Gargling With Tar

1: They called me Ilya

They used to call me Ilya, all the nuns, all our foster-mothers back in Siřem, because as a baby I would call out iya, iya to people, and since this is Czech for ‘donkey’, they called me Ilya.

I would call out whenever the faces of the nuns at the Home from Home began to break into my dreams of Shadowland.

Shadowland was my earliest childhood. I would sometimes find myself going there. Before the nuns arrived, I lived in the kitchen.

I matured rapidly in the Home from Home’s prayer-filled, god-fearing atmosphere, and spoke Czech well. Monkeyface didn’t speak at all.

The nuns called me Ilya long before their nerves began to shatter.

When I was very little they would even call me ‘Ilya, our long-suffering little donkey’. They liked the way I fussed over my baby brother and ‘wouldn’t have a word said against him’, as they put it.

After the kitchen, Monkeyface and I grew up at the Home from Home, because our parents didn’t give a damn, not a shit, not one sodding shit about us. That’s quite common here.

Apparently, our parents left us on a bus when they fled the country.

I’m not surprised they didn’t want Monkeyface, but I’ve no idea why they didn’t want to keep me.

The children at the Home from Home had all sorts of ideas about their real parents.

The only certain fact about them was that they had disappeared.

In Siřem, at the boys’ home (as sisters Leontina, Alberta, Eulalia, Zdislava, Dolores and Emiliana called it), or ‘this colony of louts’ (as Commander Vyžlata called it), we all lived lumped together, boys of every imaginable nationality, including some Czechs, such as Dýha or Karel.

To keep us free from scabies and lice the nuns would scrub us with coal-tar soap.

The tar water, grey with the grime of us boys, splashed all over the black gowns and white caps of the sisters. The suds, whipped up by the washing process and constantly in motion, looked like the delicate lace trim on Sister Dolores’s underwear, for often it was she who bent over us with the scrubbing brush. She would scrub us so vigorously that her gown was soaked right through. It was hot from the steam of the wash-tub and tiny beads of sweat would break out on Sister Dolores’s forehead, then drip into our tub. Sometimes she found the heat so oppressive that she would loosen her gown and bare her shoulders. We used to sit in the tub in twos or threes. Sister Dolores didn’t know that we could see her lace. She didn’t know that inside her lace we could see her breasts. The nuns were not allowed to wear lace, just like we were not allowed to smoke.

The nuns had lots and lots of coal-tar soap. Sister Alberta had crates of it piled up in her closet. The coal-tar soapsuds killed our head lice.

We boys had a plentiful supply of lice. In return for a handful of lice — caught and killed or squeezed out of our bitten skin — we would be given a piece of fudge. It melted in our mouths with all the sweetness of the world. That sweetness stayed for a while, even after the fudge had slipped down.

We collected our dead lice in matchboxes. Sometimes we joined forces and put them in the same box. Then we would share them out. Sister Alberta would hack at the fudge on the kitchen table with the sharpest of the bread knives — chop, chop!

Sister Alberta was a nun like all the others, although she wasn’t quite like the others. I’m pretty sure she loved both the Virgin and Czechia.

Even the smallest longshirts who had caught just one louse would get a lick of fudge. Some tried sucking up to us, offering us flies, spiders, midges, anything they could grab, anything that was too slow to get away. Sometimes we let them have a lick.

We used to steal full matchboxes from each other. Anyone caught thieving would get their knuckles rapped with a ruler. It hurt, but it was a mild punishment.

If anyone lied that they hadn’t stolen a matchbox, they had to gargle soapy tar-water. It made great bubbles, but it was better not to get caught.

We had to gargle tar for other lies as well. It burnt and it got worse as the bubbles travelled down your throat or up your nose. Even a tiny bubble grew into a gigantic, scratchy bubble that hurt a lot. Even just thinking of telling a lie made you feel that burning sensation in your throat. Everyone wondered whether the pain was worth it.

In the dining room-cum-classroom of the Home from Home there was a painting of Jesus. When I was tiny, I thought it was the long-haired St Czech and his virgin mother. Then I thought about it more and decided that it was a portrait of my parents, but that was clearly nonsense. The idea had come to me during the Lord’s Prayer! It was nonsense.

That rubbish stuck in my head, though, because sisters Leontina, Alberta, Eulalia, Zdislava, Dolores and Emiliana taught us all that we were the children of God. We weren’t, of course, and the nuns paid dearly for lying to us. We weren’t the children of God. We were vermin, bastards, psychopaths, sons-of-bitches and foreign scum. Later, Jesus would be replaced by Private Fedotkin from Stalin’s Flying Brigade.

I was fine. Once we got to the Home from Home, I grew up fast. I learned to talk and get about.

Me and Monkeyface, we were from the same litter.

I used to find the idea terrible, but the truth is we had the same parents. That was one of the reasons why the nuns kept on stressing that the world was a vale of thorns and that life was full of tears. You can say that again!

Monkeyface would lie around in his cot and — if the walking exercises that sisters Leontina and Alberta, or perhaps Eulalia and Zdislava, and sometimes Dolores and Emiliana did with him bore fruit — he would shuffle through the corridors of the home, provided the nuns held him up. Best of all Monkeyface liked being with Hanka. Me too.

But most of the time Monkeyface just lay around.

Sometimes I lay down with him. He would immediately start squealing with joy, smiling all over his face. I would laugh back at him, as if into a mirror. But he never spoke.

Hanka was allowed to come and visit me and Monkeyface. Her hair bounced as she skipped up and down the stairs of the home. The nuns were glad to see her looking after Monkeyface. They had their hands full with the healthy boys. Hanka’s mother, Mrs Kropek, did the cleaning at the Home from Home. She had Hanka to help out. Later, Commander Vyžlata put a stop to this. Hanka’s hair smelt nice, she didn’t smell of the Home from Home. She and I grew close. Cuddling in bed, how could it be otherwise? Hanka wasn’t at all put off by Monkeyface. I sometimes wondered whether maybe she had brothers like him to look after at home as well. I fell in love with her, but it came to nothing.

Siřem was our home. There were two floors full of boys: the snotty-nosed ‘longshirts’ on one floor, and the older boys in shorts, we called them ‘shortpants’, on the other. What we required was a firm hand, plenty of food and warmth, and to learn Czech, or so the six nuns used to say.

We were rabble and needed a rod of iron to make strong men of us, Commander Vyžlata used to say.

We came from all over the place.

Whenever a new boy arrived, especially to join the longshirts, the older ones would look him over and weigh him up. A darkie stuck with the darkies, a Chink with the Chinks. Czechs would join Dýha, and when they brought someone in who was from nowhere and couldn’t speak Czech, but just some gibberish, he’d sit in a corner for a while and blub, until the nuns took him in hand and taught him Czech and he became a child of God and started to get clothes donated by Czech children, and went to church with us, ate with us, stole lice and grew in size.

Every child of God — any new arrival, whether a longshirt or a boy already old enough for shorts — always got a bit of a working-over from the older boys, so that he knew for certain he had arrived at the Home from Home.

Above the two floors with the dormitories were the old upper storeys, which were always under lock and key. Below us was the cellar and on the cellar floor, water.

I was never once put in solitary confinement in the cellar. That was where boys were sent as a punishment or to ‘cool off’, as Sister Leontina used to say, because now and again one of the shortpants would go mad and throw a tantrum and have a fit as we were all psychopaths.

It was a Czech home for foreign kids, neglected kids, bad kids — boys, the sons of foreigners who couldn’t give a fuck for them or had died on them or were in prison or had disappeared. That’s why there were so many half-castes, darkies and Chinks among us. I wasn’t a darkie, but I wasn’t a Chink either, nor was Monkeyface.

Some boys spoke their own unintelligible language, though the nuns didn’t allow it. You had to gargle tar for that. Any foreign words were washed away from their throats with bubbles of pain, then the boys were topped up with Czech. Baby longshirts arriving at the home spoke many different languages, the languages of savage races. What a mountain of textbooks that would make, I thought to myself. Yet even the tiniest longshirt spoke Czech in a few weeks, in just a few weeks of godly, church-going Sundays, because he had to.

After they turned up, in between crying, they would still babble a few foreign words. They were only little. Then they learned to recite a prayer and how to say good morning and thank you, and it went on from there.

Now and then, after lights-out, when the boys were asleep and there was a strict no-talking rule, you could hear lots of different languages in the dorm. The little ones talked in their sleep and shouted out in their sleep and cried in their sleep. Then a nun had to come running in, the nun on night duty, because as soon as one longshirt started talking or whining in his sleep another would strike up. They were afraid of the dark, and once they were awake and they were all screaming there was nothing you could do to silence them. So the nun who happened to be on duty would run in at the first sign of trouble, the first scream or sob, and she would try to calm them, saying, ‘Come, come,’ or ‘Shhh, sleep now…’ and Sister Eulalia would sometimes sing a low, soothing lullaby: ‘Sleep, little angel…’ In the night the nuns didn’t punish anyone for speaking in foreign languages. They waited until morning. Mostly they had to punish the darkies, because they had their own language and used it so that no one could understand them. The nuns would punish us for saying certain words: ‘shit’, ‘arse’, ‘crap’ and the like. Anyone heard using words like that would be dragged off by Sister Alberta to the punishment cell in the cellar to sleep with the rats. I once got ‘dickhead’ and ‘thickhead’ mixed up and received such a caning from Sister Leontina — but I was still very small then. I only ever spoke Czech, and the nuns never ever punished Monkeyface. There was no point.

Monkeyface’s bed was in one corner with a net over it, and I made sure that his nearest neighbours were gentle longshirts. I also chose two choirboys, Šklíba and Martin, to take care of him. They had to put up with Monkeyface’s whimpering and they had to empty his potty and keep him clean, wiping his bottom and the saliva and snot from his face. I soon put a stop to all the jibes at Monkeyface’s expense, and trained Šklíba and Martin to be on their guard. I was small, but in the longshirts’ dormitory I was the biggest, though I didn’t have to move upstairs yet. The boys upstairs would jerk themselves off, but that meant nothing to me. I didn’t want to go upstairs, because I’d be away from Monkeyface, and who would have looked after him then?

I also taught the longshirts how to comfort Monkeyface when he was afraid, when he cried. The choirboys made a good team, having practised singing together. Because I sometimes didn’t have the time to see to him myself, like when Sister Leontina’s ordered me to dust her office… and I was the only one allowed to do that! After tidying her office I would sometimes stay behind and drop onto the kneeler under the Cross. It hurt my knees, but it was a good, strange pain. And I would stay rocking backwards and forwards on the kneeler so long that I’d be overwhelmed by the place I called Shadowland and I never got anywhere else when I was on the kneeler. Then I would go back downstairs and crawl into bed beside Monkeyface. None of the longshirts disturbed us. They wouldn’t dare. And shortpants weren’t allowed in our dormitory. That’s what the nuns had decided. Only the nuns, me and Hanka were supposed to go anywhere near Monkeyface. Though Hanka spent a lot of time at her mother’s in the village. Everyone else found Monkeyface disgusting.

I think it was because of Hanka that I abandoned Shadowland. The nuns themselves were amazed at how long I could remain there. I wasn’t even aware how many boys — or what boys — passed by me in the Home from Home, following their own path in life. When I was in Shadowland the nuns would feed me, and I would open my mouth. Sometimes Shadowland gave me a headache and I would hear a rumbling and a buzzing sound long after I came out of it.

Cuddling with Hanka was better than Shadowland. Cuddling with Hanka was the most beautiful thing in the world. The boys might be busy studying, but I would stay with Monkeyface waiting for Hanka to come. She crept into bed beside me, and while Monkeyface was quiet we lay there, cuddling, each listening to what the other was saying. Monkeyface liked us being together. Czechia couldn’t have been more beautiful than Hanka. One time Hanka grabbed me down below and said, ‘This thing isn’t just for peeing with, you know.’ But she was laughing, happy. Or she would say, ‘You don’t go too far, so I’ll let you do… this. And this!’ More than anything I’d like to have lived with Hanka. But that proved impossible.

Sister Alberta was a nun like the rest, but she was also a local Siřem girl. Before the home became the Home, when it was just the kitchens of the manor house, she had been saddled with me in the kitchen, and also had her hands full caring for Monkeyface.

Before the home became the Home from Home, the Centre sent Sister Alberta lorryloads of beds and brooms and cutlery in boxes, and endless boys’ tracksuits and tracksuit tops, and dinner-trays and sheets and mountains of soap in crates. It was only then that the nuns arrived in Siřem, with their hymns and their holy crosses. They came under the command of Sister Leontina, who had the entire Home from Home obeying her orders. The nuns had been driven out of their convent by the Communists. They were snatched away from their prayers and ordered to take care of us orphaned thugs, bastards, retards and juvenile delinquents. The nuns did look after us, until the Communists put a stop to it.

I don’t know when I came to Siřem. I have memories of hearing squeaking snow. I know: it was Mr Cimbura carrying me into Sister Alberta’s kitchen. Before that I was in Shadowland, where there was lots of noise and my mum and dad.

Sister Alberta and Mr Cimbura lived together as man and wife, until Sister Leontina put a stop to it. Sister Alberta wasn’t repulsed by Monkeyface. Towards the end of the war, her own children got lost in a concentration camp somewhere. It seemed to me that if they looked anything like Monkeyface, she should count herself lucky. The truth is, she didn’t mind Monkeyface at all, even if he yelled and crapped himself all the time. Mr Cimbura did mind. He minded me, too. I would listen to the fairy stories they told to get Monkeyface to sleep, even before I got stuck into The Catholic Book of Knowledge under the guidance of the nuns. Even before I attended Father Francis’s homilies on a Sunday. Mr Cimbura didn’t like Father Francis.

Sister Alberta would tell us about the wolves in Chapman Forest that gobbled up runaway orphans. And about the wicked fairies who lay in wait for boys on the run and would bite them between the legs. And the elves on Fell Crag, who would catch a boy and make him dig a tunnel into the mountain. Most of all, Sister Alberta liked telling us about Czechia.

I used to lie in my bed made from empty soapboxes, all fed and bathed, and Monkeyface, who in those days fitted nicely inside a single soapbox, would belch and fart, and Sister Alberta would read us to sleep with a fairy story about Czechia, who protected this wonderful Bohemian land from its enemies. Mr Cimbura used to come in quietly and sometimes cover the kitchen table with little parcels of goodies for us and for Sister Alberta, and he would listen attentively as Sister Alberta told us stories of how Czechia vanquished the devil’s warlocks with their yellow, vulpine eyes, or some such tale. He often brought a little flask with him, and he and Sister Alberta would take sips from it, and they carried on talking until we were asleep. All of which I saw and heard before I dropped off.

Because she cared for Monkeyface, the nuns let us stay with Sister Alberta, even after the home became the Home and Mr Cimbura had to climb into the kitchen through the window. But not for long. It happened right in the middle of the tale about Czechia… Sister Leontina flung open the door and interrupted the story just as the virgin Czechia had closed the eyes of the last heroic defenders of Bohemia, and was riding out against its enemies, brandishing aloft her blazing sword… Seeing Mr Cimbura, Sister Leontina shouted ‘A man!’ and, as he left shuffling on his unsteady legs, she grabbed the flask from the table, sniffed at it and shouted ‘Alcohol!’, then immediately ordered Sister Alberta to tidy up the kitchen. That was the first night I slept in the longshirts’ dormitory. Monkeyface too. Not in his box. He slept on a bunk, as if he were the same as the other lads. Then they fixed the net over him. Otherwise it wouldn’t have worked.

Our nuns brought us up and cared for us day and night, and told us we were the children of savage or motley races, carried to Siřem on a whirlwind of bad times, when the world was a vale of thorns, but that none of this mattered because God had us safe in the palm of His hand, as did our guardian angels. But we were not to be naughty or act crazy or lose our tempers or fight or steal, or we would be consumed by hellfire. And we had to speak Czech.

At Siřem, the boys who were best at speaking Czech were the Czechs, who were scattered among both the shortpants and the longshirts. They were here because they had done something wrong, like Karel, or for stealing or running away. Even Dýha had run away from his parents or whoever he’d been with before.

It would be our last winter with the nuns, although we didn’t know it.

The days passed and clearest of all I remember that last winter, when the nuns’ nerves began to shatter; when some of them began wandering around on both floors of the Home and in the kitchen-cum-classroom in tears; and when they were on night duty they would fall down on their knees in the corridors, next to the holy pictures; and Sister Alberta would smoke a sneaky cigarette out of sight of the others, though we could see her and afterwards some of us would fight over her dog-ends.

That last winter, the youngest nuns, especially sisters Eulalia and Dolores, had tears in their eyes and stopped punishing us, even for pushing and shoving on the way to church, and laughing and deliberately falling down in the snow. And one morning Sister Dolores said to Sister Leontina, ‘Five kilos! Oh God! They’ll only let us take five kilos! What an awful place that re-education centre must be! Oh dear! What’s five kilos of books and underwear?’

Sister Leontina frowned and told Sister Dolores, ‘And how much underwear and how many books did the sweet young Mary take with her to Bethlehem?’

And Sister Dolores blushed, as we could easily tell, because she was standing against the pure-white snow. She nodded and we walked on.

Just like any other morning on the way to church we sang hymns as we went. I only really remember the frosty mornings and this was one of them. But Monkeyface never had to go to church, because he couldn’t, and sometimes I didn’t have to because the nuns allowed me to keep him company; so me and Monkeyface, we’d often be left all alone in the longshirts’ lower dorm, all alone, and everything was silent.

I would go iya, iya! and tell him, ‘Say something, you ugly mug, you bugger!’ That’s what I called him, but he didn’t care and he went gru, gru! and laughed back at me, and poked his hands through the holes of his net. He wanted one of the nuns to come and walk with him. They wouldn’t let me, because I couldn’t hold him up. He would also have liked Hanka to come. Sometimes Sister Alberta or Leontina, Eulalia or Dolores, Emiliana or Zdislava would look in on us, whichever nun was on kitchen duty, and she would bring us some bread and butter and milk, and to me she’d say, ‘It’s so sweet how you look after your baby brother…,’ and she’d pat me on the head and think I was a long-suffering little donkey.

After the nun had gone, Monkeyface would gobble up all the bread and drink all the milk, then loll back in his cot and start farting. Sometimes I lay next to him, and before falling asleep I would think about Shadowland. The nuns didn’t know about Shadowland. It was just for me and Monkeyface. I thought about Shadowland, where the shadows would hold me up high and stroke my head, coo over me and feed me something deliciously gooey, and they would laugh with me… I thought about these shadows and remembered them. The first people I saw were at Siřem, but by then I knew enough not to give a shit about this earth, because this earth is the earth of those bastards, my parents.

Cuddling was better. If we cuddled for a long time, Hanka smelt more. We put our arms around each other. ‘Do you like this?’ she would ask. I liked it a lot. Hanka didn’t mind what I was like. I told her once it might be nice to do cuddling with Sister Dolores as well. Hanka gave me such a smack that I saw stars. She didn’t want me cuddling anyone else. Her breasts were much smaller than Sister Dolores’s. When Hanka was in bed with me, Monkeyface was usually calm and quiet. Maybe he was thinking that she was in bed with him as well, which she almost was. Because of the way she cared for Monkeyface the nuns wanted Hanka to be a nun one day. So did I. Then we’d always be together. But it didn’t happen. It wasn’t possible.

The church services were taken by Father Francis, and because his altar boys were lads from the village, the shortpants, led by Dýha, Páta and Karel, always made for the front pews. While Father Francis and the nuns were praying or telling stories about the saints and not watching us, the shortpants and altar boys would wave their clenched fists and make faces at each other.

The altar boys stuck close to Father Francis, because left alone among us somewhere in the church, they would have got a good thumping. Father Francis went on about love being the sweetness of the world and that those who have no love have nothing. The nuns kept an eye on us while blowing on their frozen fingers, and we listened to Father Francis because we had to, and whenever he talked about love and loving, the boys would giggle, but after a while we stopped nudging each other and pulling faces, and a chill came over us, because we had had a snowball fight outside the church and our wet clothes made us cold. Among the locals only the old women from Siřem went to morning mass. They loved Šklíba’s singing and the other choirboys from the Home, and they would book Šklíba’s choir for their funerals. I remembered some of the old women from the olden days, before the home became the Home, and before the nuns were in charge, and I thought the old women didn’t remember me. But I was wrong.

There was a time when I was chosen to join the funeral processions as well, but then it was decided that only Czech boys should accompany the dead as it looked better that way. In exchange for crying a lot they got heaps of extra sweets and soup and other goodies, but they always had to surrender some to the shortpants, who refused to cry at the villagers’ funerals and called the boys who profited from funerals crybabies… But that’s not how it was! No-one wanted the shortpants at funerals, because they were wilful and cheeky and stole anything that wasn’t nailed down, and nobody ever wanted me at funerals either and I never sang… but I didn’t care!

The singers called themselves the Circle. They were led by Sister Eulalia, and Šklíba was the head choirboy. But the choirboys’ voices hardly ever rang out in winter. Even Father Francis’s teeth chattered in the cold, like ours, and so he would ‘storm through the service’, as the old women put it, the ones who came to early mass with us, and outside the church gave us the apples and walnuts that the older longshirts lost their milk teeth on, and if anyone lost a milk tooth it meant he was big enough to join the shortpants… So I was very careful when eating nuts, because the last thing I wanted was to join Dýha in the upper dormitory, where the lads kept wanking and going on about it, which didn’t interest me at all.

When we walked to church in the morning, we always had to line up, us longshirts going first because we were slower and wouldn’t be able to keep up with the shortpants. But in the frost and snow the shortpants went ahead to tread a path for us. The only thing I remember is those freezing mornings as our column of God’s children passed the village pond on the way to church, and the village was empty except for the dogs that barked at us… The villagers didn’t know us then, because Commander Vyžlata, who would hire us out to do odd jobs for them, hadn’t arrived yet. The dogs didn’t know us at all and they barked at us, a procession of children, wrapped up in the scarves and caps and clothes donated to us by Czech children.

The walk back was different, because by then the village had come alive, no matter how fast Father Francis had stormed through the service. And on the way from the church to the pond snowballs and chunks of ice whizzed through the air… Not on the village green, though. There we fell into lines with the nuns at each end, and we all sang ‘Closer My God to Thee’, so the village could hear us. But further on, where no houses lined the path, we formed a huddle. The village boys would be waiting for us, and they’d pelt us with lumps of ice and stones, and the shortpants would form a wall around the tiniest longshirts, cursing and swearing, and catching the ice and stones and hurling them back. They made sure the lumps of ice didn’t hit the heads of the smallest boys, throwing them back into the faces of the village louts. And the nuns were powerless to prevent it.

‘You’re all delinquents and syphilitics! Darkies and gippos! Losers and scumbags!’ the village lads would taunt us. ‘And you’re bog-trotters and yokels! Peasants and churls and clodhoppers!’ the shortpants shouted back. And Dýha, Chata and Karel and the other shortpants took no notice of the nuns’ pleading and drew out of their trouser legs the sticks that they had got ready for the village dogs, which the locals sometimes set on us. It was all a scream and great fun, despite the bruises and the nosebleeds and the odd torn ear. And although the journey to church on those freezing-cold mornings seemed endless, on the way back, with all the mayhem of fighting and trying to dodge the whizzing ice and rocks we were inside the Home in no time.

Then the nuns would put iodine on our bumps and dress our wounds, and that day the youngest one, Sister Eulalia, was sobbing because a dog had frightened her and torn her habit. And that day Sister Leontina railed against the locals, calling them Philistines and comparing us to the holy infants of the Crusades, and that day the hero was Dýha, because his forehead had been cracked open by a stone, and all the boys who were limping or had their hands bandaged were heroes too, and they bragged about their injuries, and those who didn’t have any pretended they did, and we began thinking up all sorts of traps and tricks to play on the village lads, and we shouted and cursed and swore. And that day in the dining room-cum-classroom Sister Alberta roared, ‘Shut up, the lot of you!’ and hurled a ladle to the floor.

Straightaway, one of the darkies grabbed it and licked it clean. Dýha kicked the darkie, but the darkie’s brothers weren’t going to stand for that, not even from Dýha, so Dýha received a gash on his thigh from a piece of broken plate to add to the cut on his forehead. The older boys started a fight, and the longshirts ran in and out among them, knocking each other down, and before long everyone was fighting, and those who had their own languages shouted and swore in their own languages, though they swore in Czech as well.

Sister Alberta sat on her chair, plates and cutlery flying over her head, and in the fracas someone overturned the milk jug and knocked a tray full of sandwiches to the floor, and Sister Alberta lit a cigarette and, in the middle of all the mayhem of fighting, crying and the sobbing of longshirts who’d got trampled on, flicked her ash on the dirty, greasy floor.

I got to the sandwiches and shoved one under my shirt, sticking the buttered side to my belly. I just had time to wolf down a couple more before Sister Leontina bounded into the room with a broom, followed by sisters Zdislava and Dolores with buckets of water. Sister Leontina bashed the brawlers over the head, while the other nuns sloshed water over them. Then Sister Leontina stood in front of Sister Alberta and gave her such a slap that the cigarette shot out of her mouth. ‘Forgive me, sister,’ said Sister Leontina. ‘Our nerves are beginning to crack.’

And Sister Alberta said, ‘Why won’t the parish council send us a policeman for walking through the village?’

‘Because they’re godless,’ said Sister Leontina. ‘It’s an ignorant Communist village!’

We all heard her, for silence reigned in the dining room, aside from the odd snivel.

The shortpants squeezed round the overturned tables and desks, and some of the longshirts were still rolling about on the floor in a state of disarray.

Sister Dolores, who was almost resting her back against a painting of Christ, cried out, ‘What is to become of us? Oh God! What is to become of us?’ Sister Zdislava put her arm around Sister Dolores and said, ‘Calm yourself, sister, and consider what is to become of them, the little ones.’ And when Sister Dolores heard her, she shrieked and fell back against the wall, banging her head, which made us all gasp.

Then Dýha stepped forward from one of the groups and stood opposite Sister Leontina, and although he was almost as tall as her, he stuck out his chin and said, ‘I’m a Communist too!’ And Sister Leontina said, ‘So, you can spend the night in the cellar! And anyway, because of the fighting, I’m sending you all to bed without lessons, and there’s an end of it!’

