Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

“Just leave me, walk away.”

If anything, they held tighter to him. He wanted to walk, put the wound behind him, control for himself what destiny was left him. Pretend that he had not been shot. Reality was a wound in the upper chest that would not have been life-threatening if the Chinook had come in fast and the expert care was on board. He had his right arm around the boy’s shoulders and most of his weight rested there, and the girl had snuggled herself closer to him and had an arm around his back and clutched the waist of his trousers to keep a firm grip, but struggled to sustain the burden. What he was, a damned burden.

“Am asking you, ordering you – I am pleading with you. Leave me.”

He flailed with his arm. He might have caught Natacha’s chin with the heel of his hand and he saw her head rock but she rode it. He kicked at Timofey’s shins, to better effect. Two results of his efforts to free himself: when he hit her he widened the entry wound, and aggravated the dirtied tunnel of the bullet’s passage, and felt pain along the depth of the wound, seemed to split his chest in two on either side of its passage, and the agonies crumpled him… And because he kicked and Timofey hopped one-legged and lost balance, they almost fell and the boy had to reach down and steady himself before straightening. He thought he saw a shape that moved alongside them, tracked them. Thought he had seen it before. Delusions, a degree of madness. Gaz wanted to be free of them, dependent on himself, and they did not permit it. Trees were close around them. The wind came on harder and riffled the branches over his head… and without them he was dead.

“You help me and I’ve the right to know. Why?”

Timofey’s answer: “We have to.”

He was a city boy. Some of the kids of his age were a part of the Nashi youth group. A favoured arm of the regime, they had summer camps in the forests, and hung banners of flattering portraits of the leader, called him Vova, and girls wore knickers celebrating the ‘close relationship’ with the President, the hero. A brutal version of the Komsomol of Soviet times. Inside the ranks of the non-believers they were the Putin-jugend . Timofey avoided them because he, or Natacha, would have had a beating off them if they had trapped him on the street… would have stolen his stuff, would have smoked it, would have beaten him for amusement. The Nashi boys and girls might have had an idea about how to move across this barren, frightening place, and hold the direction he was asked for. But they would have been in the wilderness if recruited in Murmansk… the ones who strutted on the parades for Defender of the Fatherland celebrations. He did not know whether they went forward or sideways – could have gone backwards – but reckoned the injured man had the strength to guide them in the right direction, had to. Each time that the direction was set, Timofey took charge. Why? Not easy to answer without baring something that was private to him, shared only with Natacha – and only then within limits. Started slowly, and was thoughtful, but would grow in confidence.

“Because of what you brought us, friend. I call you ‘friend’. You are a soldier, I am a dealer in narcotics. You would have a uniform to parade in. I have a uniform if I go to gaol. She wore a uniform in the prison. We are so different, but you gave us something. What we did not have. First, the start. Who I am. The result of a bastard’s birth? Have your blood in me, some of your people’s blood. A sailor’s blood. Would have been ordinary, not an officer. Met a girl in the shadows, in winter. And a child born. And the child would be a grandparent, mine. That is how I feel I am joined to you. I tell you something you bring to me and why I have a love of you, friend. I am not a serial killer, I have not stolen millions, have stayed at a humble level and sell drugs. Good weeks and bad weeks, and I have Natacha. What I despise is the corruption. Who am I, a criminal, to speak of wrongdoing? I am entitled. I see it. We are stopped in the car. The car is searched. The cannabis weed is found. We can be handcuffed, arrested, sent to court, sentenced and imprisoned. You would not want to spend days in a gaol here, friend. Or, I can feel under my seat, where I keep trading cash, and I can pay them, and come back again the next evening and pay some more, and again. You give me a chance to kick their testicles. I think you made them angry, and I think they will be angrier if they do not have you imprisoned, where it would go badly for you. The way it is, I give one kick to one testicle, and you give the second kick to the second testicle. I see them, then, at FSB on the Prospekt, doubled in pain. That is why I help you. Please, friend, do not hurt me again, it slows me. When we reach the Kola inlet you have not told me what we look for, what will happen. Because, friend, you do not fully trust us?”

No reply given him. Nor did he know if his words were heard. He thought they were watched from the deeper undergrowth, and sometimes he looked behind him, and sometimes he thought a shadow passed between the trees. But the wind had freshened and the noise from the trees clattered in his ears. When there was wind, there would be rain chasing behind it.

“You have given us something, friend. That is enough. We rejoice in it, the freedom, the opportunity to kick. And you are heavy, friend, fuck, you are heavy. And I tell a truth. You should have killed him and now he is free, and he will be back with the snakes he lives with and they come for us, and all we can do is kick. You should have killed him.”

Lavrenti hopped from rock to rock, and sometimes jumped to clear the bog pools. He could have been out in the carefully preserved woodlands – accessible only to residents of the gated dachas near the President’s own palace – where he had walked as a teenager, before his father had decided that he should go to the Academy of FSB, and start the fast track. A great weight, one that had bowed him, was lifted. His mother was not in his thoughts, nor his father. No longer any consideration of what curtains he should have in his new Moscow apartment, and what girls he should take to dinner, nor which businessmen entrepreneurs he should offer a protective ‘roof’ and what rewards would accrue and how his promotion prospects could be enhanced.

The rain was hard in his face, came from ahead of him where the border was. It flattened his hair and ran down his face and added to the weight of his military tunic.

Lavrenti Volkov’s decision was made. Not usually generous in handing out gratitude, but in his mind, Lavrenti was prepared to give thanks to the man he now knew as the corporal. He held the pistol in his right hand and his finger rested on the trigger guard and the rain washed it and highlighted where the paint had been scraped from its body. He had not fired his own pistol while in Syria, also a Makarov, except on that day. If the corporal had been a witness to the long hours spent at the village then he would have seen him shoot. Of course, the two sergeants were also witnesses but their loyalty was to his father and no mention had ever been made of his behaviour and actions at Deir al-Siyarqi. Their attitude towards him had changed, formality turning to scarcely disguised contempt. They had eked out their time with him, would shortly – with his father’s blessing – retire to their dream of the restaurant with chalets on the Moscow-St Petersburg road. The day had never been spoken of, nor had he challenged them if they were late, slovenly dressed, or the car smelled of their sweat or fast food… neither possessed the corporal’s dignity.

It was as if a way had been shown him: what the corporal had done.

Through the rain sheeting on to him and below the cloud that bucked on the tips of the trees, he had seen the two men who had been at his side on that day. They should have driven him to the airport, grunted a farewell, and he would have boarded his flight south and they would have spat an insult. He would never meet them again. He could not remember when he had last met a man, uniformed or civilian, who had been with him, close, for only a matter of hours, who had been able to cleanse him. A good man, only a corporal but with behaviour that could not be faulted. The arrival of the witness had brought conclusion to a nightmare. He was at peace.