Sándor Jászberényi
Days in the Wild
The jeep cut across an unplowed wheat field. The wheat was tall and crunched under the wheels of the car. Aromas of hay blew in through the rolled-down windows, washing the smell of burning houses and fuel from our noses. I stared at the seemingly endless yellow field. Off to our left, the sun was setting, flaring red and pink throughout the evening sky. The sergeant behind the wheel, Petya, squinted his eyes.
Twilight would be upon us in an hour, and then darkness. Somewhere in the distance, mortars thundered with a deep rumble. The Russians had started shelling the village.
The sergeant cleared his throat, broke the silence.
“We did what we had to do. You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Those animals shot the men dead and raped all the women in the village.”
“I know. I saw the mass grave.”
“They’re not people. They’re animals.”
“Yeah, I would have done the same thing.” I meant what I said. I had not a drop of sympathy for the Russians who had been shot, and it didn’t bother me in the slightest that I didn’t care.
Since the launch of the offensive, Russian tactics against Ukrainians had drastically chipped away at my enthusiasm for the Geneva Convention. I began by taking pictures of the mass graves, as I had done in all the towns and villages that had been liberated. Didn’t take much digging. The soil that had been thrown on the piles of bodies was more a marker than anything else.
The bodies of the men were clothed, with their hands tied behind their backs and their faces to the ground. The female corpses were naked, little girls, old women, and everything in between. The sergeant had not been speaking figuratively. It was what the Russians did, everywhere.
The twelve soldiers who had survived the Ukrainian attack had gotten off light.
Certainly nothing even resembling torture.
The ragtag Ukrainians killed almost all of them with the first shot. Only one had had to be shot in the back of his head, lying on the ground. They didn’t desecrate the bodies, didn’t spit on them, didn’t strip them naked. They just carried them into one of the houses that was still standing in the village after the shelling.
The only exception was a blonde kid in his twenties. When the soldiers were finished with the prisoners, he swaggered over to the door of the house, AK slung across his back and a cigarette slung in the corner of his gloating smirk. He wrote, “Buryats for sale” in chalk on the wooden door of the house.
Russia, as always throughout its history, was sending its minorities to war. Starving wretches from the edges of the empire. Criminals, Chechens, Dagestanis. The men who had been taken prisoner had been Buryats.
The kid’s joke had met with general amusement among the soldiers until the commander had seen it. He was in his fifties, graying, and had lips as thin as blades. He smacked the private so hard that his nose bled. I watched him make the kid erase the dark joke.
The commander stalked up to me and began to explain his actions in terrible English, as if he owed me an explanation.
He spoke to my blue Kevlar helmet, focused his eyes on my international press badge.
The Ukrainians would have lost the war, without help from the West, but thanks to the influx of arms, they had not only stopped the Russian invasion, they had even managed to launch a successful counterattack.
The operation was so successful that the enemy left everything behind and fled the eastern front. The American Stringer shoulder-launched surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles became so popular that families named their kids after them, and sometimes you could see them in the hands of the saints on icons. St. Stringer, a strangely loving name, for the weapon.
I didn’t understand much of what the commander said. All I could manage to decipher was that he had ordered the execution of the prisoners of war because the Russians were expected to counterattack in a matter of minutes, and he simply didn’t have enough men to secure the village and guard the prisoners. I shrugged at his comment. He nodded once and barked orders at Petya, who turned to me and said, “we must go.”
The shocks of the SUV squeaked as we bounced across the field boundary and along a white dirt road. The evening light reflected blue, gray, and silver across puddles that hid mortar and bomb craters. The outlines of acacia trees shimmered in the distance, the silhouettes The crews sat in the turrets, along the shield panels, smoking and waiting for orders. They waved us through with a bored glance.
We were close to the Ukrainian base. I knew nothing about where I was going to sleep, but I was hardly counting on anything luxurious. I’d been sleeping on various bunks next to NLAW missiles for a week, using latrines built out of empty ammunition crates, like everyone else in the detachment.
