An easy argument might be made that Russians know the tragedy of
war
better than most. Russia--present and past--is the world's largest
country and borders many peoples, and those neighbors through the
millennia have not always been peaceful. So if Russians and their
families have suffered from battlefield loss, they've also learned
some
of how the human spirit survives.
Thirst by Russian
novelist
Andrei Gelasimov is a contemporary account of one such survivor
from
the Chechen war. Konstantin (Kostya to friends and family) returns
from
the front to live as a civilian in an apartment with one problem:
"All
the vodka wouldn't fit in the fridge," and Kostya likes his drink
cold.
During the war, twenty-year-old Kostya suffered disfiguring
facial
burns, when grenades exploded and set afire the tank he and his
buddies
were in. Shell-shocked and worse, Kostya would like nothing more
than
to now live life on a deserved binge alone in his apartment.
![[book cover]](thirst.gif)
Such self-imposed exile, of course, won't last when Kostya's
buddies, Genka and Pashka, show up. The new "civilian" mission is
for
the three to find the fourth survivor of the tank explosion:
Seryoga--who's gone missing.
Driving around in Genka's SUV (All-American consumerism is Genka's
post-Chechnya dream life), Kostya takes comfort in the tinted
windows,
letting him watch people without alarming them with his
disfigurement.
That the three survivors finally find Seryoga parallels Kostya
finding himself and accepting life need not be dulled. Told in a
compelling first-person voice, Kostya relates highlights of his
young
life before and after the mutilating injury.
Time cuts back and forth to Kostya's school days and his lifelong
passion for drawing, the school director who was his mentor, life
with
his parents (now divorced) and, the tank explosion and its
aftermath:
"If you really tried, you might make one normal guy out of the
three of
us." With such sardonic, dark humor, Kostya wins the reader over
for a
well-earned epiphany.
Gelasimov closes out Thirst
with a moving, but restrained, passage in which Kostya admits his
school director was right to call him a fool for not believing his
mother's injunction to "wait and believe." Kostya now understands the director.
Waiting
is the time given to express gratitude for what life gives. Even
thanking the birds for their song can heal.
Read Thirst for an an
unsentimental and sensitive account of what one Russian war
veteran
convincingly learns from his brothers-in-arms.
Thirst by Andrei
Gelasimov,
amazon crossing, Las Vegas, 2011, 118 pp., ISBN: 978-1611090697
Read the
story collection, The Cat
at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable
formats:
.mobi
(Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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