‘Now, now, sisters!’ Sister Leontina clapped her hands and the nuns lined us up in the direction of the door. They also clapped and sang to the longshirts to set the pace: ‘One, two, three… “There was a little mouse, stealing grain about the house, but He understood her need and let her hold on to the seed!”’ But it wasn’t like that after teatime on other days. That day we were all battered and wretched, and nobody was showing off any more, and nobody said much either. Dýha stayed where he was, in a rage. Sister Alberta approached him, jangling some keys on a ring. It was her job to drag wayward boys down to the cellar, because she was the strongest. Sister Dolores was leaning against Christ on the wall and mumbling. Sister Leontina went up to her and grabbed her by the arm. Then they both joined Sister Zdislava to kneel before Christ and pray, all of which I saw and heard, as I was the last to shuffle out of the room.

Then I was alone in the corridor outside our dormitory.

And through the door I could hear the soothing voices of Sister Eulalia and Sister Emiliana.

The smallest longshirts had been terrified by the fighting. I could hear them crying here and there, but I could also make out Monkeyface’s contented gru, gru! One of the nuns was probably trying to soothe him and lull him to sleep, so I didn’t have to worry. I didn’t feel like going in and joining the little ones. As the nuns left the dormitory, I hid around the corner, and I was pleased to discover that the bread I had concealed under my clothes had survived intact. The whole home fell silent as the boys slipped into sleep, while the nuns were probably lingering over their prayers.

I ran downstairs and stood by the big front door. It was locked. I tried the handle on the kitchen door, but that was locked too. Then I stood on the steps to the cellar, where it was almost dark. I could hear a voice coming from down below, so I set off down the stairs and along past the bend in the corridor… I knew it was Dýha shouting and singing, and that he was down there alone with the rats, and I thought I’d take a good look at him. He was behind bars, so if anything happened he couldn’t get at me.

I followed the bends of the cellar passageway. It was almost dark. Here and there water dripped down, and because I was frightened of the rats I ran through the vile water making it splatter. I approached the punishment cell, past cubicles stuffed full of old papers. I knew that above our two dormitory floors there were more floors, but the nuns never went up there. The floors above us were kept locked and barred, and were said to be full of papers as well. Through the bars of the cellar cubicles I could see bundles of paper tied up with string, like little cities for mice… and then I was standing in front of Dýha and staring at him.

In the punishment cell he had a bucket and a blanket. A single bulb gave him light. He was leaning against the bars. I didn’t know whether to say something, because longshirts never spoke to shortpants unless they were spoken to. I wasn’t a longshirt, but I didn’t really belong with the shortpants either… I waited for him to notice me.

‘Wow, a rat!’ said Dýha. ‘I thought you was a big rat coming for me. And it’s you, you rat.’

‘Rats aren’t this big.’

‘They are though. Down here there’s rats this big!’

‘No way!’

‘You’re a bit small for a boy, but big enough to be a rat.’

‘What do you do down here?’

‘Nothing. Got a fag?’

‘No.’

‘There’s a Communist uprising going on outside. So nip out and find Karel and get me some fags.’

‘What?’

‘Listen, why don’t you sleep with us lot upstairs?’

‘I’m staying with my brother.’

‘Look here, Ilya. You’re small, but old. You should be up top. How long’ve you been in the Home?’

‘Since for ever.’

‘Listen, if you get me some fags, we might take you with us. Might.’

‘Where?’

‘Foreign Legion. We’re going: me, Karel and Páta. Chata as well. We’ve got knives and torches. You can come with us. We’re the Bandits.’

‘Can Monkeyface come too?’

‘No way! Monkeyface is useless!’

‘Then I’m not going, either.’

At that point Dýha shot his arm through the bars and hit me on the chin. The blow sent my head backwards, then he stuck his hand up my shirt and stole my sandwich.

‘You just want to stay behind and stare at Dolores’s tits, eh?’

‘Idiot,’ I muttered, gazing at my sandwich.

‘I’ve had nothing to eat yet,’ said Dýha, stuffing the bread into his mouth. ‘Stop gawping and quit snivelling, will you, you big crybaby? You hungry?’

‘No.’

‘I haven’t eaten!’ said Dýha.

‘Stupid idiot!’

‘Ilya, you really are crying! Here!’

He handed a bit of the bread back to me through the bars. I popped it in my pocket.

‘My old man’s an airman,’ said Dýha. ‘He’ll get me and some of the other lads into the forces. He sends me reports about the Communist uprising. How about that, then?’

‘My old man’s an airman too,’ I said.

‘Bollocks! They chucked you away! You and that little shit. No airman would do that.’

‘Bollocks! He would!’

‘You gonna fetch them fags?’

I was going to go, but we both froze and tried to grasp what we were hearing… It was the midday silence, and anyone who broke it was severely punished, but we both heard it. The front door had creaked noisily, we could hear voices and the tramping of feet, people shouting… It was as if a lot of new boys had come into the Home. Yet we could hear their voices and they were the voices of grown-ups. And now grown-up feet were pounding the stairs to the upper floors.

Dýha tried to poke his head through the bars, probably to hear better, but he couldn’t. He was twisting, comically.

‘They’re supposed to walk quietly,’ I said. ‘I’m off to get them fags.’

I turned and went back through the cellar. I tried to go fast, to get through the gloom as quickly as possible and be out in the corridor.

‘Wait, rat! Don’t go!’ shouted Dýha, but I wanted to see those people.

2: Previously

The manor house was at the bottom of the hill. From the house you went uphill to the village. At the edge of the village was the cemetery, and in it the family vault of the manor’s previous occupants. When it was the manor house we lived in the kitchen. We never went to the upper floors. Mr Cimbura said that when the Czech nobility, like everything else Czech, came to an end, the Nazis put a soldier in the house. Mr Cimbura said that Hitler personally chose the best man for the job. ‘Had a rifle to guard the locked upper floors with, he did. He never drank, not a dram,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘He was human enough, though. Even lived in the village. When Holasa and Kropáček were sent to work in the Reich, and Moravčík and Kropka were in a concentration camp for poaching, he used to lend a hand in the darkened houses with no men in them.’ Mr Cimbura winked at me and drank straight from his flask, while Sister Alberta tried to stop him. ‘Of course, when the blokes came back, they sorted him out in no time. Yeah, there were any number of them, them Jerry soldier boys, knocking about in Chapman Forest in those days, I can tell you,’ said Mr Cimbura, and he went on to tell me all about it.

‘Then our bloodstained bourgeois government put a different soldier in, don’t you know? A Czechoslovak lad. The very sort as had been shooting at the hungry masses during the uprising. Hanging’s too good for the likes of them,’ said Mr Cimbura, who went on to regret that I was too little for him to send me out for another bottle in such foul weather with snow on the ground. Mr Cimbura said nothing about Monkeyface. ‘Yeah, guarded the upper floors, he did, that bloke with his tin hat and his little gun. Then he disappeared as well — to Hell I expect. But it was all still locked upstairs.’

He was right. The third floor was locked. Padlocks hung on the door, black and huge.

‘But the rule of the people’s yet to come,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘It’ll be some while before the new order reaches us all the way from Prague. But it will, you can bet on it, sonny.’

Mr Cimbura called me ‘sonny’, even though I wasn’t his son. My mum and dad were in Shadowland. They had no faces. I taught myself to go back and visit them. It worked if I moved. I would rock backwards and forwards and Shadowland would start to come down over me. I used to do it when I was little. I used to do it before I met Hanka.

Previously, I had known only grown-ups. No boys, just Monkeyface. He grew bigger. He wouldn’t have fitted in his old soapbox any more. Sister Alberta and Mr Cimbura finally realised he was never going to change.

‘They used to stick little sods like him under the ice,’ said Mr Cimbura. Sister Alberta was working on Monkeyface over by the stove. He was yelling and the shit came flying out of him.

‘Just shut it, will you?’ said Sister Alberta.

‘Sods like him get born out of black eggs,’ said Mr Cimbura, leaning on the kitchen table, unsteady on his feet.

‘Shut it while the kid’s around,’ said Sister Alberta.

She meant me, of course, not Monkeyface.

It was cold. We were in the kitchen. I was sitting by the stove. I was waiting to see if Mr Cimbura would leave or sit down. If he sat down, he’d be with us for the evening. I wanted Sister Alberta to myself.

‘And black-egg sods always cut their mothers,’ said Mr Cimbura.

Well, if Monkeyface cut our mum, I’m not surprised she wanted rid of him, I thought.

‘And they cut themselves on the eggshell as well, on their way out. That’s why they turn out to be sods,’ added Mr Cimbura, then he sat down.

‘But he’s a baby, for goodness sake!’ said Sister Alberta. ‘There, there, my ugly little duckling,’ said Sister Alberta to Monkeyface. ‘Isn’t that right, little sausage?’ He was washed clean now. Then he fell asleep.

But why Mum got rid of me too was puzzling. Mr Cimbura said he didn’t know.

‘But I ain’t surprised, lad, I ain’t surprised at all,’ he kept nodding as went out to the woodshed with an axe. It was freezing cold and Sister Alberta sent us to the woodshed time and time again.

We used to live in the kitchen before the home became the Home. We lived in the kitchen and went outside to the woodshed. Because of Monkeyface we used to go to church.

Mr Cimbura led the way to church, trampling a path through the snow, because it had been snowing. The pond on the green was iced over. Our path linked up with other trampled paths. Till then I hadn’t a clue what a pond was or what a green was, so I stared. Mr Cimbura went first, stamping down the snow, then I came next, and I also stamped. We were followed by Sister Alberta. She had Monkeyface in her arms. Those days anybody could have lifted him. We went to church to have him made better.

Mr Cimbura didn’t come inside with us. He didn’t like Father Francis.

There were lots of people in the church. The women came and stood around Monkeyface, smiling at him. They made signs of the Cross on his forehead. Mine too. He didn’t cry. He obviously wanted to be made better. They poured water on him. Me as well. Even though he was the sod who’d cut his mother. Not me. All the way through their making him better I held on to Sister Alberta’s skirt. People were singing all the time. They were happy. So was Father Francis. He told the people what to do — kneel, get up, wave their arms — he ran the whole thing, smiling. In the church I was amazed how many things there were. I didn’t know that later a painting of Jesus Christ would be on the wall at the Home from Home as well.

Afterwards everyone came from the church to our place. They ate in our kitchen. They drank alcohol from little glasses. Every now and then, someone stuck a finger in their glass and made a Cross on Monkeyface’s forehead. He never squawked, just gaped. Everyone took care of Monkeyface. I slipped away to the woodshed.

I tried to reach Shadowland. I could stay in Shadowland from morning dark to the dark of night. I bet I could have stayed there from the first day of snow to the last. But Mr Cimbura came in. He couldn’t have me taking naps in odd corners, he said. He said my tongue was hanging out of my mouth and I was out of it. Mr Cimbura spat. ‘I ought to be on hand to help Sister Alberta,’ he said. And he also told me to be ready, because before long I was going to have lots of brothers. That’s what they’d decided at the Centre. What else was a stately home good for? The Germans had got rid of the last aristocrat. Mr Cimbura sat down on the chopping block. ‘Did I ever tell you, lad, that he left it too late to fly away and escape ’em? He was, like I say, a keen flier. Now he’s got a nice tomb in the cemetery,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘Under the new order a tomb’s the best place for toffs, I reckon. And their house is going to be a home for poor boys. And that’s as it should be.’

‘What boys?’ I asked.

‘Right little shits, mostly,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘You’ll see.’

He stood up and we went back to the kitchen. And now they all turned their attention to me. ‘So let’s drink to the firstborn as well, eh?’ said Mr Cimbura. And people stood up or leaned towards me from their chairs and knocked back their shots in a toast to me and me alone. They were all gawping at me. Then they started chatting among themselves. They were all being nice to each other. But Monkeyface didn’t get any better.

Then it wasn’t quite so cold. I used to go to the front door. I would stand on the steps looking out for Mr Cimbura. He always came.

Then a lorry arrived from the Centre. Men in overalls carried beds and mattresses into the hallway. The men dashed all over the first two floors upstairs with wires and hung up light bulbs, while other men from the village followed them around and made a right pigsty of the place. Mrs Kropáček, Mrs Moravčík, Mrs Holý and Mrs Kropek came in with brooms and buckets and floor cloths. Every day they washed bits of the corridors and bits of the upstairs.

The men from the village and the men in overalls brought bundles of paper and piles of mouldy old books down from the first and second floors. They threw them on the lorry. The men in overalls trampled the piles of papers on the lorry, and Mr Holasa, Mr Dašler and Mr Moravčík opened the second-floor windows and, using pitchforks, tossed even more bundles of paper down onto the back of the lorry. When it was full, the men came down and drank some hard liquor with the blokes in overalls. They slapped hands and clapped each other on the shoulders. It wasn’t that cold any more, but they made a bonfire outside the manor house. They warmed their hands at it. The lorry kept coming and going.

Sister Alberta also begged Czechia to help Monkeyface. She showed me a painting of Czechia. I liked her bare breasts. So maybe I wasn’t quite such a kid any more. Or I was. I dunno. I wanted to keep looking at Czechia, but Sister Alberta took the picture away.

Whenever Sister Alberta talked about Czechia and Mr Cimbura turned up in the kitchen late in the day, a bottle in his hand, he sat down and listened quietly. When the story got to the great feats of Czechia, he didn’t argue with Sister Alberta like he did at other times.

When he told stories, it was terrible.

The thing is, Sister Alberta sometimes needed to pop out for a chat with the girls, meaning great big Mrs Kropáček and great big Mrs Moravčík, so she didn’t spend the evening with us.

Mr Cimbura scared us. He told us about this horrible black egg and how the fair Czechia took a gulp of stinking water from it and died. Monkeyface used to scream. Mr Cimbura would sit on his chair with his hands pressed to his ears and go on with the story at the top of his voice. You couldn’t tell if Monkeyface was just making a noise or crying. I cried for real. Mr Cimbura didn’t care.

At other times, Mr Cimbura talked about Chapman Forest. It was spread all around Siřem. ‘There’s wild animals in the forest,’ he said. I believed him, because Sister Alberta had told us the same thing. I was glad to be sat in the kitchen by the stove and that I didn’t have to share the fate of wayfarers lost in the forest.

‘When a wayfarer falls asleep, he dreams of faraway places, and when he wakes up, he gets drawn to them places! The fate of them as can’t stop is terrible — horrible — so you just listen!’ Mr Cimbura would wake me if I fell asleep by the stove. If Monkeyface fell asleep, me and Mr Cimbura were glad. We stared at the wall and the creeping reflections of the flames from the stove, and we imagined faraway places. But best of all Mr Cimbura liked telling stories about Czechia.

He would spit on the floor, because there was nobody to tell him not to, and start: ‘If Czechia is ever destroyed, then the hardworking, diligent sons of the Bohemian Basin will be exterminated. I hope you understand that, my lad. But Czechia’s protected by intrepid warriors. They’ve vanquished everybody from the Tatars to the Krauts. Other enemies have hardly been worth their bothering about. They can swat ’em with their hats. One day you’ll be an intrepid warrior too, laddie. I’ll make sure of that.’

And Mr Cimbura promised that when I was older he’d get me a portrait of Czechia for me to keep as my very own.

Mr Cimbura told us that when he gave away pictures of Czechia to the newly confirmed outside the church, Father Francis reported him, and Mr Cimbura had been horsewhipped by the lord of the manor. But that didn’t matter. When he got back to his cottage after the whipping, the newly confirmed who hadn’t got a picture came knocking at his window in the night. ‘Girls,’ said Mr Cimbura, ‘want to be like Czechia, and boys want to have her, but her not being around, they lie on top of the girls and make babies with ’em, so the seed of the Czechs shall not perish! Czechia dealt with that toff in a roundabout way, it seems. Anyway, he’s long been resting in his tomb. He tried to take off in his plane, but the Communists hanged him, the collaborating Jerry bastard,’ said Mr Cimbura, although he had said something different earlier.

He also told us how Czechia’s intrepid warriors would lay traps in the forest for the Krauts and Tatars. How they would carve images of Czechia into the trees with axes dipped in the putrid matter of black eggs. Some warriors would cut her image into their own skin. She was their protection. And an enemy soldier would go mad in a wood full of images of Czechia cut into the trees, throwing down his weapons and equipment and becoming a wanderer. And he would walk on and on, never stopping, until he died.

Mr Cimbura liked telling that story. It amused him.

When Sister Alberta told stories, I stuck it out through the nasty parts and fell asleep, feeling happy, because Czechia was victorious and everything turned out all right. But Mr Cimbura didn’t like happy endings.

I remember all that. In fact I don’t remember anything else at all.

That’s how we lived before the nuns arrived.

And then someone else came.

I was standing in the corridor. I might have been able to hear Dýha if I craned my head towards the cellar steps, but I wanted to see who these new people were.

3: The nuns. Mayhem. Quiet outside. He did it himself!

I ran up the steps, almost crashing into a soldier. He had a rifle, but no helmet.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he shouted. I shot past him like a rat, ran into the dining room and crouched behind the door. You wouldn’t have spotted a whisker, or even my rat’s tail… Standing in the dining room were sisters Zdislava and Alberta, Eulalia and Emiliana, and Sister Dolores as well. They had little bundles in their hands and wore travelling coats. Soldiers or cops from the Communist uprising were standing around them and one Communist said, ‘Five kilos each, I said!’ The nuns stood there in a huddle, looking like chickens in a book of nursery rhymes or like naughty schoolboys who hadn’t learned something they should have. Then one of the nuns said, ‘Yes, sir.’ And the Communist said, ‘There aren’t any sirs now,’ and laughed. Then the Communists poked the nuns with their rifle butts, and one of them roared, ‘In line!’ and they set off, out through the door of the dining room into the corridor. I was hunched down behind the door. The nuns didn’t see me. Not even Sister Dolores, who was the last out. I never saw her again, ever. Sister Eulalia suddenly ran towards the door of the smaller boys’ dormitory, but the Communists dragged her back into line.

The Home was silent. The boys were probably pretending to be asleep, making good use of the midday calm for a nice nap. The Communists led the nuns down the stairs, and Sister Zdislava gripped the banister and said, ‘What will happen to them?’ and one Communist said, ‘Come on,’ and pulled her away. Then downstairs the door slammed as the nuns and the Communists went out to the front of the Home. ‘Where are they taking them?’ I wondered. Then the door of Sister Leontina’s office flew open and she fell through it. She didn’t have her dark cape on, that came flying through the air afterwards, tossed from the office by a Communist. Sister Leontina fell to the ground. She was wearing a funny white shirt, and if I hadn’t been able to see her head, I might have thought one of the taller longshirts had fallen down… For the first time I saw Sister Leontina’s hair. It was grey and lay flat against her head. She got up slowly and kept touching her hair with one hand. Two Communists came out of the office. They didn’t have rifles, just pistols, and the one who had thrown the cape had his gun in his hand. He said, ‘You should have had kids yourself, bitch!’ Now Sister Leontina was standing, wrapping her travelling cape around her body. She lifted her head back to stare at the Communists, just like Dýha when he spoke to her, and she said, ‘God can see you…’ ‘Sure, you old prayer-bag,’ said the one with a pistol in his hand. ‘Get moving!’ said the other, and he pushed Sister Leontina so hard that she almost fell, then shunted her along the corridor. Then Sister Leontina walked on by herself, the Communists behind her. I didn’t even wait to hear the door bang. I jumped to the window like a rat. Outside the sun was shining. The five nuns were standing in the snow in their travelling capes, the Communists standing around them. Then Sister Leontina came out of the Home from Home, and the gaggle of nuns surged around her. A lorry drove up and the nuns, one by one — sisters Eulalia, Zdislava, Dolores, Alberta, Emiliana and Leontina — climbed onto it. The Communists were laughing, prodding them. I bet they felt Sister Dolores’s tits. That’s why they were laughing so much. The lorry drove away slowly, and the Communists lined up in twos, like us boys on the way to church. Behind me I heard a noise in the corridor, voices. Longshirts were creeping out of the dormitory, one after the other, their mouths open. From above I heard the tramping of feet… the boys in the other dormitory running to the window. They were all around me at once, and they crushed and shoved at the window, pushing me aside, but I still saw the nuns waving to us. I glimpsed them. Six nuns raising their arms, waving to us, then the lorry picked up speed and they were driven off up the hill.

Someone asked, ‘Where are they taking them?’

Somebody replied, ‘Dunno.’

And one longshirt started blubbering. It was cold by the window and maybe someone had trodden on his foot.

I went to see Monkeyface, to tell him what had happened.

Then mayhem broke out all over the Home.

Monkeyface was trying to scramble out of bed. He was surprised that the midday calm was so full of noise and shouting. His net was over his bed. I didn’t let him out. I went to see what was going on. Monkeyface gawped at me through the net. I came back and gave him some bread. The whole bit that was left. He wanted more.

‘I could go and join the Legion as well, you know,’ I told him. ‘The lads want me to go. So watch yourself!’

And I went and found the others.

Mayhem had broken out on both floors and in the dining room. I’d hardly left the dormitory and in the middle of all the hullaballoo — with all the lads whooping and shouting and laughing and running up and down the stairs — I heard bang! bang! coming from downstairs. And when I got there, I saw that the shortpants had grabbed a big bench and were hammering away at the kitchen door — bang! bang! — and the door flew open and they broke in, laughing and shouting. Pushing in behind them went the little longshirts, clambering over the bench, and I jumped over it too, and landed in the kitchen and got a shock to see it was snowing… The shortpants were hurling bags of flour at each other, and their faces were all white, and they’d also opened all the cupboards, big and small, that weren’t under lock and key. First we ate the fudge. Anyone who could get hold of it crammed it in his mouth and chewed away. No-one cared about ruining their teeth. There wasn’t all that much fudge, so in the hurly-burly we stuffed ourselves with gherkins too. There were huge jars of them and one fell out of a cupboard and smashed. So, laughing and shouting, we hunted the gherkins all over the floor. They slipped out of our hands. And if anyone had felt like it he could have stuffed his mouth with butter. There was a great pile of it in little cubes. Then Karel announced, ‘And who wants some bread?’ and with a huge kitchen knife he hacked at the loaves and handed out bread to anyone who put up his hand. In a cupboard we found jars and jars of jam and plum curd, and everybody’s face was sticky with the goodies, and we swapped bread and gherkins and jam among ourselves. Then Karel called out, ‘Pick up the glass, dammit!’ because some of the little ones had dropped their jam jars, which smashed on the floor, and the sticky sweet glass lay among the glass from the gherkin jars, and the little ones were wading up to their ankles in flour and laughing, playing tag and smearing butter over each other’s faces. Then finally someone kicked or smashed open the door to the pantry, but inside were only boring things: scrubbing brushes, buckets and floor-cloths and boxes full of coal-tar soap… And the noise! The lads kicked the bars of soap all over the kitchen and the corridor, aiming them into the corners… There was a huge washer drum in the kitchen for doing the dirty linen, and one little boy climbed inside and the others set it turning, laughing as they stood round the drum. They all wanted a spin inside. They got hold of the tub we used to bathe in too. Someone climbed into it and the others dragged it around. Then some of the older boys found some salamis. They cut them into little cubes and anyone who wanted some got some. The longshirts left the drum and the tub and begged for salami… Then no-one could eat any more, so we started throwing it at each other.

I put some bread and salami in my pocket.

I went out into the corridor and there was just one longshirt there, sitting on the overturned bench, gripping his belly and snivelling.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Ow!’ He just crumpled up on the bench.

‘You mustn’t eat glass!’ I said, but by then I was standing by the front door of the Home and I took hold of the handle and the door opened.

It had been snowing. I could see the footprints of the nuns and the Communists, and the deep tracks of the lorry.

The snow was still falling, so the tracks looked as if someone had sprinkled flour into them.

I watched. The slope went off into the distance. Towards the village. I took a step, then another — and I was outside.

It was quiet. The noise and mayhem had calmed down. I turned and saw the others standing in the doorway.

First to come out was Karel, then Páta, and in a moment even the little ones were outside, plastered with jam and with flour in their hair; and some of them didn’t have shoes on, having crawled out of bed barefoot or in their socks. Now they were standing in the snow, and suddenly Páta roared ‘Yippee!’ and jumped in the air. They all started shouting and hopping up and down, and the snow outside the Home was suddenly full of footprints and tracks as we ran around, snowballing and chasing each other round and round in the snow… Then we stopped and suddenly the silence was massive outside, like a great blanket. In the Home you could always hear someone talking, shouting, stomping around or at least coughing… but here it was silent and no one was laughing. We turned back, one by one, and went inside, and the last one closed the door.

I went to see Monkeyface.

I walked up the staircase. The lads had knocked the holy pictures off the walls and the dining room was a mass of overturned tables, but it was still quiet. The door to Sister Leontina’s office was ajar, as was the door to the longshirts’ dorm. And Monkeyface wasn’t in bed.

That had never happened before.

The net had been torn down. He couldn’t have done that by himself.

During the riot downstairs I hadn’t spotted Martin or Šklíba.

The silence upstairs was filled with my breathing. I came out into the corridor. I pushed at the door to Sister Leontina’s office and said, ‘Where are you, you buggers?’

Papers were scattered about the office and the kneeler lay on its side. The only light came in through a chink in the blind. The nuns stood there in the gloom. And the nicest, most beautiful of them, Sister Dolores, came towards me, raising her arms… So I raised mine… Then a great rumpus broke out, and shrieks and high-spirited laughter, and suddenly I saw the lads from the Home leaping around me and shouting, ‘Iya! Iya! Stupid Ilya!’

They had dressed up in the clothes they had found, putting on the nuns’ bonnets and even their black capes. Amid the shouting I heard crying and whimpering. It was Monkeyface calling to me for help. They had tied him to a bed and jammed a bonnet on his head. He was trying to get it off, but was making himself choke. He was crying and snot was streaming from his nose. I wiped his tears and saliva away with my sleeve, and Monkeyface let out a big puff and a huge glob of snot landed on my face. Now the lads were laughing their heads off. I tried to untie Monkeyface. My fingers were shaking. Then someone bashed me on the head. It was Šklíba and he was shouting, ‘Watch the dummy yourself, dummy!’ Then someone else thumped me, and they kept pounding away at me. It didn’t hurt much. I just wanted it to stop.

The door flew open and Karel and Mikušinec came in. ‘Is Ilya here?’ said Karel, and the longshirts fell silent and grabbed at me from different sides, and Karel said, ‘Get out of that clobber now, you faggots!’

