AWOL

In Sergey’s dream, a giant woman with rippling triceps on her tattooed arms picked up his tank and shot-putted it into a mined wheat field.

He dreamt of the tank hitting the ground with a wallop and then sinking into the black earth. The Amazon-in-camo strode over and picked the crushed and burning machine out of the dirt. Like a child searching for the toy in a cereal box, she shook the tank and two of Sergey’s mangled and bloodied comrades were tossed clear of the twisted turret.

Then, Sergey saw himself getting stuck at the entrance. With fingernails as long as stepladders and sharp as scythes, the giant tried to pick him out, but, instead, she pincered off his right leg at the knee. Smiling, she flicked the separated limb into the spaced rows of winter wheat.

In a rehab clinic in a provincial city on the western plains of Canada, the young tanker startled from sleep with his hands searching the space where his lower right leg had been. There was nothing there.

Sergey and nine other wounded servicemen had been flown to the facility two weeks ago to be fitted with new, high-tech prosthetic limbs, courtesy of Canadian donations. His gleaming-black, carbon-fibre lower-leg device leant against the bedside chair — half robot, half stick insect.

He noticed two leaflets on the chair where missionaries — a Canadian couple as fat as the steer they raised — had left them together with a sheet of translation: ‘What Is It All About?’ and ‘A Home For You’. Sergey picked up the sheet and randomly picked a sentence: ‘We wonder who can help us, and why do we feel so alone. God placed that longing deep inside our heart because He love us.’

“Fuck that bullshit,” Sergey quietly said, so not to wake his two roommates — a drone operator with one arm and an artillery gunner with no legs. At the train station, leaving the war-torn country, his family had said he was lucky compared to them.

“Fuck that bullshit,” he had thought then too.

It was Sunday and everyone at the clinic was sleeping late, as there were no ‘programs’ that day. Only a skeleton staff, pointless hours of doom scrolling on phones, and a church service to be avoided at midday.

But otherwise no talk by the earnest male psychologist — even younger than the soldiers — explaining mindfulness. No enthusiastic art therapist with watercolours and dangly Navajo Indian ear-rings. And, no physical rehab therapists with their complex contraptions to pull, push, stretch and swing battered bodies back into something like normalcy.

“It’s amazing the progress you’re making, Sergey,” the smiling female care coordinator had said to him the day before. The Canadians’ default was politeness, he had heard and it was right, whereas Canadians said his people’s was endurance. He’d faked a smile in return.

Now, Sergey sat up in bed, suctioned the new prosthesis onto his knee, and pulled his clothes and parka off the floor and onto his thin frame. He silently scooted out of the room with the help of lightweight aluminium crutches.

The key ring — with a Molson Canadian bottle opener attached — was on the hook behind the vacant nurses’ station where he’d spotted it yesterday. Sergey lifted it off and headed out the door to the clinic’s van. On its side panel, a Hope for Heroes logo in bright blue-and-yellow letters peaked from beneath the patina of sprayed mud and road salt. Someone had used their finger to trace a trident in the grime on the rear window.

Prairie started not 10 kilometres from the centre of the silent city. He looked at the plains from the driver’s seat — hectare upon hectare of grey stubble in every direction. Immense and endless; monolithic and missing dimension. They erased his sense of distance and scale. As another kilometre clicked over, Sergey grew lonelier and he liked its familiarity.

There was also no feeling of fast or slow from the accelerator through his prosthesis. The technology was brilliant at holding him up and propelling him, but even the best engineers could not simulate sensation. He used to love driving his second-hand BMW outside of the Austro-Hungarian, chocolate-box city for which he’d left his hometown of foreign-owned farms and one drunken disco on Friday nights.

Then, the rev of the engine hadn’t been just aural; it was visceral through the touch of his foot on the gas pedal, sometimes light and sometimes fierce. It had made him feel alive, that driving; now, he felt like he was floating and formless.

It was April, but it had often snowed since they had come to Canada, it usually did, the rehab people said, and, now, flakes started to swirl and surge from the grey sky that matched the grey fields. Without any feeling in his driving foot, Sergey regularly glanced at the speedometer and made mental calculations about what speed suited the road as it became more wet and slippery. Then, he over-ruled them and drove on. The windscreen wipers streaked and squealed.

