The rats know our voices.
That's the first thing you learn in this dugout. When Lyokha talks, they freeze, because Lyokha throws things at them. When Gena talks, they come out, because Gena eats while he talks and drops half his bread. When I talk, they don't care at all. I try not to think about what that means.
The rats aren't only a joke, though. Last month two guys in the next dugout caught what everyone calls mouse fever: a fever that wouldn't break, vomiting, kidneys so swollen they couldn't stand up straight. Nobody could get them out, because the road was being watched. One of them is still in there. We sleep with our sleeves tied shut now.
There are five of us down here. Four layers of logs over our heads, and a roof of dirt that drips every time it rains. It has rained for eleven days. The floor is mud, cigarette butts and something sweet-smelling that nobody wants to talk about. Our only light is a candle stuck in a fish tin. Lyokha is cleaning his nails with a hunting knife. It's pointless. The black under our nails is the war, and the war doesn't wash out.
Vanya is nineteen. He laughs at everything Lyokha says, because Lyokha is the only one here who has ever been kind to him. Mostly, Lyokha's kindness means beating up the guys who used to beat up Vanya. Back in training camp in Rostov, the sergeants called Vanya Doch', "daughter". They made him do push-ups over a bucket of piss until his arms gave out. I didn't stop them. I was a contract soldier with a year of university and a flag on my sleeve, and I thought it would make a man of him. I think about that a lot now.
Timur doesn't talk. He's a Tuvan from a village with no road. The others call him Chingiz, or Chinaman, or Monkey, depending on how drunk they are, and he answers to all of them in the same flat voice. He's the best of us. He's the only one who can tie a tourniquet in the dark. They send Timur's people in first, because there are lots of them and nobody in Moscow will cry for them on TV. I used to say that was a lie the West made up. I don't say that anymore. When Timur is around, I don't say much at all.
"Professor," Lyokha says, pointing the knife at me. "You're praying again. I can see your lips moving."
They call me Professor because I studied chemistry for a year and a half at the polytechnic in Nizhny Novgorod. Then I signed the contract, in the spring of 2024. Not for the money, even though the money was good. I signed because I believed. I want to be honest about that. I believed a nation is a family, and a family protects itself. I believed in the President the way a seven-year-old believes in his father. I believed God had given Russia a mission, and that refusing it meant refusing God. I wore a tin cross my grandmother gave me, still warm from her neck. Under my body armour I kept a paper icon of Saint Nicholas, the size of a playing card, wrapped in tape so the rain couldn't ruin him.
I don't answer him.
There are things I don't say out loud. Last week our company commander, call sign Granit, made a boy from Buryatia stand all night in a pit of water up to his chest. His crime? He asked when the water delivery was coming. We'd been buying our own water: five thousand roubles for six plastic bottles, from a sergeant in the rear who had a car. The boy asked where the water was that the state had paid for. So Granit threw him in the zindan, the punishment pit with a metal grate on top. By morning his lips were blue and he couldn't stand. The next day they sent him forward in a group of three. None of them came back. On Granit's tablet, all three are now listed as SOCh: deserters. I know, because I was the one carrying the tablet.
I don't say that I prayed for that boy, and then went to sleep.
And I don't say what I'm really afraid of. It isn't the Ukrainians. It's the drones, sure; everyone is scared of the drones. But underneath that, it's Granit. It's our own sniper behind the treeline, waiting for anyone who runs the wrong way. It's the word the officers use, obnulit', to "zero" a man, said as calmly as accountants.
The candle flickers. Something buzzes past above us, like a huge angry mosquito. All five of us stop breathing. Even the rats freeze. We wait. The sound fades. We breathe again. Vanya's hands are shaking, so he sits on them.
Here's what nobody tells you about drones. It's not that they kill you. Everything here can kill you. It's that they watch you. Somewhere ten kilometres away, a guy is drinking tea and looking at you through a little camera. He can follow you to the latrine, watch you squat, and decide if you're worth five hundred dollars of explosives. No roof here is really a roof. No hole is really safe. There's only the sky, and the sky has eyes.
Then there are the glide bombs. Our planes drop them from far behind the line, and they sail over us on little wings, half a ton each, and somewhere on the other side a whole stretch of trenches just stops existing. Gena cheers when he hears them. I used to cheer too. Lately the other side has started sending theirs back, and you don't hear those coming at all.
"Same as Afghanistan," says Gena, who was never in Afghanistan. "Same as Chechnya. Keep your head down and you go home."
The order comes at four in the morning. The radio coughs and Granit's voice says our call signs and a grid and the words close with and hold. Lyokha asks, politely, with what. Granit says we are to take two drones' worth of grenades and the water we have. Lyokha asks what water. The radio says: Dig deeper when you get there, and then it says nothing, because Granit has gone back to sleep, or to his vodka, or to the girl from the village who does his laundry.