The longshirts started stripping. They felt silly now. Karel stamped his foot. ‘Beat it, scram!’ and they fled.

I untied Monkeyface at last. He grabbed me around the neck and wouldn’t let go. He was overjoyed that I’d found him.

Karel stood over us and said, ‘When you’re done with him, come down to the cellar, okay? We’re having a meeting, okay?’ Then he left with Mikušinec.

I knew I couldn’t carry Monkeyface by myself, and I didn’t want to ask Karel and Mikušinec. Monkeyface made all the boys feel sick.

I picked up a sheet and tied him to the bed by one leg. He couldn’t undo it.

And I had a bright idea: I would get the tub from downstairs. I could push him around in it. And when Dýha and the others invited me to join the Foreign Legion with them, I would tell them we could easily push Monkeyface along in the tub. He would be able to come with us. But then I realized there was snow all around the Home. I wouldn’t be able to get the tub through it. We would have to stay behind. The lads could go and join the Legion. But how were we going to live at the Home?

I wished the nuns would come back. Then I could lie down next to Monkeyface and drop off to sleep.

I gave him all of the bread and salami.

He looked pleased.

I was on my way to fetch the tub when I met Karel and Mikušinec. They were waiting for me. So I had to go down to the cellar.

In the kitchen, the bigger longshirts had swept up the glass and the little ones were fooling around with the washer drum. I looked around for the tub… two longshirts were pulling a third around in it.

Then we went through the gloom of the cellar and from the bend in the passage I saw candles flickering, which was strictly prohibited in the Home. Some shortpants sat or squatted outside the grating of the solitary-confinement cell, smoking cigarettes. Dýha was standing, leaning against the bars.

If one of the lads moved, his shadow on the wall moved as well.

‘Did you get ’em from the kitchen, the candles?’ I asked Karel.

‘Yep,’ he nodded.

We walked through the gloom, splashing in the cold cellar water, the line of boys standing and sitting there rippled as they made way for us, along with their candles. Now we were standing in front of Dýha, the bars of the cell between him and me.

Dýha pushed an arm through the bars and grabbed my ear.

‘Arsehole!’ he said. ‘You didn’t obey orders!’

I tried to duck, but I couldn’t, because of my ear.

‘I was gonna get some fags,’ I said, ‘but that lot turned up!’

‘My orders count!’ said Dýha, and tugged my ear so hard that my head banged against the bars. Then he let go.

‘Whose orders?’ said Chata, standing beside me and making my shadow a head taller. Then he said, ‘Dogshite to you, you cellar Communist arsehole!’

And the lads laughed.

‘We’re the Bandits,’ said Karel. ‘We agreed to go and join the Legion. But now some of you wanna join the Communists. So what are we gonna do?’

They all started gabbling and asking questions: ‘Where are the nuns?’ ‘Where did they take them?’ ‘Will they be coming back?’ ‘What are we going to do?’ and nobody listened to Dýha. That was okay.

Then Chata said we ought to sort ourselves out and go to the village, and some wanted to go and some didn’t… As they got up, waving their arms about, and sat down again, the shadows on the wall got all mixed up, sliding into each other. They were all out-shouted by Dýha.

‘Listen up, guys!’ he shouted. ‘Belt up, I tell you! My dad’ll be here in a couple of days and he’ll get this place organized. For now, you find the key to this cell so I can get out. My dad organized the Communist uprising.’

‘Your dad, eh? He’s always in the slammer!’ Karel cracked up. He laughed and pointed at Dýha, who was now careering round and round the cell in a rage.

‘At least he ain’t dead!’ Dýha bellowed at Karel. ‘Least he ain’t pushing up daisies, is he?’

‘You shuddup!’ shouted Karel and leaned towards the bars. ‘You’re locked up.’

‘And you’re a psycho,’ said Dýha, shoving his face up against the bars so that it was only inches away from Karel’s.

They stared at each other, then gobbed at each other, and Karel hammered at the bars with a knife, making a terrific racket. Then he stuck his arm through the bars and, stretched out on tiptoes, stabbed and slashed at Dýha with the kitchen knife, but Dýha just dodged out of the way, and now it was his turn to laugh.

‘Cut it out,’ said Chata. ‘I reckon we should go into the village.’

‘Ha, ha!’(It was Dýha again.) ‘Go to the village then, darkie. They’ll have a welcome waiting! Off you go, gippo, and grab us a chicken while you’re there!’

The lads started to laugh, and I was smiling and Chata also laughed. Karel sat down and the other lads got up, and the shadows on the wall rose and fell.

I didn’t know whether to join the Communists or the Foreign Legion. I realized that the first thing me and Monkeyface needed was the tub. Once that was sorted, we could think about which side to join.

Then I heard a vroom-vroom noise, like when the old washing machine was running. ‘They’ve started the drum!’ someone shouted, and Mikušinec said, ‘You take charge of the little brats, Dýha, they’re messing up the place!’ Then we all started laughing again, and the washing-machine drum above our heads went vroom-vroom… until the cellar ceiling shook. The youngsters must have plugged it in and didn’t know how to switch it off. ‘Washing detail at the ready… wash!’ roared Dýha and we all laughed. Then Páta bellowed, ‘Shitty shorts at the ready…’ and we all roared ‘wash!’ then fell about laughing. Vroom-vroom, the drum above us shook and rattled all its metal parts; the plaster came off the ceiling in bits, falling into our hair, then someone came running into the cellar… longshirts! They were screaming and splashing through the cellar water. Šklíba ran up to us out of breath, and covered his head when he saw me.

He was protecting his head. The moment I saw him I guessed what they’d done to Monkeyface. The dreadful noise kept making the cellar ceiling shudder… vroom-vroom… I sprinted down the passage and shot up the stairs, and the further up I went, the louder the vroom-vroom became. I burst into the kitchen and yanked the plug from the socket. It was high up, but I jumped. There was a broken chair on the floor. They hadn’t been able to reach, because it had snapped under them. The noise stopped, but the drum kept turning. Martin was standing there with blood on his hands. He’d tried to stop the drum, but the metal had cut into him. I tripped over a sheet lying on the floor. Aha! That’s what they had used to carry Monkeyface!

The drum was still turning. With Martin’s help I stopped it. I flipped the iron lid back and heaved Monkeyface out. He’d always been too heavy for me, but now I pulled him out by myself. He didn’t make a sound. I carried him upstairs without help. His head was dangling and his little face was all squashed.

The inside of the drum was covered in spit and shit. He had it all over him. I hauled him upstairs to our floor. I had to stop for a rest, propping him up against the frame of the window opposite the dining room. Now he was whimpering quietly. I held him tight.

I heard the slap of bare feet and the clump of boots. It was the boys. I pressed my face into Monkeyface’s, not caring that it was covered in sick. I’d never been bothered by his spit either. We were always together… He was heavy. I think he wanted to walk. His legs were shaking. He was kicking and fighting, and I was shaking as well, and Monkeyface flopped against the window, banging his knees at the glass, thrusting his knees out in front, fighting to get away from me, slipping… He thrust me out of the way, and now he was top-heavy and banged his head against the window. I grabbed him by his feet, but he kicked out at me and flew headfirst through the glass. He fell, turning once or twice in the air, then thumped down, landing on his back in the snow, bits of glass showering down around him.

‘Shit!’ said Páta, who was standing next to me.

‘It wasn’t Ilya!’ panted Karel. ‘Monkeyface fell out by himself. I saw it.’

‘He did it himself!’ shouted someone who had just run up from the cellar.

‘Yeah,’ said Páta. ‘I saw it too.’

Now there were lots of lads standing around. We looked down from the window at Monkeyface lying there. He wasn’t moving.

I went downstairs. In the kitchen I looked for a tablecloth or something to put over Monkeyface. But I almost didn’t care, now he was dead. I couldn’t find anything anyway.

My head started to ache from being bashed on the bars when Dýha grabbed my ear. If my head were as soft as a cucumber and if the bars were made of knife-blades, they’d have sliced my head like salami. Similar ideas filled my head. I didn’t want them, but unfortunately they kept coming. I was sitting by the washer drum. I didn’t know if the blood on it was from Martin’s fingers or from Monkeyface.

Chata, Mikušinec and Karel came in. They stood there in the kitchen and looked. We all had the same hairstyle. Mikušinec was gingery. The shortpants made fun of him. They said he had dirty hair. Karel and Chata were the tallest. Dýha was fat. Karel was bigger than Chata.

‘Here, have a drink,’ said Karel. ‘You’re a Bandit now, and we’ve decided to join the Legion.’

He handed me a small brown bottle.

‘Give it here,’ said Chata.

‘Hey, let him have a drink,’ said Karel. ‘He’s in shock.’

I was glad to be a Bandit. That was important. Chata reached out to grab the bottle, so I took a swig. My stomach heaved. It wasn’t as disgusting as tar water, though. The horrible clammy taste stuck my lips to the neck of the bottle. I carried on drinking.

‘You’ll make yourself puke,’ Chata told me.

I felt a bit like puking, but I had to laugh as well. I had turned up before them. Years before. The lads knew a lot. About how to do a runner. They knew a lot about Chapman Forest. But I was there when the Home from Home was a stately home. I started laughing again.

I emptied the bottle and dropped it on the floor. Someone opened the door. It was Páta. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘all of you.’

I went, though I kept falling about in a funny way. Karel dragged me along by the shoulder. By the kitchen there was some blood on the floor. I wanted to tell the lads it was the longshirts’ blood from when they were fishing for gherkins in the broken glass, but I couldn’t speak. My tongue kept flopping about.

4: The cellar again. My watch. They arrive

Now there were lots of candles in the cellar and lots of lads, including longshirts, and lots of shadows.

We went to the solitary cell, and Dýha shouted, ‘Is he blubbering?’

And Mikušinec shouted back, ‘Nah, he’s pissed!’

All the lads, crammed into the cellar next to the cell where Dýha was locked up, were laughing like mad, even the little longshirts, most of whom had pulled sweaters and anoraks over their nightshirts… But Šklíba and Martin weren’t laughing. They were shut up in one of the cubicles. They sat on a pile of papers and underneath them was a mouse kingdom, and the mice could come and get at them through all the little tunnels and runways they had dug, and they could get out through the bars too, because mice can… but the boys couldn’t.

They didn’t have a blanket or a bucket or a light bulb.

Šklíba was kneeling on the piles of paper, like you do in church, saying a Hail Mary… Martin said nothing, he was blubbering.

‘We’re gonna sentence them now,’ Karel whispered in my ear.

‘Quiet!’ shouted Dýha. ‘I declare this meeting of the Bandits open, because they stuck Ilya’s Monkeyface in the washer drum. Šklíba, shut it!’

But I never heard whether Šklíba stopped praying, and none of the others could have heard either, because the front door banged again, and voices and footsteps echoed through the Home from Home. Someone was pounding up the stairs, and suddenly I felt elated that things were back, back the way they had been! The others also thought the nuns were back, because the little longshirts let out a cry; they were all shouting now and suddenly thrusting their way out of the cellar. The youngsters pushed me and Karel to one side as they sloshed their way out through the cellar water. We ran after them, though I was a bit unsteady. I was the last and our shadows kept jumping. Mikušinec and Chata blew out the candles. After all, no-one could even imagine having candles in the cellar — it was forbidden! In the dark I could hear Šklíba mumbling something religious. I was the last to haul myself out of the cellar. There was no-one anywhere. Slowly I went upstairs, leaving the cellar behind me… and then I opened the front door. I was going to fetch Monkeyface, but I got a surprise!

Outside there was a little horse harnessed to a sleigh, and on the sleigh there was a pile of blankets. They’d come by sleigh! The villagers… I peeked under the sleigh, but Monkeyface wasn’t there. I kept looking for him! I craned upwards and saw the broken window, and I was trampling on the broken glass in the snow… There were no footprints any more; instead the snow had turned into black mud and everybody had been trampling in it. I went round to the little horse and then I got this stupid idea… the idea that the horse had been sent to me by Monkeyface, since he wasn’t lying there. But that was impossible! Sent for me to get in and let the sleigh take me to Shadowland, and my little brother would be waiting there for me… And then I heard, ‘What about that then, sonny?’ and I looked up and there in the sleigh sat Mr Cimbura, wrapped in blankets. He was looking at me, but I don’t think he recognized me. I always recognized him, though he was much older.

‘Some surprise, that, eh? When they took them penguins away, eh? Well, it had to come. I’m from peasant stock, sonny, and I served ’em for years. But now the people’s rule’s reached even us, here in Siřem, and the worker and the peasant shall eat from the nobleman’s plate. Listen, where did the silly bitches hide their gold crosses and pyxes? Their vestments and stuff? The valuables? Do you know?’

‘They didn’t take them with them,’ someone somewhere behind me said. It was Mr Holasa, and behind him was Mr Kropek. I don’t think they recognized me. When the Home was the manor house I was little, and the villagers couldn’t tell one child from another if it wasn’t their own. But I knew who they were.

From lying in his blankets Mr Cimbura sat bolt upright, looking silly, and he said, ‘I’m interrogating this youngster here, see.’

‘Is that you?’ Mr Holasa asked me, so I knew he had recognized me.

‘I’m Ilya, sir.’

‘What sort of a name’s that? You some sort of little Russky?’ Mr Holasa punched me in the shoulder.

‘Little Russky be damned!’ Mr Cimbura croaked. ‘What’s in a name?’

Mr Kropek was also looking at me. He put out a hand and tapped me on the shoulder by way of saying hello.

‘Otherwise they’re all little Russkies, Asians, and lots of gippos!’ said Mr Holasa, and he rifled around in the blankets on the sleigh, Mr Cimbura shifting out of the way.

Mr Holasa got some wire-cutters and a hammer from under the blankets and handed them to Mr Kropek. Then he fished out some wire-cutters and an axe for himself, and they went inside the Home from Home.

‘I’ll finish interrogating this youngster,’ Mr Cimbura called, but they ignored him. The little horse looked straight at me. I dodged, but his head still followed me…

‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell them,’ I said to the horse…

‘I knew it!’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘You know where those holy cows hid it all, don’t you, sonny? We won’t let on to anyone else. Here.’ Mr Cimbura leaned out of the sleigh and handed me two squares of chocolate. I wolfed them down at once, and the vile taste of alcohol still in my mouth was sliced through by the fabulous sweetness. I ate it all myself. I wouldn’t have to share things ever again.

‘I can’t help it that he’s dead!’ I cried.

‘’Course not, sonny. Just tell me where they put it.’

‘He wanted to. He did it himself!’ I said.

‘Of course, sonny. I know. I’ll testify for you,’ said Mr Cimbura and he gave me another piece of chocolate…

‘He wasn’t any use and they didn’t like him,’ I said. ‘All the time he wanted to die and he couldn’t.’ I swallowed and my belly was full of sweetness… and the little horse snorted and pawed the ground, raising his head and looking at me. Oh no. Tears started streaming down my cheeks, and I’d been so proud when Mikušinec had shouted down there in the cellar that I wasn’t blubbing. Ha! And there I was blubbering. ‘I don’t think it hurt him much,’ I said, and the little horse snuffled warmly at my ear.

‘Ah well,’ said Mr Cimbura, ‘I’d give you some more, but that’s all he had. Wanted to die, he did, mouldy old monk, and you can bet it hurt him. We stamped all over him… punishment detail. Red specialists come all the way from Prague to interrogate the counter-revolutionary Vatican maggot,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘He wanted to die, sonny. You’re right there. Then he did. And you know what, sonny? He got such a doing-over, that bastard of a priest, they had to toss him up onto the lorry. Then they threw some straw over him and the nuns sat on top of him, and how the stupid cows must’ve started squawking when they found their arses resting on their very own vicar… So towards the end I reckon he did want to die…’

‘Like I said!’ I said, moving my shoulder out from under the little horse’s mouth. The horse breathed hot on me, then I went inside the Home from Home with Mr Cimbura calling after me. But I didn’t stop.

Not in the kitchen, but in the dining room there were bits of paper everywhere, old yellow bits and blackened bits. They crackled when you touched them and fell apart, lying around the floor and even floating in the air.

Then from the shortpants’ floor came a crashing noise — bang-bang! Longshirts were running around everywhere, gathering handfuls of documents and throwing them down the stairs, enjoying seeing them flutter. The large, studded door on the second floor, the door with the big black padlocks, had probably been broken open by Mr Holasa and Mr Kropek, busting them with iron bars. For the first time ever I saw the forbidden stairs leading to the upper storeys. We weren’t allowed there, and the nuns didn’t go there either… Now the longshirts with sweaters and anoraks over their long white nightshirts were chasing one another up and down these stairs and causing havoc, and in all the racket they were making the banging went on and on.

The men were smashing in all of the doors on the first forbidden floor. That was the noise I’d heard.

Piles of paper lay in and on the cupboards, some on top of each other in bundles, others any old how, and in places the stacks reached up to the ceiling.

Mr Holasa and Mr Kropek split another door in two, knocking it flat on the ground, then went inside in a cloud of dust, and we followed them, we Bandits… We stood in a huge room, the walls plastered white and in many places it was flaking off, and against one wall there were piles of linen baskets and suitcases with rusty padlocks, and Mr Holasa shouted, ‘This is it!’

They started dragging the linen baskets away from the wall, then smashed them open straight away.

Mr Holasa and Mr Kropek turned the baskets upside down, and it was all just more paper. They covered the floor with it, waded through it, then kicked at the cases and swore.

Páta and Bajza climbed onto the mountain of linen baskets and started throwing them down onto the floor, and me and Chata were almost buried. They did it on purpose! They made the plaster dust swirl, and the dust from the masses of crumbling paper. Then Mr Holasa bellowed, ‘That’ll do now! Bloody kids!’

The men smashed their way to another floor, and Mr Dašler called, ‘Come here!’ and Mr Holasa and Mr Kropek went. Shortly after, we heard heavy footsteps above us.

I went over to the toppled linen baskets and saw a huge picture. It was leaning against the wall. It wasn’t a religious picture. I wanted to call the lads over, but they were still having fun. Plaster and swirling dust were falling all around the picture. I waited for it to settle.

‘Guys!’ I called. We huddled around the picture. It showed a big man and a little woman and an aeroplane. The plane was quite small. I think the big man was the flying toff Mr Cimbura used to talk about. The woman was slitty-eyed with long black hair and a fat belly.

Looking at it, Páta spluttered with laughter. We kept pointing at the funny-looking woman with the belly and sniggering.

‘It can’t be from round here,’ someone said. ‘There’s no forest. They’re in some sandy, flat place.’

‘That’s a desert, idiot,’ said someone else.

There was something about deserts in The Catholic Book of Knowledge.

We looked to see what a desert was like.

Then Chata started sniggering at the picture again, and laughing a squeaky laugh. Then he said, ‘Idiots! That’s Dýha’s dad, the airman!’ We all started laughing. Then we made to leave, but Páta stopped me. We stayed behind in the big room.

‘We put him in the cellar,’ he told me in a low voice. ‘When you was pissed.’

‘What?’

‘We put Monkeyface in the cellar, so these buggers won’t see him. We took him down in a sheet.’

‘Aha,’ I said.

‘He’s next to Šklíba and Martin, since they’re the ones as did it to him. We was gonna put ’em on trial, but now we can’t.’

‘So what can we do?’

‘Dunno.’ Páta shrugged. ‘Nobody knows.’

A little kid came up. He’d been wandering about the floor on his own. Now he stopped and stared at us.

‘Are these people gonna take us away?’ he asked.

‘Where to?’ said Páta.

‘I wouldn’t mind the village,’ said the boy. ‘I could live with some people and herd their goats and feed the chickens. I’ve done it before.’

‘Don’t be daft. The altar boys would eat you for breakfast!’

‘But I never fought ’em. I never threw anything at ’em. And I’d fetch water and firewood.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Páta. ‘They’ve got kids of their own to do that for ’em.’

‘Us Bandits are off to join the Foreign Legion,’ I told the kid. I stretched out full length on the paper. I lay on one of the heaps of paper and stared at the ceiling.

‘I wanna get away as well,’ said the boy. ‘I keep dreaming about my mum and dad.’

We don’t say anything. He’s one of the youngsters.

‘My parents were executed, see,’ he added.

‘You don’t say!’ said Páta.

‘Honest!’

‘By the Germans, right?’ I wanted to know.

‘Don’t be stupid!’ said Páta. ‘That was ages ago. The Communists did it, didn’t they?’

‘I’m frightened of ’em,’ said the lad.

‘They can frighten the Germans or the… them others, but they don’t frighten me!’

I was lying on the paper as if it were a gigantic bed. The ceiling was high up above me. Páta and the other kid were still chattering. I was thinking about the picture we had found, and other stuff. It was nice. I could even have fallen asleep on the paper.

I did fall asleep, and dreamed of Mr Holasa and the others putting the wire-cutters and the iron bars and the axes and the hammers onto the little horse’s sleigh, and leaving only Mr Cimbura in the blankets, because he was old and his legs were wobbly, and the little horse heaved, straining every sinew, but only a little bit… the sleigh was light! — and it pulled the sleigh out through the gates of the Home from Home and trotted daintily up the hill, and the men followed the sleigh and they were arguing and cursing and swearing, because they hadn’t found anything, no expensive goblets or cups, no vestments or gold candles, no precious ornaments… That’s why the sleigh was so light! It wasn’t weighed down with any treasure, so the little horse was carrying just Mr Cimbura and the blankets and axes and wire-cutters — but what’s that to a little horse? Nothing. It’s not heavy… It couldn’t have coped with all the men and a huge treasure trove — that would have put its back out, they would have hurt him, and no-one wanted that… crippling a little horse with a heavy load. They wouldn’t do that. It was a nice dream.

And then I woke up, because Karel gave me a kind of gentle kick… and handed me some bread and a frankfurter.

‘Where did you get it?’ I asked him. The dream and the food made me feel happy.

Karel flopped down on the paper heap next to me.

‘They brought it on the sleigh — frankfurters and bread! They’re afraid we might go knocking out their windows and scavenging around the village. I’ve come to wake you. It’s your watch.’

‘What?’

‘The committee decided we have to take turns on watch, ’cos of the altar boys and Communists.’

‘I see,’ I said and got up.

‘Look, the thing with Monkeyface was a bit off, I know, but at least you can come with us now,’ said Karel.

‘I know.’

‘I saw it happen, little Monkeyface falling out of the window by himself, and Páta saw it too. We was there!’

At that moment we spotted a little light moving through the dark. It was Chata with a torch in his hand. He reached us and said to me, ‘You’re on guard duty, twat,’ then sat down where I’d been and tucked into the bread and sausage. So I went.

Outside the moon was shining, the light flowed across the snowy slope up through the windows and was reflected off the white papers I was tramping over.

The piles of paper everywhere were spooky, there were so many. I almost tripped over two longshirts asleep in a heap of documents as if in a big mouse nest.

There were more longshirts up the staircase.

One was setting fire to the papers with a match. I stamped on the flame and told him to scram. He turned on the waterworks, as did the other longshirts squatting there on the stairs. The boy gave me his matches, and said, ‘We’re really scared!’

‘Did you nick ’em from the kitchen, the matches?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘We could’ve burnt to death. You mustn’t set fire to paper.’

He started crying even more.

‘Come with me, all of you.’

‘Sure, we’re coming,’ said one of the ones sitting on the staircase, and he got up and grabbed me by the hand.

I led the longshirts down the stairs. As I did so I wasn’t afraid. On the second floor one lone youngster was sitting on the ground, and when he saw us he started screaming… Then other feeble little voices piped up, more like those of giant mice than boys, and, just like mice, little longshirts came crawling out of all the nooks and crannies where they’d been sitting or lying, some possibly sleeping, others perhaps chatting together… Another two appeared at the top of the stairs and came running down towards us, and one of them had no shoes on and he called out ‘Wait!’

So we waited. I took all the ones I found into the dormitory, and there, in Monkeyface’s bed, someone was asleep, a youngster, and I let him be. I didn’t care… The longshirts kept snivelling, and they crawled into the beds and one asked, ‘Is Sister Eulalia going to come and sing about angels?’ and I said, ‘No.’ And another asked, ‘And we don’t have to wash?’ and I said, ‘No.’ Then the one who’d asked about Sister Eulalia said, ‘Couldn’t you sing it instead, Ilya?’ and I said, ‘Get into bed!’ and he said, ‘Okay,’ and went straight to sleep. I was still on guard duty.

There was a pile of frankfurters on the dining-room table, so I had one more and went to stand guard in the kitchen. There was water sloshed about everywhere. I looked towards the washer drum and couldn’t believe that so much could have happened in one day.

Then I heard the choirboys. From the cellar they sounded just like when Sister Eulalia used to practise hymns with them.

So I went down to the cellar to take my turn at guard duty.

Standing at the bend in the passage I could see the flames of candles, and the little songsters had stopped singing. The cubicle where Šklíba and Martin had been locked up had had its bars forced outwards, and the choirboys had chucked out bundles of papers and made room… I saw they had brought the kneeler down from Sister Leontina’s office. They had also stolen her Christ on the Cross, and Sister Eulalia’s six little songsters were kneeling on the ground, not at all bothered by the slimy cellar water. Šklíba was standing and Martin too, and both were wearing the nuns’ quite badly torn and dirty gowns, which they had drawn tight at the waist with string somehow — of course, they were quite small… Šklíba was prancing around and waving his arms like he had seen Father Francis do, and Martin now handed him a fat book, and Šklíba said, ‘Let us pray.’ The heads of the ones who were kneeling dropped as they prayed… and then I heard a great roar: ‘Let me out!’

I moved away from the wall and saw Dýha leaning against the bars under the light bulb, which was swinging like mad, probably because he had been hopping all over the place. I went closer… and what did I see? Monkeyface was lying on some papers in front of Šklíba, wrapped in a sheet. They had put lots of paper under him, so he wasn’t lying in the cellar water. I went over to them.

Dýha saw me first. ‘Ilya,’ he said, ‘tell ’em to stop!’ Šklíba came stumbling towards me, tripping over his black gown, and raised his arms in a pious way. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we’ve washed him and got him ready. Now we have to bury him. We’ve said all the right prayers, but we can say ’em again: “Our Father”, “Hail Mary” and “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” and all that… that’s if you want us to.’

I wanted to say something to them, but I couldn’t make my mouth work, and I was shaking. I didn’t want to look at Monkeyface, but I did.

