even finished stacking the first pallet. The hands starting to itch, and for some reason they didn't give us protective gloves…

Grisha Dorfman, with the air of a dejected palm reader, studies the fate lines on his palms… For some reason, on both at once, not one after the other… Or is he looking for discrepancies?

Besides, the white silicate dust clings to our outfit, and it's a pain to shake it off, but they didn't even offer us overalls…

. .. .

Return transportation to the unit's location for lunch. Leaving the highway at a fork outside the city, the truck rushes past a group of industrial-type buildings off to the right. Our brigade-squad erupts in a wild shriek-and-whistle. The guys wave their piss-cutters at the industrial hub—a mob of infatuated fans greeting the jog of their football team out into the field.

Vitya Strelianny reluctantly explains that this isn't an industrial hub, but the Zone. Now it sinks in—the corporate spirit of those who served their time and ate their balanda rations.

(… 30% of the construction battalion personnel were citizens who had served prison terms for moderate crimes before being drafted into the Soviet Army.

The remaining 70% were unfit for combat duty due to an unacceptably low educational level, health issues, or, like me, unsuccessful attempts to dodge the draft.

At thw temporary lucid moments amid his chronic dementia, Battalion Commander of MCU-11 would occasionally utter undeniable truths: 'A rabble of cripples and criminals, afucamuzza!'…)

They brought us home from work at dusk. The evening roll call after supper was conducted by the commander of the first company, Captain Pissak. The company formed two lines from one end of the barracks to the other, with the 'youngsters'—so the rule—in the front row.

. .. .

Facing the line, Pissak read the names, not raising his head from the list, but listening attentively to the responses:

‘Here!’

‘Here!’

‘Here!’

He didn’t need to look; he recognized each 'here!' by ear, and by the tone of their voices, he could determine the soldier's general state at that moment.

When the roll call reached the greenhorns, Pisak would approach and stand opposite each new 'here!' for a few seconds, silently scanning your face with an unblinking gaze from under the black peak of his cap, then call out the following one.

And—that's it, his photographic memory has you fixed for two years to come, and a month later, instead of 'What's your name, private?' he'll say, 'Private Ogoltsoff!'

‘Yes, Comrade Captain!’

‘Do you act a master thief, Ogoltsoff?’

‘No, Comrade Captain!’

‘Why does the belt blakha dangle to your balls then? Sergeant Batochkin!’

‘Yes, Comrade Captain!’

‘Private Ogoltsoff has five extra duty assignments.’

‘Yes, Comrade Captain!’

Well, yes, when we were approaching the nine-story building under construction, I loosened the belt on my tunic, just a little. How was I to know he'd watched from behind the ruined forest belt trees? But he popped up and started twirling my belt, one duty assignment for every 360-degree turn of the buckle.

. .. .

That day, I worked my ass off to curry favor with the sergeant, who sent me to plane the ground for the curb.

I carried on like a fucking shock-worker! Shoveled for at least two hundred meters, hoping the sergeant would wink at those work assignments to reward my diligence.

'Two constbatters full of vigor

substitute a backhoe digger…'

A couple of passersby on the nearby sidewalk were deeply impressed by my zeal; they approached me and offered to share a bottle of wine they were carrying somewhere.

'No, thanks! I can't.'

During the evening call roll, the sergeant silently beckoned me with his finger, 'To the floor fatigue!'

. .. .

'To the floor fatigue!' means—when everyone's settled into their beds, sweep the central aisle and the passages in the quarters, fetch water from the wash basin by the latrine, and wash the barracks’ entire sixty-seven-fucking-meters, including its quarters, utility room, and vestibule.

Do this in two stages.

Step one: with a rag drenched heartily, wash every goddamn centimeter of the linoleum floor.

Step two: thoroughly rinse the rag, wring it dry, and repeat Step one. And the more often you change the water when washing the floors, the better your chances of avoiding the on-duty sergeant's order to wash again because of the cloudy streaks on the linoleum.

Then go and report to him that the order is complete and awaiting inspection. And if he accepts it on the first try, you can take a late lights-out and be glad you weren't sent to the mess hall tonight, where other 'fatigued' like you haven't yet returned from.

Undress, lie down, and the moment your head hits the pillow, you'll hear:

‘Company-ee! Reveille!’

~ ~ ~ no steadier groupies than muses

‘Vanya was carteed away to the nutshouse.‘

‘Which Vanya?‘

‘C’mon, you know—the scar on the crown of his head.‘

‘What for?‘

‘He refused to get up at the raiveille another morning, said, there’s a mouse nested in his boots.‘

‘Faking or went bonkers?‘

‘Who the fuck knows? They'll check his head.‘

. .. .

Our first day off happened in August. Until that day, we'd been working on site from half past eight until dark. And then, out of the blue, we spent the whole Sunday at the unit's quarters.

The 'youngsters' washed their dusty, stinking cotton uniforms. They hung the laundry on the white brick wall along the deserted road and flaunted from barracks to barracks in black underwear, white tank tops, and black tarpaulin boots, like those sporty Fritzes with automatic Schmeissers in the movie 'One Chance in a Thousand.'

Before our first day off, our brigade-squad dropped the habit of whistle-and-yell salutes to the roadside Zone at the fork from the highway. And on cloudless mornings, on our way to the latrine, we no more stood still, gazing at an unseen wonder—the snow on the distant peak of Mount Elbrus, hanging in the sky above the pigsty.

Private Alimonov, aka Alimosha, taught me to finish off a burning Prima cigarette’s butt I'd borrowed for a final pull from my comrades, until there remained three millimeters of smoldering paper.