The sergeant clearly felt he had to explain himself. He spoke with tears in his eyes. “We’re defending our country, you know. We are not animals. Everyone in the detachment’s a teacher or an engineer or a doctor or a farmer.”
“I know, Petya,” I said. He was bald, hefty, with a 1970s porn moustache. Came from somewhere near Ternopil. He had been assigned as my handler when I arrived in Donbass because he spoke English.
“These beasts are just in it for the kill. We do it so we can go home at last and get on with our lives.”
“What did you do before the war?”
“I had a little stand where I sold fried fish.”
“You going back to it when the war’s over?”
“I don’t know. I guess so, if I ever get back home.”
“The Russians are fleeing.”
“Yeah. But the war’s not over yet. As long as the invaders still have one scrap of our land in their hands.”
We fell silent. We were both thinking the same thing. That officially, Russia was not yet at war with Ukraine. The collapse of the front did not mean that peace was any closer. The Ukrainians had only won a month or two while the Russians conscripted another quarter million soldiers. Everyone knew they were coming. The war had been going on for eight years now.
We got out of the fields and drove down a white dirt road in the evening light. There were acacia trees on either side of the road with Ukrainian T-64 tanks behind them. Their crews were sitting on the turrets, smoking, waiting for orders over the radio, and waving as we passed by.
“So, you’re not angry that you couldn’t take pictures?”
“No. I know why you took the camera, and besides, you gave it back.”
“I was following orders.”
“Petya, stop explaining. The Russians got what they deserved.”
“You’re a good man. I’m glad you understand.”
I watched the shadows of the trees dancing on the dirt road. I thought of Marti, the psychologist from Budapest. She was a slender, short-haired blonde woman I had met before I left for the front the first time. We had had a little fling, which ruled out a doctor-patient relationship, but we had become very fond of each other. We got together for a drink fairly often when I happened to be home.
*
She was the only person I would put up with that psychoanalysis talk that I guess you run into with every shrink. What would she say, I wondered, if I were to tell her that I had felt nothing when the Russians were executed in front of me. I imagined her eyes widening and the pace of her breathing shifting nervously as she tried to appear calm. I remembered the expression she had had on her face two weeks earlier, holding a glass of wine in one hand and earnestly asking.
“What exactly are you trying to prove?” she had asked.
“Nothing.”
“How long do you think you’ll survive with your skin intact?”
“I’ve always managed to pull through so far.”
“I meant how long do you think you’ll stay the same man?”
“I’ve been doing this for eleven years.”
“That’s quite a big ego you’ve got.”
“Yeah, not just my ego.”
She smiled for a moment but then her face grew stern again.
“If you dance with the devil, people will mistake you for the devil.”
“That’s cliché.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true. No one comes home from a war. The people who come home aren’t the people who went.”
“Clever. See that in a film?”
“I don’t know. But you’re evading the question. Why are you going back?”
“For the money.”
I had no intention of lecturing Marti about how I’d rather be in the middle of a patriotic war surrounded by heavy shelling than feeling sorry for myself on the terrace of some bar with craft beers, sipping a sparkling rosé with hints of almond and wondering whether I should switch to a cocktail.
I’d rather be where history was being made than yammering on about stirring depictions of violence from behind a lectern at some smalltown college while life ticked away.
In Ukraine, a new iteration of a nation was being born, with new myths. The Ukrainians were standing up to an empire, and the empire had begun to crack.
They were all fucking heroes. My place was there, with them. Especially since I’d written about their struggle for freedom since the revolution had broken out in 2014.
There was a checkpoint at the end of the dirt road. Concrete blocks narrowed the road leading to the village. Nearby, pits charred black indicated the constant Russian shelling. At the side of the road, you could see the entrance to the trench where soldiers posted in defensive positions. One of the soldiers came out at the sound of the car, but Petya didn’t slow down. He just shouted out the password that was sent twice a day by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. The soldier gave a wave, telling us to move on.