‘We searched everywhere for you, but we couldn’t find you,’ said Martin. ‘It was bloody dark upstairs.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But now the moon’s shining everywhere.’

Suddenly I went very cold, as if the chill of the cellar had gone straight to my bones. Monkeyface lay on the papers, through which the cellar water was starting to seep.

‘Come on,’ said Šklíba, and he took me inside the cubicle and past Monkeyface and past the kneeler, and there at the very back behind mountains of paper Martin bent down and lifted a half-rotten board from the floor, and underneath it was some rusty metal, a cover… Martin lifted it to reveal a drain, and from below came a droning noise, probably the wind.

I had stopped shaking, and I wasn’t crying.

‘Catacombs,’ said Martin.

‘Do you want to put him in yourself?’ Šklíba asked.

‘No.’

‘Do you want to see him one last time?’

‘No.’

‘We’re the Virgin’s choirboys. Do you want to join us?’ Martin asked me.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘You don’t have to sing.’

‘I don’t want to.’

So those six little boys picked up Monkeyface, carried him, sagging, in the sheet, and Šklíba made the sign of the Cross at the spot where his hidden head was dangling. Then they dropped him into the drain. There was no splash, so the loud droning noise must have been the wind.

Šklíba dropped the cover back and Martin replaced the board, and the little choirboys who had carried the sheet now joined forces to shove a heap of paper over the drain. I went up to Dýha.

‘This is stupid,’ he said. ‘He’s buried and any detectives are gonna find out sod all, and now we can’t hold a trial for ’em killing him in the washer drum.’

‘But it ain’t clear who killed him,’ Martin chimed in. He was standing behind me. Outside he would have looked ridiculous in his black smock. Anyone would have laughed at him. Not in the cellar though.

‘We’ll pray for him here and consecrate it,’ Martin went on. ‘Now we’ve made it a cemetery. The first saints and Christians also held requiems in the cemetery. Nobody wanted them. The nuns told us.’

‘He fell out of the window,’ I told them. ‘Karel saw it happen, and Páta.’

‘Some of us’ll stay up all night to pray,’ said Martin.

‘Till the daystar appears,’ Šklíba added. ‘Now we’ll help you,’ he told Dýha.

To the bars he tied a washing line nicked from the kitchen. The little choristers grabbed hold of it. Me and Martin tried to work the grille loose.

We were tugging at the bars and the plaster started coming away. The Virgin’s little songsters pulled on the line. Šklíba tried to prise off the grille from below with a plank. Dýha was also levering away with a plank. Just as I was about to say, ‘I’ll go and wake the Bandits,’ the choristers got a grip and Dýha got a grip and I clenched my teeth and got a grip, and Šklíba yelped and dropped his plank, the grille came loose and fell out of the wall. A shower of plaster landed on Dýha and clouds of dust on the rest of us, but we were all chuffed… and Dýha came out and said, ‘Now I’m gonna grab some of them frankfurters… if there’s any left!’

‘There is!’ I cried, and off we tramped through the cellar water, and the choirboys called out, ‘Wait for us!’ and pushed the kneeler and crucifix on top of the pile of paper… Then we set off along the passage and up the stairs, and when we came up from the cellar and snuffed out all the candles, we went outside and one of the little lads said, ‘Hey, it’s light!’

And so it was! The sky was blue, but full of light. We looked up at it and high above us shone one pinprick of light, and Šklíba said, ‘Lo, brethren, the daystar.’

But Dýha said, ‘That’s Sputnik, idiot!’

We stood outdoors and breathed the air, dusting ourselves off… and suddenly we heard, ‘Well, my lads, that’s what I like to see. Bright and early and already hard at it! Or are you exercising? That’s fabulous! We’re going to get on well together.’ Outside the Home from Home stood Mr Vyžlata, our caretaker and carer and commander, though we didn’t know that at the time. Behind him stood a boy pulling a cart, a kind of trolley thing, and when I glanced at him, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

5: I swear! Work began. You can’t do a runner in winter

The next day the first morning of our new life began, and Mr Vyžlata was everywhere.

And we set about clearing up.

And the Commander kept checking our home.

The youngsters even decided there had to be more than one of him, because Mr Vyžlata was in the dining room when we thought he was checking the first floor, then he showed up in the kitchen when we thought he was investigating the cellar, and when we sneaked off for a fag by the aeroplane picture on the third floor, suddenly he was there, as if he had been waiting for us among the piles of paper. He snatched Páta’s fag end from him and threw it on the floor, but didn’t squish it.

‘What do you want to be, lad?’ he asked.

Páta pulled a funny face and several of us sniggered, because whenever the nuns asked that question, everyone replied, ‘An orphan’, so they gave up asking.

‘Most of all I want to be a cowboy on a cowboy ranch, sir.’

‘No sirs now. Call me Commander. Understood?’

‘I’d like to be a cowboy, Commander.’

Along with the rest of us Commander Vyžlata watched the wisp of smoke rising from the fag end in the pile of paper, but he didn’t squish it, and he said, ‘Ha, ha! Have any of you ever seen a gippo cowboy? You’re a teeny bit of a gipsy, aren’t you, lad?’

Páta was pissed off, you could tell.

‘Attention!’ Commander Vyžlata bellowed, so loudly we all froze, not just Páta. ‘Just to clear up a few things here! You are the most neglected boys in the whole of Czechoslovakia. Understood? You’re the sons of syphilitics, alcoholics and murderers, whores and foreigners. On top of that you’ve been ruined by an obscurantist education. But that’s all going to change. Do you see that fire, lads?’ And you can bet we were wide-eyed, because a little flame had shot up from the smoke. ‘Do you suppose I’m afraid of this fire? Certainly not. I’ve come through worse fires. Have you read these documents?’ Commander Vyžlata kicked more stacks of paper into the bonfire. ‘’Course not. They’re written in languages dead to the future, and that’s why they must go. But then you and I will get this place cleaned up, won’t we?’ the Commander suddenly roared, making us jump, and tossed another fistful of papers onto the fire. The crackling flames snaffled them up… They began to nip at his fingers.

‘You boys, everybody else has thrown in the towel where you are concerned, but I picked the towel up! I used to be like you… abandoned, a hard nut, a wretched street kid, but I was found by soldiers from Stalin’s Flying Brigade, who offered me friendship and made me a son of the regiment — syn palka — and I was saved, and you too shall be saved… You there, don’t move until you’re told!’ and Dýha, who had meant to stamp out the fire, jumped back. The smoke was getting up my nose, so I let out an almighty sneeze.

‘Boys,’ shouted Commander Vyžlata, ‘this fire between us is going to carry on burning until you give me your oath… You’ll be given airguns, tracksuits, mess tins, compasses, provided you swear that we’ll be friends… But if you don’t, may we all burn to death!’

We stood there… Dýha, Páta and me… and there were others too, but it was hard to see, hard to see even the Commander, standing by the door, but the fire was between him and the door and it had begun to spread. Then I saw Commander Vyžlata’s face right in front of my own. He had leaned across the fire and he said, ‘Do you swear?’

‘Yes!’ I gasped, then I heard Dýha shout, ‘I swear!’ and Páta shrieked, ‘Yeah!’ and others called out ‘I swear! I swear!’ Then Commander Vyžlata’s voice broke in and said, ‘All right, lads, you can put it out.’

We jumped onto the papers, trampling them down, putting out the flames as best we could, then suddenly — hisssssss! — we were all splattered by a stream of something white. The whole of the third floor was full of smoke, and as we coughed our guts out and tried to flap the smoke away with our arms we saw Commander Vyžlata holding this small red drum thing, and out of it he was squirting a stream of white stuff to extinguish the spreading fire, and the Commander was laughing, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen the latest fire-fighting technology, lads, but that’s something else that’s going to change… run along and get outside.’

Half-choking, we staggered to our own floor and on down the stairs. Outside the Home from Home stood the longshirts, the choristers and the rest of the Bandits, goggle-eyed and staring at us. I was the last out, and I heard Bajza say, ‘Hell, you look like ghosts,’ and someone else said, ‘We thought you was dead!’

‘Yes,’ said Commander Vyžlata, who was suddenly standing there in the doorway. ‘They were dead, but they’ve given me their oath, so now they’re boys with a new life ahead of them. And the same goes for all of you.’

And so our work began. Before we could set about clearing dead languages from the upper floors, we had to line up and be counted, so that Commander Vyžlata knew how many of us there were. We didn’t mind.

Now we, the shortpants, had to catch all the stray, lost and hiding youngsters, and they were everywhere… Some were blubbering and calling out for the nuns, some had shat themselves and others were screaming with hunger.

We older ones got the kitchen stove going and washed the youngsters and ourselves, and Commander Vyžlata unlocked a cupboard with a key on a metal ring, and in it were heaped sackfuls of clothes donated by Czech children. So we chased all over the upper floors, catching the littlest boys and hauling them down to the kitchen… We dragged every weepy, shit-arsed, struggling longshirt over to the stove and washed their bottoms and faces, and then they got some clothes. Karel sliced some bread and Páta poured tea into mugs. ‘Well done, lads!’ Commander Vyžlata praised us, and perhaps because I was the smallest of the shortpants, and maybe also because I had the experience, I got the arse-washing job and I stank. We found a nest of three longshirts sleeping among piles of paper and shouted to wake them up, sending them down to get washed and eat, chasing them downstairs, where Commander Vyžlata was standing. ‘There we are, lads,’ he said. ‘I picked up the towel others had thrown in, and I was right!’ Then me and the older longshirts pottered about the first and second floors, picking up the papers and bits of books that had fallen or been thrown down from higher up and making them into little stacks. And we had a good view of Commander Vyžlata in the dining room with the new boy, and of what the new boy was up to. ‘He’s going all over Christ with a damp cloth,’ said Dýha, and Mikušinec said, ‘Ilya, the new boy looks like you!’ ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Have you got more brothers somewhere?’ Mikušinec asked. I shrugged to show I didn’t care, but there was a tingling in my shoulders. We looked at the new boy, who had hair like mine and a nose like mine and eyes like mine.

Many of us were still washing and counting the lines of longshirts, while others of us went off with Commander Vyžlata to another cupboard, which he opened with another key on the ring. Then he handed out scrubbing brushes and floor-cloths… We scrubbed and washed the floors upstairs and peeked into the dining room… We saw the new boy painting over the face of the Lord Jesus.

Then Commander Vyžlata heard our report that the longshirts were filling up the kitchen and eating, and that some had fallen asleep, sprawled on blankets beside the stove — that the kitchen was gradually becoming a longshirt camp… Then we heard an uproar, and the Commander ran to the dining room and some of us ran after him.

In the kitchen Šklíba and Martin were fighting with the new boy, kicking over his pots, which contained white paint. There wasn’t much left of the holy picture in the dining room: Christ and his Mother had almost been painted out… Commander Vyžlata grabbed Šklíba and Martin, each by an ear, and said, ‘What’s this then?’ and Šklíba said, ‘We want the sisters and Christ back!’ and Commander Vyžlata clapped one hand around his own ear in a funny way, and bent down over Šklíba and said, ‘What’s that I hear?’ and Šklíba stamped his foot and I could see he was about to burst into tears. Then Commander Vyžlata spoke severely, ‘There are boys here who look after their little comrades,’ and I almost yelped, because Commander Vyžlata suddenly leapt towards me and grabbed me by the shoulder and shouted, ‘See! This boy is almost the double of the lad I’ve brought you. This boy washes the little boys’ bottoms without complaining — and that’s something out of which friendship can be forged! But we also have here victims of the obscurantism of the old, dying world!’ Commander Vyžlata roared at Šklíba. ‘Listen lad, before you and I swear to be friends, I want you to understand one thing: there were no sisters here. There were never any of them nuns here! Right?’

‘There were!’ Šklíba shouted back.

‘You are a stupid, stubborn boy,’ said Commander Vyžlata. ‘Tell me again: were there nuns here?’

Šklíba shook his head.

‘Were their sisters here?’

‘Yes!’ Šklíba shouted.

‘But sisters are nuns, and no nuns were here. So they weren’t here and there’s an end of it. You’ll get the point one day, my lad,’ said Commander Vyžlata.

The first day of our new life ended with us sorting the longshirts into small and smaller. We assembled them on the first floor and Commander Vyžlata walked past their yawning ranks and pointed: you to the left, you to the right… We drove the ones assigned to us into the littlest ones’ dormitory, grinning at each other and winking, expecting tears, screams and shouts! But Commander Vyžlata locked himself in with the youngsters. He was only there briefly, and when he came out there was no uproar. They were quiet and asleep.

There wasn’t even time to register our surprise. Commander Vyžlata nodded to us and we went into the dining room and sat at our places, as if for lessons.

‘I know, lads,’ said Commander Vyžlata. ‘It’s evening and you’ve had a hard day of it. But, believe me, I came here convinced that I could turn this home full of ne’er-do-wells in the middle of nowhere into a first-rate unit. The nuns stuffed your heads full of nonsense. Have any of them ever had to get a hut full of Russian street urchins to sleep? No. But I have. As a son of the regiment I was forged by Stalin’s Flying Brigade. They sent me from the Centre to cleanse this place. We’re going to cleanse it together! We’ll sling out all those vile old papers full of nonsense! Together we shall cleanse it by fire, and that way we will forge a glorious friendship. And I, my lads, will prepare you for life in the new age. I, lads, have been seared by the fiercest fires of the twentieth century! Yes, I was forged on the anvils of the twentieth century! So now I’m prepared to nurture you for the new age. And in this new age I want you to become leaders and commanders. Understood? Together we shall lay the foundations. Agreed?’

We said nothing. He didn’t want us to answer. That was obvious.

‘Boys!’ Commander Vyžlata shouted. ‘Others threw in the towel, but I picked it up and, believe me, I take this challenge seriously. Listen closely!’ Commander Vyžlata stood up.

‘Many of you are orphans.’ He started walking about, waving his arms around as he spoke. ‘You’ve been neglected. You’re morally defective. You’re a bunch of sneaks and liars and petty thieves. You’re scumbags. Village kids of your age are already slogging away in the fields, and the only thing you know how to do is say your prayers.

‘I’m sure you’re thinking, “This is all bullshit, I’m gonna run away”… Because that’s all you’ve ever learned, running away… But you can’t run away now. You’d die of starvation and hypothermia. But by the spring, lads, I’ll have you forged… You’ve got just one hope, lads! That hope is work! And work is everything that I’m going to tell you to do! I’ve already ordered airguns and knapsacks and billycans and mess tins. Which of you wants to learn how to shoot and crawl and throw hand grenades at the enemy?’

We all shouted, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ and Commander Vyžlata nodded. Now the new boy, the one who looked quite like me, came up to him and the Commander smiled and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘This boy and I have travelled the world together,’ he said cheerily. ‘I met this boy in a faraway eastern land, where I snatched him from his dying family in the midst of combat.’ The Commander was smiling… and we were glad he’d stopped calling us names and being so cross. We were always calling each other names, but it was never for real, and sometimes the nuns used to call us ‘little demons’, ‘gallows-fodder’ or ‘scallywags’. And they’d call the youngsters ‘sweetheart’ or ‘angel’ or ‘poor wee thing’ or ‘frightened little bird’ and stuff like that… but that wasn’t name-calling either. And Commander Vyžlata told us how he had snatched this boy from a horribly dysfunctional family — a drunken father who was a waste of space and a mother dying from an infectious disease — so that he could forge him into a future commander. ‘Which is what lies ahead for you, too, my lads!’ And the Commander would have us know that the new boy had an important task… in place of the religious painting in the dining room he was going to do a portrait of Private Fedotkin from Stalin’s Flying Brigade! ‘You’ll be hearing all about Private Fedotkin and the son of the regiment. I can promise you that, lads,’ Commander Vyžlata bellowed, and some of us shouted ‘Yeah!’ and ‘Yes!’ because that was the kind of thing that made the Commander happy.

‘So I want to introduce this boy to you.’ Commander Vyžlata pointed to the new lad. ‘His name’s Margash!’ he said, smiling at us. So we laughed as well, and Bajza shouted ‘Goulash!’ and fell from his desk, laughing and kicking his legs in the air.

Commander Vyžlata raised his arms to command silence, but it didn’t come. Pebbles and pencil stumps and whatever else anyone could find in their pockets started flying through the air. We created mayhem, banging our fists on the desks and stamping our feet, and the Commander stood there with his arms flung wide, listening to the noise. And Commander Vyžlata reached into his pocket and pulled out a big black pistol: bang!… and what a bang it was! And the bullet buried itself in the dining-room ceiling above our heads, and when a strip of plaster peeled away and fell somewhere among us, then there was total silence. Commander Vyžlata put away his pistol and said, ‘Go to bed.’

We had stopped laughing. We were totally worn out. We tramped up to the second floor, to the shortpants’ dormitory.

We flopped onto the empty bunks wherever we could, and the ones left over crept in with someone else, it didn’t matter. Our heads were all drooping, but some of us were talking anyway.

‘What did he mean, saying we’re scumbags?’ wondered Mikušinec.

‘Nobody wants us,’ someone said.

‘Airguns could be fun,’ Mikušinec whispered. ‘It’s like being in the Legion!’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘let’s do a runner. Let’s go and join the Legion. How about it?’

‘Idiot,’ Dýha whispered. ‘You can’t do a runner in winter. He was right about that.’

‘You can, even in winter,’ someone said.

‘But not in Siřem,’ said Dýha. ‘Listen, let’s wait for them airguns. That could be just what we need. The altar boys don’t stand a chance, and if Vyžlata starts buggering us about we can cut and run and shoot our way to the Legion.’

‘And what did he mean about the sisters?’ asked Mikušinec.

‘You’ve just gotta act like they were never here, or he’ll do his nut,’ someone said.

‘But they were here!’

‘Forget it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Sod him,’ said Páta, and someone started sniggering into his pillow and said, ‘Ha, ha! A gippo cowboy! Ha, ha!’ and from somewhere in the dormitory came, ‘Yeah, that’s a good one, a gippo cowboy… I just had this vision of a gippo cowboy and I had to laugh.’ And Páta said, ‘You’re all stupid.’

Then I whispered to Karel, whose bunk was across the aisle. ‘Karel! I’d still rather go and join the Legion.’

‘It’s winter, Ilya. Go to sleep.’

6: All about Fedotkin. Hanka. Cleaning out. The new lad

In the morning we lit the stove and washed in basins, as we always did in winter, and someone said, ‘Do you reckon they’ve brought those airguns yet?’ and Páta roared, ‘Yippee!’ Then we heard Commander Vyžlata: ‘Weapons training will come later, lads.’ He led us out to the front of the Home from Home and got us limbering up in the crisp, cold air… He was wearing just a vest and shorts and set the pace, and after the tiniest longshirts had collapsed in the snow, he appointed me and Páta and the new boy Margash to exercise with the littlest ones and look after them, and when any of them flopped into the snow, we picked them up… The youngsters enjoyed falling in the snow when it was down to me or Páta or Margash to catch them, so I reckon that us three got the most exercise that morning. Then Margash and I suddenly made a grab for one longshirt who had fallen down and our foreheads crashed. We picked ourselves up and I watched him in slow motion, and it was like looking in a mirror, and I said, ‘Watch out!’ and he said ‘Okay!’ So he did speak Czech!

Work began only after we’d limbered up. We began clearing the Home from Home of its mountains of paper. Fortunately, we started at the top of the house, because if we’d begun with the cellar, Commander Vyžlata would have discovered the grave in the cellar floor. I knew that.

Teams of us took turns at carrying out the old paper and burning it at a spot we had cleared of snow, outside the front door. We took turns so all the lads had their fair share of time in the fresh air.

We liked having a bonfire. We turned the burning heaps of paper with poles.

We spent each day clearing bundles of paper out of the Home from Home, passing them in a long chain, and we also picked up the various documents that had landed here and there, blown about in the draught. Inside the Home from Home there was a draught all the time now; the wind whistled along all the corridors and through all the upper floors, making the doors bang. We also knocked the holy pictures off the walls and added them to the fire. The Commander didn’t want them in the corridors.

On the very first day, Commander Vyžlata informed us that we older ones didn’t have to sleep at midday, which we welcomed with a roar. The nuns used to make us. We went to the dining room and watched Margash sketching, then painting, a picture of Private Fedotkin on a white patch of wall where a holy picture had been.

The days of our new life dedicated to work — and later to studying as well — passed one by one, and the portrait of Private Fedotkin was very quickly coloured in on the wall, and Commander Vyžlata used tiny brushes to add his own touches to it.

We no longer talked among ourselves at night. Commander Vyžlata would lull us to sleep, so we didn’t waste our energy in the evenings, and got up in the morning well rested and eager for work and study.

Commander Vyžlata lulled us to sleep in the same way he had persuaded the waifs in the huts of Vorkuta to sleep at minus forty degrees. He told us about the son of the regiment.

He would walk up and down the dormitory and tell us the story of Private Fedotkin and an abandoned street kid, and I kept my eyes closed, holding on to the day’s images under my eyelids: burning paper and floating shreds of scorched parchment dragged back to earth with poles; assembly in the dining room before lessons and at mealtimes; teams of boys moving from floor to floor; and our dusty hands passing bundles of documents from one to another all the way to the bonfire.

Sometimes I thought about Monkeyface. I didn’t want to. It took the story told by Commander Vyžlata to overlay Monkeyface’s image in my mind. So I probably waited more expectantly than any of the others for the Commander to come.

The voice of the storyteller was interrupted by the breathing and snoring of the ones who fell asleep first.

The Commander told us about the son of the regiment, who had not only been abandoned, but was also beaten and driven out and jeered at by villagers, and by people in the towns. His parents — whores and foreigners — couldn’t give a shit about him. The boy trudged his way through the world until one day, having escaped from a fire, he saw a tank drive into the fire and on top of the tank stood Private Fedotkin of Stalin’s Flying Brigade. Private Fedotkin reached out for the boy and they forged a friendship, and together they crushed lots of Jerries to a pulp with their tank and generally made mincemeat of heaps of wicked people, and the boy became the son of the regiment and Private Fedotkin made him a boy-sized uniform. Every evening the story was the same, and the lonely boy at the start of the story endured endless wrongs, beatings, slights and jeering among stupid people. But then his life was transformed by Private Fedotkin.

They travelled the world together in triumph.

And how did it end? I really wanted to know what became of the son of the regiment, but I always fell asleep.

Commander Vyžlata told the story of Private Fedotkin in Czech and Russian, so we could talk about it among ourselves, and if anyone didn’t know some word, somebody else would tell him. It was easy. We came from all over the place.

We swapped parts of the Commander’s story among ourselves. Some had extra bits, because they’d been dreaming it, and others lost some words of the story in their sleep, so we all knew slightly different versions.

Mikušinec, say, fell asleep hearing about the tank driving into the fire… Others fell asleep earlier and others later. So it was ages before I pieced together the whole story of the son of the regiment… Dýha, for example, talked about Fedotkin being disgraced, and then he and Karel would always argue. Karel claimed Fedotkin was officially delegated to the hut at the Vorkuta camp!

‘Delegated, you stupid prat! That means he was promoted!’

‘Bollocks!’ Dýha shouted back. ‘If that’s so, why was Fedotkin brought before the criminal tribunal of Stalin’s Flying Brigade, eh?’

None of us ever heard the story to the end, because Commander Vyžlata didn’t have just a pistol in his armoury. He also had a voice that made you sleepy.

So the days passed, and one day a van came up from the village… and we were excited at the prospect of airguns. I hoped that Mrs Kropek would show up with Hanka, but it was Mr Holasa bringing salamis and smoked meats. He dropped off his load of crates and left. And another day another van came, and we gathered round in expectation… it was Mr Kropek with bread and jugs of milk and stock cubes, but he had Mrs Kropek with him as well, and I went backwards and forwards carrying the jugs of milk ever so carefully so as not to spill any. I spotted Hanka, too, but it was just as we were being given our assignments. We formed into cleaning details, details to watch over the youngsters and mopping details… There were no more classes with the nuns, no more praying or singing (and only the choirboys were sorry about that), and no more geography or bible stories or homeland study and we were glad, because we didn’t give a shit about learning by heart all the rivers and forests of some bloody homeland.

Every day our teams struggled with bundles of ancient documents and heavy old books, and the strongest among us would rip them from their bindings and we burnt everything, but there always seemed to be plenty more… So far we hadn’t cleared out a single floor. Great mounds of ash piled up around the spot where the fire blazed, but we couldn’t dig them into the ground because it was frozen solid.

So the days passed, one after another, each one much like the next, like pages torn out of the same book, round and round in a circle, days turning at their centre, which was always the evening, when we fell asleep to the story of Fedotkin.

During the day, thoughts of Monkeyface were driven from my mind by work. It was a good thing that I could look forward every day to the Commander’s story.

Me and Hanka did see each other, on the day the van came from the village, but they split us up straight away.

I was taking out a full ash pan from the kitchen stove and bumped into her in the doorway. Bleary-eyed from sleep and half-blinded by the ash that the wind kept blowing in my face, I put an arm around her, because I was falling over. She put an arm around me too. The smell of her hair was gorgeous. She hugged me to her. The weight of the ash pan nearly toppled us over. I accidentally placed a hand on one of her breasts. It was soft, firm and warm. Unfortunately, my other hand was holding the ash pan. I tried to tell her everything quickly. I was sure she was looking for Monkeyface. But her hair was in my mouth. We had our arms around each other, but only for a moment. I had to let the ash pan go, so I could put both arms around her. It clattered off down the cellar steps. We stood there in a cloud of ash and started coughing. Then it was over.

Some of the lads came running out of the kitchen. The noise had broken in on their morning ablutions. Billows of steam followed them out. They whooped and shouted. Dýha, Karel and the others. ‘Wow, look at that! Ilya’s groping Freckleface,’ shouted Mikušinec… And now they were right by us, and Dýha touched Hanka. Then they were all touching her. They shoved me away with their elbows, backs and bottoms and formed a huddle around Hanka. I couldn’t get through to her. For a moment I couldn’t move at all.

She tripped, she was on her knees. I caught only glimpses of her face between the boys. It was bright red now. In the steam they were all going bonkers, as if they were hidden in a cloud. Some longshirts also came out into the corridor, squeaking and shouting.

