Gargling With Tar

13: And things started to happen! Sacks and violence. The sweetness of the world. Dago

And that’s how I came to know Captain Yegorov that night.

And things started to happen.

All I can remember from the succession of days that followed is the roasting, blazing daytime. It was very hot. We flew along, and the days and nights were coloured by the flashes that our column’s weapons spat whenever the need arose.

Our isolated tank column criss-crossed the rebellious Czech countryside. The insurgents had torn down the signposts marking towns and villages, making it totally impossible for us to find our bearings in the open.

That much I gathered from what an orderly, Kantariya, said. As soon as me and Captain Yegorov, whose embrace had rescued me, jumped down off the armour plating of the lead tank, Gunner Kantariya and I unloaded the command tent for Captain Yegorov from the two pickups that made up our supply train.

I spent part of that night and the following morning answering the questions asked by the little band of tank crewmen and sub-machine-gunners. It was a friendly, informal interrogation. The experienced fighting men of the Soviet armoured corps were pleased to have met me. In the land of the Czechs they had grown accustomed to being sworn at, stoned and shot at by snipers. Whereas me, marching towards the tanks with my arms held high, I had seemed more like some boy fallen from the skies. They were pleased that I had greeted them in their own language. During the interrogation, not one of these smoking, smiling, fighting men had asked me about my parents. Later I understood that many of them saw the army as their family. I blessed all those at the Home from Home who had come from the Soviet Union and spoke their language, even though the nuns had tried to ban it. For it was only thanks to what they had taught me that I was of any use to my rescuers.

I spent that first night with Captain Yegorov in his tent, and when he ordered me to remove his boots I quickly understood that the trick was to kneel, grab one boot and hold it tight, while the exhausted captain levered gently against my shoulder with his other boot, gave a little kick with one leg and a jerk with the other and so liberated his leg from the boot’s firm embrace. Only then did Captain Yegorov collapse onto his folding camp bed, while I wrapped myself in one of the many rugs that made up the soft, multicoloured floor of the command tent and fell asleep as well.

It happened in the morning, while we were drawing rations.

After answering all of the questions, I was assigned to the hull front of the lead tank in the column.

Gunner Kantariya brought me the bottom half of a tank crewman’s uniform, while Gunner Timosha brought me the top half of a tank crewman’s uniform, and we turned them up and pinned them.

As I was getting changed, the bundle of documents fell out from under my tracksuit top.

Gunner Kantariya tore one up and niftily rolled himself a cigarette, but when Captain Yegorov saw this he grabbed him by the ear and gave him a cuff.

Then Captain Yegorov pored long and hard over the maps I had drawn on the documents. During my explanation, he kept nodding in agreement.

I’d had saboteur training and now it came into its own. And if the Soviet soldiers still had any doubts that I’d been sent from heaven, now they were dispelled.

I described the world as mapped on the documents that had fallen from under my tracksuit top and Captain Yegorov listened closely. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Molodets!’

At the time I knew nothing about the special assignment of the ‘Happy Song’ tank column. I had no idea why we were cruising around the countryside and scouring it. I didn’t know what or who we were looking for.

Nor did I know that the defiant Czechs had torn down and destroyed all of the notices and signposts and town and village signs absolutely everywhere, nor that Captain Yegorov’s tank column, cut off for some strange reason from the main body of the Warsaw Pact troops, was wandering about the country lost.

That first morning of my life in the turned-up uniform of a Soviet soldier was spent watching Captain Yegorov and his taciturn band of tank crewmen and gunners study my maps long and hard. Then Captain Yegorov jabbed a finger into one of them at the point where the village of Tomašín was, and our column moved off.

And things started to happen!

*

I saw the world from the front hull plating of the tank, and I heard the world in the roar of its engine, and in the crackling and whistling of the radio, and the crackling of the transmitter inside the tank, and in the raised voices spluttering protests at the Soviet occupiers, crazed voices coming from the loudspeakers that had been erected in every village around Chapman Forest, just like in Siřem, and I also saw the world on the televisions inside captured but not yet demolished houses and cottages, but television held no more surprises for me. I didn’t give a damn about it anyway, because there was never a naked girl on it. The television screens were just filled with newsreels from various battles, and you couldn’t even tell which side was reporting, because the Russians often overdubbed Czech transmissions and vice versa, and sometimes the Czechs spoke Russian and the Russians Czech so as to confuse and frighten each other, and nobody knew what was really going on.

