When we shot people, usually we shot them in the back. But this wasn’t how we wanted it to be, Aleksei and me. It was just the best we could do. One consolation, they were all traitors, wriggling and jumping, pissing themselves, crapping in their pants, shouting to their mothers and to God, and so our consciences were clear.

They had to come up this way, it was the only path. We shot them by the sentrybox, by the barrier pole we painted every week but never had to lift. The noises they made before we shot them. I always used to think how foolish to expend energy on such sounds, final precious whisps of breath rising without profit into the clear mountain air. But it helped us that they did it. If they had stayed silent, what might we have thought?

“Why do we do it this way?” Alexsei always said.

“I would rather look them in the eye,” I said, “but they don’t give us the chance.” It was just like him, on those grand questions of life and death to be harassed by guilt, but invariably he tired of it soon enough, got back to thinking of his beloved wife and his beloved kids down below at home in the city. That was where his conscience truly lay.

“This is no job for a man like me,” he would say, “stuck up here on this pass.”

“What sort of man would do a job like this by choice?” I said.

Inside my heart was another heart, and inside that another one. Which heart was really mine? Was it the big one, the one that enclosed the others, or was it the smallest, the most secret one? Or were they all mine? It was too much to have so many hearts. How could a man be a man? I told Aleksei I had too much heart for the job but he looked at me with his twisted mouth and judged me as he judged all men without children, without wives.

“Men such as you,” he said. “You can never understand.”

Alexsei scratched the stump of the little finger of his left hand. Cutting it off was his sacrifice to God on the day he was married. His people had the crude belief that no one but God was perfect. What superstition. But sometimes I thought it was the secret of Aleksei’s life, this knowing about imperfection and not crude at all. That was why he cried at night. Shooting people was just one small thing in his mind when there was so much imperfection to choose from.

When we had shot the people who came up the pass, the traitors, each and every one, we had to dispose of them. To me it was a simple task. We dragged them the few yards to the edge and pushed them over. It was so deep we didn’t hear them hit the bottom. Small blessings. Think of the work if we’d had to bury so many bodies up in that hard mountain soil, which was hardly soil at all.

The trouble with Aleksei was he had a memory and he nurtured it, remembered things no one should have to bother about. I told him a revolution was no time to think of the past, it smacked too much of sentimentality. We no longer had any need for such bourgeois ideas. A curious fact. We didn’t crap and piss down over the edge in the same place as we shot the traitors. But why not? After all it was the same thing, the same cycle of putrescence and decay, death and defecation, and they were traitors who deserved it. No, we walked away from the post further down. Alexsei thought it right.

“What’s the difference?” I said. “Things have changed. We are new people.”

“We are the same people,” he said. But I did as he asked, walked the extra distance in the cold air, and no real reason why.

We sat and waited every day. Sometimes we slept, sometimes we played cards, sometimes we looked through the window down on the path that snaked its way up towards us. In summer it was bearable. We took our chairs and we sat outside, our rifles resting on our laps, and we looked up at the peaks, the soaring birds, the sun slicing the rock, cutting shadows into the mountain flanks. The snow never left the highest peaks. I knew what Aleksei thought about this. He believed the untouched snow was a manifestation of the perfection of God. But I knew he was also thinking of other things. Would he ever get back to see his wife and his kids? I didn’t tell him I knew and he knew too. It was staring at us.

In winter it was more difficult. Then we huddled inside the hut and did our best to keep warm. We had no fuel. How could it be fetched up to such a place? At times we were forced to huddle under the blankets together, to stop from freezing. We did not talk about this, how his arms and mine, his and my legs, were intertwined, his cheek rough against mine. Aleksei said it was a riddle why the President insisted we policed the pass in the winter when no one would be so foolish as to attempt to come up there. I didn’t tell him that I believed that the President knew nothing about us. We did it only because some soldier with three new stripes on his arm desired to flex his bureaucratic muscles. That was what revolution meant.

“Inside, as deep as we can get, Aleksei, my friend, all we want to do, all of us, is stay alive.”

I pointed through the window.

“Look,” I said. “No one could survive out there.”

“Who are you to say such a thing?” Alexsei said. “How do you know who can survive and who can’t? Who knows what circumstances force people to migrate?” I knew it, this was a family man talking.