And suddenly there was the Commander. In an instant he had opened the front door and there he was. And did he lash out! The lads fell away from Hanka, fleeing from the Commander. Mrs Kropek also came indoors, and started screaming and shouting and raging. ‘Filthy beasts! Wretched little idiots! And you, you silly tart, stop gawping!’ That’s how she spoke to her own child, and she pushed Hanka outside. Suddenly they were all outside. Mrs Kropek stayed behind with me, leaning against the door and breathing so fast that I thought her heart was going to burst.

‘Don’t stare, you poor mite!’ said Mrs Kropek ever so softly. After all the shouting I quite liked her soft voice. She turned and went outside. So I went too.

I pottered up and down outside the Home from Home. Where had the Commander chased them all off to? I followed the wheel-tracks of the Kropeks’ truck around the corner.

And there I saw Hanka again. She was sitting huddled in a blanket and staring ahead. I tapped on the window. What did I want? I dunno. I tapped the glass again. I dunno what she was thinking. The Kropeks never came again. Later on they couldn’t.

And every day we stood by the bonfire and poked at the piles of pages and documents with our poles and rakes to make sure they were thoroughly burnt. And sometimes a flame shot up high and a wall of fire whooshed up and over and hung in the air, then slid hissing back to the ground. Some of us danced and shouted, especially when the Commander ordered us to burn the books the nuns used to teach us: The Catholic Book of Knowledge and My Jesus ABC… and other books. The lads hadn’t enjoyed lessons, but I made a grab for The Catholic Book of Knowledge. I had had to keep an eye on Monkeyface so often while the lads were in class, so now I could look through it, and I gawped at all those animals, whales and globes. I hid it under my pillow, though I ripped off the cover and tossed it on the fire. Later I put The Catholic Book of Knowledge under my tracksuit top… I spent the evenings poring over it and so protected myself from Monkeyface’s face, until the Commander came in to tell his story.

Every day, old records turned into ash above our heads, then fell back down into our hair, and every day charred bits of pages floated down all around us. That was us clearing out the Home from Home.

One day I was standing there with the other Bandits (no-one was allowed near the bonfire on his own) when I was gripped with anxiety. I suddenly knew that nobody wanted to run away to join the Legion any more, so I would have to go alone, make my own way in the world, because I couldn’t bear to stay in Siřem, because Monkeyface was there and because it had happened.

I tossed my pole away and left… The Bandits started shouting, but I went inside and I didn’t care where Commander Vyžlata was, because he could be anywhere. I passed by the kitchen and round the bend in the corridor and down the steps to the cellar. The water made my feet cold. It splashed. I made my way to the cubicle and heard low, mumbling voices.

Šklíba was kneeling over Monkeyface’s grave in a torn, dirty, black tunic and Martin was kneeling under the Cross in a crumpled, dirty, black tunic. Only two of the six little choirboys were kneeling there and they had just one tiny candle. Šklíba’s face twisted with anxiety when he heard me. I gave him a fright! But when he saw me, his face was calm again… I went to take a look at the solitary cell and was amazed to see it had been repaired. I sat down inside it on a blanket. In the silence the praying voices floated through all the cubicles towards me… but then I heard some quiet footsteps and before anyone spoke my short hair stood on end in horror. I could feel every single hair on my skull… I knew the choirboys couldn’t hear the footsteps. When they prayed, they mumbled. And Commander Vyžlata said, ‘What’s this then?’ After that all I could hear was him cuffing the boys and them yelling. I crept close to the cell wall. I could hear the boys sobbing, then Commander Vyžlata chased them out of the cellar and they screamed… but he soon drove them away.

Then I heard more quiet footsteps. He was going deep into the cellar. I found myself hoping he would fall — plop! — into some hole. There were supposed to be open drains back there, and huge rats. If you didn’t have a candle or a torch they could finish you off. Commander Vyžlata wasn’t afraid, but the Bandits wouldn’t have ventured that far. Then the steps came very close. I yelped and the steps came my way.

The new boy, Margash, was out of puff as he sat down. He looked at me and said, ‘I’m glad it’s you.’ Then he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been looking for you for ages. I didn’t know you were here.’

‘In the cellar?’

‘That you’re Czech and in Bohemia. It’s a good thing the Commander didn’t find you in the cellar. He hasn’t much time to worry about us right now.’ Margash tapped at the bars. ‘Me and the Commander mended this on the first night.’

He raised an arm and grabbed the bars. I remembered Dýha and how he had ranted through them. The grille glinted in the half-light. I was happy there were puddles of underground water all around. If anyone came, we’d hear them. We spoke in low voices.

‘I’ve been looking for you all this time,’ said Margash. ‘Everywhere.’

I was glad he had been looking for me, but it was a bit strange.

‘I wanted to talk to you, too,’ I told him. ‘We’re alike. We might come from the same country. Why do you hang around with the Commander?’

‘That’s just it,’ said Margash.

I thought about Margash’s dad.

‘Did he really snatch you… from those horrible people? Did he? Why do you travel together?’

I liked us sitting there, looking at one another as if we had known each other for ages.

‘That’s not how it was,’ said Margash. ‘My dad’s a wolf.’

‘What?’

‘Me and the Commander go everywhere together. And now we’re here. I’m glad you’re here too!’

‘Right,’ I said, already looking forward to showing him around all the hiding places in the Home from Home. I’d tell him everything there was. I’d always lived at the Home from Home.

‘Kill the Commander,’ said Margash

‘You what?’

‘You have to kill the Commander.’ I must have stared at him, because he frowned and asked, ‘Wasn’t your dad a wolf, then?’

It crossed my mind he might have got some Czech words mixed up, so I said, ‘I never knew him. I was very small.’

‘I’ve often dreamed about you,’ said Margash. ‘I’ve often dreamed of meeting a boy who would be like me. You’re that boy. Kill the Commander.’

I was lost for words. Margash pulled a long face. Now he was angry. It looked like he was cramming his eyes into slits. But he wasn’t a Chinky like some of the other boys. Now he looked more like some animal. I’d never heard of any wolves at Siřem, but there could have been some in Chapman Forest. I rolled my eyes a bit like Margash and thrust my chin down.

‘Right,’ he laughed, ‘you kept turning up in my dreams.’

‘What did you say about my dad?’ I asked him.

‘Was he a wolf? Because mine was. We might have the same dad, since you look like me.’

‘Is it possible to have dads that are… not people?’

‘Wolves we can.’

‘Where are you from?’ Again I remembered what Commander Vyžlata had said about Margash’s mum and dad, and I had to laugh.

‘I come from a wonderful country,’ he said. ‘No forests, grass everywhere, you can go wherever you like, on and on. Do you fancy coming home with me? I’ve got lots of brothers. Would you like to live with us?’

‘You bet!’

‘So kill him.’

‘You want me to kill the Commander? You really do?’

‘It’s nice where we live, honest,’ said Margash.

‘But the Commander’s really strong,’ I objected, ‘and he’s got a gun.’

‘So what?’

‘Why don’t you do it?’

‘I can’t,’ said Margash. ‘I dreamed that you would.’

‘Couldn’t someone else do it?’ I was thinking of Karel. Margash shook his head.

‘No. It wasn’t anyone else in my dream.’

‘I see.’

I remembered how Commander Vyžlata had cuffed the little choirboys. How he had sloshed quietly through the cellar water. And how he was in all places at all times.

‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I’ve never killed anyone before.’ As I said it, I suddenly felt sick. If Commander Vyžlata could find the choirboys, he might also find the grave. I got up and went straight to it, and Margash followed.

It would be nice to go around together.

In the cubicle there were papers tossed everywhere and the kneeler was in smithereens. Commander Vyžlata must have smashed it against the wall. I did everything in one quick movement, like when you whip off a plaster. I shifted the papers, lifted the half-rotten board and tossed it aside. I raised the cover and there was the drain, very noisy, down below, and the stench and the cold rose up at me.

Margash watched as I told him everything. I also said that if Monkeyface was still alive and got cured, there’d be three of us.

‘That’s not gonna happen,’ said Margash. ‘But our little brother ought to be buried in our wonderful country!’

‘Dead right!’ I said. I looked around that squalid cellar in the gloom, and I dearly wished that Monkeyface could be out of there.

‘We can do it, once my dream comes true. Shall we?’ asked Margash.

‘We’ll move him, won’t we?’

I was so glad to see Margash nodding. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking how awful it would be if Commander Vyžlata found Monkeyface.

‘Yep, we’ll move him together,’ said Margash. ‘But you’ll kill the Commander. If you don’t kill him, I’m going to run away.’

‘You can’t run away now! You’d freeze to death in the forest. Or starve. And there are wild animals.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Okay.’ I put the cover back and we left.

And the Home from Home was in uproar.

7: The Choirboys. New things. Knife, salt, matches. Team commander!

The kitchen was full of crying longshirts begging for bread and tea. Margash went into the command post, which Commander Vyžlata had created in Sister Leontina’s office.

Silva nudged me. He’d been chatting with the other longshirts.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘They’ve locked us in here.’

I said, ‘Job assignments!’ and Silva muttered, ‘Bollocks!’ But the other longshirts stood to attention, then Silva took his place in line as well… ‘Quiet!’ I shouted. ‘Form a queue for bread issue! Form a queue for tea issue!’

The boys I’d picked out hopped into position behind the bread counter and next to the huge copper full of tea, complete with ladle, and the youngsters started pushing and shoving, but when I bellowed at them, they formed queues, and the bread was unbuttered and the tea was cold, but that didn’t matter. I’d noticed long ago that when they were afraid or there was any kind of confusion, it was always best to shout at them. Then they were less afraid, and the one doing the shouting also became less afraid. I sat down on a bench.

*

After a moment the door opened and I stood to attention to give my report, but Commander Vyžlata ignored me and everyone else… The order came for us to go to bed immediately. The Commander disappeared behind Margash and into the command post. The work teams were dejected and frozen stiff, but they hauled themselves off upstairs to the second floor without any fuss or noise. Only Mikušinec and Karel came back to help me chase the longshirts to their dormitory and the youngsters were playing silly beggars.

I went on upstairs and said to Karel, ‘What was that about?’

Karel rolled his eyes and said, ‘Phew!’

And Mikušinec whispered to me, ‘Šklíba’s in the shit. They was arsing about with Christ in the cellar.’

In the dormitory they were all talking quietly, and Šklíba was sitting on his bed in the corner, and next to him Martin. They were wearing black tunics, but no-one made fun of them. The moon was so bright we could see each other and we spoke quietly, because we had a sense that Commander Vyžlata wasn’t going to be sending us off to sleep with a story today. I soon discovered that the Commander had blown his top because of the pious choirboys, and had burnt their stolen cellar Cross as a twentieth-century abomination, and made the two little choirboys trample on the Cross, and, to add insult to injury, the others had all laughed. But Šklíba insisted he hadn’t stamped on it, even though Commander Vyžlata had ordered him to, and then the Commander had pulled out his pistol. But Šklíba refused to stamp on it anyway, to everyone’s surprise. Now in the half-dark trickling in from the moonlight they were all debating the issue. What had actually happened?

‘What was it like, Šklíba?’ the boys asked. ‘Were you scared?’

‘I’d have been shitting bricks,’ said Bajza.

‘Don’t be daft, you’d have stamped on it,’ Chata said.

‘And you wouldn’t, you reckon?’ Bajza replied, and they started fighting and Chata was suffocating Bajza with a pillow, but only pretending. Šklíba said nothing, though we all kept asking him, and Martin said, ‘Shut up, the lot of you. He can’t hear you anyway.’

‘Aha,’ said someone else, ‘so he fired the gun right next to his ear, then the other ear?’ And they went on and on, deciding that Commander Vyžlata had crucifixes and nuns on the brain. He was a nutcase, really. And all that stuff about the twentieth century. We didn’t give a shit what century it was.

Then someone said, ‘Did you stamp on it, Martin?’ and Martin said, ‘Yeah.’

The lads carried on chatting, but not me. I was thinking about what Margash wanted me to do. I couldn’t let him run away. We’d get Monkeyface, then together we’d escape to Margash’s wonderful country. I tried to imagine Margash. If I had a dream about him, we might talk in it again. I dropped off to sleep, then woke, because someone was standing by Dýha’s bed.

I tried to blink my eyes open… It was Karel, Mikušinec, Chata and Dýha. I went over to them, barefoot. I could hear the breathing of the ones who were asleep, and someone in the corner was sort of squeaking, and the wind outside was going whoo-whoo, so the Bandits didn’t hear me until I was right up close. Dýha put a finger to his lips and pointed downwards, so I dropped to the floor. The boards under Dýha’s bed had been ripped out… They’d been putting little packets down there! Packets made out of old documents. I spotted the sharp blade of a kitchen knife, and there were more of the same. Mikušinec was just wrapping some candles.

Dýha pushed his lips towards my ear and whispered, ‘That thing with the airguns, that’s all crap. We don’t give a shit about him and we’re off to join the Legion. You coming?’

I felt like shouting out loud. I was suddenly so happy! But I just said, ‘Yep,’ very quietly.

Karel nodded. ‘No-one messes with the Bandits!’

I reached in my pocket and handed Dýha my box of matches. He nodded and said, ‘Fantastic!’ and Mikušinec said, ‘Good,’ and wrapped them in paper. They put the packets down the hole and replaced the floorboards.

I crept off to bed. I was so proud to know the Bandits’ secret. They had to tell me because I’d seen them. I was glad to be a Bandit.

I decided to tell Margash that he ought to join the Legion as well. We’d take Monkeyface with us and find some pretty spot on the way to bury him. I was really chuffed that Margash had said he had dreamed about me. I was so happy to have made an appearance in somebody’s dream. I couldn’t get back to sleep for ages, but I dropped off eventually.

Next morning we woke up like on any other day in our new life, but it was a completely different day, not just because of the evening bonfire and the fuss around Šklíba, but also because a car arrived bringing Commander Baudyš, so we didn’t work at clearing out the Home from Home.

At morning roll-call Commander Vyžlata briefly introduced us to Commander Baudyš.

He told us that Commander Baudyš had been appointed to us by the Centre. He also said that we were to obey Commander Baudyš implicitly. Fair enough. But who was actually giving the orders? Sometimes it looked as if Commander Baudyš gave orders to Commander Vyžlata, and sometimes the other way around. Not that it mattered.

We formed a chain and started unloading mess tins and billycans and tracksuits and boots and boxes of airguns and smaller boxes of airgun cartridges and gas masks and green knapsacks and other stuff we’d no idea existed, and nobody talked about the Legion any more.

We were over the moon at all these wonderful things and several times whooped with delight. Commander Vyžlata smiled at our glee and put everything under lock and key. Then they handed out booklets that smelt of clean, new paper, but the lads just sneered — they couldn’t stand it when the nuns used to try and teach them… My guess was that they’d soon have the booklets in tatters or lose them or not think twice about burning them, but I was thrilled by my first glimpse of Fundamentals of Close Combat and I looked forward to A Manual for Saboteurs. I also took a copy of The Motorized Rifleman’s Handbook and hid it under my pillow.

I no longer wanted to go back to Shadowland, and Hanka had stopped coming to the Home. And so whenever I was snuggled up in bed, worn out from the day’s work, and before Commander Vyžlata’s footsteps came down the corridor, I would immerse myself in The Catholic Book of Knowledge or the new booklets. The other lads had had their chance to study, but not me. I’d had to clean the shit from Monkeyface’s little arse and wipe the tears and spit and snot from his face! So the Bandits let me study now.

We knew we would see the things that had been locked up again some time. We would hold them and sniff at them, because lots of the things smelt different from anything we’d ever smelt before. These things were new, nobody had ever had them before us and they were for us.

Commander Baudyš had a whistle hanging from his neck. He wore a full tracksuit and he and Commander Vyžlata would call each other ‘old warhorse’. Then Commander Vyžlata, in shorts and a T-shirt, showed Commander Baudyš all the limbering-up exercises, and Commander Baudyš said, ‘This is going to be a super-dooper unit.’ I was in one row and Margash was in the row behind me, and we were just doing a knees-bend and I whispered to him, ‘The guy with the whistle, what about him?’ and Margash hissed back, ‘He wasn’t in the dream.’ Commander Baudyš was a huge man and must have been much, much stronger than Commander Vyžlata, so I was glad I didn’t have to kill him in Margash’s dream.

We didn’t go off to join the Legion. We were thrilled by the airguns and talked about when we’d be getting the tracksuits and knapsacks and billycans, and Mikušinec said, ‘With a billycan you can camp out in the woods.’ Then Páta laughed, saying, ‘You don’t need anything to camp out in the woods!’ and Dýha roared, ‘With your prick you can camp out in the woods!’ and they all laughed and laughed, and Chata said, ‘Knife, salt, matches…’ and then Bajza and Chata together started chanting, ‘Knife, salt, matches…’ Then Silva chimed in and some of the other little fuzzy-wuzzies, and they began pretending to attack Chata and Bajza, and they were all shouting, ‘Knife, salt, matches! Knife, salt, matches!’ and I found myself mouthing the words as well. Then Karel said, ‘Spring’s coming and you’re all thinking of getting away…’ We were standing in the snow, but there wasn’t a frost and Karel said, ‘“Knife, salt, matches” — that’s a gippo password… First time I escaped, I didn’t have a knife or salt or matches… and I stayed hidden in the cemetery, but if ever anyone came there in the night, man! — I was scared… Then me and Páta ran into each other. That’s how we met. He used to nick flowers from the graves to swap with the old ladies for an apple, and later we recognized the flowers — the old ladies would take ’em back. We got caught and they sent us to Siřem!’ And I asked Karel, ‘Can a boy have a wolf for a father?’ When I saw the way he stared at me, I knew at once it wasn’t possible in the twentieth century. Then there was a whistle blast, and commander Baudyš called, ‘Line up! Equipment issue!’

One day, soon after our training started, I was taking the ashes out and Margash came down the corridor towards me, and he pretended to bump into me and whispered, ‘Get it done soon!’

I gripped the ash pan and emptied out the ashes. They fluttered around my head in the morning air and landed in my hair. My fingertips tingled as I gripped the metal handle of the ash pan. I was glad Margash still wanted us to go with him to his country. But I had no idea how to go about making his dream come true.

The training days had begun and those of us who made up the combat unit came out of the Home from Home into the big wide world. We trained outdoors.

We ran across a field, hopping sometimes, because there was still snow here and there, but I kept being bumped into by flying beetles, then a bumble bee and a butterfly, and at first I tried to dodge them, then I broke away from the running line.

Commander Baudyš severely reprimanded me in front of the assembled unit, and the lads laughed at me.

After that I would run straight on, whatever came flying at me.

In the past, me and Monkeyface had been trapped indoors. Now we made up Fedotkin squads for offence, defence and sabotage. Under Commander Baudyš’s guidance we learned how to protect ourselves from the most terrible weapon of the twentieth century: the atom bomb. We would lie flat, pointing away from the epicentre of the explosion, and cover our heads with newspaper. Except we didn’t have any newspapers, so the documents from the upper floors served just as well.

During hand-to-hand combat I usually got beaten up, but I was absolutely the best at crawling, and Commander Baudyš took note of this.

I could creep up on an enemy patrol without a single twig cracking. I would think about the rat I turned into on the day they took the nuns away. I seized the enemy around the neck with my left hand and jerked his head back, while plunging my cold steel into his kidneys, then with an up-and-down flip I released my weapon from his body in such a way that the weight of the enemy falling could not damage my cold steel blade.

That’s how it was described in the Manual for Saboteurs.

One time, I slipped past Dýha, who was on patrol, crept round Páta and Mikušinec and landed a fatal blow on Chata, who was standing around aimlessly, and I won.

That day, Dýha sang mockingly, ‘No-one ever hears a sound when Prince Ratty comes around.’ But the name didn’t stick. Dýha and the others from his patrol were punished for being so useless. They had to clear a stretch of wood of every last fallen twig.

I was no longer the long-suffering little donkey the nuns used to call me. I really was more of a creeping, crawling rat. But the nuns didn’t know that. And I didn’t know anything about the nuns. None of us knew anything about them.

We all launched ourselves into the big outdoor world, which grew even bigger with our movements. I liked being in that world. I became a saboteur.

One part of the training of the Fedotkin squads was to spot and map all the bridges, big and small, in and around Siřem, as well as all the wayside shrines and triangulation points, and that’s what we did, trotting this way and that the length of Chapman Forest. I mapped the area in pencil on documents gathered from the Home from Home. From signs and signposts we read off the names of the hamlets and farmsteads that lay all over the forest and I entered them in my maps made from those documents: Siřem, Ctiradův Důl and Tomašín, Bataj, Skryje… I never got a single thing wrong and Commander Baudyš commended me.

I carried my bundle of maps under my tracksuit top, and I kept rehearsing the various names the outside world had and thinking about them… Dýha told us that the town called Louny was huge — even bigger than Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, which was the country we were in — and that there were thousands of streets and thousands of paths and thousands of cars in Louny, and that there were huge numbers of people everywhere. He’d passed through Louny when the cops brought him to Siřem.

I would pore over the maps I’d drawn on the old documents and sometimes I closed my eyes and I could see Louny with its jumble of cottages and ponds and footbridges and shrines. I saw thousands of Mr Cimburas carefully lifting their feet, and thousands of Mrs Kropeks scrubbing floors, and thousands of Commander Baudyšes saying ‘old warhorse!’ and I saw myself, too, running all over the town, a thousand Ilyas, and we ran up and down the backstreets and dodged the traffic and the dogs and read hundreds of different names on signs and signposts, then suddenly it was just me and Margash there, and that was the best. We strolled through the streets and took from the cottages any food or stuff that we felt like, and then I could see nothing. I was asleep.

During our training we did a lot of marching, crawling or rushing along the fringes of Chapman Forest and forging deep into it.

One time we spotted some smoke and reported it to Commander Baudyš. We had found the spot on Fell Crag where the altar boys were camped out, but Commander Baudyš wouldn’t let us attack, so we obeyed. What else could we do?

Poor lads, the altar boys, all ragged. They had to slog away in the field. They would have goggled at our weapons! An atom bomb would have killed them all! They didn’t know anything! Ha, ha! we laughed. I carefully marked on my maps the spot where we’d seen the smoke.

Margash didn’t gallivant around the fields of Siřem with us. He was Commander Vyžlata’s main assistant in raising and training the longshirts. The little choirboys were among the longshirts. They didn’t wear their black surplices, of course. Martin and Šklíba stayed inside the home to be the Commander’s aides. They both had to wear surplices. Commander Vyžlata meant to let them take their dirty surplices off when they came to their senses and recognized the truth about the nuns. They refused.

We were still cleaning the home out and burning bundles of paper. Part of our training was working in the village to ‘win the trust of the wary population’, as Commander Baudyš put it during the theory part of our training in the dining room, and that meant we would go out to do jobs.

During the theory part we read the booklets and revised from them. I took the cover off the booklet I was reading. I put it with The Catholic Book of Knowledge and my roll of maps and kept it under my tracksuit top.

One time Mr Kropáček needed us for a job in his barn. Páta kept saying dirty words, so we laughed a lot. Then Páta showed me how to wank, but I wasn’t interested, and then Páta said that babies are made by a bloke peeing inside a woman, and we both laughed even more. But I didn’t believe him. I thought it disgusting. I resolved never to do anything of the kind.

Mr Kropáček banged on the barn door and shouted, ‘Shut your filthy mouths!’ so we fell silent. It stopped raining. Mr Kropáček slung us out. Páta stole a cup with little apples painted on it and I took a cup with goslings painted on it. Unfortunately mine dropped out of my pocket in the yard and got broken. Mr Kropáček said, ‘You of all people!’ and he grabbed Páta and found the other cup. He whacked Páta across the face and said, ‘Ungrateful little shit!’ He didn’t hit me.

Mr Kropáček reported the theft to Commander Baudyš, who came to pick us up with the others, and he wanted the cup paid for, but Commander Baudyš bawled him out: ‘You must be joking! They work their hides off for you in exchange for dog food!’ Mr Kropáček said nothing. Commander Baudyš was good at that sort of thing. He always took the part of us boys from the Fedotkin squads.

Whenever we ran up against the altar boys we would have a slanging match. We would throw sticks, stones, anything at each other. The worst thing that happened was when Dýha and Chata nabbed one of them on his own and stabbed him through the hand.

That time, Commander Baudyš lined us up on the village green and lots of the villagers gathered round and the stabbed altar boy’s actual mother, Mrs Holý, gave Chata and Dýha a real good slapping, and in return Dýha kicked her in the ankle, and when the people saw that, they really started screaming at us, but Commander Baudyš restored order and promised to put things right.

He made Dýha and Chata step forward and so all the villagers could hear it said that they’d be going to jail, without further ado! And the lads had to say sorry to Mrs Holý, but not to the altar boy — he’d been taken off somewhere by his dad to be stitched up. But Commander Baudyš had only been pretending to bawl out Dýha and Chata.

Outside the front of the Home from Home he had us fall in again, and when he liked our lines he shouted, ‘Karel!’ then he made Karel an orderly. Then Commander Baudyš shouted ‘Dýha, Chata, Ilya!’ He appointed Dýha commander of the Fedotkin attack squads and Chata commander of the Fedotkin defence squads, and he made me commander of the Fedotkin sabotage squad! Margash heard it, because he was there with Commander Vyžlata and all the longshirts.

That was a ceremonial line-up.

Afterwards, they all surrounded us and congratulated us and Margash congratulated me as well, and he winked at me and shouted cheerily, ‘It’ll be a doddle now!’ and I was the only one who knew what he meant.

We stood around in little huddles and were happy, because after the ceremony a special dinner had been announced. Our little group of saboteurs was joined by Commander Vyžlata. He was tottering a bit. He handed a bottle of booze to Commander Baudyš, then said to me, ‘Well, my lad, how about I reassign you to the command post? You and Margash would have uniforms and you’d be a special unit. Guards!’

The boys were silent and so was I.

‘Though in uniform or stark naked, few could tell you two apart, could they?’ said Commander Vyžlata.

Commander Baudyš clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Now, now, me old warhorse!’ he said. ‘You know what it takes to train up a saboteur and this one here’s a natural. Off you go!’ Commander Baudyš gave me a shove and our group broke up and mixed in with the other boys, and I fell in behind Orderly Karel, who was the tallest, and I had the Bandits around me.

In the dining room the tables were laid for dinner: huge quantities of frankfurters and bread and gherkins and jam for the longshirts, and not even the longshirts had to go straight to bed.

