Mortal Happiness: Chapter Six

The flat steppe of the North Caucasus spread around the convoy like an open palm. During a rare twist in the road Jones tried to count the number of trucks behind and in front of his own but dust hid all but the closest. Grasping the overhead strap to prevent his spine jerking free of his ribs, he looked from the faded green canvas roof to the always receding vista, with its row upon hundreds of thousands of rows of maize.

The personnel carriers were old Soviet vehicles covered with bows and canvas, some lacking the canvas. He’d been told that once over the border they’d transfer to armoured vehicles but he didn’t believe it. After ten hours on a wooden plank he felt very old. Everything in his body ached, even his teeth. The fifteen men around him seemed resigned or indifferent to the discomfort. They slept through the worst of potholes and ruts, knees and shoulders rubbing companionably together. Awake they smoked foul smelling cigarettes, holding a few centimetres of butt in stained fingers. Just now everyone was asleep, their faces remote and empty as the landscape around them. Some of the men were small and dark eyed, farmers’ sons, Jones guessed, or herders maybe from Tatarstan or Kalymkia. A few were rawboned, russet-faced plough-boys. Others looked like Krasin and his clones, blond with deep-set eyes and knife-edge cheekbones. One or two, including Never, he couldn’t place. All wore peacekeeper insignia on their camouflage jackets.

They stopped once after leaving Rostov and celebrated with a mass urination into the ditches that separated the road from the crops. Piss-filled cans and bottles were emptied and kept for future use. Looking along the line of urinating men Jones decided he’d never seen so many pricks in one place and using Never as a shield he took image after image.

As the journey continued, Jones was aware of Never studying him from under the rim of his cap. Watching seemed natural to Never and he did it with an intensity which Jones found amusing and unsettling. The Lieutenant observed as though observation were the key to many interesting, private things.

Flatness felt strangely exposing to Jones and after a day of it he was gratefully aware of the slightest gradient. Soon after the mountains appeared, sharp and clear in the far distance, the road began to climb and the line of following trucks was suddenly visible. Behind them the steppe spread, smoothly fertile. Mother Russia, he thought, saying farewell to her sons. Finally his own eyes closed and he slept.

Beyond the small terraced house, the wind rises and falls with a sound like winter wolves. The cold wind is sucking the breath from his lungs. He inhales sharply, imagining wind striking the slag heaps that rise behind the house, beyond the gash in the landscape everyone calls the cwm. Surfaces are stripped, slag is hurled into the air right under his feet. Ash and coal dust, whorls of sparkling filth, dancing and spinning between earth and sky, and he’s holding it in his hands. When the wind drops, the world will be covered with a delicate layer of black that will crunch underfoot like snow. He’s seen it before.

The cwm’s true depth is concealed in places by layers of ancient brambles, stems thick as his forearm. He crawls through the tearing thorns and hides as thin sheep and rats wander around him, soundlessly, through a mosaic of detritus. Tinkers camp here and their otherness clings to the grass and shabby scrub underfoot. Down here, nose to the ground, he can smell them.

Back in the kitchen it’s growing darker. His heart thumps so that he can feel it in his throat as he looks out through the window, up towards the path that leads steeply away from the backyard, up, up to an outside world set on steep slopes and angles that echo the land. Wet slate roofs shine white and sodium orange in the dusk. There’s a sound that could be the wind or a man moaning in his sleep.

By the light of a dim, unshaded bulb he peels potatoes with a small, ivory-handled pairing knife, its tip missing. The knife in his dream hand feels real. Thick peel spirals across the oil-clothed table. He’s trying to do a whole potato without breaking the spiral, but his eyes move like a pendulum between the clock on the beige tiled mantelpiece and the potato in his hand. The peel breaks. He starts again, faster this time, setting an impossible rhythm that matches the louder, louder ticking of the clock. At five-thirty precisely boots crunch along the high path that runs past all the back yards in this terrace. The boots move heavily down the steps towards the back door. The potatoes are finished; sharp-faceted ellipses huddled in the battered aluminium saucepan. His heart lurches as the kitchen tips sideways with a crash.