We go on foot. There are no vehicles. There was a quad bike, but a drone found it on Tuesday. We go in single file with fifty metres between us, because that is the doctrine now: never two men in one bomb. Gena first, because he has been here longest and knows where the mines are, or says he does. Then Vanya. Then me. Then Timur. Lyokha last, because Lyokha says he wants to see who runs.
The mud is the colour of liver. It is not mud the way mud is at home, in the yard of my grandmother's house, where you wipe your boots on a grate and go in for tea. This mud has an appetite. It takes your boot and then it takes your foot inside the boot and it holds on, sucking, so that every step is a negotiation. Rasputitsa, the season without roads. My grandmother used to say that in the old days nobody fought in the rasputitsa, not the Tatars, not Napoleon, not anyone, because God made it so that men would have to stop and stay home with their wives for a month. I think of that as I pull my right leg out of the field and the mud makes a sound like a kiss.
There are bodies. I'm going to say this once, plainly, and then I'm going to stop, because I promised myself I would not make it into a poem. There are bodies in the field and some of them are ours and some of them are theirs and after enough weeks of rain you cannot tell, and the ones that have been there longest have sunk until only the shapes of them show, a shoulder, the curve of a helmet, a hand with the fingers up as if waiting to be given something. The crows have been at the faces. There is a man sitting against a stump with his legs straight out in front of him and no head, just the collar of his jacket, very neat, and someone has put a cigarette in his breast pocket, and I don't know if that was a joke or a prayer. There is a smell that gets inside the fabric of your mask and stays there for days. That is all. That is all I will say.
The shelling starts at six.
You hear the big ones before they land, a sound like a sheet being torn slowly across the whole sky. Then the ground jumps and you're face down in the mud with dirt and wood raining on your back. Then another. Then another. They are walking it towards us, ten metres at a time.
Gena is shouting something. Vanya is ahead of me, and then he isn't. He's a red shape folding in the air, coming down in two places. I don't stop. God forgive me, I don't stop.
The next one lands close. Too close.
I don't hear it. I feel it. The air turns solid and hits me like a wall, and I'm off my feet, flying, and the only thing my body thinks to do is throw both arms over my face. Something tears through them. Hot, then cold. I hit the ground, roll, and slide down into a hole.
It isn't much of a hole. An old shell crater, a metre deep, half full of brown water. But it's a hole.
For a while I don't know where I am. The world rings like a bell. My head is full of cotton and broken glass. I throw up into the water without deciding to. I try to sit up and the sky tips over, so I lie on my back in the mud and look at my arms.
They're still there. That's the first thing. Both of them. But the sleeves are black and wet, and something white is showing through the left one, near the elbow. My legs are burning. I can't feel my right foot. It doesn't matter. I can see. I can breathe. I'm alive.
Gena slides in beside me, on his side, and doesn't move. His hand ends up on my ankle. I tell myself he's resting.
I reach into my jacket with fingers that won't close properly and pull out Saint Nicholas in his tape. There's blood on him now. Mine. I kiss him anyway.
Thank you, I tell him. Thank you. Nothing hits the same hole twice. Grandpa said so, and his grandpa before him. I can feel the shells walking away through my back, further and further. I'm in a hole, below the line where the fragments fly. For the first time since six o'clock, I'm safe.
That's when I hear the buzzing.
It isn't loud. It's almost polite. It comes over the lip of the crater and stops, and hangs there against the grey: a little black cross with four propellers blurring at its corners. It looks down at me. I can see the eye.
And all at once I understand the thing I already knew in the dugout. The shells never cared about holes. But this isn't a shell. It doesn't fall where the maths says. It chooses. And a man lying on his back in a shallow pit with his arms torn open is the easiest choice in the world.
I try to move. I try to roll over the lip, out, anywhere. My legs won't push. My arms fold under me like wet paper. I get my chest halfway up the wall and the mud lets go, and I slide back down, face up, with Saint Nicholas still in my hand.
The little cross tips forward.
Then a gun goes off. Close, from another hole somewhere to my left. Two flat bangs, then a third.
Not a rifle. A shotgun. Lyokha's shotgun, the one he bought from a supply sergeant for two bottles and an old phone. Everybody laughed at him for it.
The drone jerks. One of its corners stops blurring. It starts to turn in the air, slowly, like a leaf coming off a tree.
He got it. Lyokha got it.
I feel my face do something it hasn't done since the dugout. My split lip pulls. I'm smiling. Twice, Saint Nicholas. Once with the hole, once with Lyokha. Of course you did. I lift him up a little, towards the sky, so he can see I'm grateful.
The drone keeps turning. It isn't flying away. It's falling. And it's falling here.
It hits the mud a metre from my head.
The last thing I see is a white flash through the paper saint.