Commander Vyžlata started the dinner by getting up and saying, ‘You can do all the fighting and bruising you want, my lads, but that ain’t nothing compared to what the son of the regiment lived through.’ Then Commander Vyžlata mopped his face clean of the tears that had gushed from his eyes and, before our hungry gathering, he spoke about Private Fedotkin, saying that not even in forty degrees of frost in the huts of the Vorkuta camp had he abandoned the son of the regiment, nor had the son of the regiment abandoned him. Not once!

Then Commander Vyžlata placed his face in his hands and peeked at us through his hands to check whether we were listening closely to his story… The Commander’s tears dripped between the fingers of his clasped hands, then with his head bowed he kept on talking about Fedotkin and the son of the regiment, and me and the others couldn’t help wondering how the story of Fedotkin and the son of the regiment ended. Would we ever know? But we were hungry and Commander Vyžlata was sobbing so much that between sobs you could hardly make out a word of the story.

Commander Baudyš slapped Commander Vyžlata on the back and said again, ‘Now, now, me old warhorse!’ Then Bajza punched me, saying, ‘Me old warhorse!’ so I punched him back. Commander Vyžlata fell silent and picked up a paintbrush. He turned to our squads as we stood to attention, then sketched in a new face next to Private Fedotkin’s in the portrait. He glanced back over his shoulder and shouted, ‘For your exemplary actions, I shall now paint a memorial to friendship, and to go with Private Fedotkin I shall paint in one of you, a Czech boy! At ease!’

We pounced on the food. Commander Vyžlata worked on painting the boy until the very end of the celebration, which came soon enough. In the dormitory I felt sick because I’d eaten lots and lots of jam, which I’d taken off the longshirts. I thought about being made squad leader. I couldn’t get to sleep for sheer joy. But then I did drop off and slept until morning.

8: Work. Još. In the workshop

The days passed. Every morning we left the Home from Home and trudged off to the village, rather like when we used to go to church with the nuns.

Now it was Commander Baudyš leading us, assigning us jobs to do.

In the morning we walked through mist, then later the sun came out. During the day there was lots of light everywhere. The wind swept the snow, whined and skittered across it. The edges of the frozen snow crumbled away. The wind wooshed at the last snow frozen in tufts of grass. There was no snow left on the rooftops. There was snow left only here and there.

It was not a good time for burning papers! It was not a good time for training in the forest! It was wet everywhere.

The sleet froze us to the bone, even down by the footbridge. There was deep water under the bridge and some huge rocks.

‘Right, lads, on this bank we’re going to learn how to build levees and defensive ramparts,’ said Commander Baudyš, pointing. ‘Stay clear of the other bank,’ he ordered.

All among the reeds on the bank opposite was the village rubbish dump. ‘You get all sorts of stuff in rubbish dumps,’ said Páta. ‘But not in this one.’

In the frozen reeds there was a rotten door, a tyre, some rusting oil drums and scrap iron. There was lots of iron, its black outlines washed by the black water and overgrown by reeds. Páta said that where there were reeds there was mud. And leeches. We won’t be going there, we told ourselves.

The longshirts stayed at the home. Studying and working. Šklíba and Martin were aides to the Commander. Margash too. Ah well.

My world in the village was vast. It had barns where we stored the tiles when Mr Moravčík stripped the roof off the cowshed, and granaries where we piled sacks, and yards that we cleared of dung and chicken droppings, and coal holes that we fetched coal from in scuttles, and sheds where we took bundles of wood that scratched our hands.

In my world there were cellars and stables and sheds full of animals, and there were pigs that would eat anything and nanny goats and billy goats that leapt up onto their shed roof after bits of green in the spring, and a huge bull and cows that kept curling their lips, and some of the animals were nasty, clanking their chains in the dark of their houses, because we didn’t smell of the village, but of the Home from Home.

For our benefit Commander Baudyš set up jobs by the stream and in the workshop.

At the stream we worked with stones. The twisted ironwork in the rubbish dump, over which the black water flowed, looked like the skeletons of ghostly animals from the dawn of time, as pictured in The Catholic Book of Knowledge. I didn’t tell the lads that.

There was a footbridge over the stream and under the bridge the water was deep. We picked rocks out of the stream, passed them to one another and built them into levees and defensive ramparts. That was one shift. The second shift was the reverse: we formed a chain and passed the rocks to one another back into the water. The rocks of the defensive rampart dried in the sun and wind. Until they dried out completely we did physical exercises.

Sometimes Commander Baudyš left us alone by the stream. He would go into the village ‘to do some requisitioning’, as he put it.

One day, just as he’d left us, along comes Još.

I was passing rocks and suddenly, from behind me, I hear Chata saying something in gippo to Još, an old gippo who had a cottage on the other side of the village, where more gippos lived. Chata and Bajza, and sometimes Silva too, would go there whenever they could… Now we all gathered round Još, who was carrying a sack… It was bulging and moving and Još hit it with his stick. I thought it might be a rat, but it was a weasel. Još told us this was what he did. They’d send for him from the village whenever weasels or martens were killing hens and chickens, and then, with their snouts soaked in blood, they’d eat all the eggs too. Još would lay traps for the weasels and sometimes even caught one… only sometimes! Usually not even the village dogs can catch a weasel! A weasel’s fast! It fights like mad to stay alive! Often Još would be given a chicken, even if it was torn ragged and practically dead, and he could always get himself eggs — and that’s not all! When he said that, we all laughed. Then Još shoved the sack with the weasel in it in the deep water under the bridge and held the sack down with his stick by the rocks, and the weasel was completely under water and thrashing about like mad. The sack bulged out in every direction and Još held his stick ever so tight in both hands. The weasel fought long and silently and furiously, then died. Još took it out of the sack. Its paws were sticking out sideways.

Chata and Bajza went to see Još at home and we had to work extra to make up for them, because Commander Baudyš knew how much time we needed to put the rocks from the defensive rampart back into the stream, and if we frittered away the time when we were alone, then we’d really find out what having a tough time meant! And we didn’t want that.

During the damp and rainy days of the thaw Commander Baudyš found a new subject to add to our education: woodwork and metalwork.

In the early days of our training, Commander Baudyš slept upstairs in the nuns’ dormitory, close to Commander Vyžlata and Margash’s command post. Later, though, Commander Baudyš arranged things to suit himself, as he put it. He moved into the kitchen.

He had a bench and saws brought in from a van — tiny hacksaws and fret-saws, and a big saw for cutting beams — and he knocked up some shelves and filled them with little boxes of screws, large and small, wire netting and nails. And the fact of him showing us these things, that was part of our training. And because the ground around the piles of ashes left over from the burnt documents was soft now, some of us dug ash pits, while others, under Commander Baudyš’s guidance, made wire-netting fronts for rabbit hutches or built shelves for jars of gherkins, tomatoes, sweet corn… whatever they wanted in the village! And Commander Baudyš also repaired locks and alarm clocks and pump motors, and could even mend snapped and rusted threshers.

After we’d done a repair job and returned it, Commander Baudyš received food from the villagers, and we all got to eat it, although any bottles of booze were for him and Commander Vyžlata.

We filled the breaks between jobs with lessons. What sometimes happened was that Commander Baudyš would call me and I’d take the bundle of papers out from under my tracksuit top and the boys gathered round and we revised the names of the hamlets and the positions of streams and triangulation points and committed them to memory. Commander Baudyš commended me. He was of the view that I should have a special leather case for my papers to wear at the waist, but that never happened.

It was soon certain that the lads would still be committing the world drawn on my maps to memory when the thaw came. Especially during the time of the thaw I worked busily at my maps. Sometimes I drew the world from reports by this boy or that. I found an old pillowcase. Then I carried my maps in it under my tracksuit top. At night I kept them under my head.

We worked and we learned things from the booklets and from Commander Baudyš’s explanations. In addition to jobs to be done in the village we also worked on installations. That was one branch of workshop practice.

Outdoors it kept raining, and we couldn’t practise crawling all day and every day in the soft mud with airguns and gas masks, though we’d have to in a real combat situation! So we would sit around the stove and watch Commander Baudyš’s hands cleaning a watch mechanism or dismantling a gearbox or applying a soapstone coating to a piston with a fine cloth. In the kitchen-workshop Commander Baudyš never shouted; sometimes he even laughed. We never created mayhem. You couldn’t with Commander Baudyš, but some of us did talk to him. And one evening, Páta coolly asked, ‘Commander, why’s the boy painted next to Fedotkin a Czech?’

And Commander Baudyš looked at Páta, who was both slitty-eyed and a darkie, and he said, ‘Because we happen to be in Czecho. Don’t you worry about it. But in the starvation huts of Vorkuta… that, my lads, was international, there you had every type of mug, like here.’

But Páta stamped his foot and said, ‘Even so!’

And Dýha whooped, ‘Ha, ha! The gippo cowboy!’

‘Yob!’ said Páta, and Dýha was about to lash out when Páta tossed a cloud of sawdust in his face. Without looking up from the huge bowsaw he was oiling, Commander Baudyš said, ‘Orderly, discipline the men!’ and Karel struck Páta in the midriff and stuck his chin out at Dýha, and the lads sat down.

When it rained we worked. We also learned things from Fundamentals of Close Combat, acting out the positions in the book’s drawings. We were soon at the last lesson. We trained by the book both outside and in the kitchen-workshop, where it was warm because of the stove.

I did some thinking about whether I’d rather go with Margash to join the Legion, or to his country.

In Margash’s country there would be no village houses in the sleet; no Chapman Forest full of animals just waiting to rip a boy limb from limb. It was a bright place, with grass everywhere. As I worked away at my the task I had been set I thought up ways to fool about in the grass: me, Margash and Margash’s brothers. I enjoyed those workshop lessons held in the kitchen when it was raining.

One evening we learned the truth about Fedotkin. Commander Baudyš told us the story of the end of Fedotkin.

We were making a set of rabbit hutches and Commander Baudyš said, ‘That’s right, keep learning, lads. You know what they say: golden Czech hands. How could I have made it all the way here from that bloody camp at Vorkuta without ’em? That time we were freezing and helpless in the huts of the penal colony at the mercy of the cruel Soviet Russians. Yes lads, and if you think a Russian like that would sweep the flue of a smoking stove, bollocks! He’d just kick it. And when it was minus forty, who do you suppose sealed around the flues in the huts of Vorkuta to keep out the cold, eh? Aye, that was some cold, let me tell you, that time we set out from Buzuluk, meaning our entire Czechoslovak Army Corps… If you didn’t wrap your foot-rags properly, you died in the ice and frost. And if a transporter got stuck, who was on hand? Or if a belt snapped and a half-track gave up the ghost, who did they call for, eh? “Baudyš, fall in!” So you see, you lot, learn how to handle a hammer, learn how to work. It’ll come in handy one day, believe me!’

We did believe Commander Baudyš, and he was highly pleased and satisfied with us in our workshop lessons.

On many an evening he told us stories until we were quite worn out and until work ended, and in the dormitory his voice was replaced by the voice of Commander Vyžlata, telling the story of Fedotkin and the Czech boy.

That was how our commanders saw to our education.

Commander Baudyš told us how they, some Czech boys, had been called up by the homeland and how they had gone with the Czechoslovak Army Corps all the way from Buzuluk to Prague. In concert with the security services of the Soviets, our homeland had tracked them down even in the death huts of Soviet penal colonies. And Commander Baudyš talked himself hoarse about how the Czechoslovak Army Corps marched in concert with the Red Army from the icy wastes of freezing Buzuluk to the smiling face of Prague in May, and how they had cut down whole hordes of Germans on the way and saved hosts of women and children and defended the Fatherland… ‘And now, Commander Vyžlata and I have been called up as educators,’ he said, squinting into the fire.

‘But then you know, boys, back at the Centre they had thrown in the towel as far as you were concerned. No-one wanted to come here. So for your benefit they enlisted us. The Party enlisted us — the obvious thing to do. And we’ll make men of you yet. And when all’s said and done, lads, I don’t think you’ve done badly, getting us. Who better to nurture you, human spawn, than us old warhorses, eh? When the end of the world comes nigh once more, you’ll be properly prepared. You know, Commander Vyžlata actually raised me, too,’ said Commander Baudyš. ‘We met each other in the hut for street kids at the Vorkuta camp up there in the Arctic. And Commander Vyžlata was saved, as a Czech boy in a burning village, by Stalin’s Flying Brigade, as no doubt you know. The Flying Brigade! Now that, my lads, was a unit of Guards. They gave him an education, believe me. Then, as a foreigner, they shoved him in the camp, the way they used to in the Soviet Union. How I got there, I’ve no idea! I was little! Then we got hardened in combat, that we did. And now the ones who survived all that have been chosen to teach others. I reckon that’s quite right and proper, I do. What do you think? Obviously, not all of us old warhorses who made it back to Prague could make a go of it as teachers. I mean, this war business. Some might’ve survived it — but without legs. Had ’em whipped off by a grenade — in seconds flat, right out of the blue. A bloke like that with no legs could hardly lead you lot through life, now could he?’ said Commander Baudyš, and because he was checking the work we’d duly handed in and was satisfied with it, he was smiling.

And if one of us boys hit himself with a hammer and threw a tantrum or if someone got the shakes because one of his fingers had got frozen or he’d spiked himself on some wires in the mains supply, Commander Baudyš would cool him down — quick as a flash! — and say: ‘Compared to the Soviet gulag, you’re living in clover here in Siřem, believe me…’ and Commander Baudyš used to smile fit to make his whiskers crackle.

And that evening we finally learned what had really happened to Fedotkin. That evening the Commander talked himself hoarse, and when his voice dropped to a low wheezing, someone piped up in a thin little voice: ‘And Fedotkin? Did you know Fedotkin?’

‘Oh yes, boys, I knew him.’ Commander Baudyš fell silent, then he screwed up his eyes even more, because he was thinking so hard.

‘And what was Fedotkin doing in Vorkuta?’ the same little voice squeaked. I knew whose it was. It was Dýha. He was acting up and squeaking so that no-one would recognize him.

‘Fedotkin was waiting for his court martial,’ said Commander Baudyš, and we all — me and the other boys — pricked up our ears.

‘But how could a war hero like Fedotkin get locked up?’ someone asked.

‘I never tried to find out,’ said Commander Baudyš. ‘You know, I was just a street kid, like you lot… and in those terrible camps at Vorkuta. But there you have it — see where I am now!’

‘Commander,’ Dýha began in his normal voice, ‘did you know Fedotkin well?’

‘Oh, yes.’

And we were all quiet. Anyone with a hammer stopped hammering, and the boys who were stoking the stove froze where they knelt. That’s how keen we were to know, all of us who weren’t outside raking ashes, because it happened not to be raining, and finally someone blurted out: ‘So what did happen?’

‘To Fedotkin you mean, boys? They shot him.’

And Dýha said in his normal voice, ‘But why?’

‘What’s “why” got to do with it?’ asked Commander Baudyš. ‘That’s irrelevant. And anyway, getting shot — that ain’t too bad.’

We were all still. We had just learned how Fedotkin met his end.

9: And Fedotkin’s boy? Liquidation. Šklíba

The truth is, sometimes we’d be waiting for Commander Vyžlata to tell us his Fedotkin story in the dormitory in the dark and he didn’t turn up. That did actually happen!

But that day we didn’t care that he hadn’t come yet. We knew the truth about how Fedotkin had died. We’d heard it in the kitchen-workshop, and even those who’d been outside digging pits got to hear from the others about Fedotkin being shot.

And the boy? What about Fedotkin’s boy? What became of him? Commander Vyžlata was not there to ask.

The truth is that when Commander Vyžlata came in, making the wooden dormitory floor echo with his footfalls, and when he told the story of Fedotkin and the son of the regiment, we did listen — we had to — but we slipped into sleep with our own thoughts in our heads and with endless images from all our training and working. The thing was that many of us now thought much the same about Fedotkin’s story as Dýha, who had said, ‘Sod it. He snuffed it anyway.’

We were all boys from defence, attack and sabotage squads, and Fedotkin’s death by firing squad affected us.

I don’t think we were quite so keen to hear the Commander’s fairy story any more!

We had admired the undaunted Fedotkin and wanted to be just as courageous and ready to fight as his boy.

And Fedotkin’s execution ordered by a court martial affected us, I can tell you!

We didn’t want to hear about it!

After the news of Fedotkin’s death many of us started talking again about escaping to join the Foreign Legion. I was one of the first.

Soon it was hardly winter at all. Then Šklíba disappeared.

Commander Vyžlata didn’t like him. Neither Šklíba nor Martin took part in training exercises, and they didn’t go to work either, being the Commander’s aides.

But Šklíba did a bunk. He shouldn’t have. After that things got a whole lot worse.

The alarm went off. First we gathered round to study the maps that I pulled from under my tracksuit top. I set out the parameters of the search. Commander Baudyš listened closely and sometimes gave a curt nod.

Then we quickly availed ourselves of the requisite arms and equipment, and Commander Baudyš read us our orders.

After Commander Baudyš had given us our orders, our squads began to fear the worst. I feared it too.

But it wasn’t that Commander Baudyš didn’t like Šklíba. He didn’t actually know him! He was just doing what Commander Vyžlata wanted. That was the only reason why he commanded us to ‘liquidate Šklíba with cold steel’. He didn’t really mean it.

After the order had been given, our squads spread out in assault formation.

Šklíba was soon spotted. He hadn’t even got as far as Chapman Forest, where he could have disappeared. But he hadn’t made it. He was stumbling. Going slow. He couldn’t go very fast in the muddy field full of slush. He didn’t even try to avoid the wet stones. All shoes will slip on those.

‘You, you and you! You will make the interception!’ Commander Baudyš pointed at Mikušinec, Chata and me, and again he gave the order to carry out liquidation by cold steel without waiting for any signal. We set down our knapsacks and airguns and ran ahead.

Chata pretended to trip and twist his ankle painfully.

We ran on. As saboteurs we knew which way the wind was blowing, and that Šklíba could hear us and Commander Baudyš couldn’t. Cautiously we called out to Šklíba. He didn’t hear.

The shots from the Commander’s gun close to his ears had burst his eardrums and he still had some dried blood in his ears even now. I saw it as I knocked him to the ground and pretended to pull my cold steel out of him. He gurgled, but he didn’t spray snot all around him like Monkeyface, but dirty tears, yeah, he had those.

We raised him to his feet and took him to Commander Baudyš. We hadn’t followed orders, but Commander Baudyš didn’t say anything.

At the Home from Home Šklíba went straight into the solitary cell in the cellar, which they say is commonly the case with people who do a bunk at other Homes from Home for ne’er-do-wells like us.

Because we’d tracked down Šklíba so quickly, there was plenty of time left for jobs in the village.

*

Me and Páta were assigned to Mr Cimbura, who sometimes called me ‘sonny’, sometimes ‘Avar’ and sometimes ‘goggle-eyed sprog’, but I didn’t care. If he called me ‘shitbag’ I only pretended not to care. I thought Mr Cimbura didn’t remember who I was. I was wrong about that.

Even with me joining them, Chata was still the smallest Bandit. If anybody shouted or swore at him, he hated it.

Mr Cimbura’s house was just beyond the village. By the cemetery. I didn’t know if Sister Alberta sometimes lived here with him as man and wife. I wasn’t bothered.

We wondered: ‘Does the old boy keep gherkins in his cellar?’ ‘No, sweetcorn!’ ‘Could he have salamis?’

And we went to his cellar window and gawped inside: ‘What’s he got down there?’ There were girls inside!

It was gloomy in the cellar and there were some girls there. All we could see of Mr Cimbura were his feet. He was sitting on something. The sun was blazing down on us, but the girls in the cellar were all wrapped up. They were wearing tracksuits or skirts and they had headscarves on, so I couldn’t tell if Hanka was there. How was I supposed to recognize her in the gloom? Now the girls were singing, so we listened to the song. It went something like this:

We’re the girls of the village

and we’re bringing you some flowers,

forget-me-nots

and everlastings

from that sweetheart of yours!

And then one girl started dancing in the middle of the others. It wasn’t Hanka. And they had a portrait of Czechia in a big golden frame. They were taking the flowers to her. Bunches of flowers lay all around the painting. It looked as if they had painted over some Virgin Mary from the church and turned her into Czechia. The girls weren’t topless, which made sense as it was so cold. Pity, I thought to myself, and I reckon Páta thought so too. Mr Cimbura was sitting down and his knees were shaking, though I couldn’t tell if it was because of the song or old age. I looked at him and thought, ‘It must be ages since I lived in the manor house. In those days Mr Cimbura’s legs just wobbled a bit. I don’t know how long ago that was.’

Then a different girl started dancing in the middle of the crowd in the cellar, wrapped up warm in her headscarf and fully dressed all over, no doubt because it was so awfully cold in the cellar.

The other girls were clapping. I could see pickaxes and shovels leaning against the wall and a pile of freshly dug soil. The girls were working in the cellar. And then someone suddenly gave me a shove. Páta was shoved too, making him yelp. Some big girls stood over us, swearing and chasing us away from the cellar window. There were two of them and they were a good match for us. They must have been in the cellar. They wore caps and scarves over their long hair, and aprons over their tracksuits and they were in wellies. I badly wanted to see what they were up to in the cellar and what they were singing, but I couldn’t. The big girls were pushing at us and trying to chase us away from the window. I was glad nobody could see. If Dýha and Chata and Karel and the rest had seen those unarmed girls shoving me across that muddy yard, it would have been so, so embarrassing — a fate worse than death!

So we waited for Mr Cimbura by the fence. We fooled about, climbing on the fence and joking that it was nothing really, being chased by big girls, though actually we did mind. It was afternoon, the feeble sun had gone down. Páta pointed and said, ‘Hey, Ilya. Those things I thought were thistles or something, they’re crosses.’ The sky was full of dark clouds and the snow that still lay here and there reflected no light, so the crosses in the cemetery on the other side of the fence weren’t very clear.

Then we heard: ‘That’s right, young men, I’ve a fine view, no doubt about it. If you get up on your tiptoes, you can even see the tomb!’ Mr Cimbura had toddled out to find us and was leaning on the fence. ‘I often stand here doing nothing, keeping a lookout,’ he said. ‘But you quit snooping and get down to work. Go on, hop it!’

So we didn’t even check in and set about our jobs straight away, and that day it looked as if things were going to be just like old times. But I was wrong.

First Páta spilt the grain for the chickens and Mr Cimbura gave him one hell of a whack across the face and yelled, ‘You little brown shit! Who do you take me for? Some Cimbura Rockefeller, you brainless brat!’ Then Mr Cimbura settled down in his chair and told us to light a fire with some green pine branches, which we broke down into small bits, and anyone who does that usually gets splinters all over their hands, but never mind that, and Mr Cimbura was drinking water from a big ladle, and he said to Páta, ‘I know I can be a bit harsh sometimes. The hens would’ve pecked it all up, but you have to learn, even if it’s the hard way, my lad… Just take it easy, no need to rush things… slurp-slurp!… and what’s your dad do, by the way?’

And Páta said, ‘My old man’s a pilot.’

‘Don’t be stupid, lad,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘No pilot would leave you in a rogues’ orphanage. No, not a pilot… slurp-slurp!… I might even adopt you, but I know shit all about what you really are. You could have some bastard genes or something…’ Then Páta suddenly yelped as if he’d pricked himself on the twigs, and he turned and was all white in the face (though he really is a bit on the sunburnt side) and he grabbed the ladle from Mr Cimbura and began laying into him with it, and Mr Cimbura tried to duck, but he couldn’t get up on his feet, because Páta wouldn’t let him use his arms to lever himself up. And Páta delved into the pile of greenwood by the stove with both hands and lashed at Mr Cimbura with some branches and bloody scratch marks zigzagged all over Mr Cimbura’s old face, and Páta danced round and round him and kept on hitting him, and I said, ‘Páta! Knock it off!’ but Páta had gone crazy.

Mr Cimbura fell off his chair and I felled Páta from behind with a textbook move, and because he fought back I locked him in the best room. You could hear him making matchwood of the best room. But he couldn’t get out.

Then I wiped Mr Cimbura’s face, and it was like washing the shit off someone’s old arse, but I washed the mess of blood and phlegm off his face and went down to the cellar.

There was no whiff of girls in it, just a smell of cellar and cold. If Hanka had been dancing there, I think I’d have recognized her smell.

It was cold down there. In the cellar wall there was a hole, a tunnel. Because I felt a gust of cold from the tunnel that cut right through to my bones, I realized that it led off to somewhere under the cemetery.

Mr Cimbura had just one shelf in his cellar. No decent stash! There were a few eggs, so I cracked one top and bottom and sucked it out… ugh, it was vile! My mouth was full of bitter, black muck. There were no good eggs, just these disgusting black things… I reckon he did it deliberately! My eyes flooded with rage as I spat out the eggy goo, then I smashed the rest of the eggs against the wall — ugh, the stench! They were all off… disgusting. There were some pickled ones in jars and I ate as many as I could, then I trampled on the rest and peed in some of the other jars.

I waited for Commander Baudyš.

A howling draught was blowing out of the hole. I went to the kitchen.

I thought I might have to treat Mr Cimbura some more, but I didn’t. Mr Cimbura was sitting by the stove, sipping tea from a mug and his face was all wrinkly with age, but clean. And not a scratch on it, not a single one.

‘Hmm, a nasty piece of work you’ve turned into!’ he said the moment I entered the kitchen. I stopped where I was. The twigs crackled in the blazing stove.

‘You handled that little brute nicely, though. That counts for something. You’ve grown. I never liked you much, no, but I never beat you.’

‘And I didn’t beat you neither,’ I said.

‘I should think not!’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘You’ve been snooping in the cellar, haven’t you, my lad? I try to do my bit for the lassies, see. The country’s going to the dogs right now. And the people’s regime started out so well! The comrades wrung a few bourgeois necks and bent a few gallows, it’s true. That counts for something. But now the comrades are getting all cosy with those Moskies. They don’t love their country, bloody comrades. But Czechia will cleave them to her fine young bosom and crush ’em! Have you heard about the Moskies, sonny?’

‘No, Mr Cimbura.’

‘Our stout heroes have been giving the Jerries what for since the beginning o’ time. So they’ll deal with the Moskies all right too! Whoever heard of ’em before? They comes from Moscow. Russian Tatars, they are, but with their ugly mugs painted white to fool us, so they look like us. Siddown, lad! You used to get me bloody annoyed with all your sleeping. You can’t do so much of that now, eh? I don’t suppose you want to anyway. You’ve grown up. Have you notched up your first bird yet?’