He was woken by a jarring blow to the neck as the truck’s front wheels hit a hole the width of the road. The shock disabled him – old panic mixing with present embarrassment. Embarrassment made him feel like a kid waking on the school bus to hysterical laughter at his open-mouthed drooling. He glanced around wet faced, stomach heaving upwards into his chest. Only Never was awake. Awake and looking at him with an indecipherable expression. Jones held his gaze for a moment, then Never closed his eyes and rested his head on the shoulder of the man snoring beside him.

Jones wiped his eyes with shaking fingers then hunched forward head in his hands. For longer than he could remember, panic and waking had been almost indistinguishable. Mostly he ignored the bone-tiredness that stretched the skin of his face pale and taut as a drum skin. Over the years he’d developed techniques for dealing with his predicament. He’d learnt to doze standing or sitting upright in empty offices and under trees; any unobserved place where he couldn’t sink too far towards where the terror began. At the age of thirty six he felt he’d come to some kind of accommodation with his problem, though he knew that others, Ivan Kossov included, would disagree. He hadn’t spent the entire night with anyone in nearly ten years. He recalled the last time – a large-breasted psychoanalyst who’d picked him up in an Atlanta singles-bar - with the greatest clarity.

‘Dee-nial,’ she’d retorted when he’d dismissed his screaming nightmare as a one-off bad dream. ‘Dee-nial, dee-fine-itely – see it awll the time with your type of man.’

He’d felt almost hurt, had thought he’d shown her a pretty hot time. But he’d laughed anyway at the idea of denial. ‘De Nile is a river in Egypt,’ he’d whispered into her ear, assuming she knew the old joke. Before he could wonder what kind of man she thought he was, she’d dressed and left.

He picked up an empty plastic bottle that had been rolling back and forth underfoot since they last stopped hours earlier and pissed into it unsteadily. Trying to rearrange his joints as they had been before he started the journey he moved warily through the log jam of sleeping men to the open back end of the truck and looked out. In just a few hours they had climbed several thousand feet and entered a new world. Overhead reconnaissance aircraft passed back and forth, their noise masked by the drone of the truck’s engine. Legs braced against the jolting, Jones poured the contents of his bottle into the wind. A libation, he thought, to whatever gods do their god-thing here.

At midday they stopped in a cleared area, rusted cans and plastic bags evidence of previous halts. Climbing stiffly out of the truck Jones noticed the thinness of the air. Something of his dream was still with him, heavy and painful. He gripped his nose and blew out hard, clearing the seemingly constant pressure in his head. It was very quiet under the giant pine trees and the men seemed momentarily subdued. Only Krasin’s voice shouting orders broke the silence. Two trucks stood under the trees, the rest were gone.

‘Where are the other units?’ he asked when Never appeared with two steaming canteens.

‘There are several passes through the mountains, word is that we are being split up to move forward on a wide front towards the target area.’

‘The target area being …?’

‘Our official destination is what’s called the Zone of Conflict between Abkhazia and Georgia. Our official purpose is to ‘reinforce’ our peacekeeping guys already in place.’ He glances at Jones over the rim of his canteen, ‘But you know all that from Colonel TImofeev, no?’

‘Yeah, I know what he told me … the official story.’ He smiled encouragingly at Never. ‘And the unofficial one?’

Never shrugged. ‘I’ve seen no orders yet, Krasin and Major Tchekov deal with everything important.’ He paused then said casually, ‘Do you have any ideas about where we’re going?’

Surprised, Jones said, ‘Me? I’m just along for the ride. I don’t even know where I am.’

Never nodded, slowly. ‘I read on the Internet recently that some Chechen leader has made himself at home in the Upper Kodori Gorge, using it as a base. It wasn’t clear which side he’s on.’ He made a sour face. ‘That’s how it is, if I want to understand my orders I have to ask foreigners, or check the fucking Internet on my own time.’

Jones grinned unsympathetically. ‘How long do you think we’ll be travelling?’