The back of van began to fishtail right to left to right. He tried to adjust speed and steering, but the sway across the sleet only increased. In a slow sweep, the van went into a 360 across the road’s double dividing line. He registered a truck down the road and coming toward him as the van turned tail-first. Then, it swung again. He was righted and, for an instant, relieved, but the instant vanished as the van kept spinning.

The front wheels gained some traction that took the van off the road and into the deep ditch of the roadside. Sergey saw he was going down into the big dip where the wild grass was now lightly covered in snow. He instinctively pushed from his hip and the prosthesis pumped the pedal to the floormat. The van gained velocity and bounced along the ditch, and he pointed it up the rise. It flew back on to the asphalt of the two-way; the on-coming truck blared his horn and blew past. Sergey noticed the green-and-yellow livery on its bulk grain haulage container and, in the English he could read but barely speak, it said:

Prairie Heritage Seeds Incorporated, Fish Creek, Saskatchewan.

“That just happened and I had nothing to do with it,” Sergey thought. He didn’t dissect it or explain it to himself or credit some force for its occurrence. Since the charge from the enemy drone had dropped from the sky to blow away his leg and blow metal shards into his torso, everything was random for Sergey. He didn’t bother slowing the van down. The 360 was a distraction from the plan that was coming together in his head.

The other wounded men found a way, Sergey saw. The emptiness of their missing legs and arms was filled with by the hero-worship of neighbours, the love of family and the fandom of strangers. Or, some took comfort and gained purpose from the righteous and its valour — that they had served it and sacrificed in its name with honour. Others thrived on the personal challenge of recovery from their horrific wounds and scars; his roommate did one-arm push-ups with 80 kilograms of metal plates on his back. Thousands liked his posts on Instagram. Somehow, Sergey thought, his brothers-in-arms — in their shattered bodies — found the significance he failed to locate within or without himself.

“This place is blank,” Sergey thought as he scanned the horizon. Sergey was on the look-out for a tree. Preferably one just off the road; preferably one that was solid like the oaks or chestnuts at home; preferably one that could stand the force of the van.

The thoughts of death that came to him had different personalities. One was the mathematician. The mathematician did cold sums of the costs and benefits of ending life. It added up the reasons both for and against suicide with the ledger favouring the former. The dread would end, but you will hurt people like your parents and kid sister — that was one of the mathematician’s favourite equations. But Sergey could handle the mathematician; he could challenge the assumptions and calculations. There were intangibles that the mathematician couldn’t figure.

The witch was not so methodical in her approach. She spontaneously snuck into Sergey’s brain and flashed sinister pictures of driving into trees — or cutting veins open or putting his service weapon to his brain. Sergey feared the witch, as he had less control over her. She came when she wanted to and stayed for as long or as little as she chose. But Sergey knew that, if he hung on, if he closed his eyes and deeply breathed, or if he played some music on his phone, he could distract her. For now.

It was the comedian who was the most insidious and cynical. The comedian just laughingly dismissed existence. ‘Life is all bullshit, Sergey, it’s just a fucking joke on you and on everyone else,’ he would laughingly say. ‘People are all assholes — nasty, stinky and unreliable. What the fuck would you want to do with them?’ Not a hint of hope was left for Sergey by the comedian — who often came late in the night and after too much vodka.

There were instances when Sergey felt like they — the mathematician, the witch and the comedian — were all in a martial arts fighting cage. They rained blows and throws on each other to gain bloody supremacy. He would see himself as the inept and mocked referee between them. Powerless and pointless. It was their show.

The snow had stopped and, with it, his monologue somewhat shifted.

“Fuck, this place is a desert without sand,” Sergey said to himself as he looked out at the ceaseless slate of the sky and the flatness of fallow fields. His was the only vehicle on the road.

