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 prospekt and she’d told me the story. ‘He loved poetry. That’s how we met. His family lived in the same apartment block as mine. One evening when I came back from school I found him sitting on the front steps. He was reading Pushkin. I love Pushkin …’
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