The first shell had already done its work on his arms and legs. Fragments had gone through both forearms where he held them over his face, shattered the left elbow and opened both thighs. Those wounds alone might have been survivable.
The drone did the rest, although nobody had sent it for him. Its pilot, somewhere far behind the Ukrainian line, had looked at the crater through the camera and seen two bodies in brown water. Dead men, as far as he could tell. He was turning the drone toward the trench line beyond them when Lyokha's pellets cut one of its motors. After that it went where gravity put it.
It was a small charge, a kilogram at most, with steel bearings taped around it. The blast took the hands at the wrists, still raised, and the paper icon went up into the air in pieces and was never found. The bearings went into the face. They took both eyes. They broke the upper and lower jaw and took the front of the tongue. The pressure wave burst both eardrums and went further in, into the small bones behind them, and broke all of it.
Gena Fyodorovich Kalinin, forty-four, from Tula, was already dead, on his side in the water, with one hand on Alexander's ankle.
Timur Ayasovich Oorzhak had been thrown twenty metres the other way by the same shell. He came to with steel in his back and his rifle gone, and he crawled toward the sound of the shotgun.
Lyokha reached the crater first, crawling forty metres through the mud from his own hole, the empty shotgun still on his back. Timur slid in after him, bleeding through his jacket. Between them, with the black Soviet rubber tourniquets that come in every kit and go stiff in the cold, they tied off both of Alexander's arms above the elbow and both legs high on the thigh. Timur took a marker from his pocket and wrote the time on Alexander's forehead, which was the only part of his face that was still a forehead: 06:41. They dragged him back to the dugout on a rain cape. It took nine hours, because they could only move when the sky was quiet.
There they waited.
The army's rule, which it copied from the armies it hates, is that a tourniquet should not stay on a limb more than two hours. After six hours, the flesh beneath begins to die and will not come back. Alexander Yurievich's tourniquets stayed on for three days and seven hours, because that is how long it took for a vehicle to be found that a commander was willing to risk on the road, and because, for the first thirty hours, there was a discussion on the radio about whether he was worth it. Granit's view was that he was not. A man with no face, no hands, is not a soldier who will go back into the line; he is a cost. There was paperwork that could be filed. There was an easier word than “wounded”.
It was Timur who walked back. Timur, with steel in his back, walked eleven kilometres to the battalion aid post, through the night, and stood in front of the battalion surgeon and would not leave, and would not stop standing there, and would not stop saying the same sentence in his flat voice—he is alive, he is alive, he is alive—until the surgeon, a tired man named Zhuravlev who had not slept in two days, found a driver who owed him money.
In the dugout, for three days, the rats came to the smell of the blood. Lyokha sat by Alexander with the hunting knife and killed every one he could reach. He killed, by his own count, forty-one. He talked the whole time. He told Alexander about car radios and about his mother and about a girl in Saratov, and none of it was true, and none of it was heard.
The legs went first, at the field hospital in the occupied city, above the knee. Then the arms, at the elbow, what was left. The infection came anyway and they took more of the left thigh in a second operation, at a military hospital far to the rear. They closed the face the best they could. They put a tube into his stomach and another into his throat.
He lived. Yet that was not anyone's intention.
It is dark.
Not night-dark. Night has edges: a window, a crack under a door. This dark has no edges at all. I wait for someone to take the bandage off my eyes. Nobody does.
It is silent, too. Not quiet. Silent. I can't hear my own breathing. I only know I'm breathing because I feel my chest move.
I try to call for a nurse. Nothing happens. There is nothing left in my mouth to make a word with, only a raw stump where my tongue was, and a pain in my jaw so big that I black out.
When I wake up, I reach for the bed rails. I can feel my hands. I can feel my fingers spread, my thumb cramped from the rifle, my little finger itching. But nothing touches anything. Something short and wrapped moves near my shoulder, and that's all.
Then I try my legs. My feet are cold. My left knee aches. I can feel all of it. But when I try to bend my knees, there are no knees. Just below my hips, the sheet lies flat against the mattress.
I am not in a hospital. I am in what the war has left over, and it has no window and no door, and nobody else lives here.
All I have left is skin. A draught means a door has opened. A cool, quick hand is one nurse; a warm, slow hand that smells of cigarettes is another. The sun crosses my chest in the morning and my throat at noon, and that is my clock. I can't tell sleeping from waking. And because there is nothing else to do, I think.
I think about the President. I loved him the way you love a father you never had. I had his face on a mug at the polytechnic. But he doesn't know I'm here, and he never will. To him I'm not a soldier, not a son. I'm a line on a list that some colonel wants to make shorter. A cost that Granit tried not to pay. Is he worth it? they asked on the radio. And the answer on the radio was no, and if it had not been for a Tuvan whom we called Monkey walking eleven kilometres on a back full of steel, that would have been the last answer anyone ever gave about me.
