Gerald Seymour: Battle Sight Zero

He heard the rumble of a door being pushed open and felt the blast of frozen air tunnel through the gap. The box would be lifted by four men and heaved on to a lorry’s flatbed. He could do the work required of him if he dreamed, bowed with tiredness, cold. He could perform his tasks and could imagine. He was permitted to imagine because the supervisors and the commissars, always close, listening for subversion, could not read words that he imagined or see what he saw… The crate was on the lorry.

Josef imagined… The rifle came out from the crate, was stored, then issued to a shivering conscript. An officer, a veteran of the Leningrad siege or the victory at Kursk or the advance into Berlin, would see the damage to the wooden stock and would beat the kid, thrash him for carelessness. And imagined… The rifle was buried in permafrost ground, or in sand or in the jungles of the east, or was doused in sea water, and was retrieved and would still operate. Would never degrade or be destroyed, would live for ever, and would kill for ever. And imagined… Production increased, the belt going faster until it raced, covered with a squirming oily mess of rifles that were spewed out of a machine that could not be slowed, more and more; great underground bunkers filled to overflowing with them, thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, and millions and tens of millions and all the same and all deadly. It was boasted that the simplicity of its design made it a suitable weapon for conscript troops, many with poor education. That children – like the ones at the schools in Izhvesk – would easily learn to handle it, and fire it and kill with it. And imagined… Rows of graves stretching further than those at the Piskaryovskoye military cemetery in Leningrad or the Rossoschka military cemetery outside Stalingrad, in the steppes. Stones and posts and mounds of earth and swarms of flies and packs of hunting dogs looking for food. It could be that each year, every year, a quarter of a million people – men and women and children – would lose their lives after being hit by the bullet fired from such a rifle. And imagined… the end of the day’s work. Not a special day, not exceptional, different from the one before or the one after, when he stood almost at the end of the production line and checked another of them, the AK-47. And imagined…

The hooter went. A noise like a beast in pain. Work stopped. Men and women did not finish their tasks, tidy what was in front of them, make good what they had started. The line ground to a halt. Pieces were abandoned, left until the next morning when the factory would again come to life and the music start up. The rifle parts would stay there, untouched. The heating went off and all but skeleton lighting was doused. The trigger, the hammer, the magazine catch, the bayonet lug, the muzzle compensator, the operating rod, and the bolt and firing pin. They would stay where they were all night. The place emptied.

The lorry had gone. Josef walked through the low pall of cigarette smoke that the loaders had left behind them, huddled against the drive of the weather, and imagined his supper: a bit of bacon, with cabbage, and perhaps a glass of weak beer – not as good as Sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov would enjoy – and the radio, and a magazine that highlighted football. It had seemed important to him that he had dropped a weapon, that it had shrieked – the cry of a whore in pain, he had briefly thought – and a piece of the stock had broken clear. And that particular weapon, with its individual serial number, and the scar on the stock close to where it would nestle on a soldier’s cheek, now moved at slow speed on an ice-covered road, out of Josef’s life.

‘You all right, Andy?’

‘I’m fine, doing well.’

‘Have a good day.’

‘Why not?’

A smirk on the face of the security guard at the yard’s gate. ‘Anything decent at the end of it?’

‘Decent enough for what I need.’ A smile and a wave, and a little whack on the horn, and Andy manoeuvred the big flatbed out and on to the main drag. He had the radio turned on, not obtrusive, but loud enough to pick up traffic reports for his route.

He set his concentration on the road ahead and the cars and vans and lorries around him and kept up the necessary checks for cyclists. Not a good morning to be shifting close to 40 tonnes in and out of hazards. It had rained in the night, and had been drizzling since he had crawled out of his bed, still dark outside and the only light from the street lamps, outside the bedsit’s window. He’d showered, tepid water because the landlord was a creep and exploited his tenants, keeping the temperature low. Glanced at a text that had come on his phone. Grabbed a couple of slices of toast, smeared jam and wolfed them, and sluiced down a mug of instant coffee. He dressed for work: no comfort and no style, needed neither to put a lorry with its load on to the road and guide it across the western outskirts of Manchester. He would end up between Chadderton and Milnrow at a site waiting for him. His wipers worked well and cleaned the windscreen of the filth that came up from the tyres ahead.

He would have appeared to anyone who looked up from their own vehicles – as he sat high in his cab – an ordinary young man. Difficult to pick out anything in his appearance that made him stand out. Narrow shoulders under his lightweight company anorak, no tattoos on his neck, anyway none that showed above the collar; might have needed a haircut by next week or the one after. He wore a pair of tinted glasses, obstructing his eyes, as he intended.

He drove carefully because – as he would have told the security man at the yard gate – there were some right idiots about at that time in the morning. The lorry cab had been faultlessly clean when he had taken it from the depot, near Oldham, and driven it to the yard where the team had loaded him up with the clean timber A-frames that he would drive to the building site. But, already the doors and hubs of the cab were covered in a layer of wet slime, a skim of dirt.

He told people what they wanted to hear, some of it true and some of it pretend… he was good at that. The security guard on the yard gate would have wanted to know. He was fine, he was good, and he’d have a decent enough day. Men, in his experience, liked to know that all was well with the world, and things negative would nag at them and lie heavier in the memory, but if life was liveable then a few quips would easily pass out of the memory chain. He aimed to make the fewest waves… and, yes, not a lie, at the end of the day there was something ‘decent enough for what I need’. A girl. Unseen of course, sitting behind his wheel and steering the beast towards Shaw, in the direction of Milnrow, but a short sharp snap of a smile slid across his mouth. He would meet his girl that evening. He could think of her, not for long and not putting detail on the outlines because there were too many cyclists and motorbikes and general road users around him, and the buses would not give ground unless it were forced on them… There had been talk on the radio that it would rain pretty much through the day, then when the light fell the temperature could drop – might even be a sprinkling of snow on the road by the evening. He could look forward to it, seeing the girl, allowed himself only a moment of dreaming, a quick glimpse of her face, and that serious frown she usually wore, and the almond of her eyes, and… A supermarket delivery truck came across him and he backed off and gave it space and did not blast his horn or wind down his window and bawl. He liked seeing the girl.

It was one of Andy’s qualities that he could compartmentalise what was important in his life. The girl had had a moment, and the man on the yard gate, and the team who had driven the fork-lifts and loaded his flatbed, and so would the men and women on the site out towards Milnrow who were building three-bedroom and two-bedroom houses, and one-bedroom maisonettes. There were one or two individuals who had an understanding of who he was, but more people were awarded the box in which they could sit, stand or stare, and as long as folks were happy to stay inside their compartments, then all was well: which was what Andy attempted to achieve.