Just then, in the distance, about three or four kilometres off the two-way, he spotted a couple of structures — one taller and painted a fading red, the other was squatter and yellowish white. There was an unsigned dirt road leading to them and, unthinkingly, he turned into it. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Rocks and loose gravel crunched and grinded under the van’s tyres. Then, there was a loud crack of ice splintering as he drove over a frozen puddle. It struck Sergey that, sometimes, the quietest of places were actually filled with sound. It was good to think of something else, even for seconds, as he headed toward the buildings on the horizon line and began to make out what they were.

He pulled up near the buildings and got out of the van, leaving its engine running and smoke streaming from the exhaust pipe. On the westside of the road, there was an old timber grain elevator that stood about 15 meters high. It was unused and it was collapsing onto itself. Rows of wooden planks, once straight, sagged and gapped; shingles from its pitched roofline littered its base like fallen leaves. The structure reminded him of the Jenga block game he and his comrades sometimes played when their tank was rotated out of the line and into the rear. If you took out one too many blocks, the whole thing would fall down.

About three-quarters up the elevator, there were white blocked letters, fading to faintness. They spelled out the name of what might once have been a town there:

Hardy & Co. Elevator 6. Tarnopol, Sasketchewan.

Tarnopol. But for one letter, the name was the same as that of the capital of the province he was originally from in the country at war. He turned and walked toward the church.

It was smaller and squatter than a barn, but its five onion-domed cupolas aspired to something grander. The cupolas were made of sheets of tin-plate bent into shape and then welded together. On the largest, central cupola, some of the welds were thick and uneven and others narrow and straight.

Sergey recalled welding chain-link fence to the outside of the tank as anti-drone protection. A ‘field solution’ soldiers called what wasn’t in the manuals but hopefully saved their lives. Welding took skill and, here, he concluded that the cupolas were the work of different men at different times.

The church’s door was bolted shut with a padlock so Sergey started to circle counter-clockwise around it’s wind-stripped wooden walls to where he saw a small cemetery. Further away, along a low timber fence line, there was a F150 truck as big as the military vehicles he drove. He didn’t notice anyone around so he kept crutching his way through the ankle-deep snow.

The first grave was a small, worn, stone rectangle engraved with an Orthodox cross and the words:

Fedyk, Nykola

Son of John and Anna

Born in Western Ukraine in 1895

Wandered Into The Wilderness Of This Area in 1899

And Has Never Been Found

There were two more loose rows of gravestones with similar dates of birth or burial from around the early 1900s. Some of the surnames were the same as neighbours of his parents back home.

Then, in the next set of rows, there were three cement gravestones painted white and with white crosses on them. Each had a wrought iron red maple leaf stuck into the ground before it and a blue metallic plaque attached to it. He read the white letters on the plaque of the first grave:

In Memory Of

B-133640 Sergeant

Peter Berezny

Born 1920, Tarnopol

Died June 1944, Juno Beach, France

It was a military gravestone, he could see. Or, a memorial. Sergey wondered Peter’s body was buried here or on some distant fatal shore. He saw the other two similar burial sites; one for Private Paul Berezny, who, it said, died at Juno Beach, aged 22, and Private Mark Berezny, who died aged 22 at Caen, France, a month later than the two others.

Sergey concluded that the Sergeant was probably the eldest of a trio of brothers, and considered whether the youngest knew the others were dead when he too went down to some Nazi firing from a foxhole in a French pine forest.

The maths told Sergey that the brothers must have been the sons of the original settlers in the first row. He’d once seen a documentary of the ‘pioneers’ who came to these barren plains, carrying seeds still from the old country and wearing embroidered shirts. And, he cursed the idiot in some warmly-heated office — thousands of kilometres from any bullet or bunker — who had decided to sign a piece of paper that sent three siblings to war together.

His thoughts circled the site with purpose and presence. Like he was seeing everything through the screen of an FPV drone. There were, he noticed, fresh footprints in the snow, going from the graves to the other side of the church. Emerging sun cast his shadow ahead of him.

With his artificial leg suspended above the snow, Sergey swiftly moved, the crutches piercing frozen mass. Coming around the corner of the church, he saw an older man carefully climbing up an aluminium ladder; he was wearing a green John Deere hat and precariously holding a roller brush in one hand and a splattered can of white paint in the other.

The wounded warrior considered which language he could ask the questions in.