Why we were there? We were there because we were there. Aleksei wanted a reason. I was tempted to tell him. It was just the random stroke of a pen on a piece of paper. But he couldn’t have taken that.

There had to be a pattern with purpose, however imperfect it was.; Aleksei pinned a picture of a naked woman to the wall of the hut, a big melon breasted woman with swollen nipples that he tried not to look at. I knew Aleksei. It was his way of staying on the narrow path of righteousness, his cross to bear.

Aleksei said it was strange. In the three and a half years we had been up there no one had come up from the other side, from the outside world. I said they didn’t come because they knew we were there. He said how do they know we’re here if they don’t come? And how do we know they’re there?

Two good men, and good men we were, up there in that position, we could have held off an army. We had automatic weapons and could pick anyone off as they made their way up towards us from inside or outside. It was too steep and too narrow for any vehicle, for any armoured car, for any tank.

We knew who the enemy was. The enemy came from outside. And we knew who the traitors were. They came from inside. It was no problem for me. It saved a lot of thought. Aleksei didn’t like it. He wanted shades of opinion.

“The distinction between a traitor and a good citizen is narrow,” he said, “as fine as the hairs over the eyes of the small birds who hover and feed on the gorse up here in the summer, the ones we shoot because there’s nothing else to do.”

“My friend,” I said, “this is revolution. Things are simple but not perfect. You alone should understand that.”

“I am not talking of perfection,” he said, “but of understanding.”

I sometimes wondered if Aleksei shot the traitors, or if it was just my bullets that cut them down. How could I have been sure that his gun was pointed at them? When I was firing, when the gun sprayed and the bodies fell, how did I know that his bullets reached our targets, did not speed out into the cold mountain air, plunge deep into some snow covered gorge miles away? I thought sometimes of the parabola of his bullets, the rise and the fall and for some reason it lead me to think of the melon breasted woman. Strange how these things come about, how one thing touches another.

Sometimes in the winter nights, his cheek against mine, the wind howling outside, I wondered what it was that really connected things. I used to imagine fate was the result of making decisions that mattered, but now I know that you are lucky if you can join just one thing to another and make it stick.

“Who does the shooting?” I whispered to him in the night. “Who does it, Aleksei? Me or you? Or is it the both of us?” But he chose not to answer me, pretending he was asleep. I decided not to shoot, to allow him to do it, just to see, but it never happened. Always when they came up the pass towards I had to fire. It was something in me. I don’t know why.

“A traitor is a man or woman who gets this far,” I said to him. “It’s a simple thing to acknowledge. Aleksei, are you with me on this? This is the truth. This is official. Aleksei, are you listening?”

Our rifles were the glory of the state, so the President said. Our factories made them and they showed how far we had come in such a short time. Day One, Year Zero. Under the stock, by the trigger guard, I discovered letters. It was not the writing of the people of our country, none of the tribes. I knew that for sure. I told Aleksei. He swore he could see no writing at all. It didn’t matter. After all, I put my faith in the weapon, not what the President said, nor the writing on the stock. I had no need for such things.

The last season it was quiet. We did not use our weapons at all. We waited for the warmth to come, the birds to circle, the snows to melt in the valley, our supplies to arrive on the mules.

It was a time when Aleksei had not talked to me for days. I let him be. I looked down the path, back towards the city and wondered who would try next. Aleksei had not seen his family for three and a half years, his children had grown. Would he have recognised them? Was his wife the nubile woman he remembered in his dreams, like the woman on the wall, or would she have grown a moustache, her breasts have shrivelled? “Talk to me, Alexsei. These things, they’re sent to test us. Memory is a heavy weight that we need to shed at the first opportunity.”

We sat and we waited. I stroked the serge collar of my uniform where my rubbing had worn a hole. It felt rough and cheap. Certainly the uniform offered little protection against the elements. But we wore it for other reasons. Aleksei did not see the significance of this. When he thought of clothes he thought only of the protection they would afford his children. He asked me why the President failed to supply us with winter clothes. These are winter clothes, I said. It’s just you don’t see it that way. That was the nub of it, I see that now. Alexsei couldn’t separate ideas from things. He was too primitive to understand. I am sorry I have to say this but we all carry on, whatever, live our lives as best we can.

