The Matiushin Case by Andrew Bromfield, Oleg Pavlov

disappeared. The senior sergeant, whom everyone called ‘the Moldavian’, even to his face, walked about in flip-flops, undershorts and an army hat, as if he was on the beach. He held a knapsack check.
    The sergeants stood and looked on good-naturedly to see what various bits and pieces had arrived in Dorbaz with the knapsacks, but they didn’t attempt to take anything. They would filch it all that night, which was why they were so genial now. The senior sergeant just confiscated a can-opener from someone and strolled along the line-up, toying with it, tossing it from one hand to the other and explaining his laws – and he was affable, because he was explaining those laws for the first and last time. Matiushin didn’t hear a thing. His feet were on fire with a pain so bad, it felt as if they’d been shoved into a furnace. Standing was even more unbearable than walking. Matiushin thought he had to endure this pain – that was what he believed every other day too, as he re-bound his blister-tortured feet in their blood-soaked wrappings during a moment’s break when they were allowed off the parade ground, and then the Moldavian’s favourite command would ring out smartly:
    â€˜Co-o-o-mp-a-a-any, fall in! A-a-at the dou-ou-ouble!’
    When they had been out marching around the parade ground for hours and the weaker soldiers – who weren’t even soldiers yet but half-soldiers who still hadn’t sworn the oath – were dropping with sunstroke, unable to take the forty-degree Asiatic furnace, they were got up on their feet and back into line with the help of sal ammoniac supplied to the sergeants by the army doctor. Drinking water was trucked in. A cauldron of water was boiled up with desert acacia collected out on the steppe, and everyone was given a flask of this sticky, nauseating tea to drink every day. It wasn’t possible to drink much of it: only a swallow, and besides that, the boiling water had only cooled off a bit and no one felt like drinking something hot. A tank of water for technical use was moored behind one hut, by the kitchen. This water was taken from wells in the steppe and it was tainted with infection, dangerous to drink but, either because they wanted to get infected and end up in hospital or because they didn’t understand, at night many of the men would sneak over to the tank and drink from it.
    In addition to the Russian draft, there were Armenian, Georgian and Ukrainian drafts in training, or ‘quarantine’ here: about a hundred men. During the day the officers walked to the village (its name was also Dorbaz) and filled themselves so full of tea in the chaikhana that when they got back to the camp in the evening, they just flopped onto their beds and slept like dead men. For them the month of quarantine was penal servitude in exile from their families, from a better life. At night the sergeants went to the village. They bought hashish and moonshine from the locals and had a high time in the barracks until dawn. After getting stoned, some spent half the night trying to extort money for a hangover cure, while others spent half the night torturing and passing judgement on those guilty of offences under their law, allowing those to whom they took a liking to smoke hash and drink moonshine with them for the rest of the night. To amuse themselves they held battles in the passageway that ran in a broad strip between the beds. Young Russian, Georgian, Kazakh and Armenian guys – some intimidated and some plain terrorised – fought tooth and nail while the bombed sergeants giggled.
    The most brutal atrocity was the safety tax imposed on the half-soldiers by the Moldavian. They all had to line up and then the Moldavian would punch every one of them on the left side – on the heart.
    The sergeants told them that this blow had long ago made the Moldavian famous in the regiment. After his punch your heart might stop, and only another blow