Private Kochkurkin's Demob Rocket

Private Kochkurkin's Demob Rocket

(in two books, unfinished)

Preface

— Defendant, your final words.
— A million!
— The court retires to deliberate.

Just for laughs.

At first, this work was conceived simply as a collection of construction-battalion folklore with a fair amount of grim realism. But over the long process of writing, the amount of folklore gradually decreased, while the amount of artistic fiction grew. Initially, this worried me as an adherent of social realism. However, later I decided that there is plenty of grimness in literature nowadays, whereas humor is in rather short supply. Therefore, I decided to leave everything as it is.

Although the setting, characters, and events are not fabricated, everything is considerably exaggerated. Therefore, one shouldn't blame the author for making things up. Just read, and I hope you enjoy it.

The Author.

Part One: The Threshold

Two soldiers from a construction battalion can replace a Gestapo platoon.

An observation.

Chapter One: The Company Sergeant

— I can see for myself that it's a photon reflector. Why isn't it painted?

Pilot Kirk.

...The remnants of the rocket were burning out on the launchpad. Struggling to stand on my wounded leg, I dragged the commander to a trench and collapsed onto the bottom, utterly exhausted. The air reeked of burnt flesh and heptyl; deadly radiation scorched my brain... I've been lying in a hospital bed for the 3rd month now; the division commander came by and said I'd be recommended for a medal. I don't know if I'll survive, my sweet Marina, so just in case, send about 50 rubles for the funeral... I folded the sheet, wrote "12 / Marina" in the top corner, and slipped it into a folder. Then I started a new one: "Hello, dear stranger, a heroic defender of Baikonur is writing to you. You don't know me, which is why I feel so lonely here without you..."

At that moment, my relief walked in, and I began preparing to hand over guard duty. The guardhouse, as usual, was packed tight.

Kochkurkin, "stalker", my old friend, had distinguished himself again: all night long he had been painting "DMB-83" on the hull of a rocket with a Soviet-French crew, but on the last two-meter letter he was spotted by the valiant security and got 15 days of arrest, twice.

Khatin, the electrician. Dead drunk, he burst into the new recruits' company at 2 a.m. and staged a marching-and-singing review. The first platoon sang, "Higher, and higher, and higher, and now you can see the knees..." The second sang, "First of all we'll wreck the airplanes, and as for the girls..." On the third platoon, the assistant duty officer walked in. Three days in the "cooler."

Lyamkin, the driver. Traded a truckload of plywood crates to some Kazakhs for a crate of vodka. When the Kazakhs used that plywood to stoke their stoves, the explosion blew away their yurt and three more around it. Moral: check the markings on crates and don't trade gunpowder. (Besides, you can sell gunpowder for more!)

After the guard mount, I headed for the barracks.

The unit, as usual, was preparing for another inspection. Everything was parallel and perpendicular, trimmed, painted, and sprinkled with sand. The grass was painted with brilliant green, the barbed wire with ultramarine, the cast-iron front gates with varnish. Leaves were being tied onto oak trees, and the asphalt was being washed with soap.

Recruits from the second company were urgently swapping out a poster reading "Soldier's Club: 'A Night Full of Passion', night screening" featuring a half-naked Madonna for "The People and the Army Are One" featuring a soldier in dress uniform. However, Madonna stayed on—apparently personifying the people.

In the barracks, as usual, it was total chaos. From the drying room came whoops and muffled groans. In the Lenin room, they were cutting a deck of cards out of newspapers. In the utility room, judging by the sounds, someone was sighting in a homemade pistol. In the sleeping quarters, the short-timers were playing "demob train." Two bunk beds represented a train compartment, and five running recruits holding brooms acted as trees flashing past the window. Another crowd in civilian clothes... The orderly, playing the conductor, was serving tea. All that was missing were music, girls, and booze. Though I hadn't reached the company sergeant's office yet. I wish I hadn't.

The company sergeant's office smelled overwhelmingly of solvent—two young soldiers in gas masks were meticulously painting a wall pink. In general, the walls of the room were painted in so many colors that it was hard to single out a dominant one. As for booze, a blue bottle of "Stekloochistitel" glass cleaner stood proudly on the table. Next to it sat a compact disc player. There was no sign of any girls, though. Apparently, all hopes rested on me.

