Both my sister and I thank God that my brother, though grieved, came back alive. Now he was another man. This is no longer the young man who looked at me frightenedly from the train. He was a warrior who exploded on a mine. He did not need instruction or consolation. In one word, he looked up, comforted me, his older, but now weaker brother. He was not my younger brother, but my older brother. Yes the elderly! And how could he, who had been between life and death for months, be the younger brother of a man who has been messing with dirt all his life and has seen nothing but his swamp.
My primitive, small words began to disperse like fog. What will grow in the deserted place is still unknown, but one thing is clear: there has appeared a powerful germ of life. He was raised by my younger brother.
* * *
Mother is dead. Completely freed from all earthly concerns, she lay in our house, in our hometown, where we returned. And the steppe, and dusty roads, and nasty mosquitoes, everything is already there, behind. Together with the shadow of the mother’s soul, we returned to our hometown. There were red maces, streams, green grass. My mom wanted to see them again.
My mother’s body lay on a new blanket. We, her children, were gathered around, all crying. Only Gulnoza smiled and repeated:
– Mom came, Mom came!
* * *
… We went to my mother’s grave. When he bowed over her, the father whispered:
– Your son is going to the city. Wish him a good way, let his spirit be hard and his head clear. May the spirit of your mother support you, son. Abduvahid hugged me by his shoulder with his scattered hands:
– Now you run out into people for our happiness. You wanted to be a writer. Write about our mother, about the people with my fate. – We said goodbye. They stayed at my mother’s grave. I walked along the road that led to the city with my old suitcase in hand. After walking a little, I turned back. Father and son. Two fates, repeating each other, relying on each other.
I don’t want to talk about my customs in the city. They survived every village boy who came to study in a big city. But wherever I worked, I remembered, kept in my heart, like a precious diamond, the words of my brother, which sounded at the tomb, as a will. At the time when I came to the city, it was difficult to write about the guys with my brother’s fate. But from those terrible places, one after the other, zinc boxes arrived with the inscription, weighing two hundred kilograms. In one house, in another, there was crying and worship of mothers. The people, with their shoulders down, listened silently to their heartbreaking cries.
Every time I came into the village, I looked at my brother, his frozen face, his eye, the place where his hand was, and found no place for myself, feeling my helplessness. His surviving, but submerged blurred eye looked at me, as if reassuring, sympathetic, as though wishing to say, "Don’t be sad. There will be days when you will be able to write about everything".
Every time I returned to the city, my father and brother accompanied me to my mother’s grave. This has broken up many times. Many times I returned to the city with a bitter feeling of dissatisfaction with life.
But you can’t be silent forever, everything ends someday and I exploded. I began to collect materials about the lives of Afghan soldiers. My hopes, the people with whom I was born remained in different parts of the country. For years while collecting material for the book, I listened to them and still listen now. I believed that their voice would be heard by my people.
* * *
The guys who were affected by my brother’s fate spoke reluctantly about themselves. I had to meet with them many times to recreate the picture of what they experienced.
– Give it up, they repeated. Why torment yourself and ourselves? Write better about our hard-working dekhkans. What have we seen? The blood? The broken bodies of friends? With these hands we gathered their bones and pieces of meat from the dust and placed them in the graves. At first, we cried. Then we stopped. Our hearts turned into stone. Day after day we lost human appearance, became angry. We were crushed, killed. The outcast friends gathered our bloody bodies. We returned home without feet, without hands, without eyes. And for all this, the medal "For Courage" and "The Order of the Red Star" were hanged on our chest. We killed completely strangers who were never our enemies, and they killed us. I thought we were doing this for the sake of our country. How about otherwise? After all, we were boys whose mother’s milk still did not dry out on our lips, and we believed what we were beaten in our heads.
What else to say? Please do not remember those days. These memories are too heavy. Again before my eyes is blood, death, horror. Why are you bleeding the hearts of people who have already suffered from this life? My lips trembled when I spoke these words.
The mother of a soldier wounded in the Afghan war with tears in her eyes could not withstand:
– Burn in hell who brought my child to this state! We did not have time to rejoice that our son grew up and became a support for us as this trouble happened. Who to curse, I don’t know, – she recounted, wiping the tears off the edge. Her son hurried to reassure her:
– Do not cry, Mom. I am alive. Think of the mothers whose children have not returned, and then you will understand that you need to thank fate, not curse it, – he said, trying to wipe her tears with his unburned hands. In those moments, I remembered my brother, my mother, my poor, beloved mother.
Over the years, I have visited thousands of people who have returned from Afghanistan. Many times I listened to their short, unimaginable stories. Hundreds of times I looked into the wrinkles on the faces of sedentary mothers who greedily listened to their children. They all seemed to me like my brothers and my mothers. In houses with lining, in poor housekeeping, in the restrained voices of the boys, in the restless gaze of the mothers, in everything I saw similarity to my family. It seemed that the bitter fate hit only children from poor families, destroyed, and returned them to their homeland. Every acquaintance with a new family left a scar in my heart. Then it seemed to me that I experienced something like this myself; I saw it all, experienced it, and became disabled. I have started having nightmares. My legs, my arms, and my broken eyes demanded that I bring them back to my bodies. I fell into this state only from the stories I heard, being a healthy person. And what might then happen to them as eyewitnesses and participants in this nightmare? It was difficult even to watch the boys when they painfully gave details of what happened to them. At such moments I silently lowered my head. These were hard, sad days in my life. It seemed as if I had become a part of their suffering heart.
It was as if my body was infiltrated by electricity when I saw guns in the hands of boys, machine guns and tanks in the toys department of "Children's World". In front of my eyes, the toys turned into real machines, guns, huge tanks. There was a continuous shooting in my ears. I was scratching. It happened, I did not endure and offended in anything innocent girls-sellers. In those days, I came home, trembling with my whole body, inflicting my anger on my relatives.
– Something is happening to your father. Probably found a girlfriend. He was never in such a state, as if he had been replaced, – my wife cried, pressing her children.
But it was more and more difficult for me to get rid of this compulsion, of my obsessive thoughts.
As an obsessed man, in search of Afghan soldiers, I wandered through the distant corners of the country and disappeared for months. I came home shocked from meetings, stories, pressed, like a madman, the button of our apartment.
"Go there where you have been overnight", – I heard the angry voice of my wife, and the door before me closed with a whisper. Not to forget the days when sad and tired, I turned back from the door of my home.
Muhammadrahmat from Khodjent told me that he involuntarily pulled his head into his shoulders and covered his face with his hands when the shells exploded in the cinema. At first I was surprised, but later I realized that there is nothing worse than war and there can be neither winners nor losers. Because both of them and others carry blood, tears, death. I began to understand why so many writers turned to the subject of war. L.Tolstoy, A.Barbus, E.Hemingway and Y.Bondarev… War brings unbelievable