Глеб Бобров - The Torn Souls - An Anthology of Prose About the Soviet War in Afghanistan

— Let’s be the will of Allah, almighty and all-merciful! His will together with my desire is to give life today to one of my enemies. I act this way, not out of pity, but only because I do not want to shed the blood of another person on this memorable day for me. I let him go in peace, and tell his shuravi, that Latif is the one who do not want to fight. The man who is now dead in the dust, was not invited to my land, he came here with a weapon in his hands to kill innocent people. This sarbose (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor) — and Latif pointed to the soldier’s side — does not know what he is going because his unreasonable commanders sent him to us, and this is not his fault of being here. Let’s be this decision fair. Allah Akbar!

The bearded crowd repeated three time “Allahu Akbar” after Latif. It was the end of the entertainment.

“The goliath” came to the soldier who was in utter prostration. Wiping the blade of his bloody dagger against his cheek, he almost literally translated everything that was said by Hadji Latif.

The soldier did not immediately get the sense of what he had said after the horrifying scene that had just happened in front of him. But when he eventually realized that the life was given back to him, he fell down on the ground, bursting into tears.

He did not yet know that the order giving by one field commander, is not necessary an order for strict implementation by another field commander. If this poor young fellow knew what kind of twisted test had been prepared for him by another ruler of his life, Haji Askar….

……

— Lesha, Lesha, look, there the doukh (a unofficial disparaging name for mujahedeens used in the Soviet army) runs!

Sleeping in his remote post, half-awaken Lesha hit his head on the protruding stone, trying to look through his SVDashki (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor) at the direction where his friend Petruha pointed.

Indeed! It was a figure, sure enough, wearing the black Afghan traditional male dress but with only the sleeves which was fluttering in the wind like a wing of a raven that unsuccessfully trying to take off from the ground. This loomed figure was running on a rocky-sandy surface in all visibility of the flat, like a table, earth, towards the Soviet post.

— What an asshole! — Lesha was amazed — He is running directly to the minefield. Is he stoned?

— Maybe he is a defector? — suggested Petruha.

— Ha!, you are stupid salabon (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor), where did you see the defectors in Afghanistan? Only brutal doukh (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor) here.

After this short conversation, fully awaken Lesha together with Petrukha began to watch how the doukh was getting closer to the minefields, which for the security reason was placed around the Kandagar airport zone. They even placed a bit on exact time when the runner will step on the first. mine. The experienced Lesha gave him two mitutes; and less experienced Petrukha a bit more — three minutes.

The body of running man was blown in exactly 1 minutes and 25 seconds. Unfortunately nobody won.

Through his SVDashki, Lesha had a good look how the body was fragmented from the mine explosion: flames flashed beneath his feet, and black smoke rose. Turning high in the air, the body landed on the ground and crawled forward with its blooded stumps of what used to be legs and arms.

Watching all this through binoculars, Lesha and Petrukha placed a new bet on how long it will take for the doukh to died from losing blood. Lesha placed on ten minutes, Petrukha predicted five minutes. And again no one was a winner.

The mutilated body died in half an hour. During this time, an idea to finish him off, came to the head of Petrukha, but after estimation of his rifle possibilities and the distance to the target, he withdraw this option from his head.

While they were watching the death of the wounded doukh, they received the telephone call from the outpost to report on the explosion in their direction. So, Lesha reported exactly what he saw: that some stoned douhk apparently lost his way and jumped on the minefield, where he blew himself into pieces. The caller at the opposite end of the wire just spat and with a great satisfaction commented that with less shit, the earth will be better.

In a couple of days, hungry jackals will pull the corpse all over the “green”, and nothing could be left to testify the existence of this body. This incident would have gone unnoticed by anyone, except for Lyesha and Petruha… but the agent occurred who reported details of the bloody history of Soviet soldiers’ disappearance…

Haji Askar did not obey the order given by Haji Latif and failed to fulfil the goodwill wishes.

Promising his boss, Haji Latif, that the captive men will be taken closer to the location of the Soviet troops, and released, Haji Askar did it all differently. It was not in his rules of freeing an enemy in peace. None of those shuravi, who fell into his hands, stayed alive until the evening namaz (see “Terminology and Glossary” — Editor).

In the beginning, the doukh forced the prisoner to take off his uniform and washed it himself in the irrigation ditches. An extra set of Soviet uniforms could be handy for the gang while doing provocative actions in the city. After this, the doukh stripped him naked and several bandits raped him with the butts of their rifles. The young fellow cried, screamed in pain, tried at least somehow to resist, but several blows form the rapists with rifles, forced to face the unenviable fate of being raped.

After a full humiliation of the captive, he was forced to dress in Afghan clothing and put in a car, from where he was dragged out late at night in the area closed to the Kandagar airport. The prisoner was accompanied by the giant man and one teenager, both from the Haji Askar gang.

In the east was getting slightly lighter, then three of them stopped about four kilometres from the security zone of the airport. The giant men pointed to the direction of the airport indicating by his hand that captured one should keep walking. He also warned that the standing next to him teenager can kill at a distance of not less than two kilometres.

Keeping this warning in mind, the soldier drugged his feet towards the northeast for two kilometres, but after that he gave in to the nerves, and he broke into running. At that moment, Petrukha, the soldier from the remote outpost, spotted him.

Nobody knows how this story ended.

The story is silent, whether the names of ensign and the driver remained on the list of missing persons, or the “craftsmen” from the funeral team of the Kandagar Brigade were able to retreat these two names into a mournful “cargo of 200”, giving them a chance to be buried somewhere in the ground, on the vast territory of the former Soviet Union.

The story is silent about whether Hadji Latif has a legitimate heir and whether the elder himself is still alive. After all, according to the modest estimates, he now is over ninety years old.

But one thing is certain that the young wife of Hadji Latif was six months pregnancy when the shuravies left Kandahar forever, and if she really gave birth to a son, then it is likely that this seventeen-year-old boy is now fighting in Kandagar with the Americans.

Gergel, Alexander Nikolayevich was born in 1961, in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers, but after the 4th year of his study, he left tertiary education for the army. From 1983 to 1985 he served in a separate motorized rifle regiment at the “860 hot point” located at the fortress of Baharak (Afghanistan, Badakhshan Province, Faizabad). He was awarded the medal “For Courage”. Currently, he lives in Moscow.