The company sergeant, briefly snapping out of his trance, sliced a loaf of bread lengthwise, shoved a pack of "Solnechny" margarine inside, smeared it around with his finger, and bit off a good half of the sandwich. Our company sergeant was one of those warrant officers who don't wear a shoulder board on their right shoulder so they don't rub it away with a sack. You could unleash guys like him on enemy facilities instead of a neutron bomb: the people would remain, while all material assets would vanish without a trace.

Noticing me, he yelled, "Shut the door, you'll let all the buzz out," and invited me to sit down. Fighting off waves of nausea, I said:

"Comrade Warrant Officer, order them to stop painting."

"Why? It's a fine high—the paint's acetone-based, fifth coat they're putting on, can't get enough of it." He barked at the recruits, and they quickly packed up.

"How many parcels for today?"

The company sergeant rummaged through the delivery slips. "Three."

"So that makes about 30 in total already. Turns out every fifth fool sends gifts in reply to my letters. Good yield."

"They write, they write. Why do they only send cigarettes, salo, and collar liners, though? Where's the vodka, the tea?"

"Comrade Warrant Officer, I can't very well write that a valiant defender of the Motherland needs vodka or chifir, can I? On the other hand, five of them confessed their love."

"What kind of love is that? Just words." The company sergeant folded a crust of bread in half and, with energetic thrusting motions of his finger, demonstrated his understanding of love. "Write and tell them to come here. Say a Hero of the Union needs female care to recover his health." With the same finger, he punctured a can of condensed milk and, without pausing, poured it straight into his mouth. Then he let out a satisfied belch and handed the can to me. "That's for your tea."

I poured tea into the can and took a sip. "One of them's potentially up for it—a city girl, young, swept up in romance. She'll come, alright, though whether anything comes of it..."

"It will. Here's another dozen addresses for you—lifted 'em from the new batch of recruits." From under a slab of salo, he pulled out a blank honorary certificate with addresses written on the back. "By the way, as a bonus you can take this compact player; doesn't work anyway. No matter how compact the records I shove into it—" he nodded toward a pile of cut-up vinyl records "—not a single sound, just whines pitifully and blinks."

"Comrade Warrant Officer, after your service, are you going to join the militia or the firefighters?"

"Don't mess with me. I'm not going to work either way."

Chapter Two: The Political Officer

Shoot the Politburo, and paint the rails green.

A proposal.

I took the addresses, left the sergeant-major's room, and stepped into the political officer's office. As is well known, construction battalions are formed on a residual basis. And this is the only place where they take people with criminal records. So, a troop train travels from Tuva through Siberia to Kazakhstan and picks up along the way everyone left behind in the "fridges." As a result, out of the 20 drafted Russians in our company, only four had no convictions, and of those four, only two could write almost without mistakes. Thus, one of us (me) was destined to carry the entire company's political enlightenment on his shoulders. The second one was occupied with a more important matter—decorating dembel albums. And since by the second dozen company newspapers I had grown tired of it, for April 1st I put out a wall newspaper with "humor."

The editorial was titled "Virginity for Political Studies!" In it, I proved that the construction battalion had been founded by Lenin, as evidenced by his organization of subbotniks, voskresniks, and kolkhozes.

Another, under the headline "Our Goal Is Communism," explained in popular terms that we had built the Buran rocket to place a system of X-ray lasers into orbit. With their help, any anti-government demonstration could easily be destroyed with high precision.

In the third article, "In Case of Nuclear War," I wrote that when a bomb explodes, you must stand on guard duty holding your bayonet at arm's length so that molten metal does not drip onto your boots. Then wrap yourself in a bedsheet and crawl quietly to the cemetery. Quietly—so as not to create panic. And then, after the nuclear war, they will dig a mass grave for all of us at the rate of 0.5 cubic meters per 100 people.

For the next article, the title alone was enough: "On the Necessity of Liquidating All Non-Komsomol Members."

The political officer started chewing me out right from the doorway:

"Palek, you're a completely apolitical character. What is this column, 'Creativity of the Whites': 'That's how we build our sites, / With kicks and swear words flying. / Someone plows, and plows, and plows, / Ending up the fool!' Who did you have in mind?"

"Me? The Blacks of South Africa. And who did you have in mind, Comrade Lieutenant?"