All the bonfires of the century converged on us, while the iron hammers of the age whizzed through the air above and pounded the landscape like an anvil. Hunkered down in my snug made from rags on the front hull of the lead tank, I realized that as interpreter to the ‘Happy Song’ tank column I had tumbled headlong into the greatest event of the twentieth century: the Czecho-Russian War.

It was summer and the land of the Czechs shuddered and shook under our tanks, and the horizon was filled with the smoke of fires. The armies of five nations of the Warsaw Pact, led by the Guards regiments of the Soviet Army, had attacked Czechoslovakia and an uprising had broken out.

Guiding the tank column around the Siřem area was dead easy. My maps perfectly depicted the landmarks around Chapman Forest.

Me and Captain Yegorov cruised the countryside aboard the lead tank, smashing pockets of resistance. We pored over my maps point by point, and my world became vast. I saw the world from the front hull plating of the tank, high above the heat-softened asphalt, over which the air quivered in blasts from our engines.

I surveyed all the footbridges and wayside shrines and triangulation points that I knew from our training sessions, and I guided the column safely. So we burnt down Tomašín, because some Czechs threw Molotov cocktails at us, and we fought doggedly against snipers hidden in treetops and barns. I pinpointed the last of them to Captain Yegorov with my arm outstretched and my thumb raised, and I estimated the distance with my fingers and reported it, exactly according to The Motorized Rifleman’s Handbook, and when the barrel of our lead tank flashed and the sniper disappeared along with the treetop, Captain Yegorov put his arm around me and said to his men, ‘That’s my boy!’ and the soldiers laughed, and Gunner Kantariya exclaimed, ‘That was your first bag!’

And so on the squishy asphalt of Tomašín village we laughed for joy, because we’d destroyed a treacherous sniper. But we didn’t laugh long, because we were attacked by members of the 1st company of the Jan Žižka Motorized Rifle Division of the Czechoslovak People’s Army, and they didn’t stop attacking us until we had killed lots of them.

And this was a new situation, since the Czechoslovak Army had joined sides with the rebels and therefore had betrayed the other armies of the Warsaw Pact.

I told Captain Yegorov what unit the dead belonged to after reading various papers taken from their pockets, and I translated their letters, but not quite in full because they began with things like My love, I’m thinking of you… or Hi Gran, I’m well… Captain Yegorov just waved them away. But we didn’t find any decent maps on the dead men.

And from the rasping transmitter in the tank and the radio receiver in the commander’s tent I gathered that the Bohemian Lion had roared and the entire land was in revolt.

After we were attacked for the first time by a regular army corps, gunners Kantariya and Timosha, accustomed to killing cowards in cottages, sank into contemplation. Gunner Timosha said he couldn’t understand how the Czechoslovak Army could take defensive action, betraying the armies of five nations of the Warsaw Pact, but Gunner Kantariya wasn’t one for moping around, and with a whistle and a snap of his fingers he started dancing on the tank’s front hull, as if to challenge the low, dismal clouds… Kantariya’s dancing was a challenge to the land of the Czechs and a warning as well… The tank crews cheered him on, but I couldn’t work out who had betrayed whom and where that left me. What would happen if I were spotted on the tank by, say, Mr Kropáček with his poaching piece or Mr Moravčík with his pistol? Who was that sniper we’d made mincemeat of? Was it someone I knew? And what would Dýha or Karel think if they could see me now? And I got the idea that from now on I would only look out at the world from my tank with my face blackened, and I was about to scoop up a handful of axle grease — a common subterfuge when you’re in a hostile alien environment — when I heard a voice I knew well coming from the tank’s radio down below, in between the whistling and crackling of the signal. And so, as swift as a weasel, I dropped inside the tank, and the clapping and whistling sub-machine-gunners who were still admiring Kantariya’s dancing didn’t find it at all odd: Ilya the interpreter was merely going about his work.

