Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich Page A

‘Sasha’ written on it came out of the hat twice, so that was that. He was bom big, four and a half kilos and sixty centimetres long. I remember he could walk at ten months and speak at a year and a half, but until he was three he couldn’t say his ‘r’s and ‘s’s. ‘I’ll do it myself’ he used to say, and he called his friend Sergei ‘Tiglei’. His nursery-school teacher, Kira Nikolayevna, was ‘Kila Kalavna’. The first time he saw the sea he shouted: ‘I wasn’t bom, a wave threw me up on to the shore!’
    I gave him his first photo-album when he was five. He had four altogether, one from his nursery-school days, one from his big school, one for his military academy days and the last for the photos he sent us from Afghanistan. I gave my daughter her own albums too. I loved my home and my children. I wrote them poems:
    â€˜Through the frosty springtime snows
    A little snowdrop poked his nose
    When the sun shone bright each morn
    My little baby boy was born … ’
    At the school where I taught my pupils loved me, I was always cheerful and happy …
    Sasha loved playing cops-and-robbers and always wanted to be the goodie. When he was five and Tanechka nine we went on holiday to the Volga. We got off the boat to walk the half-kilometre to their grandma’s house. Sasha refused to budge. ‘I’m not walking. Carry me!’
    â€˜Carry a big boy like you?’
    â€˜I’m not walking and that’s that!’ And he didn’t. We used to tease him about that.
    At nursery school he loved dancing. He had lovely red trousers — we’ve got a photo of him in them. He collected stamps until he was fourteen, we’ve still got his album; then it was badges, there’s a big basket full of them somewhere. He liked music, we’ve kept his cassettes with all his favourite songs …
    When he was a child he wanted to be a musician, but as he grew up he was surrounded by army life. His father was a soldier and we’d lived in army compounds all our lives. He ate with soldiers, cleaned cars with them, so there was no one to say ‘no’ when he applied for the military academy. On the contrary, all he heard was: ‘You will be a true defender of the Motherland, my son’. He was a good student and joined in everything. He passed out well and the Commandant wrote us a personal letter about him.
    1985. Sasha was in Afghanistan. We were proud of him, of the fact that he was at the front. I’d tell my pupils and his friends about him, and longed for him to come home on leave.
    Living in garrison towns we never locked our front door. So one fine day he came in without ringing the bell, shouting, ‘Was it you that wanted the television repairman?’ From Kabul he and his friends had flown to Tashkent and then as far as Donetsk. Then on to Vilnius, where he had to wait three hours for his train, which was frustrating because home was only a couple of hundred kilometres away. In the end they took a taxi.
    He was tanned and thin, but his teeth were lovely and white.
    â€˜You’re skin and bones, my love!’ I cried.
    â€˜I’m alive, Mama, I’m alive!’ He swung me round the room. ‘Do you realise, I’m alive, alive, alive!’
    Two days later it was New Year’s Eve. He’d hidden presents under the Christmas Tree. Mine was a big scarf. A big black scarf.
    â€˜Why did you choose black, my love?’ I asked.
    â€˜There were various colours there, Mama, but by the time I got to the front of the queue there was only black left. Anyhow, it suits you.’
    I buried him in that scarf, and wore it for two years afterwards.
    He always loved giving presents. ‘My little surprises,’ he used to call them. Once, when the children were still small, I came home with their father and we couldn’t find them. I went to the neighbours, on to the street — they