Free Fall. Nicolai Lilin

for medical aid, negotiation, conversation, or unexpected offers to surrender to the law of the Russian Federation with gunfire.

      Part of the order transmitted via radio to all the units involved in the offensive in the city ‘N’ in the Chechen Republic, 1999

      Pummel, throttle, crush . . .

A favourite saying of General Aleksei Yermolov *

      If you only knew what a friend I lost in battle . . .

      It happened not forty-two years ago, but just the other day . . .

      In the middle of the mountains, in the sand, where the heat burns all,

      sparking my memory, now far away from youth . . .

      Can you hear me, my friend?

      My dear friend, in the end we were able to climb,

      climb to that height that cannot be measured in words,

      under which you fell . . .

      What a friend I lost in battle . . .

      As kids we would read war stories,

      he certainly couldn’t have imagined

      I would have to drag his body behind the rocks . . .

      Thirty metres away, only thirty metres,

      but how far that road was, between night and day . . .

      Sand and stone,

      sad light of the unknown moon over our heads.

      Honour to the flag!

      Farewell my friend, you will be with us forever more.

      Forgive me, you were killed and I was only wounded,

      in the Afghan mountains, in Afghanistan.

      If you only knew what a friend I lost in battle . . .

      The damned dust filled our eyes,

      and our BTR was in flames,

      in the sky, like a dragonfly, the helicopter circled

      and like voices from the past, everywhere you could hear shouts of ‘Go!’ . . .

      Like a nerve, he broke like a painfully stretched nerve,

      and from the slope straight towards him a bullet took flight . . .

      Sand and stone,

      sad light of the unknown moon over our heads.

      Honour to the flag!

      Farewell my friend, you will be with us forever more.

      Forgive me, you were killed and I was only wounded,

      in the Afghan mountains, in Afghanistan.

       Song by singer-songwriter Alexander Rozenbaum, dedicated to the veterans of the war in Afghanistan

      And even if we don’t yet know the sweet touch or allure of a woman,

      even if we’ve never experienced the pleasant torments of love,

      at the age of eighteen we’re already used

      to gun fights,

      to bloody battles that never end,

      and we know exactly what it means

      to cross the line of fire.

      Those days blazed, those nights went up in smoke,

      and death flew through the air, laughing and touching us all.

      We don’t want any honours or promotions,

      we’ve already got what we need to feel worthy.

       From the song of the Russian army veterans who were involved in the Chechen conflict

      _______________

* Charismatic nineteenth-century Russian nationalist and representative of imperial tsarism in the Caucasus. He applied a policy of terror and repression towards the Caucasian peoples, especially those of the Muslim faith, forcing them with violence to adopt Christianity.

      One morning – really early, it must have been four a.m. – Moscow woke me up. My comrades and I had slept in the courtyard of a half-wrecked building in a public housing district on the outskirts of the city. We’d been embroiled in a series of bloody skirmishes with the enemy for days. My group and I had been fighting on the front lines but luckily we were all still in one piece. We hadn’t taken any losses, but we were dead tired.

      It seemed like the battle was never going to end. Every second was crucial, every action was important and required great concentration, and at the end of the day we felt like juiced oranges. During battle, we had a clear objective: to push the enemy to the other end of the city, where the armoured infantry units were waiting to eliminate all of them . . . It was an exhausting task, and Captain Nosov had given us permission to take a break, to go behind the line to rest amidst the rubble, in the area guarded by our infantry.

      Before falling asleep, some of us said that maybe the mission was over; we were all hoping we wouldn’t have to set foot in that godforsaken city again. Then, sleep came.

      A little while later – at four, as I said – Moscow woke me up by tapping my chest with the butt of his Kalashnikov.