She used to think of something really sad. Her mother’s death, maybe.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m sure you can guess.’
A grim silence filled the car. The pulse in my neck quickened. I pictured a twenty-one-year-old kid on a mortuary slab with the back of his head removed by a tumbling missile fragment. I was just going on what she’d told me, but the image was astonishingly vivid - maybe because I was no stranger to scenes like that.
It was 1987. They were young. They were in love. They’d started dating when she was just sixteen - a schoolgirl. He was almost nineteen and in the Soviet Army. And then he’d gone to Afghanistan. She waved goodbye to him at the station, and the next time she saw him he was in a coffin. Even now, she still went to the station sometimes when she wanted to remember him.
‘Grisha was an idealist.’ I remembered the sadness in her voice as we’d walked along a windy Moscow
They’d got talking. He wanted to go to university to study literature, but his family didn’t have the money or the influence to send him - in those days you couldn’t do it any other way. He would have been conscripted anyway, to fight in Afghanistan, so why not get a university education from the army as well? It meant signing up for five years, but then he’d be free of it. He wanted to become a teacher.
Anna’s father didn’t approve of the relationship. But, then, he didn’t approve of anything much. He was an alcoholic. The Soviet system had killed his love of life. He worked in a factory that made machine tools. He hated it. Anna’s mother was scared of him.
Anna was his only child. He wanted her to make something of her life, and study, study, study, he said, was the only way to achieve it. She had to see Grisha in secret. He had a motorbike, so they could escape every so often for a few hours on their own.
When he’d joined the army, Grisha had gone away for almost a year. In that time Anna saw him only once. He didn’t talk about his training, but she could see that it had affected him deeply. It was only after the Chechen war, years later, when she’d helped families who’d tried to discover what had happened to their dead or missing sons, that she’d found out what they did to recruits. There was systematic abuse. Punishments had nothing to do with performance. If the officers and the NCOs in charge were having a bad day, they beat you. If they were bored, they beat you. When Grisha had come home that summer he was a changed man. He didn’t want to talk about the army, just kept telling her that it wouldn’t be long - another four years - and then he’d be free of it.
It was Grisha’s father who had bought the motorbike, a beaten-up old thing from the Great Patriotic War, and restored it for him. The only times she had seen Grisha happy that summer were when he and his father had worked on the bike and when he had taken Anna out on it.
It was her eighteenth birthday while he was still on leave so they had decided to hand in their application to get married. Russians didn’t have engagements and rings. They applied to ZAGS, the department of registration. But the wedding had never happened. He was sent to Afghanistan before ZAGS had given them a date.
Grisha used to write a lot when he was in Afghanistan. In February 1989, the month the war ended, so had the letters. The army told her he was missing, presumed dead. She wrote requesting further information, but the authorities had never replied. It was like he’d never existed.
Almost a year after they’d lost the war, Grisha’s father had got a call from a man who claimed to be from the military forensic medical laboratory that had performed an autopsy on his son’s body. He wanted to meet; there was something he needed to ask. But Grisha’s father was too scared. This was Soviet Russia.
Anna had said she would 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. Then he showed me some pictures.
‘The autopsy had been carried out at a 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: face up, eyes closed, like he was sleeping.
‘The colonel told me the carrier had been hit by an anti-tank rocket. A fragment had pierced his eye, hit bone and tumbled. 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.’
It was a Soviet missile. The army had found a whole cache of them soon afterwards. The boxes had identified the manufacturer. Someone had sold them to the
Grisha’s father worked for the Soviet Union’s biggest arms manufacturers. Weapons that he had helped to build had killed his son. Grisha’s death drove them both - him, until his death, to unearth arms trafficking; her, to champion the underdog at every turn.
I turned my head. Anna was weeping, and this time the tears weren’t on demand.
‘Walking through that graveyard made it easy. Those places always make me cry.’
‘Pull over, Anna, I’ll drive. You navigate.’
She bumped to a halt. Three trucks thundered past us, just metres apart. She hardly noticed. She had both hands on the wheel, head down.
‘I try to move on, Nick, I really do. But it’s … hard …’ She turned to face me. ‘Do you understand?’
I put a hand gently on her shoulder.
22
About half an hour out of Odessa, Anna glanced towards me again. ‘When you asked about the tears, Nicholas, what were you trying to tell me?’
Jesus, this girl didn’t miss a thing. ‘Nothing really. I was just—’
She pulled into the side of the road again and swivelled in her seat. ‘OK, we can play this one of two ways.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Either you carry on treating me like one of your army friends - and we pretend there’s nothing wrong - or you tell me why you look like shit and what those little red pills are for.’
I didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Anna, I thought … I thought … if you still can’t hold back the tears every time you think about Grisha, then what right have I to—’
‘You don’t really understand this at all, do you? Grisha’s story is about the importance of telling the truth, however painful it might be.’
Her beautiful, sad eyes bored into me, and stripped me back layer by layer. And for the first time since I could remember, I didn’t cut away. I told her about the headaches and the visit to Kleinmann. I told her about his prognosis and the Smarties and the fact I had binned all the other treatment on offer. Finally, I told her about sitting in the flat, desperate to make a call to her, but being unable to do it. I told her I was too scared of her reaction, that I didn’t want her to bin me.
Then I sat, arms folded, not daring to look at her, and stared out into the darkness.
I felt her fingers gently brush my cheek.
‘You idiot …’ She was shaking her head. ‘I would never walk away. Surely you know me well enough to know that?’
I nodded, letting my hands drop, and tried to smile.
A tear had formed in her eye, and I watched it roll down her cheek. I’d done that. Her first chance of moving on and I’d fucked it up for her.
‘You can understand, can’t you? I wanted this one last kick at it before I go. Wouldn’t you do the same?’
‘The treatment - we can fight this …’
‘It’ll just delay the inevitable.’ I pulled the Smarties out of my jeans. ‘At least I can take these in front of you now.’ I flicked it open and stared at the shiny red pebbles inside. I let the silence lengthen. ‘I don’t want to be a lump of dribbling jelly, depending on you, making your life as miserable as mine would be. You don’t deserve it. Fuck it, better to burn out than fade away, eh?’
She moved her mouth closer to my ear. ‘You stupid, stupid idiot.’ She kissed me on the temple, then took two