I dropped inside the tank and put on my headphones. The announcement — ‘Hello, hello, Radio Free Siřem calling…’ — was followed by a terrible barrage of obscenities and profanities, many in Czech and many in Russian. It was Commander Žinka calling the people to arms and giving instructions on how to produce effective home-made weapons, as well as advice on the tactics of partisan warfare, including poisoning wells. He even talked about a scorched earth policy. Judging from the obscenities and profanities, I decided that Commander Žinka had not quite stuck to his pledge to give up alcohol, and I imagined Margash and me standing in front of Žinka with our knives down our trousers, still wet after washing off Vyžlata’s blood, while he assembled the Radio Free Siřem transmitter. And I remembered the depths of the cellar at the Home from Home and what lay there, and I told myself that because of the rebels who listened to Radio Free Siřem and ambushed us and tore down signs and demolished bridges, we couldn’t even get our tank column past Chapman Forest and leave Siřem far behind, and I was sorry that we, Margash and me, hadn’t managed to kill Žinka in the end.

And so we cruised the countryside. Sometimes Czech bandits blocked our way with barricades, and in some places that we had previously driven through unmolested we met with gunfire. We were indifferent by then to the crack of hunting rifles and poaching pieces, but more and more we were subjected to volleys of automatic fire, and on the lead tank Captain Yegorov was frowning.

Sometimes, even during our evening halt and with his boots already removed, Captain Yegorov would listen to Radio Free Siřem.

During Radio Free Siřem’s transmissions Captain Yegorov would drum his fingers on the top of the folding desk in the command tent, and I judged from his silence and the gloom that furrowed his imperious brow that the destruction of the Radio Free Siřem transmitter would make Captain Yegorov very happy.

But I didn’t want to go into Siřem! I’d been using my maps to direct the tank column away from Siřem — as far away as possible.

Reading maps and using the Czech language were part of my job description. I only abandoned my snug on the front hull of the tank during battle situations, provided there was time. I was small enough not to restrict the movement of the tank’s gun barrel, but I always wanted to be as far away from the cannon as possible. In battle situations I stuck close to the prudent Gunner Timosha and the roguish Gunner Kantariya, who never stopped cracking jokes, even in a blaze of shellfire. I was just following Captain Yegorov’s orders. In the calm of evening, inside the command tent, me and gunners Kantariya and Timosha would see to the needs of our commander.

Kantariya and Timosha also looked after the supply train. They had the drivers and crews of both pickups in the train under their command.

It was like this: every time we destroyed a pocket of Czech resistance, Kantariya and Timosha would drive out in the two pickups. They would load onto them kitchen clocks, rugs, stag statuettes, church plate, wall decorations, and also selected fancy crockery and anything else that Captain Yegorov requested.

Money, jewels, watches taken from the dead and various other small items were stuffed in sacks by Kantariya and Timosha. It all belonged to Captain Yegorov.

At night it was me who guarded the sacks, but I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the supply pickups. The two gunners made that plain from the outset. That was fine by me and I made no attempt to discover their secret. I had plenty of work of my own to do, thank you very much.

During that long succession of days, which were all much alike, I lived pressed tight to the tank’s armour plating, snuggling up to the iron like a beetle mimicking the bark of a tree, and no-one ever called me a ‘little bugger!’ or a ‘filthy beast!’ or ‘Avar!’ or a ‘poor slob!’ Nobody there ever spoke to me like that. Bullets from the sub-machine-gunners’ Kalashnikovs and the NCOs’ side arms would have killed them on the spot if they had. Our column carried massive quantities of weapons and supplies and fuel, and nobody could touch us.

My task was to report everything I knew about my field training to Captain Yegorov. I reported where signposts were. I knew in advance where we’d get sight of a church tower, where there could be snipers or valuables, and only I knew which way and how to get inside grain stores, where there could well be pockets of resistance.

In the tank column I alone knew that barns also have small doors through which insurgent Czechs could cut and run for the open, and I alone knew that the cellars under the village houses were often linked by passageways, and where to look for them.

Yet I sensed that soon we would have covered the entire area marked on my maps, and then what would happen? I didn’t want to go to Siřem. We trundled round and round in circles through the heart of Bohemia.