‘You weren’t listening to me.’ Never said, suddenly irritable. ‘You know as much about this business as I do, maybe more.’ He eyed Jones for a moment. ‘Who can say what our real destination is.’

‘Isn’t that a bit paranoid? Or are you asking a Russian-type existential question?’ He shrugged. ‘Someone somewhere must know what’s going on.’

‘Oh yes, some gold braid-covered prick sitting in a carpeted office in Moscow had this great idea. He suggested it to someone, who told someone else, who had a chat with the Commander back at the base who ordered Timofeev to lay on some trucks, and Michael …?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Never, and I mean never, tell a Russian he’s being paranoid. You don’t know what the word means.’

Jones nodded. ‘No problem Alexei, no problem at all.’

The other man snorted, picked up his pack and began walking to where his men were establishing their territory in the clearing.

Later, when Never’s men were unpacking and boiling meat breathed it’s stink between the trees he re-appeared carrying two more canteens of strong black tea.

‘These have strawberry jam in them,’ he said cheerfully, passing one to Jones. ‘You don’t put jam in tea in England I think.’

‘I’m not English.’ Jones said, ‘but I’m pretty sure they don’t put jam in tea.’

‘Really? If I was rich, rich as the English, I’d always have jam in my tea.’

Jones said nothing.

‘So you’re not English? What does that mean?’

‘It means I’m from somewhere else?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘I’m British,’ Jones sighed. ‘British, but not English.’

‘Ah,’ Never said.

Jones took a mouthful of sticky liquid and swallowed with difficulty. ‘I’m here to get a story Alexei, you know that, right?’ So tell me what I don’t know about this whole operation Alexei. Tell me why there are Chechens in Georgia.’

‘Seems to me that these days, anyone who does something foolish, like trying to get independence, is automatically a terrorist. In Russia ‘terrorist’ and ‘Chechen’ mean pretty much the same thing.’ Never looked at Jones then shrugged. ‘But I’m sure you knew that.’

‘But Georgia is a long way from Chechenya.’

Never nodded, ‘Chechenya’s an uncomfortable place for insurgents these days, too many Russians.’ He grinned. ‘So, they’re expanding outwards. Small training units have begun supporting insurgents across the region, even non-Moslems … like the freaky Forest Brotherhood. Colonel Timofeev told you about them, no?’ Jones nodded as Never continued. ‘So the operation is to keep the peace. The question is: which peace? If the Georgian government is too weak to kick the Chechen’s out of their country we’re going to do it for them, whether they like it or not. That way we keep a peace.’

‘”Keeping a piece of this and a piece of that”, that’s what Timofeev said to me.’

Never looked away from Jones, squinting his eyes behind his glasses as if imagining the high mountain border, invisible behind the clustering forest. ‘The truth is, Georgia is happy enough to sleep with our enemies - even the Chechens who make most Georgians want to shit themselves.’ My enemy’s enemy is my friend, isn’t that the expression? ’

‘You have an unusually … uh, clear, view for a Russian officer.’

Never smiled, ‘And unusually good English too. Most journalists would have asked me about that, I think. So, I have to wonder what kind of a journalist you are.’ He looked Jones up and down and shook his head. ’I think Krasin did you a favour. You like wearing it.’

Ignoring the last statement, Jones said, ‘You think I lack curiosity?’

Never’s shoulders lifted towards his ears in a gesture Jones is coming to recognise.

‘Already you’re too much like a Russian soldier. You don’t ask the right questions.’

‘I just asked for your opinion didn’t I?’ Jones said, surprised.

‘You asked me questions to which you already knew the answers.’

Jones opened his mouth to remonstrate, but Never continued quickly, ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I think my opinions interest you, but not as a journalist would be interested. And that makes me wonder, once again, why you’re really here.’

‘Maybe I’m just a bored old hack who wants a change.’ Jones got up, picked up his bedding. ‘Thanks for the tea.’

To Jones’ retreating back, Never said, ‘Remember what I told you before we left. Whatever your reason for being here - you need to be sure of it, and soon.’

Across the clearing, Krasin shouted that he had told God to send the rain elsewhere, so there would be no need for tents tonight.