I sat down, but I was really scared in case Mr Cimbura started asking about Monkeyface. I was relieved to hear Commander Baudyš’s voice and Páta’s hollering, because as soon as the Commander entered the hallway Páta started hammering away at the door of the best room, and when Commander Baudyš opened it, he jumped him, though it was pointless attacking Baudýš.

Although the lads kept a tight rein on Páta, he caused considerable confusion and no interrogation of Mr Cimbura or of me by Commander Baudyš took place.

We dragged Páta along and windows opened and mad dogs tugged vainly at their chains. Then our squad passed through the village towards the Home from Home, where we all spread out, because Šklíba had done another bunk — but this time he got away. I never saw him again.

Commander Vyžlata had us line up and Margash was still with him. The Commander was drinking some booze. He had a bottle in his hand and he said that something unfortunate had occurred, that one of us had left after having declined an offer of friendship. Commander Vyžlata shed a tear and bowed his head briefly, then wiped the tear away with a finger and flicked it to the ground. We said nothing… Then, gesturing with both arms, he summoned us into the dining room and we obeyed, because we were anxious, and there, painted on the picture of Private Fedotkin, was a Czech boy in a tracksuit with a green knapsack over his shoulder, and he was handing Private Fedotkin a gun belt. And we stood there in silence. We knew by now that they had killed the brave Private Fedotkin. And I looked towards Margash and Margash looked at me, and I got a shock, because Margash had a face as long as a fiddle, like that time in the cellar, and he was furious, but not in the way some of our lot sometimes were when we lost it a bit, us being psychopaths and all. When any of us got the red mist we looked different from Margash. And now I got angry as well, being full of hatred for Commander Vyžlata, because why should Šklíba have to wander alone through the snow and the forest just on account of the nuns? Why wasn’t he here with us, like usual? Why was all this going on? Because of Commander Vyžlata! And it crossed my mind that if Margash said, ‘Now!’ I’d do what he’d already seen in his dream anyway. ‘But how?’ I wondered. ‘How should I kill the Commander?’

Commander Vyžlata tipped back his bottle of booze and took a swig and flopped down on the floor. With him squatting down like that I could get at his neck. But the Commander suddenly stood the bottle on the floor and quickly stuck one hand in his pocket, making some of the longshirts squeal. Commander Vyžlata’s eyes flashed as if he meant to spear us with them, but he stayed sat on the ground and I could have reached him, and the other lads would have helped me, I think… I glanced at Margash and nodded a ‘Yes?’ at him, but Margash shook his head, meaning ‘No!’ and that was good, because Commander Baudyš entered the dining room and said, ‘Dismissed! Prepare for training!’

So we went outside the Home from Home and lined up in our shorts and T-shirts ready to train for whatever it was we had to do.

We used to train under supervision, under the commands of our commanders, but Commander Vyžlata wasn’t training us this time. He was walking up and down our lines and talking about how he’d coped with other scum before this… like the guttersnipes of the Vorkuta camp… and he wasn’t going to be put out by a handful of little jerks from Bohemia, so we should all bloody well watch it! That’s what Commander Vyžlata said, keeping one hand in his pocket. Then he bellowed, ‘Do you know what befell the son of the regiment, what they made him do?… They made an executioner of him, my lads!’ The Commander smashed the bottle to the ground and the smallest longshirts squealed. Then Commander Vyžlata told us what it had been like in the freezing cold hell of Vorkuta… after the court martial! And how they had forced him, Vyžlata, to take up the murder weapon and finish off Private Fedotkin… thereby turning his — Vyžlata’s — humanity inside out… but what else could he do? ‘And what would you have done in the penal colony of icebound Vorkuta? Well?’ All that was left of the son of the regiment’s hand-sewn uniform were worthless tatters… The son of the regiment had finished off Fedotkin, the man who had been like a father to him. Yep. That’s how it went at the snowbound camp in faraway Vorkuta. They saw things differently there.

Commander Vyžlata talked and ranted at us, but we cared sod all about what he was saying. We didn’t want to hear any more about Fedotkin and we didn’t want to be listening to our commander, because our mate Šklíba had gone.

In the evening we were alone in the dormitory. Commander Vyžlata, along with Margash, had stayed at the command post. Lots of longshirts came creeping into our dormitory, but we didn’t chase them out.

The Bandits gathered around Dýha and Karel, and Chata openly took out some cigarettes. We sat there and stood about and our words flittered everywhere, and then we heard Martin saying, ‘I’m leaving too!’

We said nothing and watched Martin, and Martin said, ‘You lot know nothing. You lark about outside with airguns,’ and he slipped off his bed onto the floor and curled up in a ball. We stood round him. Now he was blubbering.

And Karel shouted, ‘Leave him be!’ as if someone were doing something to Martin. Nobody was doing anything to him.

Martin got up and said, ‘You lot know nothing. You haven’t been locked up here with the Commander.’ Then he goes on, saying that he really hates Commander Vyžlata, because Šklíba is wandering helpless among the ravening beasts of Chapman Forest and he might even be dead. ‘I’m getting out of here!’ Martin told us, though he’d already said it once, and he stood up.

And Chata said to him, ‘And how are you gonna get past Vyžlata and the new lad?’

And Martin sat down.

And Páta said, ‘Out of the window would work, with knotted sheets.’

No-one even laughed. I look at the moon, which had suddenly come out above the window, chopping the darkness into shadows. In the shadows that we cast on the walls we looked like grown-ups.

Then things went fast. Páta and Karel knotted some sheets together and Mikušinec gave Martin his sweater, and Dýha took a paper packet out from under the floorboard and Martin took it. I didn’t know if my matches were in it, but there was a knife. Its blade glinted and someone gave Martin their tracksuit. Someone else even handed him an anorak and Martin tore off his black rags and got dressed.

As he climbed down the sheets I was afraid he might start kicking or shouting, or even drop down through the rubbish chute, so I didn’t watch.

Páta told him what to do. He had already run away like this. When Martin was nearly down, Páta told him, ‘We’ll leave you some food in the cemetery. Hide in the tomb.’

‘Which one?’ Martin called back, quietly.

‘There’s only one.’

‘Right,’ we heard Martin down below.

And when Martin reached the bottom, Páta tossed him a blanket and Dýha also tossed him a blanket, because it was still very cold at night.

We got into bed and chatted for a while, and Bajza asked Chata, ‘Did you give him any salt?’ and Chata replied, ‘Bollocks, let the old cheesecake cry himself all the salt he needs.’ Only then did someone let out a ‘Ha, ha!’, and I decided to run away as well, then Margash’s dream wouldn’t come true, and I meant to run away after the others fell asleep, but I fell asleep too, and in the morning we went off with Commander Baudyš to shift rocks.

10: On the rocks and in the village

We were working away on the rocks. The sun blazed above us and jabbed at my head. It blazed above the rubbish tip on the other bank, drying out the reedbed. Water that had been locked in ice crashed into the pieces of iron and made the stinking things in the tip move about. In the winter the tip didn’t stink.

Anyone who picked up a rock or a bit of wood with leeches clinging to it out of the stream and put it down on the grass would watch a while as the leeches shrank and dropped off in the heat. That didn’t interest me. That morning we weren’t sent to track down Martin. He wasn’t on Commander Baudyš’s list of squads. That morning, like many before, we worked on the rocks. But that day everything was different.

Commander Baudyš took a trolley to the stream. It was pushed by Karel, the orderly. The trolley was piled high with technical equipment from the kitchen-workshop. Commander Baudyš never let the trolley out of his sight, or if he did it was only to look at his watch. He was waiting for something or somebody. I wasn’t really interested.

As always, we formed a chain by the stream. We heaved at the rocks and passed them one to another out of the water and onto the bank. Chata held on to me. I pulled at the rocks that poked above the surface, all wet and jumbled. I was at the end of the chain, because I’m light… Chata suddenly pulled me over to him onto one rock and pointed under the footbridge and — oh dear — there trapped in the rocks was Martin’s blanket. It was completely waterlogged.

I broke away from Chata and jumped off the rocks onto the grass, moving a little way off, then I curled up in a ball like some little kid. I suddenly felt sick. My head was full of the image of Martin lying motionless among the wet, black stones, water streaming over him. I wasn’t feeling at all good. My life was not good.

Then Chata was right there beside me. He gave me a kick and said, ‘Get up, man!’

A little way off, on the bank, stood Commander Baudyš, staring at his watch.

Now all the lads were scrambling onto the bank with the rocks. I got up and grabbed one where it was lying. We built them up into ramparts and in a low voice I told Karel about Martin’s blanket, and Chata told Mikušinec. We didn’t move our lips. The lads passed it on and before long we all knew, and the mist — chilly and clammy as it rose from the water under the footbridge where it was still cold — was like dark, choking smoke that made us cough as it swirled around, like church candles when someone snuffs them out after Mass. I had no idea I still remembered the candles. Commander Baudyš didn’t know about Martin. We wouldn’t tell him. He could kiss our arses now.

We were all lined up by the ramparts and defences and the squad commanders — me included! — were about to report, but… we could all hear it! We could hear this clattering noise, and it was the clatter of a pickup truck. The pickup was stopping! And some strange bloke hauled himself out! Hauled himself, because he had no legs! Not one! He held himself up on sticks, crutches. He held on to the pickup. None of us laughed.

Commander Baudyš went up to him and his face went from white to red and back. He went over to the stranger and he wasn’t happy. He didn’t like him.

But when he stopped in front of the stranger, he gave a smart salute, like soldiers do. Just like he’d taught us.

‘At ease!’ said the crutch man. It was interesting seeing somebody give Commander Baudyš orders.

They stood there gawping at each other.

Our ranks began to break up without Baudyš having stood us down. We broke up by ourselves.

‘It’s you!’ said Commander Baudyš, and he stopped standing to attention and threw up his arms as if totally amazed. The man with the crutches just nodded.

‘Where’s the equipment?’ he asked. Commander Baudyš waved to Karel, who went over to them, pushing the trolley full of wires and technical equipment from the kitchen-workshop. The guy on crutches bent down, holding on to the door of his pickup, and took a close look at all those wires and fittings, and the other stuff Commander Baudyš and Orderly Karel had piled on the trolley.

Then the man told us to step up. We didn’t budge. Commander Baudyš glanced at us and you could tell he was glad. He was glad and proud that we were his. He gave an order. We shifted ranks, rearranged ourselves and lined up neatly. Karel took up his position as orderly. The stranger made a couple of swishes with his crutches, and now he was sitting on the trolley and upright he was quite tall. First of all, he said, he was called Major Žinka, but we should address him as ‘Commander, sir’. He carried on talking very loudly: ‘Listen, boys! It’s said that you’re the most neglected thugs in the country. Your commanders have turned you into a fine unit…’ And so this Commander Žinka went on about all the stuff we knew, and behind me Bajza hissed, ‘More vermin from Vorkuta,’ and Commander Žinka said that the process of regeneration in Czechoslovakia was getting up the noses of the Soviet party bigwigs, and that hordes of Moskies wanted to crush Czechoslovakia under their boots.

I noticed that the sun was roasting and the clammy mist from the water under the footbridge had disappeared, and we were all exposed to the strong sunlight and had to screw up our eyes, and Commander Žinka went on and on about a spirit of defiance spreading throughout Czechoslovakia like a wildfire in the steppes, and that Soviet armoured corps might be lined up on the borders of liberal Czechoslovakia and that our freedom was in jeopardy, but we would not buckle! And I imagined that if hordes of jackbooted Moskies arrived, they might kill Commander Žinka, which would be great. Me and Margash would grab Monkeyface and beat it. And Commander Žinka was saying that he knew we would give a good account of ourselves, just like the boy soldiers of the Hussites. ‘I was a boy myself once, lads!’ he said. ‘So I know that all healthy boys know how to fight and enjoy fighting.’ Commander Žinka told us all this so we knew, but we couldn’t give a shit. We were worn out from lugging rocks… and Martin! Oh dear. Without being given the order, we all sat down in the grass and started chewing stalks, perched on various rocks that had dried out in the wind and sun.

Commander Baudyš and Karel were fussing around the trolley, and Commander Žinka was still going on and on. We heard, but we didn’t listen, until he said, ‘While the representatives of a regenerated Czechoslovakia are defending socialism with a human face at the meeting in Čierna nad Tisou…,’ then Bajza got a fit of the giggles and started squirming, his lips twitching, and quietly muttered, ‘Arsehole.’ Commander Žinka leaned towards us from the trolley. ‘You boy,’ he said, ‘have you got epilepsy?’ and Páta roared, ‘Nah, he’s got syphilis!’ and that was the end of Commander Žinka’s speech. We got up, but something had changed.

Something had changed because Commander Baudyš suddenly turned to go. He looked back just once and ran an eye over our formation, which had begun to stand easy without being ordered to, and he just went… he was leaving. Just like that! Karel trotted after him and he was running, and we stared open-mouthed after our mate Karel, and when Karel caught up with Commander Baudyš he fell in two steps behind him with the easy stride of a detachment on the march, then both of them slowly disappeared from sight and we were left gawping at each other, and Dýha shouted, ‘Hey! Karel! Come back!’ and carried on like that, hopping up and down, but Karel couldn’t hear him, or if he could he pretended not to.

And crutchy Commander Žinka watched it all, with his head held high and his chin stuck out, looking sidelong after the departing Commander Baudyš, and we all clustered round the trolley. Then Chata kicked me in the leg and Bajza tugged at my sleeve. I’m commander of the saboteurs! Chata and Bajza and me, we crawled under the footbridge, looking around the rocks, and poked at the dark water with sticks. All we could find was the blanket. No Martin. We were glad. I saw Chata and Bajza smiling and chattering away in their own language, so I told them to speak normal.

Bajza flung his stick in the water. ‘He did the right thing,’ he said. ‘You have to dump stuff when you’re escaping. ’Cause of dogs and things.’

‘There ain’t no dogs to chase escapees here,’ I said, as if they didn’t know.

‘All dogs chase escapees,’ Chata said.

‘So where’d he get to?’ Bajza asked.

‘He doesn’t know where the cemetery with the tomb is,’ I said. ‘He isn’t one of us saboteurs!’

‘Only a Whitey could escape down the main road,’ said Chata.

‘Hmm,’ said Bajza, and I also said, ‘Hmm,’ though I’d never done a runner.

‘He could still be downstream, couldn’t he?’ I said. ‘Carried by the water, no?’ I looked across the water, and it was washing over the scrap iron and other stuff in the tip across the stream.

They both laughed and went on in their own language. That pissed me off.

‘The stones wouldn’t let him pass,’ Bajza explained with a grin, as if he were talking to some idiot, though he was smaller than me.

We clambered onto the bank.

The lads were now on the road by the trolley and the pickup. If our longshirts had happened along and squashed up tight, they would have all fitted on. We could all have gone somewhere. But that wasn’t going to happen.

Commander Žinka sat in the pickup’s cab. He had chucked his crutches on the floor, and we could see his stumps wrapped in great big leather patches… As he sat there, we could see that he was huge, with paws like a bear out of Chapman Forest. He was explaining stuff to the lads and doing great things with his hands among the tools: ‘And this is a loudspeaker, lads, and this is an amplifier,’ and he kept pulling stuff off the pickup and more stuff off the trolley. The lads handed him at once whatever he pointed to, and he put it all together and then he was holding the loudspeaker with wires hanging from it… He had loads of these loudspeaker things on the back of the pickup… ‘And you screw it together here, and so we’ve got a public address system and the revolution can begin any time you like, my lads.’ Commander Žinka smiled at them and the lads were laughing too, having fun, listening… But I couldn’t be bothered. I dunno what’s wrong with me.

‘Boys,’ said Commander Žinka, ‘we’ll go into the village now and hang the wires and loudspeakers up, then we can inform the villagers about what’s going on in Czechoslovakia!’

Dýha asked if we would be able to talk into a loudspeaker.

Žinka reached out a gigantic paw and smiled and patted Dýha on the shoulder, and he said, ‘I like your initiative, boy. What would you say into it?’

‘That altar boys are buggers, Commander, sir,’ said Dýha, making such a funny face that we fell about laughing.

Commander Žinka said, ‘No, that’s not a good idea. But anyway, let’s get going.’

Dýha and Páta led the procession, pushing the trolley along. The pickup followed them at a walking pace, and behind it there was us, the Bandits, and we were sorry we weren’t on field manoeuvres. It would have been better to go into the village with airguns.

*

The pickup stopped outside the first farmhouse, belonging to the Kropáčeks. Commander Žinka pulled a stepladder off the pickup, opened it and swung himself onto it straight from the cab. He jammed his stumps between the rungs until his leather patches squeaked, helping himself along with his teeth. Then he fixed the first loudspeaker to the Kropáčeks’ fence, and Mr Kropáček came out and said, ‘What’s all this, then?’

Commander Žinka handed him a sheet of paper. Mr Kropáček had to sign it and, syllable by syllable, he worked out that he was accepting material responsibility for the loudspeaker, and he gawped and said, ‘And comrade, sir… erm, Mr Comrade…’

‘Address me as “Commander”!’ ordered Commander Žinka.

‘Will you have a dram, Commander?’

‘But of course!’ said Commander Žinka. Grabbing the top rungs, he swung back a bit and launched himself into the cab. Mr Kropáček called his wife, and she brought out a bottle and a tray of glasses, and other people came along as well. We stood by the fence and were a bit surprised to see a couple of the altar boys arriving with the villagers, so Chata ripped a piece of wood from the fence, and Dýha and Mikušinec, who were behind us, picked up some stones and niftily slipped them to us in the front, but all the people from Siřem, including the altar boys, were just gawping at the pickup, and at the stranger, Commander Žinka, and at the loudspeaker.

Then we moved on again and arrived at the Holýs’, where the stabbed and stitched-up altar boy lived, and Mr and Mrs Holý came out and Commander Žinka gave them a sheet of paper, and they signed it and they also fetched a bottle and poured a drink for Mr Kropáček as well, and for anyone else who wanted one, but not us, and Mrs Holý was holding her hankie to her eyes and sobbing, and she said, ‘So we haven’t been forgotten by them in Prague! And how’s that nice Mr Dubček?’ And Commander Žinka had his stumps jammed firmly in the ladder, and he was attaching the loudspeaker wires with pliers, and he called down, ‘Sasha Dubček’s okay!’ and they all shouted ‘Hurrah!’ and ‘Hurrah!’ and Mr Holasa’s ‘Hurrah!’ was the loudest. He had brought a whole pail of sausages and frankfurters, and Mrs Holasa carried a tray full of bread!

Everyone helped themselves and Mr Holasa even came over to us — the Bandits! — and he said, ‘All right, lads, you have some too… Today’s a great day!’

Our front line swarmed around the bucket and cleaned it right out.

Then we moved on. The whole village was on the march and some people were waving Czechoslovak flags and red, white and blue banners, some of which had slogans like THE TRUTH PREVAILS stitched on them, and the old women of Siřem were at the church, but the church was closed. Father Francis wasn’t there any more. Hadn’t been for a long time. The church was all boarded up, and Commander Žinka ordered a loudspeaker to be erected in front of the church, and we helped him with it.

Dýha knew which wires he needed. Páta handed him the pliers, and Mikušinec the hammer. Me and Chata, we held the ladder… but I felt queasy.

It was warmer among the houses than down by the stream. The great big sun was unbearable, pounding away at the white walls of the cottages. The heat bore down on me and I didn’t know whether I could take it. I felt hot inside as well. I was supposed to be holding the ladder while Žinka swung on it, but it felt more like I was holding on to support myself.

We were in the middle of a great free-for-all. We were surrounded by the entire populace of Siřem. I looked at the people between the rungs of the ladder, breathing the hot air. Over by the church I could see a girl in a yellow dress and next to her a girl in a red dress. They waved and their gazes cut right into me. I looked away and there was a girl in a green dress standing right by the ladder; we were so close that we could have touched cheeks. She was smiling at me, holding out a tray of little glasses. Men’s hands immediately reached for the tray, so then all I could see were their sweaty vests and shirts and their sweaty necks, and then the girl slipped out of the circle of thirsty men, taking her tray with her, and she was gone.

I half-turned my head towards the church and glimpsed the fluttering red dress. It disappeared in the crowd and the fluttering of red, white and blue flags. I kept blinking, because of the glare of the sun bouncing off the church walls and all the white-painted house-fronts right into my eyes, and Chata thumped me on the shoulder, because I’d stood on his foot, and he said, ‘Hold the ladder!’

This time there were far more people in front of the church than when Commander Baudyš was trying Dýha and Chata, and as Commander Žinka clambered down from the ladder one of the old village women knelt down and kissed his hand, saying, ‘We’ve got our freedom at last!’ and she was crying. In front of the church two old women were pushing Mr Cimbura along in a wheelchair, and there were more girls either side of him. But no Hanka! In no time at all, they had laid a plank across two crates and Mr Cimbura floated round to the other side of the plank, and he had something. A wodge of something or other, which he was handing out. I watched. The altar boys were milling around him, and Dýha! — Dýha as well — joined them, as cool as a cucumber. Mr Cimbura was handing out pictures of Czechia. Dýha was followed by Mikuš and then Mikušinec came back and showed us the pictures of Czechia! I wanted one too, but me and Chata were busy folding away the ladder, so I couldn’t get one.

People were passing bottles around and eating, and gangs of Siřem boys were running about everywhere. Dýha was back with us. Us Bandits were together again.

Then Mr Dašler turned up and he had loads of tarts in the cab of his pickup. They were still warm. I know, because we got some as well. And Commander Žinka was sitting down and Mr Holasa and Mr Dašler and Mr Moravčík were standing up in the back of the pickup and chatting. Mrs Kropek was waving a banner saying THE TRUTH PREVAILS and Mrs Holasa and Mrs Dašler and other people were waving Czech flags and various religious banners like those I saw inside the church… And Commander Žinka told everyone there that the evil times under the scourge of Sovietism and bolshevism would never return and that our leadership with Sasha Dubček at their head (‘Hurrah! Hurrah!’ everyone roared at this point, even us Bandits) would never betray the people! Then Mr Holasa took the microphone and read from a sheet of paper, saying that it came from Prague, declaring the creation of the Siřem Autonomous Zone — Siaz! — and that in many places all over the country zones of resistance were springing up against the incursion of foreign troops. And everybody clapped like crazy, then Commander Žinka spoke into the loudspeaker and said that the Soviet Union was standing ready on the borders, but that this time the West wouldn’t abandon us and that there would be no repetition of Munich! Then Mr Holasa grabbed the loudspeaker from him and bellowed, ‘Just let ’em come! We’ll give ’em what for!’ and everybody clapped and shouted and rejoiced. People sounded the horns on their cars and tractors, which they drove around covered in flags, then they sang: ‘Where is my home? Water murmurs among the meadows…’ and so on. That’s our national anthem. We used to learn it. And none of us was allowed to move, and I looked round and the ones who had been kneeling quickly got up and they’d all taken off their hats and caps, and some of them were crying, goodness knows why! Stupid buggers. Mikušinec and Páta also started snivelling, but they were just taking the piss… And then there was a moment’s silence, so they could all wipe away their tears.

Then total mayhem broke out with shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ and ‘Three cheers!’ and hats and caps flying through the air, and the people with flags swished them this way and that. I was all agog, forgetting to keep my wits about me — then someone grabbed me and dragged me into a side street, and then I was lying on the ground and the altar boy Holý was standing over me and there were two others with him, and Holý said, ‘Ciao, Avar!’ and then they twisted my arms and dragged me off somewhere between the cottages.

11: Making friends. Nuns is nuns. Killing

They hauled me off into someone’s backyard and there was Martin sitting there, lounging in the sun and munching something, and when he saw me he shouted, ‘Hi there!’

I still expected to get a good beating, but the altar boys just stood around, so I said to Martin, ‘Hi! Everything okay?’

And he said, ‘Sure. You’re going to be our negotiator, man.’ Then he told the altar boys, as if he were pals with them, ‘He’s a saboteur, guys.’

Holý came over to me and said, ‘So you’re a Russian saboteur, are you? You Russian?

‘Bollocks, man!’ shouted Martin. ‘That’s Ilya.’

And the boy with freckles said, ‘You a real Czech? Say something in Czech.’

‘What?’ I said.

And he said, ‘Sing the national anthem!’

So I sang a bit of it, the only bit I could remember. Deep down I was thinking, ‘Now you can start blubbering, arseholes!’

Then another of the altar boys said to Holý, ‘Come off it, man, any Russian saboteur knows our national anthem. It’s the first thing they get taught, man.’

‘That’s true,’ said Holý. ‘I want Martin as our negotiator. The Russian guy can wait in the sty.’

‘Ilya ain’t no Russian,’ insisted Martin. ‘Wait here, will you?’ he said to me. I told him I didn’t care either way. He gave me what he had been munching on and it was a delicious-looking bacon and paprika sandwich, so I ate it. Then they shut me in the pigsty. There was no pig or anything, just a piggy smell and it was really hot. I was in there for a long time, but I didn’t mind. Then one of the altar boys came in and said, ‘I’m Pepper, ’cause I’m hot-headed. You Russian or not?’

‘No.’

‘So what are you?’

How was I supposed to know? ‘I’m from the Home,’ I said.

And he said, ‘Come on then.’

We left the yard and went up the hillside, where more altar boys were sitting around and messing about with something by the glowing embers of a fire.

We sat down and from the feathers and the squidgy bits of mud lying around I could tell it was a chicken packed in clay, because Chata and Páta and even Karel and anyone else who’s ever tried to do a runner had told us about it a thousand times.

‘I know what you’ve got there, guys. It’s gippo chicken! Have you got any salt?’

But they said nothing and just swapped glances, and then Holý said, ‘We ain’t no gippos.’

Suddenly we heard whistling and shouting — ‘La-a-a-ads!’ — and it’s Martin with the altar boys behind him, and the Bandits!

They reached us and sat down around the fire, and you could tell they were all on speaking terms. They chatted away like normal, and Dýha had a picture of Czechia glued to his tracksuit. The altar boys extracted the chicken. Pepper tapped the clay with a knife and it fell away from the meat. It smelt great. I munched away at the bones and meat, and it was hot and good. Martin stood up and explained — chiefly to me, as he’d told the Bandits already — how the altar boys had met him when he lost his way in the woods, and they’d taken him to their den on Fell Crag and they’d made peace… And the blanket? The altar boys had rigged it up to look as if Martin had got away by swimming!