Commander Žinka and his Radio Free Siřem transmitter were to blame for that.

Following his instructions, people tore down the signposts and tried to lure our column into Chapman Forest with decoy fire.

We would come up to signposts and find them whitewashed out.

We criss-crossed villages and hamlets, and burnt down isolated farms with hostile people lurking in them, but nowhere were there any names for these villages, and the people we captured just shook their heads fearfully, and said in Russian, ‘Don’t know!’

In our entire column only I understood the Czech announcements that drifted our way from the loudspeakers in the villages just before we shot them to smithereens.

It was one of my jobs as interpreter to translate them.

I gathered that while in many places disorientated Soviet and other Warsaw Pact soldiers were sitting around in their barracks doing nothing, Czech units, armed to the teeth, were taking over arms factories, occupying airports and aerodromes, demolishing bridges and hunting down the Warsaw Pact armies.

The Warsaw Pact armies had been surprised at the stubborn opposition of the Czechoslovak People’s Army and various armed bands of insurgents.

We had thought that the very first strike by our troops would bring the Czechs to their knees, and then the only people ruling in Prague would be traitors and collaborators, and the whole of Czechoslovakia would become a defenceless satellite of the Soviet Union. ‘Obviously, that was their miscalculation,’ the radio announced.

Radio Free Siřem reported that heroic Sasha Dubček was leading the resistance of his people from somewhere below ground at Prague Castle and that the silver-flecked Vltava was awash with the corpses of occupying troops.

‘Following the attack by the invasion forces and the outbreak of a popular uprising, which has been given effective support by the Czechoslovak People’s Army, the movements of Warsaw Pact troops within Czechoslovakia have been severely restricted. We’ve got the wretched Soviets in a clinch!’ the radio reported. Then, after its proud call sign (‘The Truth Prevails!’), Radio Free Siřem usually played the song ‘Arise, Ye Holy Warriors of Blaník’, followed by the anthem ‘Where is My Home?’.

The radio played these songs over and over again, and before long they even began to be whistled by the good-humoured Gunner Kantariya and other soldiers in our column.

Meanwhile, the number of sacks in the pickups continued to grow. They were hidden under tarpaulins.

The sub-machine-gunners and pickup drivers whistled merrily as they went about their tasks, because they didn’t understand the radio reports.

The radio said that the land of the Czechs was undefeated, yet still more and more Soviet, Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian and East German units came streaming in.

Also, the radio often spoke of the incredible feats of popular Czech outlaw-heroes.

It was then that I caught the name of Commander Baudyš.

The Soviet command issued an order for all radio transmitters to be destroyed, one by one, in any sector where their armies were operating.

On the day when the gunners and tank crews, headed by Captain Yegorov, heard a radio report that a Slovak national uprising had broken out and that the eagles of the Carpathians had swept aside the invading Soviet units, and that together with the lions of Bohemia they had the enemy in their clutches, Captain Yegorov ordered the radio to be switched off and no-one was allowed to listen to it.

He focused all of his attention on the Radio Free Siřem transmitter in our sector. But we couldn’t put it out of action, because we hadn’t found it, and I really didn’t want to go back to Siřem.

‘Attention!’ shouted the radio, in Czech and in Russian, and the sound rumbled out of wirelesses inside every cottage, and the Czechoslovak People’s Army fought hard and not one Czech or Slovak officer capitulated without a shot being fired, and the Czech voices coming over the loudspeakers were full of hatred, and the talking heads on television heaped abuse on the Soviet soldiers. ‘Isolated groups are fighting their way through the countryside!’ they announced. ‘Don’t talk to the occupiers! Don’t offer them a glass of water! Sit tight and await the arrival of the armed forces of the civilized world!’

The Czechs we interrogated knew only one Russian word: ‘Neznaju’, ‘I don’t know’. Yet those village loudspeakers emitted a constant stream of invective at the Russian soldiers, and walls were daubed with slogans and red stars intertwined with swastikas, and lots of the inscriptions were in Cyrillic, and our soldiers weren’t interested in being offered water by the people we interrogated, but in knowing where we were, but the people didn’t tell them.