"Me? The rookies... Pfft, what am I saying... Bomber."

Practically everyone who ended up in the construction troops, especially here, was flawed in some way: either physically, or mentally, or had some kind of trouble with the authorities before conscription. I, on the other hand, had merely been expelled from university for my hobby of pyrotechnics (explosions). So as not to stand out from the general mentality, I said I had leveled a police station to the ground.

"We had an agreement: I'm the one who writes about politics."

Another article in the newspaper had indeed been written by the political officer and resembled a student comedy revue: "While across the ocean the arms moonshine race continues to unfold, we cannot remain on the sidelines. Our adversaries have unleashed a cold war, from which the peoples of the Far North suffer most of all. Only as a result of the latest counteroffensive of frosts have all winter crops suffered... Although sudden warming in Iraq up to 100,000 degrees in each epicenter of warming is promised, across the Semipalatinsk test site as a whole there is high radioactive cloudiness, after which all residents will fall out as precipitate... According to NATO data, there are up to a hundred barrels per hectare of Siberian taiga; however, this is a lie: for instance, in the area of the Tyumen oil wells you can hardly find a single intact barrel, while our army needs qualified personnel and new equipment for a more deepidified reflection of objective reality."

"Look here, Palek, one more newspaper like this and I don't know what I'll do to you." The political officer sighed, probably remembering the uninhibited girls in the military town. If he decided to do something to me, he'd have to cut back on lovemaking—there wouldn't be any time left. And anyway, nobody read the newspaper except me. Half the company couldn't even speak Russian, let alone read it, and those who could had hardly read anything in their lives besides an ABC primer, the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, and the 1st page of the Army Regulations. In one newspaper, as a gag, I wrote under a patriotic drawing: "The political officer is a fool, a drunkard, and a womanizer." The political officer read the paper and said that everything I wrote was accurate and politically literate.

The political officer pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and read with expression: "I am writing to you on the boot of a killed dushman. Tough bastard he turned out to be, even broke my bayonet..." "Your work?"

"Mine."

"Count yourself lucky it fell into my hands. If only you wrote something progressive with the same passion you use to waste enemies of the Soviet Motherland in your letters. By the way, how many beloved women do you have?"

"One. Why?"

"Strange. I've already received a letter from a third fiancée of yours. They thank me for your excellent upbringing. Only for some reason one of them thinks you're a senior sergeant and a Hero of the Soviet Union, while another thinks you're a private."

"I serve the Soviet Union!"

"Stop clowning around."

"With the first one, my correspondence seniority is longer."

"Cut it out, turning the girls' heads. And stop begging for parcels."

"But they suffer from an affection deficit, Comrade Lieutenant. And the parcels are payment for making up for that deficit. Instead of sleeping through the entire guard shift like a normal construction-battalion soldier, I was busy with heart-wrenching scribbling."

"Everything goes to the sergeant-major anyway."

"Hussars don't take money!"

"All right, Rzhevsky, dismissed. Come by in the evening to solve ballistic problems for my thesis."

The political officer had been sent to us for field training after his 4th year at an artillery academy. Types like that only dream about how to increase the number of stars per linear meter. The problems in his thesis were easy as pie. At civilian institutes, they give those to freshmen. When I asked him whether, since a projectile's trajectory is curved, you could turn a cannon on its side and shoot around a corner, he thought about it and said that you probably could, but it wasn't allowed by regulations. He believed, for example, that there was air between the nuclei and electrons in an atom, confused the boiling point of water with a right angle, and just recently I had great difficulty convincing him that a sine cannot exceed one, even under combat conditions.

Chapter Three

The Company Commander

— Comrade Colonel, is it true that smart people can be found among civilians?
— If they were smart, they'd be marching in formation long ago.

A marching song.

Leaving the office, I fell into formation with the company waiting for the morning muster. Our company commander—a captain, formerly a colonel who had been demoted for heavy drinking and written off to our unit—clearly hadn't managed to nurse his hangover yet:

"Report on the presence of the absence of the personnel. Line up all absentees in a single rank. Whoever isn't all of them will be punished. Ubegaylo!"

"Present!"

"Ubegaylo!"

"I'm right here..."

"Of course you're here. Where the hell else would you go."

