All That Is Solid Melts into Air by Darragh McKeon

its way inside his boot and lie there, at the bottom of each stride, until his foot swelled up and it took all his strength not to scream with the intensity of the pain.
    Bodies were pushed in other ways; beatings were handed out, often in front of the whole battalion. A sergeant would pull someone from ranks, not even inventing a reason for his ire, and beat a man unconscious. It was not the sight of this that Grigory found disturbing—the men accepted their pummelings without complaint, so the sight lacked any pained drama. Even the officers, it was apparent, didn’t have any particular taste for what they were doing. They had to work themselves into the fury. And afterwards they walked away, no desire in them to bask in their positions of total dominance—it was the sound. The dull, weighty impact of flesh meeting flesh. He could still bring it to mind, years later, watching little girls playing their clapping games or listening to a barber apply alcohol to a freshly shaven face.
    And still they ran, and swung and climbed and leaped.
    So many of them talked to themselves. So many times Grigory had watched a man on the brink of collapse and witnessed a full and involved conversation being played out through the twitching of their lips, the physical battle taking on a dialogue of its own. He knew he did the same, in his own moments of desperation. A few cried uncontrollably. Others shut down completely, unable to focus their pupils upon whatever was placed in front of them. When a man was gripped with this kind of torpor, he was treated as though mentally diseased. Within a few days his mattress would be stolen and he would find himself sleeping in the corner of the dirt floor, swept there like the cigarette butts and the mashed leaves or bits of grass that were brought in by weary feet at dusk. If the recruit was unlucky enough to have his bunk within the small radius of heat given out by the stove in each cabin, he might only be allowed one night of weakness. In such cases their nights would be spent lying in the corner until they cut themselves off completely from their billeting and ended up outside the barracks, frozen to death against the mess hall or hanging off the beams of the watertower, or from the sturdy boughs of the ash tree that stood at the entrance to the expanse of mud that was their recreation yard. The kolkhoz boys called them “crows.” When Grigory asked why, they told him that at home they never used scarecrows to ward off threats to their harvest, they shot offending crows and tied them to poles, which they implanted throughout the crops. Once they did this, there were never any more problems.
     
    Near the end of their training they were stationed in the Troitsko-Pechorsky region of Komi. It was late March and the land was still deep in snow. Their platoon was camped in a forest, performing tactical manoeuvres. They had been in colder conditions, but they were more tired than before. Each man had prominent cheekbones and swollen joints. Throughout the months, their will ebbed and flowed, there were periods of time when they could feel themselves growing harder, stronger, feel their bodies adapting to the demands being placed upon them. But they were at the end of that process, two weeks away from their leave, and they thought of nothing but rest and warmth. They wanted to be in a bed with Natalya or Nina, Irina or Dasha, Olga or Sveta.
    They had dug into an ambush position waiting for a rival platoon to make its way into their lair and were under strict orders to keep movements to a minimum by order of their lieutenant, Bykov, a young, shrewd leader whose front teeth were missing, a trait which would have looked comical in other men, but in Bykov’s case it seemed to demand more respect.
    Sunlight twirled through the trees with the passing hours, frost blew in glassy sprays. A family of snow foxes lived about twenty metres north of their position and they became fascinating to the listless men;