And so we moved about according to my maps, eliminating any bandits in the sector.

We were at war and sometimes the movement of our column along the minor roads around Chapman Forest meant fighting for every square inch, at times relying on brute violence. We also tried to live a normal life, like drinking tea in the evening. Before joining the army, some of the soldiers and NCOs of the ‘Happy Song’ tank column had lived ordinary lives. But on the tanks we lived only violence. Living violence means that any single moment of one’s life can suddenly turn into the violence that ends in death. That wasn’t in the handbooks.

One morning I walked into the woods whistling a tune, just to… to squat down, to relieve myself like soldiers do. I went into the woods a little way from the tank, just two or three steps until I was hidden by a wall of greenery, the road well out of sight, then something cracked above me and a net fell over me, pulling tight, and a hand over my mouth stopped me from crying out.

They carried me in the net like a rabbit, deeper and deeper into the woods, where they shook me out onto the ground. There were four of them, armed with poaching rifles over their shoulders and knives in their hands.

‘God, it’s just a lad!’ spluttered one of them in Czech.

‘Who are you?’ he asked me.

‘I’m Ilya!’ I blurted out, and to stop them killing me there and then I started gabbling about the Home from Home, Commander Baudyš, the tank column and all that.

‘I see. So you’re a Baudyš boy?’ said one of the bandits, letting out a low whistle.

And then it started. They asked about the Russian column’s firepower, the names of the commanding officers, our numbers and the weak points in the column, like dented armour. They asked about the level of our stocks and fuel supplies, and you could tell from their questions that they had had some training, and I told them everything, even about Captain Yegorov’s sacks. It was easy for me, because I’d been trained too.

And when I explained how I’d been guiding the tanks and the two pickups in circles round and round the area using my maps, their chief patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘Well done, lad!’

They give me some tasty bread and salt pork, and I ate it, though I was far from hungry. Then their chief said, ‘Okay, off you go…’ and I said, ‘What?’ Having talked to them I didn’t feel much like eliminating bandit gangs any more, but their chief said, ‘You’ve got a job to do, haven’t you?’ Then he added, ‘And you can always drop messages inside some roadside shrine. That’ll work, the aggressor being illiterate and all, ha, ha, ha!’ Then they vanished into a thicket. Since they obviously didn’t want me with them in the forest, I stood up and headed back to the tank column.

I didn’t tell anyone there about the interrogation. I’m not mad.

During the day I had plenty of jobs to do in the ‘Happy Song’ tank column. By night my job was to guard Captain Yegorov’s sacks.

After a day full of the tensions of battle, the Captain enjoyed sitting in his tent and sorting out their shiny and precious contents. He soon realized they might be useful. For me there was the joy of pulling a little lever or straightening a bit of bent metal plating and setting an ancient silver watch bearing a portrait of Czechia going again. Captain Yegorov called this type of watch ‘devochka’ — ‘the maiden’ — and he was fond of it. Many items were a bit sooty and battle-scarred. There was plenty of repair work to do. I remembered Commander Baudyš and mentally thanked him for all those woodwork and metalwork lessons when he’d taught us to respect the craftsmanship of ‘golden Czech hands’.

Later, I was present at actions that presaged more spoils to come. The church in the village of Bataj held many treasures, which the Captain saved from the flames that destroyed the church. Carved saints, pictures of the Madonna or Czechia, silver and gold plate belonging to the priest and to God. In the village of Skryje the priest buried the church treasures under the entrance to the vicarage. He only volunteered this information under interrogation. He was happy to hand over lots of gold and silver teaspoons as well.

The captain’s sacks also accepted money. All currencies were welcome. After a string of interrogations, especially of cowardly non-combatants, we sometimes also found cute-looking money from those faraway, foreign Nato states Germany and America. Captain Yegorov took this as evidence that the bandit gangs were being financed by Western capital. There were many, many sacks.

It was a great honour for me to be allowed to assist Captain Yegorov during those peaceful evening moments, and sometimes I would tie up the sacks and sometimes untie them. The captain trusted me so much that he would even tie me to the sacks for the night. Having heaved his boots off by using me as leverage, he waved me away, and, tied to the sacks of valuables and money, I would snuggle down in my rugs.

