Exit wound

She didn’t answer. Neither did she fire up another cigarette as I ate. She just stared at me, her mind buzzing. ‘OK, Jim, we’ll talk…’ She sat back and took a deep breath. ‘I’m not married.’ She lifted her right hand. ‘I wear it to keep men out of my way. This is Russia, after all. But it is also there to remind me that I was going to marry once, years ago. Semyon was going to be my father-in-law. I love him deeply. He is the only family I have now.’

Her hand came down and played with the cigarette packet.

‘My boyfriend was older than me. My father didn’t approve.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Grisha. We used to go to that place you were aiming for, to escape the eyes of my family. It’s a young person’s hang-out – always has been. He always said it served the best shashlik in Moscow.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was 1987. We were young. We were in love. And then he went to Afghanistan. I waved goodbye to him at the station… and the next time I saw him he was in a coffin. Now Semyon and I have only pictures of Grisha to remind us of what he was like.’

I watched a tear form and trickle down her cheek. She fumbled to get another cigarette out of the pack. I took it from her and helped.

She sniffed. ‘I still go there sometimes when I want to remember him.’

The firebrand who’d gobbed off at the press conference didn’t square with the person I was with now. In Tehran she’d seemed utterly driven. The girl in front of me was vulnerable. But if you’d lost the love of your life in a war? The picture was steadying a little. ‘Grisha’s death still drives you.’

She looked at me. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Yes. But not, I suspect, for the reasons you think.’

I passed her the cigarette and she took it and lit up. ‘Grisha used to write a lot when he was in Afghanistan. Then, one day, February ’eighty-nine, the letters stopped. They told us he was missing, presumed dead. We wrote requesting further information, but the army never replied. It was like he’d never existed.’

In the wake of the Chechen war, I’d helped a number of families who’d tried to find out what had happened to their dead or missing sons. But during the Soviet era it would have been dangerous even asking the question.

‘It must have been – must still be – difficult.’

‘What?’

‘Not knowing what happened.’

‘But we do.’

98

Anna toyed awkwardly with her Baltika. ‘Almost a year after we lost the war, Semyon got a call from a man who claimed to be the colonel of the military forensic medical laboratory that had performed an autopsy on Grisha’s body.’

She saw something in my face. ‘You’re thinking the army didn’t carry out autopsies on ordinary soldiers? Sometimes they did. In certain circumstances.’

I didn’t need to ask her what they were. I knew she was going to tell me soon enough.

She took a swig. ‘The colonel told Semyon that he wanted to meet, that there was something he needed to ask. But Grisha’s father was scared to meet him.’

‘Why?’

‘This was Soviet Russia.’

‘So you said you’d go.’

‘I had nothing to lose. I’d left school and was waiting to go to university. I met this man – this colonel – at a cafe. He told me about himself – told me that he had served in Afghanistan and what an utter, godforsaken waste of life it had been. People like Grisha, he said, deserved better. It was then that he showed me the pictures.

‘The autopsy had been carried out at a military medical laboratory in Kazan. They’d flown the bodies there, the bodies of everybody who’d been in Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier. The first picture showed him almost as I remembered him: he was face up, eyes closed, like he was sleeping.’

The tears were really flowing now. She didn’t even bother wiping them away.

‘I asked the colonel what had happened and he told me Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier had been hit by an antitank rocket. A fragment had pierced his eye, hit bone and tumbled, removing the back of his skull. In the next picture, I saw the exit wound. There was nothing left of the back of his head – just a big black congealed mass of blood, brains, bone fragments and matted hair.’

She steadied herself.

‘The fragment that had killed Grisha had come from an antitank missile that had only just entered service with the Soviet Army. It was effectively brand new. Someone had sold it to the mujahideen. Never mind that it would kill Russians. To the people who’d done the deal, the only thing that was important was the money.’

‘So why did this pathologist approach Semyon?’

‘Oh, that bit was easy. In exchange for the information, he wanted a job.’

Caught in the pool of light cast by the street-lamp outside, a couple of peaked caps and heavy trench coats walked past the window. They stopped to look through the glass. She watched and waited until they moved on.

The stub of her cigarette joined the others in the ashtray. ‘Jim, we should go.’

99

We were on a main drag – a long prospect heading westwards, the direction we needed to go. Traffic streamed in both directions. I turned to Anna as she took my arm. ‘Tell me about Grisha.’