Heritage

я там стервенею с каждой норковой шапкой

The sun was coming up from the hills by the time we’d loaded into the truck. As a child, “as a child,” I mumbled to myself. As a child, I’d run through such hills, putting everything I could find into my mouth. I’d bend down to the ground and search for objects— I’d find little worms, insects, pellets of shit; I’d shove them all into my mouth and chew on that terrible sample. I’d then run home, my mouth black and muddy, to a supper of grains, to my grandmother’s grand disappointment. She would wash out my mouth with soap, scrubbing every corner.

“As a child,” I mumbled to myself again. K. bumped me with his elbow. “What are you mumbling about?” I smiled. “I remembered something funny from my childhood.” K. looked out from the truck’s cargo area, watching the hills roll by. So round and green— they gave the impression of giant green eyes caught in a lingering stare. “It’s okay, I want to be there too,” K. offered. I laughed. “I don’t mean it like that,” I played with the strap of my machine gun. “These hills just remind me of when you’re a child and you don’t know any better so you do crazy things in the wild.” A few crows surrounded the truck as we drove down a winding path towards a valley, enclosed by barbed wire fences. K. cracked a joke, but I don’t remember what it was supposed to be. Two or three houses with open doors pass us by. I looked at the other children in the truck, the three or four of them— their eyes were mute, their lips shut like a jar.

The truck came to a stop at a flat tarmac, full of pieces missing and crusts strewn about. It looked like K.’s face; his skin was a landscape scarred by growing pains. I laughed a bit, and he looked up at me, and I told him. He laughed a bit. I offered a cigarette to the child across from me. He takes it, he smells it; his face was scarred, rough like leather. The gap of his teeth were visible ‘tween his lips. He said his name was P. He smoked his cigarette with a closed fist. He put his head up against his rifle.

A sergeant yelled at us to come out of the truck, so we disembarked with our weapons strapped behind us and our hands on our helmets. We followed him into a hanger filled only with rusting parts, in which a mob of young conscripts were unloading big black things from a plain truck. On the side, it read something like “waste disposal.” The sergeant yelled at the young conscripts to pull the big black things towards us, onto a large plastic tarp. We walked up towards the tarp in an impatient and muddy line, like excited children with lunch-time blues. Once the big black things come to a thudding halt before us, I reach down to grab a piece frayed and torn at the edges. A tag reads “N. B+.” I held it in my hands as if it were dear to me. The inside was encrusted with black soot, and flakes fell from my fingers.

The sergeant orders us to reassemble the armored vests. He squats down and he shows us; he says to take a piece of the front with the armored plates and clean away the dried blood. He says the holes don’t change anything about the combat effectiveness of the armored vests. He says he takes a piece of the front with the armored plates and hooks them together with the back plates, and to cut off the tags and put your own name and blood type on there.

I let go of my piece and grab a new piece. This piece was the back part; there was dried blood inside, and a few bits of shrapnel. I clean away the shrapnel with a knife. I take the hooks and hook it to a front part, which is brittle and filled with holes. I take the knife and I cut away the tags, and I write in my name and my blood type. I bend my head down and I stick it through the opening created by the two pieces, and I try to get used to the weight of the armored plates resting on my shoulders. I look down at the front piece; I stick my fingers into the openings and my pinkie goes through. It doesn’t change anything about the combat effectiveness of the armored vests.

K.’s face was difficult to read; he looked frustrated. He approached me with some pieces of a vest in his hands. His voice tapered into a low rasp and he said “when’s the next time you think we’ll get to watch some porn?”