Of course, after that Captain Yegorov carried on smoking, thinking or whistling on his camp bed. Sometimes he looked at his pictures. These came into his keeping after the capture of Tomašín and other pockets of resistance.

I must admit I was a bit surprised when, on one of my first days in the army, Captain Yegorov took me behind the tank and showed me these coloured pictures. They were images of sometimes comical animals from faraway places. He showed me a camel, a tiger, a duck-billed platypus, a kudu and other creatures, and asked if I’d seen any of them.

I assured him that, to the best of my knowledge, these animals didn’t live in Chapman Forest.

Sometimes, during rare moments of leisure, the other men of the ‘Happy Song’ tank column also looked at pictures like these.

Once I caught Gunner Kantariya swapping a picture of an elephant for one of a zebra with Gunner Timosha, while they engaged in a light-hearted squabble accompanied by bursts of laughter. Gunner Kantariya had two elephants in his collection, but not a single zebra.

I knew all these animals from my nature lessons long ago, when the nuns had taught us. And I also remembered many of the illustrations in The Catholic Book of Knowledge.

At this time I didn’t fully understand the ways of Soviet soldiers. I just assumed they were having lessons on the tanks.

It also occurred to me that they thought they were conquering Africa.

At the time, I knew nothing at all about the special assignment of the ‘Happy Song’ tank column.

That was soon to change.

That night I made the acquaintance of Willy. Willy Dagobert, the midget Dago.

I’d been crying in the night. I was lying wrapped in the rugs I was guarding, because it was the time of my guard duty, although after a day full of fighting I was in a kind of limbo, only then I wasn’t in limbo, I was just blubbering.

All of us kids from the Home from Home had learned not only to speak without moving our lips during the endless roll-calls and line-ups, but also to cry without making a sound, because if we’d disturbed the others in the dormitory, we’d have got a smack in the mouth; that’s how things were in the older boys’ dormitory, because one boy crying ruins everyone’s sleep.

Blubbering in silence is easy, provided the blubberer learns to catch the snot and saliva and tears and keep swallowing them as he breathes in and out; the rhythm can even restore his calm and he can fall asleep.

I was blubbering then because there wasn’t time to while our tank column pushed onwards or while we were conquering pockets of resistance, and above all there wasn’t time to process the images that kept popping up in my head.

That day, me, Gunner Timosha and Gunner Kantariya made up the crew of the lead tank, and we had just captured a fragrant avenue of cherry trees, so we were celebrating noisily, reaching up to drag down the branches full of cherries that arched above our heads, unpicked, because the Czechs who had previously been stubbornly defending the avenue were now lying on the ground with holes in their heads and bodies or had fled into the fields. And a new watch on Gunner Timosha’s wrist glinted under the blazing sun, and he was smiling, and Gunner Kantariya was laughing too, nudging me with his elbow and shrieking in Russian, ‘Ilya, where are all the Czech girls?’ We stuffed ourselves with cherries and our mouths were full of the sweet juice, and I was filled with the sweetness of the world, and I wanted the sub-machine-gunners to let me have a Kalashnikov as well, because I could handle a gun, they’d see! And I reached out for orderly Timosha’s sub-machine gun, but his face suddenly hardened, as did Gunner Kantariya’s face, and one said, ‘Niet!’ and the other said, ‘No you don’t!’, and I understood that even though I was one of them — that is, although I was the ‘Happy Song’ tank column’s interpreter — in reality I wasn’t quite one of them.

And I thought about what we had done to the Czechs who were defending the cherry avenue, and many others besides, and of course I wondered what the Czechs would do to me, despite my axle grease-blackened face, if ever I fell off the tank or something.

It was thoughts like these that troubled me as I cried silently among the sacks, and just before the darkness parted and I saw the midget Dago, Hanka kept appearing in my mind, I was back standing with her in the corridor, feeling her soft and firm and warm breast in the palm of my hand, and the image was so powerful and full of longing that I grew heavy and limp with all the sweetness of the world, which coursed in my bones as if through rigid pipes, and the image of Hanka flip-flopped with the image of the naked girl on television coming out of the water the day the Russkies came, and I nearly relived that very best moment in my life when I jerked myself off to my heart’s content leaning back on the barn wall.