Then Freckles stepped up and said, ‘I’m on guard and I see this ghost! And the ghost’s this here borstal boy Martin and he’s dragging blankets along! And he’s blubbering. Yeah, you was, be honest! He sees me and he says, “Excuse me, which way is it to the cemetery?” Ha, ha!’ Freckles laughed so much that he ended up on his back, kicking his legs in the air. ‘Yeah!’ and ‘Sure!’ roared the others and they laughed like mad… Then we talked about what would happen if the Russians stormed the country. There’d be a war, obviously, and the Bohemian Lion would roar! It’d be a right old ding-dong! Brilliant!

We sat in the grass and made friends with the altar boys, and talked about what fun we had when we were at war and reminisced about different events in that war, then Holý said, ‘Peace can be fun as well!’ ‘Too right!’ we all shouted. Then Pepper got up and said that they’d had their den, their defensive position, up on the crag, for a long time and that they could use a couple of extra hands. And we cheered and roared and Dýha shouted, ‘Long live Czechia! Long live Siaz!’ and everyone else joined in. I leaned across to Dýha and looked at the crumpled picture of Czechia on his tracksuit… And Dýha said it would be best to get a picture of Czechia permanently tattooed on our skin… Mikušinec explained that Czechia was depicted naked so that she could drag crying babies out of burning cottages and breastfeed them on the spot, at least that’s what the old biddies at the church used to say, and Dýha told him, ‘You’re a baby yourself, man.’ Holý said, ‘Yeah, when we join the fighting, the nuns’ll bring us food and medicine and ammunition up to Fell Crag. They could get past the patrols dressed up as crippled old women going out to collect firewood…’ Then he went on to say that he respected us guys from the Home and that it was great that the guys from the Crag and the guys from the Home would make up a joint defensive force, but there’s one thing he wanted to make clear to avoid any squabbling and arguments: ‘Nuns is nuns, guys, right? And we ain’t got no nuns.’ We muttered and said things like ‘Yeah!’, ‘Uh-huh’, and ‘Right!’ Now we were all chatting normally again, so I asked Dýha, ‘Where’s that Bajza kid and Chata… and little Silva?’ ‘Those lads, they don’t want gippos, and they preferred to go to Još’s anyway.’ ‘I see,’ I said, ‘and there’s someone else missing… Páta?’ Dýha shrugged, saying, ‘Dunno,’ and passed me a bottle, and I took a swig and it was the first time I’d felt good all day.

When I woke up I had a headache. Little stars were crashing about inside my head and I threw up. All that was left of the bonfire were some smoking twigs and there was nobody around on the trampled grass any more… They’d cleared off. It was dark. I was chilled to the bone. My bones were all aching, as if someone had been tugging at them… I reached the church and kept to the shadows by the cottages and the village pond, and there were no dogs and no people anywhere. I went down the hill towards the Home from Home and there were no lights on inside… I knew I was going to run away at last.

All I needed to do was tell Margash.

And I would tell him that I hadn’t had his dream.

I got to the bottom of the hill and there in the grass… it was the whole gang of altar boys, and the Bandits as well. They were sitting on the slope, gawping at the Home from Home, and none of its lights were on and it was dark all around us and the moon was shining.

‘Hi!’ I said, but only Dýha turned round and said quietly, ‘Ciao!’

I’m glad, because I thought they’d run away from me to Fell Crag, that they didn’t want me in their den. Martin came over and said, ‘Hi! They don’t want you,’ and I said, ‘I know, but I don’t care,’ and Martin said, ‘Liar! You do!’ and I said, ‘Wrong… I don’t!’ And then Dýha and Mikušinec and some of the altar boys came over, and Freckles said to me, ‘Come up to the crag with us, but you must bring weapons and things.’

I ignored him. I looked at Dýha.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Get some knives and stuff!’

And I asked, ‘What’s with the Home? What’s going on?’

‘Look, man,’ said Dýha. ‘They’ve taken the longshirts away! All of ’em! On lorries.’

That was quite a shock, because the Home with no longshirts… well, it was weird!

‘We saw it. They took ’em away. They had their tracksuits and anoraks on, everything. The youngsters have gone!’ Dýha told me, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe it himself.

‘Some blokes shoved them on the back of the truck,’ he said. ‘We’ve combed the whole place in case any of the little ’uns were hiding, but no. Not one, man.’

We kept staring and we could hardly see the Home from Home in the dark, and it was full of silence. It was our Home from Home, and it wasn’t. Something had changed. I could tell, and I didn’t like it.

‘And is Vyžlata there?’ I asked, ’cause we both knew that was what mattered most now.

Dýha shrugged, ‘We haven’t seen him. Nor that new boy!’

The boys in the grass said nothing.

‘You command the saboteurs,’ said Dýha.

So I said, ‘Yeah, but I’ve said all I want to.’ I set off. Mikušinec called after me ‘Ilya!’ and someone else called out quietly: ‘Ilya, kid, watch yourself!’

I pretended not to hear. I walked on quickly. If I turned back now and asked Mikušinec for the picture of Czechia, he’d let me have it. But there was no turning back. I was outside the Home from Home. I reached for the door handle. The door opened.

I peeked into the workshop-kitchen: shiny tools oiled and tidy everywhere. I drank from the tap, gulping down the cold water and remembering how I used to stand guard in there. Beneath me was the cellar. I felt sick. In my head and in my body. I must have been made ill by everything that had happened.

I went up the stairs, moving fast like a rat. On the first floor I almost tripped on a bundle of documents and broke my neck. There were still vast piles of this twentieth-century tat that we hadn’t had time to burn. The beds in the dorm had no blankets, pillows, nothing.

I went on, invisible. There was someone in the Home from Home. I could tell.

I took off my shoes and tip-toed past the dining room. You can’t hear me, I thought. I am a commander of saboteurs. Private Fedotkin was watching to check I didn’t do a bunk. I wanted to get that stuff — the knives and things. I didn’t know what was going to happen.

I slunk from step to step, and I was outside the shortpants’ dormitory.

I slipped across to Dýha’s bed, grabbed a floorboard, then another, and I stuck my hand in the secret hiding place.

The knives were wrapped in old documents. I crammed the matches, the ball of string and some other small items inside my tracksuit top, stuffing them in there with my maps. The blade of a kitchen knife stuck out through the paper and was all shiny. I kept the knives in my hand and left.

I was about to slip out into the corridor, but I couldn’t. I heard footsteps. It felt like the very worst moment in my whole life.

I leaned back against the door of Sister Leontina’s study and I was in. I slithered backwards, tripped and fell — papers, candles and knives, the whole lot went flying. I’d tripped over Monkeyface’s tub. I picked up some of the parcels, the rest I hid in various corners. My maps were safely in their place.

Commander Vyžlata had made Sister Leontina’s study his command post.

I decided to try the nuns’ bedroom. I turned the door handle and slipped into the gloom, blinking like a rat. That’s how I could see in the semi-darkness… The door of the command post had just squeaked. Vyžlata had switched on the light, which shone on my feet through the crack under the door.

We were in neighbouring rooms. I crawled over to the door and peeped through the crack.

Margash was pouring water into the tub. He tipped buckets full of hot water into it. The steam made him cough. It was swirling around him. Vyžlata undressed and sat in the tub. Margash poured water over him. Vyžlata had his back to me. I had never ever cut anyone’s throat, though they did teach us how to. I didn’t know how I was supposed to kill him. I didn’t know how I was supposed to get out of there. I waited to see what happened. Maybe something would happen by itself.

Vyžlata was wallowing in the tub and splashing.

I could see his back. He was washing with soap. It took ages. The steam kept rising from each bucketload. There were splashes on the floor all around the tub. Finally, Vyžlata got up. He came towards me. Towards my door. I crept under the nearest bed.

The door opened and Margash came in. He was naked. Vyžlata followed him. Margash lay down on the bed I was hiding under. Vyžlata lay down next to him. For a while they just lay there. I peeked out stealthily to see what was going on. Then Vyžlata hauled himself up over Margash and dropped back down. Like doing exercises. I could see the flesh on his belly wobbling, and I could see his neck and shoulders as he bobbed up and down on the bed… I closed my eyes and I could hear Vyžlata breathing heavily and Margash whimpering… and it was disgusting… I opened my eyes again and took another peek, and I saw Vyžlata’s sweaty belly wobbling and flying this way and that, and the slapping noise it made… I shouted out… They couldn’t hear me, because Vyžlata was wailing a terrible wail and it was all mixed in with Margash’s whimpering… I started talking, so I didn’t have to hear them, and I said all the dirty words the nuns wouldn’t let us say. Then I ripped the paper off the kitchen knife and stuck it up under the falling belly. The belly speared itself on the knife, and I could feel its warmth on my hands… The belly reared up again, coming free from the knife, and now all three of us were shrieking, because the belly came hurtling down again onto the kitchen knife I was still holding. The blood squirted in my eyes. Then Vyžlata flopped sideways and spiked his hip on the knife as well… and it was over.

I crawled out. From the other side, Margash peeped under the bed, probably wondering what I was doing there… He scrabbled around under the bed, pulling out another knife, ripping off its paper wrapping, and stabbed Vyžlata in the neck.

I sat on the bed. Margash said, ‘Quick!’ He wrapped the body in a sheet. We were both splattered with blood, and I said as much. Margash glanced at me and said, ‘Aha.’

We ripped the sheets off more beds and tossed them over the corpse.

We went into Sister Leontina’s study and used Vyžlata’s bath water to wash ourselves. There was no other water. We helped each other: ‘There’s some more here!’ ‘You’ve a spot there!’ We helped each other, because we didn’t have a mirror. So we stood facing each other and we were each other’s mirrors, except that Margash was naked.

‘Get dressed!’ I told him. He put his vest and pants on, and a jumper and his tracksuit, which he had to hand. My clothes were bloodstained, but not much. Most of it was on my face and hands. I checked my pillowcase map. It was under my tracksuit. It had become part of my clothes. I wiped the blood from the knives as well. I spotted Margash wrapping a knife in a clean document, then keeping it, so I did the same. I just stuck it behind me, inside my trouser elastic. Margash did the same.

‘What now?’ I asked.

‘We’ll take him downstairs,’ said Margash.

‘You glad?’

‘Yeah. Very,’ Margash said, and then we were emptying the tub together. We both had the same idea. We poured the water onto the bed, because the mattress would soak it up and there wouldn’t be a telltale puddle. That was Margash’s idea.

We picked up Vyžlata in the sheets and he was pretty heavy, and I remembered all those bundles of paper and scuttles of coal, and the rocks and sacks of flour and buckets of slops. Vyžlata was heavy, but we got him across to the tub. I wondered whether his arms had gone stiff like the weasel’s paws. But they hadn’t. They were flabby.

We put Vyžlata in the wash-tub, then Margash clapped his hand to his forehead and said, ‘Hang on!’ He nipped back into the nuns’ bedroom. I was left alone with the corpse, and I didn’t like it. But Margash came straight back. He tossed that big black pistol into the tub. I said nothing.

I went first and Margash held the back end of the tub. We made our way down the stairs, bumping on each one, then I heard a strange sound — grx-grx! — and Margash called out ‘Stop!’

I put my whole weight against the tub and Margash explained that it was Vyžlata’s teeth clacking. He wound a rag torn from a sheet around the Commander’s chin and part of his head and we set off again, and this time it was okay.

Then one of Vyžlata’s hands flopped over the edge of the tub. It dangled along the side, as if the dead man were trying to scratch the wall. I was glad when Margash tucked it back in and covered it up.

We carried on down past each floor to the dining room. There was someone there! We put down the wash-tub and went to see. Our knives were behind us, held in place by our trouser elastic. If you keep your kitchen knife like that, you know about it with every move you make.

Sitting on the table in the dining room was Žinka, dead opposite the portrait of Private Fedotkin and the Czech boy. He had an open bottle of booze. In one hand was a screwdriver and there was a big radio on the table in front of him. There was masses of technical equipment around. He must have brought it all in while the killing was happening. His crutches were propped against the table.

He gawped at us. He pressed down on the table and kind of got up, stretching. Suddenly he looked terribly pale! We could see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He was gulping. His eyeballs were popping. He stretched out a hand. His paw was aiming right at us. He was staring.

Margash tittered. I also laughed.

‘Rascals!’ said Žinka. ‘There are two of you, aren’t there?’

‘Yes, Commander,’ said Margash.

‘Phew, that’s a relief!’ squawked the legless Commander Žinka, placing one paw on his heart. ‘I was afraid I was seeing double.’ He leaned over the table, grabbed the bottle of booze and flung it at the wall where it shattered. He would never have got away with making a mess like that with Commander Vyžlata in charge.

‘Right!’ said Žinka. ‘My mind’s made up: I’m not going to touch another drop ever again. Not until our final victory over the Soviets! That was quite a fright you gave me, lads! Thought I’d got a touch of the DTs.’

We said nothing. I waited until Margash nodded, then I approached Commander Žinka. I kept one hand on the knife at my back. I was glad it was me who had the bright idea of where to keep a kitchen knife.

‘I’ve had the DTs before, see.’ Commander Žinka’s head was nodding. ‘Imagine, some vodka found its way into our block one day. No, you can’t imagine it. I got so drunk I was seeing double. Double the number of huts in the penal colony, double the number of prisoners and double the number of butchers. Believe me, lads, it was almost more than a chap could bear.’

Commander Žinka fell silent for a moment, then started splashing his paw in a pool of alcohol on the table. We, too, were silent. Then Commander Žinka nodded towards the instruments on the table.

‘The Radio Free Siřem transmitter… What do you think of that, then? And what about the good working people in the village? Marvellous, eh? Well, my boys! I’ll be expecting you to be like the boy soldiers of the Hussites and fight to the last man!’ This last bit Commander Žinka bellowed.

‘Yes sir, Commander, sir,’ we bellowed in turn, standing to attention on the spot. And Commander Žinka said he must arrange a meeting of all the commanders, and asked if we had seen Commander Vyžlata anywhere.

We fidgeted… In Fundamentals of Close Combat it says nothing about the combat situation where two boys are supposed to liquidate a legless giant squatting on a table-top, but Margash hissed and I made a move… Margash was almost beside the Commander. I was looking Commander Žinka right in the eye, my right hand on the knife inside my trousers behind me, and as Margash moved again I shouted, ‘Up there!’ to make Žinka look upwards, and as he raised his head I rammed the blade right into his neck. Saboteurs use this sort of trick all of the time, as we’ve been taught.

But Commander Žinka shouted, ‘Aha, so he’s up there, upstairs! Thank you, lads.’ Then he reached for his crutches, slipped off the table, clipped his stumps into the leather straps on the crutches and sets off, as if nothing had happened. He left the dining room, banging away at the floor with his crutches, while me and Margash, we just stared after him… I was terrified he would find the body… and he did!

We heard a bang and a flop, and Žinka was lying there on the landing! His crutches as well! But all he did was shout, ‘Who the hell left this wash-tub here, for crying out loud?’ Then he grabbed his crutches and scrabbled his way up the stairs, groping step by step, rolling over the steps and slipping back down, cursing and swearing, and then he was over the top step and rolling around on the landing. He chucked his crutches angrily ahead of him and didn’t even care whether he hurt himself on the floor — he was probably used to it. Me and Margash, we leapt up the stairs after him and when he entered the sisters’ bedroom with a roar, Margash tossed one crutch in after him and we slammed the door shut and turned the key that was in the lock.

We leaned against the door to get our breath back, and I said, ‘I’m glad we didn’t kill him! He’s not that bad,’ and Margash said, ‘You’re right!’

We stayed for a while and listened to Commander Žinka roaring as he hammered away at the door. Then we grabbed the wash-tub and trundled it down the stairs so fast that Vyžlata fell out outside the kitchen-workshop and we had to stuff him back in, and he was all cold and slimy and disgusting, and it was a good thing that we did it.

In the passage to the cellar Margash told me to hold on to the tub, so I put all of my weight behind it, and I was alone again with Vyžlata. But Margash came straight back from the kitchen-workshop and tossed a huge saw and an axe into the tub, which was pretty heavy by then, bearing down on me as I struggled step by step.

We got the tub down into the cellar water, and then it was heavier than ever. Margash could only find two candles, so every few metres we had to go back and get them. We were dragging the tub along, bent over, and in the bobbing shadows on the wall we looked like hunched animals. Finally we reach the grille where the grave was. We removed the grille and pushed aside the mound of papers, and we were right next to the cover and Margash said, ‘You go now!’

‘What?’

‘Go now!’

‘But I wanna stay here with you!’

‘You can’t.’

‘Bollocks… how come?’

‘It wasn’t in the dream.’

Margash braced himself against the tub and tipped it over, and the corpse in the sheet tumbled out, and its head slipped free and hit a stone on the broken floor, and the saw, which had also fallen out, also clanged against the stone.

The axe was in Margash’s hand.

‘You’re not gonna cut me, are you?’ I asked him, though I didn’t really care.

Margash said, ‘No! ’Course not.’

‘What are you gonna do after I go?’

‘Never you mind,’ he said. ‘Go now.’

I made my way through the cellar, telling myself that if he had cut me, it wouldn’t matter. I went through the cellar and I couldn’t see any shadows, because Margash had kept the candles so that he could see.

12: In the firing line

The Bandits weren’t outside. I didn’t care. My head was full of images of how we’d killed Vyžlata. Everything had happened so quickly that the images only started popping up now. If I stopped, the image in my head froze as well. I walked fast, so as to get through all the images as quickly as possible, so they’d stop coming.

Then suddenly I heard, ‘Is that you, boy?’ Mr Kropáček was holding a rifle and he said, ‘Siaz! Now you say the password!’ He’d said ‘Siaz’, so I said, ‘Czechia!’ and Mr Kropáček nodded and said, ‘Follow me, boy!’ and I followed him to wherever it was I was supposed to be going.

In the sitting room sat Mrs Kropáček and also the Moravčíks, and Mr and Mrs Holý and somebody else. They had the television on. Mrs Kropáček said they’d be only too happy to hear any orders I’d brought from the HQ of the Siřem Autonomous Zone, but for now I should shut up and wait by the wall, because they were watching the news.

Talking pictures went by on the television. I’d never seen this piece of technical equipment before.

‘We have heard and seen that Soviet units have entered the Republic and that the Czechoslovak Army has been offering heroic, sustained and effective resistance…’ Mrs Kropáček was crying, and Mrs Holý blessed herself with the sign of the Cross and yelped, ‘Our poor boys!’ But Mr Holý roared, ‘Ha, ha!’ and thumped the table with his fist, and Mr Moravčík and Mr Kropáček kept thumping the table with their fists and laughing and shouting, ‘Just you come and get it, you Russkies, you bastards! Ha, ha! The Russkies have arrived!’ And Mr Kropáček showed Mr Moravčík his rifle, and Mr Moravčík said, ‘Huh, all you kept hidden from the Commies was your poaching piece, while I — see!’ and he held up a huge pistol. And then we all went out into the yard in the dark. The stars were out and Mr Moravčík and Mr Kropáček fired into the air, and in other parts of Siřem people had come out, the Russkies having arrived in Czechoslovakia, and they were blasting away at the sky. And suddenly all hell broke out in Siřem, and dogs howled and in the distance we could see lights all around and fires blazing all the way to the horizon.

Then we went back into the sitting room and Mr Kropáček poured everyone a shot — me too! — and he said, ‘Right folks! I drink to the moment when Nato and the Yanks launch their bombers!’ We drank up, then sat in front of the television again.

Now Mr Moravčík got up and looked at me, and said, ‘And now, folks, permit me to drink a toast to this lad here!’

I was amazed that he was honouring me like this. They thought I was a messenger from the Siaz HQ, so they thought they were honouring the Siaz HQ. The men were smiling at me and the women were smiling, and they all drank another shot.

We stared at the box and the news was over. What was coming next? Mr Kropáček reached out towards me and thumped me on the back, and said, ‘This’ll be something for this young fellow here, just look at his ears twitching like he can’t wait…’ Everybody laughed — ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ — and Mrs Kropáček said, ‘Leave the lad alone, Les. He’s a courier and on duty,’ and she took my glass away, but empty.

We sat and watched television, and the lady on the telly revealed the fairy-tale title of the next programme: Enchanting River! And at that very instant I must have gone mad, because it suddenly hit me how badly Margash had let me down. After all, I had hoped to leave Siřem for his country! That we’d bury Monkeyface in the sweet-scented grass of a wonderful land! I must have been mad. I was shocked by how much I loathed all of these people, these Siřem people who had called me a rat and an Avar and a filthy beast and a nutcase, and they had given me a stool to sit on to watch television, and they’d known they’d let me, the whole time I was there. Then they started nodding off on their seats and in their armchairs… I must have fallen asleep too. I dreamed about a chicken in embers and I was picking it out of the fire, taking it out of its clay and tapping it, and it was alive and we went off together into the big wide world… and then I heard giggling and loud laughter, and Mrs Kropáček saying, ‘Les, you mucky pup! Get that kid out of here!’ And there was a river on the telly with a naked girl in it. She was swimming and pawing at the water, arching her back in the water and looking straight at me… Czechia come to life, with long hair, standing in the water. I could see her breasts and her beautiful face… and the people in the room were like one big face, patted together out of a mound of flesh, and that fleshy mug went ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ at me. The stool tipped over and I jumped up and ran away, and I was suddenly outdoors in the dark and the cold, and, breathing as much air as I possibly could, I leaned back against the barn and wanked myself off and squirted my seed on the ground.

And before it even dawned on me that this was the very best moment of my life, it had passed.

Inside they poured me another drink. There was no girl on the television, or any troops, and me having had weapons training, I seized Mr Kropáček’s rifle like a pro, but he slapped me on the hand and said, ‘Now then, lad!’

I raised my hand to my mouth and bit it, quick and vicious-like, like a wolf, and suddenly I knew that no-one would ever dare to shout at me again. No-one would dare to slap me or call me ‘animal’ or ‘filthy beast’. No-one would ever dare to pull my ear or bash me or call me ‘little shit’ or ‘little bugger’, because I could kill them — not with a rifle or my bare hands or a knife, but just kill them.

And Mr Kropáček suddenly realized all this too and he knew, and he looked at me and they’d all realized, they all knew, so they just gawped at me. ‘What’s coming next?’ their eyes all asked.

‘Nothing. I’ll let you off for now,’ I thought to myself, and out loud I said, ‘I know a boy whose dad’s a wolf. How about that?’

Mrs Moravčík spluttered and said, ‘Sure you do, lad, and he was brought by a stork, just like you!’ ‘By a lady stork,’ Mr Moravčík chipped in, poking her in the chest, and Mrs Moravčík went, ‘Tee-hee,’ and Mrs Kropáček said, ‘A wolf? That’s nothing, but how about a randy old goat?’ and they all went, ‘Yeah, a goat!’ And Mr Kropáček said, ‘Come, come, old thing!’ and downed another shot and started choking, and Mr Holý shouted, ‘You stud, you!’ and Mrs Moravčík giggled and squealed, ‘Goodness, you men! You’re all goat here and stud there, but you’re just filthy pigs…’ and Mrs Moravčík took a deep breath, ready to say something else, but then we heard this almighty bang, then another and another, and suddenly there was light everywhere outside and the light smashed into the window, breaking the glass, which came flying in at us and we ran for it.

The sky was falling down! Giant storks were flying over the earth, flapping their wings, which were like sails of fire, and there were more great bangs, and the storks snapped their beaks — tak-tak-tak-tak! — and landed at somebody’s feet, but I couldn’t help laughing… Because in those fluttering shadows of the sky I saw pigs instead of clouds! The air was full of squealing piglets, and there was even a huge sow crawling across the black sky, and the shadows of billy goats and nanny goats leaping up high, dog shadows and cockerel shadows riding on the shadows of pigs! And a weasel with a bloody snout was begging on its hind legs in front of some hens that were miaowing like cats… It was great fun, all these rollicking shadows! And above the non-stop rumbling made by the heavens as they cracked open I could hear pigs grunting, goats bleating, and stallions and bulls stamping their hooves, making a throaty rattle, foaming at the mouth… Someone grabbed me by the shoulder and picked me up, and suddenly I was out of all that racket and chaos. Mr Moravčík and Mr Kropáček were standing together and looking up at the sky, as were the others. We stood in darkness. The sky was still thundering. Light still flew across it. But now it was far away.

‘Christ almighty!’ said Mr Kropáček. ‘They’re bombing Louny!’

‘Shit!’ said Mr Moravčík. ‘So it can’t be the Yanks.’

‘They could’ve made a mistake,’ someone said.

‘The Yanks don’t make mistakes,’ said someone else.

For a moment we were all silent.

Then someone said, ‘It’s not Nato. That’s not the Yanks. It’s the Russians.’

Then some woman squeaked, ‘Oh God!’ But the others stayed silent.

‘Where’s the lad?’ someone asked.

And someone said, ‘Quick, find the boy!’

Mr Moravčík came towards me with his arms held out, and Mr Kropáček was also groping in the darkness. They were looking for me! I dodged out of the way and from the road a light whipped through the gloom. It rumbled and shrieked over my head. The Kropáčeks’ cottage shuddered in flames and gradually collapsed. I could hear clanking and roaring coming from the road. There were some monsters by the bridge, crammed together. They had pointy beaks like storks, but they were tanks.

The air hissed again and I heard vroweeee! There was a flash of fire above me and a column of white smoke rose up in the darkness at the very spot where the people from the house had been standing. I took a step towards the bridge and went towards the monsters with my arms raised, outstretched. I went towards the shellfire, with my back to the people trying to catch me, and from the bridge it did it again: vroweeee! The air hissed and one of the tanks drove through the burning house. With a roar and a clank the tank stopped right in front of me, and rising up on top of it was the figure of a man in uniform, and he also raised his arms towards me, and I skipped up and over the tracks like a weasel and now I was on the tank with my dad. We tramp towards each other across the tank’s armour plating, and we laugh for joy in the dark and the smoke and the thudding of shells. We rejoice and embrace! Otherwise I’d have fallen off!

Dad hugged me to him. I sank my face in his belly and I was amazed to have found my father exactly where Commander Vyžlata had told us. Shells whizzed past us. You could still hear shouting, but Dad held me tight, and I got this flash of an idea that even if this man wasn’t my dad, it was definitely better to be standing on a tank than to be a corpse lying shot to ribbons under it. I guess that’s obvious.