The snow was just beginning to go, I remember it clearly, tufts of grass appearing like hope, mist rising in the valley. Sitting on my chair, outside the hut, looking down the winding path I saw something but wasn’t sure and had to swallow my excitement. Aleksei was restless, he looked here and there, but nowhere did he stop, to really look, to see what was happening. Now I think perhaps his sight was not that good. I knew spring was near but it didn’t mean that there could be any change in our duties. We had waited too long to expect that. Besides spring was always our busy season.

Those dots. They were moving. Sometimes I lost them, not because they had gone, but because my concentration wandered. I blinked, and I thought nothing was there. I wished then for the eyes of an eagle, to have the gift of sight, field glasses even, but no one thought to send such items up to us. Aleksei said he knew a woman who had vision, who had a special sort of sight, who could see things that weren’t there. What good is that, I said, to see things that aren’t there? We need to see the way things really are. This was what the revolution had taught us. Aleksei didn’t like this. He wanted to believe in the unaccountable. I will not go into this.

Those dots. Like ideas, bubbles of thought. I said nothing to Aleksei. Let him find them out for himself. I watched them moving up between the patches of snow, the purple of the rock, the white phosphorescent light of the air. I picked up my rifle. Aleksei saw me do this but he didn’t yet see where I was looking. He thought I wanted to feel the weight of the weapon in my hands. It was something we often did to pass the time. He went back to watching the peaks, the wind stroking the snow on top, shifting it like smoke. He was up there with it, swirling. That would be a good life, he was thinking, to be blown about like that, to have no cares.

Three dots. My gun covered them all. It was a familiar feeling. That was what it meant to be a soldier. I got up off the chair. The best time of all, sun off the snow, shadows on the slopes, waiting. Let them come up, let them come closer. It’s why we were there.

Then Aleksei saw them. A sight to behold, his agitation, how he tied his bootlaces, grabbed his cap. And yet, something in me stirred when I saw him agitated like this. He was scratching his stump, his little finger, wondering if there was still room left for God.

I saw them clearer now. A woman, a red scarf wrapped around her head. Two children. It wouldn’t take them long to get to us. Aleksei stood looking at the peaks, at the smoking snow, feeling it now.

“Look, Aleksei, my friend,” I said. “This is our job. Look at the red scarf, what we have to do. These are trying times.” The children’s faces were covered by rags wrapped around their heads. The woman’s face. I saw great beauty there, unmarred by age. She was smiling at me, but I could not see it for sure, only feel it. I thought in my heart of hearts, in that one true heart, what a beautiful smile it was. How at another time it would have been such a wonderful thing, perfection.

I waited for Aleksei to shoot. I had to know. My aim was true. I fired at a smoking peak. But Alexsei pointed his rifle at me.

“What is it, comrade?” I said.

And in that moment, between what had happened and what would, I heard the thin cry of an eagle and knew that Alexsei was caught between perfection and imperfection and I did what I had to do.

Later I stood outside the hut and watched the sun sink behind the high mountain. The bodies lay where they had fallen. I watched as shadows crept over them and far away powdered smoke lifted off the peaks.

I looked down the valley. Snow lay untrammelled, fresh, unspoilt. Some day I mused, I would go down there, to the outside world. And I thought of the marks of my feet in the snow, how they would besmirch its smooth surface, how they would have a tale to tell. It was just a thought. We have to allow ourselves such little fancies. That’s how we stay alive. That’s the secret of the revolution.

I picked up my gun and walked back towards the hut. In my heart of hearts, that small, still heart inside the others, I knew who I was. I had a job to do. It was not good to think of anything else. Where would that get me? Can you hear me, Aleksei? Can you hear me, my friend?

I got up in the night and dragged the bodies, pushed them over the edge, Alexsei the last to go. It was a strange feeling, how things could vanish like that, the next day nothing to show that they were ever there. I was sure that it was something that would have appealed to the President, if only I could have told him.

In the night I said Year Zero, Day One, comrade, but he did not hear me. I looked out through the window. We were so high up here. Moonlight on the snow. How could we know who we were? Who could tell us? My heart, that small thing, inside my other hearts. What was it trying to tell me?

§ § §

Richard Madelin has been published in Heinemann's Best Short Stories, London Magazine, the Guardian, Pif Magazine, Literary Potpourri, had stories broadcast on Radio Four BBC.. Richard can be reached by email at richard@madelinkings.freeserve.co.uk

This piece was first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.

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