But I couldn’t.

The thing is, in the middle of all that killing I couldn’t.

So I wasn’t like gunners Kantariya and Timosha and presumably all our other tank crewmen and sub-machine-gunners and pickup drivers, who went on about doing it with girls almost continuously both on the tanks and during rare moments of leisure in camp, talking like real blokes, in Russian.

I wasn’t a real bloke yet. I was just a child, and I was sick of it.

And so I tried to do it, but I couldn’t, and while the sweetness of the world drifted out of my reach, it was overtaken by a coldness and a futility that seemed to burrow deep inside me, as if driven by the chill wind blowing out of Chapman Forest.

And at that very moment the darkness seemed to part before my very eyes. A sack made the slightest of movements, and in the first glimmer of dawn I saw the strange face of the midget Dago.

14: We’re on the run! Animals. Meadows. The first kurgan

He had slashed the canvas of the tent and stepped inside, then pressed himself against one of the sacks and in the half-light of daybreak merged with it.

I didn’t know if he was a Czech sent to murder Captain Yegorov and steal his spoils of war or whether he was some bogeyman from Chapman Forest. My face was by his boots, but they weren’t boots, more like bootees, and I could see that if this were a man he must be very small, and at first I thought it might be one of the Bandits, but I was wrong.

I attacked at once, determined to destroy the creature and forgetting that I was attached to the precious sacks.

We thrashed about in a screaming ball, and if he had wanted to stab me, he could have done so. I had anticipated that possibility, because in the tank corps I’d had some bad moments even on days that were otherwise glorious, and then I had hoped to be killed — those were my bad moments, which came from too much thinking.

But then I couldn’t think. The little guy fought furiously and with skill, and while I was busy screaming, he defended himself without a sound. He had me flat on the ground, when suddenly I felt an excruciating pain in my side. A kick knocked me away from the creature, and I was staring up at the muzzle of Captain Yegorov’s pistol, as well as the muzzles of the Kalashnikovs of gunners Timosha and Kantariya, while all around us were the other sub-machine-gunners, holding pistols and Kalashnikovs, and also knives and entrenching tools, and they looked so furious they would have killed us both if Captain Yegorov hadn’t chased them out of the tent.

The gunners dragged me away by the rope that was tied to my ankles, cut me loose from the sacks and carried on guarding me outside, under the muzzles of their raised weapons.

Captain Yegorov stayed inside the tent with several NCOs, and the interrogation of the creature of the night began. I guessed as much from his howls. Finally I heard his voice and it was the voice of a man, and it was obvious that he was being interrogated. At one point the blows he received made the walls of the tent belly out, and you could see the outline of the creature’s tiny body. He was smaller than the smallest longshirt at the Home from Home. Outside we all froze, because the stranger’s howling inside the tent ended in the sort of plaintive whine that usually accompanies interrogations, then suddenly changed into a child’s snivelling, and then something that cannot be described as anything other than the mewling of a baby. All was clear.

Willy Dagobert, known as Dago, was an East German comrade of ours. He was the only one who’d managed to fight his way out of enemy territory. The only man in the East German contingent who’d managed to make his way through Chapman Forest on foot, avoiding Czech patrols, and find our tank column.

So he wasn’t really put out by his initial interrogation. The beating he received was more than compensated for by his joy at finding us, and discovering that he hadn’t infiltrated a camp of Czech bandits by mistake, as he’d feared initially.

It wasn’t long before he’d cemented his friendship with Captain Yegorov and all the tank column’s NCOs and other ranks with the aid of several vodkas, and although he was bleeding a little from a few flesh wounds, he made light of them and gave an impromptu performance on the front of one of the tanks.

This was received with much enjoyment among the troops of the tank column. On Captain Yegorov’s orders I also watched.

At first Dago just hopped up and down, but to the amazement and great pleasure of us all, once he got into his stride, he cut some capers on the tank, turning somersaults in the air, and it looked as if, under his tiny, sure feet, the tank was made of rubber and wasn’t at all the murderous monster that crushed some men to pulp while providing a modicum of security for others.