I think about the Motherland. I always pictured her as a big, calm woman in a kerchief, like on the posters. Now I look for her and all I find are men. Men with tablets. Men selling water. A boy with blue lips in a pit.
The army taught me to tie a tourniquet in the dark, then left one on me for three days.
And then I think about God. I ask Him where He was. I held up His saint with both hands, the hands I don't have anymore. I already know what the priest would say. God's ways are not our ways. Suffering purifies. I've said those words to other people. Now they sound like doors painted on a wall.
The worst part is that I can't let go. Every time I decide there's no one there, something small and stubborn inside me holds out its hand in the dark, palm up, waiting.
I think about the videos we used to pass around in the barracks. A wounded soldier in a field, a drone hanging over him, and he puts a grenade under his chin. We called them cowards. Now I understand them. They had a hand and a grenade, and they chose. I can't choose. I don't have a hand. I can't even refuse food; it goes in through a tube.
My grandfather taught me Morse code. He was a radio operator in the Northern Fleet. He used to tap on the kitchen table with a spoon, and if I guessed the letter, I got a sugar cube.
One day I feel my head move against the pillow. I can lift it a little and let it fall.
Three short. Three long. Three short.
S. O. S. Save our souls. That's what Grandpa said it meant. It doesn't really, but I believe him, and I send it. Morning, noon and all through the night. My neck burns. My stitches pull. I keep sending.
Then a hand comes. The quick one. She presses my forehead down, gently, and I keep sending under her palm. Then there's a sting in what is left of my arm, a warm grey falling, and I understand: she thinks it's a seizure. She isn't cruel. She's tired, and she has forty beds.
When I wake up, there's a strap across my forehead. I can move my head about a finger's width.
I send it anyway. No one comes.
Then, one day, there are two new hands.
One of them is shaking. The other is rough and very still, and it lays something small and cold on my chest. A tin cross. My grandmother's. It must have been in the crater, in the mud, with everything else. Only one person would have gone back for it.
Timur.
The shaking hand pats my shoulder, too hard, again and again. Lyokha. I can smell him: cheap tobacco and gun oil. He's probably talking. He's always talking.
They both know Morse. Timur learned it on the signals course before they sent him up the line. Lyokha learned it in prison, tapping on the pipes between cells. So I don't send them SOS. I send them something else, against the strap, a finger's width at a time, slowly, so they can't miss it.
K. I. L. L. M. E.
Again. And again. Timur's hand moves from the cross to my forehead and rests on the strap, reading. His fingers go stiff. Lyokha stops patting my shoulder. They understand.
Then Timur's hand slides down to my throat. It stays there for a long time, and I can feel the pulse in his fingers, fast, much faster than mine. Then the fingers close, a little. Just a little. Something in me jumps. Yes, brother. Yes. Now.
Then the hand opens and goes away.
Something warm falls on my chest, next to the cross. Then another drop. Timur, who never says anything, who answered to Monkey in the same flat voice for eight months, is crying on me.
The shaking hand pulls him away. A draught comes and goes. The cross stays.
They understood. That's the worst part. They understood exactly what I wanted, and they couldn't give it to me.
So I stop sending it to people. I send it upward, to Saint Nicholas. He was in my hands when it happened. The saint of sailors and travellers and men in trouble, my grandmother said. If anyone is listening on this frequency, it's him.
I'm not asking to be saved. I'm not asking for heaven; I don't think I've earned it. I only want it to stop. Please. Whoever is listening. Please.
And I think, God help me, somebody hears it.
It comes in a dream, but I know it isn't one. In my dreams I can see. Here I can't. I'm still in the dark, in the bed. But the silence breaks.
There is a voice. I don't hear it with ears. It's more like it's spoken into me, calm and close, from everywhere at once.
Alexander. Would you like this suffering to end? Would you like to begin again, in a new world, from the beginning?
I don't ask who it is. I don't ask for proof, or a name, or terms. It doesn't matter if it's Saint Nicholas, or my grandfather with his spoon, or something with no name at all. Someone heard me. That's all I need.
I don't have a mouth to say yes. So against the strap, a finger's width, I nod. Once.
Yes.
Then there is a light.
It's the colour of the inside of your eyelids when you lie in a field in June with your face to the sun. I had forgotten that colour. I feel the strap let go of my head. I feel the bed fall away. I feel the body slide off me like a wet coat, and I'm light, lighter than the paper saint above the crater.
The light at the end of the tunnel. My grandmother used to say your people wait for you there, and hold out their hands.
I hold out mine.
I have hands.
And the last thing I think, as Alexander Yurievich, twenty-three, from Nizhny Novgorod, who believed with his whole chest in a hole in the ground, is: finally.