This was the company commander's favorite joke => we heard it at every single muster. It would have been better if the captain spoke seriously—that way he sounded funnier. In terms of mental development, he definitely measured up to a colonel. Nobody believed he was demoted for systematic binge drinking—they don't strip ranks for that in the army. During a night firefight, he could shoot without missing once, though usually no dead enemy saboteurs were found afterward. He could sprint a couple hundred meters in a gas mask with the valve shut tight. He could hammer a nail into a wall with his forehead, provided, of course, that another colonel wasn't standing on the other side. And so on. For a captain, though, he was far too dumb.

"Over the past week, 200 crimes were registered across all sites. Want to hear the statistics?"

From the right flank, someone called out: "Better keep it brief—how many dead, how much was stolen." Just six months ago, they would say: "Read the whole list"—back then it was interesting to hear what a military construction engineer could pull off. But the novelty soon wore off, since in the criminal realm, a military builder is capable of absolutely anything.

"In brief: five dead, three accidents with semi-fatal outcomes, six raped, ten people beaten up. The rest is petty stuff—hazing, knifings, mass ethnic brawls. 2 million in thefts, totaling 98 years of penal battalion sentences. Yesterday, a group of Azerbaijanis went to Leninsk to file a complaint. Didn't make it. Today, a group of walking corpses from the neighboring unit went to headquarters to complain. They made it, poor bastards. Over the last twenty-five years, an unprecedented spike in crime has been observed—an average of three thefts and two deaths per soldier." The company commander cast an affectionate look over the ranks. "I wish they'd lock you all up already. Right. As you know, an inspection from headquarters is coming."

The captain walked along the bedside lockers and dumped their contents onto the floor. "Why hasn't the order been tidied up yet? Are you fighters or what, do you live in a bear's den or who? I can be reasonable in places, but in others I'm merciless—I'll sort this out properly right now and punish whoever happens to be around. What's that stench in your barracks? Did you crap your pants out of fear?"

"We don't know, Comrade Captain, it didn't stink of anything before you showed up," the company orderly chimed in.

"And whose cigarette butt is lying on the floor?!"

"Nobody's, damn it, Comrade Captain, smoke away to your health."

"Stop swearing like little children. Either quit smoking, or one of the two. Any sick men?"

The company remained silent. People had been avoiding the infirmary lately, because its head—Vasily, a former veterinarian with a fourth-grade education—liked to say: "In the army, everything goes through the ass..." and truly treated everything, even strep throat, with bucket-sized enemas.

"Consider yourselves warned: if you're drinking acid solvent, stir it longer with baking soda; and if you're gulping BF glue, squeeze it out better. If you sleep at the work site, lock the trailer from the inside, not the outside; and don't weld it shut, lock it with a key; and make sure it's a trailer, not a transformer booth. Otherwise it's like a warzone: the unit loses a man a month. That's all. Company, fall out and form up for muster in a checkerboard pattern, in ranks of four. First Sergeant!"

The warrant officer bolted out of the sergeant's room, finishing off a piece of lard with a thick-thick layer of chocolate on the run.

"Sir!"

"What 'sir'?"

"Sir yes sir!"

"What 'sir yes sir'?!"

"Hooray!"

"What 'hooray'?!!"

"..."

"Idiot! Plant a marker flag on the head of the lead column."

The company formed up on the parade ground for muster.

The duty officer for the unit today was Senior Lieutenant Manilov, the political officer of the third company. Unlike the other officers, when it came to maintaining morale, he practiced an individualized approach with every soldier. This started after his voluntary tour of duty in Afghanistan. One night, he might sneak up on a night watchman peacefully snoozing on a locker, neatly tie his hands behind his back, and string him up to the ceiling until morning. Then, once the guy came to, he'd lecture him: "The enemy never sleeps. Because of people like you, back in Afghan the dushman wiped out entire companies of OURS." (This, mind you, was a thousand kilometers from the nearest border!) Another time, he'd drive his company forward with trench shovels at the ready, charging with bayonets at a "simulated enemy," who might turn out to be a couple of cooks hauling out the slop buckets. Just don't go thinking he was a sadist—heavens, no, a kind-hearted soul of a man. Now, over at site 802, they say a single officer in just one night... (go watch the movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, preferably Part 2).

To be continued.