And one time, we even got paid. The sergeant major of the first company, a gray-haired man in his fifties, quite drunk, would call us one by one into his supply room and give each a ruble and about 50 kopecks. The rest in kind—a piece of white rag for undercollars, a couple of cans of shoe polish, and a spool of white thread for sewing on the undercollar after washing it.

But in his payroll we signed, of course, for 3 rubles 80 kopecks flat. Because everyone knows, ask whoever you choose, that a private's salary in the Soviet Army is 3 rubles 80 kopecks per month. The axiom is more indisputable than the statement of the Volga River flowing into the Caspian Sea.

. .. .

In the middle of summer, at the evening roll call, the company's political officer announced that they had sent a ref my wife, at her request, to confirming that I was serving my army hitch.

'You didn't bragged you were married, buddy.'

'You didn't ask.'

(… they had no time for that in the juvenile detention centers…)

~ ~ ~

Olga, Konotop, the Plant, dancing—it all began to seem unreal, like dreams from another, distant life.

Letters came from her:

'… and when in the evening I see girls going for walks with their boyfriends but only I'm always alone it's so unfair that I cry… '

My mother wrote letters too, and my sister and brother sent a couple each. I don't know what to write in response. 'Hello, I received your letter, thank you very much… '

And then? What next? '… I'll serve my hitch, and in 2 summers-winters—I'll be back…'?

Nothing comes to mind. And I’ve even forgotten how think the simplest thought without swearing. The words somehow don't stick together. Degenerated like a fucked up fucker, it’s just fucking incredible.

But that’s a shame, they are my close folks, the closest I've ever had, and still I feel a kinda estrangement.

Estrangement?

Well, like the one I felt when, deep in the twilight, we were sitting in a truck back, under the wall of the unfinished nine-story section looming white. We waited for a grandpa bricklayer who hadn't yet changed into his outfit. Another grandpa soldier, already in the back, started picking on Misha Khmelnitsky—for no fucking reason, just to pass the time—because Misha’s.

Misha averted his eyes and muttered that he wasn't a Ukrainian, but only his last name. The other 'greenhorns' remained sullenly silent, and the 'grandpa' started sneering—what a shitty draft from Ukraine, they couldn't even bring a single Ukrainian!

'Okay, so I'm a Ukrainian, so what?'

Only when these words echoed strangely from the brick wall, white even through the darkness, did it dawn on me that I'd said it. It's strange to hear yourself speak from the outside, especially when you least expect it. There's a strange sense of estrangement there.

'Grandpa' shut up. And really—what of? Or even of anything?

. .. .

Later, Misha Khmelnitsky opened up to me, as to a kinda protector, warding off the threat looming over the nest, that he, too, was married. And he didn't skimp on intimacy, like, he'd always wanted to piss in his wife's cunt afterward, just for fun, but it just wouldn't work.

I remained silent, but secretly rejoiced that the evolution of Homo sapiens had provided an anatomical mechanism to prevent the crappy jokes of such completely fucked up nuts, some nasty fuckers-jokesters…

Of course, my comrades in arms didn't know terms like 'evolution' or 'sapiens,' but they could easily rattle off the unrhymed lines of any article from the USSR Criminal Code.

‘Which one were you convicted under?’

‘Article 607, Part 2, Section B, under aggravating circumstances.’

‘What fucking bosh! There's no such article!’

‘No bosh. It’s introduced recently. For cannibalism.’

. .. .

As it turns out, a tattoo isn't just a cute, romantic decoration, but also an esoteric code—for those in the know, a record, and a chronicle of what the wearer of this tattooed skin was convicted. The rung he’s climbed up to in the Zone Table of Ranks. And those who got the full brunt of it and received a life sentence get 'Slave of the USSR' tattooed on their foreheads.

But then again, not everyone is the same. One of my non-combatant buddies returned from the Zone with a neat explanation across his upper arm: a discreet, in unassuming font, 3-word admonition: 'in vino veritas.' With a tattoo like that, you could easily pass for a PhD. Some fucking Latinist…

But there are also certain taboos. A tattoo not answering one's rank, attempted to falsify one's authority by means of a tattoo exceeding one's thievish status in the common criminal underworld, is punishable by cruel, brutal reprisals; sometimes even capital punishment.

And you have to be careful with the word 'waffles' too. After that half-pay cut from the sergeant major of the first company, Alimosha entered into the militar-trade store holding the gate and, pointing his finger at a pack of waffles, said to the saleswoman, 'Give me some of those checkered cookies'. But the ploy didn't save him from teasing by his fellow soldiers. 'What's up, Alimosha, you craving waffles, huh?'

'Get the fuck off my back', Alimosha snapped in a delicate whisper behind the saleswoman's back as she reached for the waffles.

In the parlance of the Zone, the name of this innocent food product has long meant semen swallowed during a blowjob. Oldtimers’ play on words.

(… and how can you not get filled with admiration and delight, not be touched by the unpretentious—yet, for all their artless modesty, full of sparkling poetic ardor—duelings of the mocking ditty couplets of Zone folklore?!

' I have fucked you at the gate,

And can present the certificate!…'

'I have fucked you in the grass dew,

Here's the reference for you!…'

'I have fucked you in the raspberries

With all of your dumb references!…'

And the final, victorious period:

'No trumps? No ace?

Grab my dick and wipe your face!…'…)

. .. .

Besides the wordplay, there were also practical jokes…

Standing at the gate after lunch, we waited for the truck. Sasha Khvorostyuk and Vitya Strelianny shaved each other's heads last night with safety razors, and now their milky-white, hair-free scalps stand out in stark contrast to their brick-tanned mugs.