We drove through a ghost village. The doorways of the mud-brick and wooden houses yawned in the darkness. Everywhere the sweet smell of fruit rotting in the grass. Everywhere stern, grave silence. Nothing but the buzzing of hungry wasps and the screech of the wheels of the jeep.
The Ukrainian forces had set up headquarters in a primary school. A two-story building, white, modern. The only signs that there had been fighting around the building were bullet holes in the walls and a few boarded-up windows here and there. In the middle of a playground were troop transports with tank-treads, the little jungle gyms and monkey bars crushed and contorted underneath them.
*
Behind the school, four men were frying meat by the outhouses, and some soldiers sat on benches under the trees smoking. Fifteen Russian soldiers kneeled in the middle of the square, their hands clasped behind their heads. Three Ukrainians with rifles stood over them.
Petya parked the car, and we grabbed my backpacks to head inside. I stopped in my tracks when I saw four women kneeling next to the fifteen Russian soldiers. Two were dressed in camouflage and were in their mid-twenties. The other two were in their fifties and wore skirts and cloth jackets.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Mercenaries and collaborators,” Petya replied. “Go get something to eat. I’ll find out where they’re putting you up.”
I put my bags on a bench and went into the school. I followed the soldiers with plastic bowls in their hands. There was no gas in the school kitchen, but that was where they served the meals. Today it looked like potatoes with chicken and three slices of bread. It was always the same, potatoes with chicken or potatoes with eggs.
I went back to my bags, sat down on the bench to eat. I saw the female prisoners being lined up and led into one of the two-story outbuildings, which I suppose must have been the groundskeeper’s house. They marched right past me. One of the female soldiers had shoulder-length hair. A natural redhead.
By the time I finished eating, Petya had come back. They had found a spot for me on the second floor in the school, a large room with ten soldiers. I took out my sleeping bag, unrolled it, uploaded my pictures to the cloud, and fell asleep.
I slept for two hours. I looked at the clock when I woke up. Not yet midnight. The room was thick with the smell of men. I put on my boots, taking care not to wake anyone, and went out into the yard.
I sat down on a bench to smoke, when suddenly I heard screaming. I set off in the direction of the sound. It was coming from the groundskeeper’s house. Soldiers were laughing and smoking cigarettes outside. The lights were on upstairs. The men were coming in and out of the door. The screaming was getting louder and louder, but it didn’t bother anyone.
When they saw me coming, they started shouting, and Petya came out from behind the little building and started walking towards me. He was drunk. He was trying hard to cover it up, but he oozed the stench of hard liquor.
“What’s going on here?”
“They are interrogating the prisoners. It’s top secret. Please return to your quarters. We are leaving at four in the morning.”
“But—”
“Go.”
I turned around. I could feel Petya’s stare on my back. I stopped in front of the school. I waited for the screaming to stop, but it didn’t. The weather was turning cold. Winters here were brutal and deadly. I’d have to buy a decent coat. A good set of gloves. I looked up. Stars glittered in the sky, their light even clearer thanks to the blackout orders. It occurred to me that I was 1,700 kilometers from Budapest, and the journey home wasn’t going to be easy.
“The purpose of ‘Days in the Wild’ is to demonstrate that, regardless of the nobility of the cause one fights for, war transforms people into beasts, irrespective of their character in civilian life. There is a darkness in wars that finds its way into the soul, nesting in the hearts of individuals and growing. It remains there when the fighting is over, staying forever.” —Sándor Jászberényi
Sándor Jászberényi (pronounced Shahn-dor Yahs-ber-ay-nee) is a Hungarian war correspondent. Over the past twenty years, he has reported on events such as the Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya, various Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip, and the rise and fall of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Since 2014, he has been actively covering the Ukrainian struggle against the Russian invasion. Notably, he remained in Kyiv during the Russian siege in 2022, among the few journalists who did so. He is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection The Devil Is a Black Dog: Stories from the Middle East and Beyond (first English edition published by New Europe Books in 2014; UK/Commonwealth edition published by Scribe in 2015). His writing has been featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, AGNI, and the Brooklyn Rail. He divides his time between Budapest and Cairo.