Leaping high above the tank Dago turned somersaults, accompanied by all kinds of sounds coming from his tiny throat — deep, drawling groans and squeaky shrieks, and now and then even little tunes — and this medley of sounds seemed to converge on us from all sides until some of the gunners began looking about them in terror. Then with his little legs Dago did a pitter-patter run-up and started leaping from tank to tank, and in this way he cartwheeled and pirouetted his way around all the tanks in the column, and the soldiers’ delight grew and grew, and then Dago executed the highlight of his turn: in the middle of a mighty leap in the air he made himself small, getting smaller and smaller, looking no bigger than a football. Rolled up like that, he landed in Captain Yegorov’s arms, and now he mooed and whined and bleated like a baby, which was side-splittingly funny, because the baby in Captain Yegorov’s arms had a moustache and the wrinkled face of a dwarf.

Roaring with laughter, the captain briefly dandled him in his arms, then kind of sniffed at his nappy and pretended to be fainting and gasping for breath, and we had never seen the captain so jolly and making jokes, so we clapped and cheered. Then he handed baby Dago to the NCO next to him, who also rocked him in his arms and to general laughter and amusement began pacing about like some village mother before passing Dago on. When Dago had had enough of this rocking and dandling, he suddenly leapt down, straightened his shoulders and stood there before us to acknowledge our applause and cheers, and Captain Yegorov was clapping, his eyes brimming with tears, and kept repeating, ‘What an artist! What an artist!’ and we all said it too.

Then Captain Yegorov bent down to the dwarf and shook his hand. We applauded, breathless with joy, and of course, Dago couldn’t make himself any bigger.

That day we didn’t determine our position using my maps. Dago the dwarf waved them aside and pointed to the spot on the horizon where the asphalt of the road seemed to merge into the trees of Chapman Forest.

Dago set our course and the column moved off to liberate the East German Hygea Circus, which was under siege by Czech bandits. He hoped that his East German comrades would be able to keep the rebellious villagers at bay until our tank column arrived.

That day, spirits were high. From Gunner Kantariya’s silly jokes and Gunner Timosha’s more earnest musings I gathered that my Soviet comrades loved the circus.

I still didn’t know exactly what our ‘Happy Song’ tank column’s mission really was, but from all the banter that rattled between the tanks to the rhythm of our progress it was clear to me that meeting a circus came as no surprise to Yegorov’s sub-machine-gunners. On the contrary, it was supposed to have happened long before, somewhere in the Tomašín-Siřem sector.

But because of the uprising of the Czechoslovak masses and also the hostile operations of the Czechoslovak Army, the plans of the circus and our tank troops had been thwarted.

So it was no surprise that, as we travelled, feverish preparations were underway for a grand meeting. In a tank on the move there is no opportunity to wash one’s clothes, so many privates aired the more neglected parts of their uniforms and underwear, at least perfunctorily, in the favourable summer breeze. Also on the move, they would rip fresh branches from the trees of Chapman Forest to make replacement camouflage.

Dago, safely ensconced between me and the gunners on the lead tank, never stopped chattering in his hard-sounding Russian, urging us to hurry. We especially thrilled to the things he told us about the girls of the East German Hygea Circus, who rode bareback and sang and flew on the trapeze. I also burnt with desire to see some of the mysterious, exotic animals I only knew from nature lessons and pictures, and Gunner Timosha didn’t need asking twice to get out his set of animal picture cards. My delight knew no bounds when Dago dismissed the picture of an elephant with a scornful, ‘Ours is bigger!’ He said the same thing about the prairie dog picture, and the bear and the polar bear… The Hygea Circus seemed to be stocked with every conceivable animal in the world, and I couldn’t wait.

And there was another thing. The circus might help me.

My days in the tank corps were mostly good, and no-one could get at me. But I sensed that no matter how many circuses we might meet, the uprising of the Czech masses would rage on. And what would I do if Captain Yegorov ordered me to start interpreting the broadcasts of Radio Free Siřem again, then ordered an attack on Siřem? How much longer could I use my maps to direct the tank column around and about Siřem, but not into Siřem?

It was clear to me that if Captain Yegorov realized that I was deceiving him, he would stop liking me. I didn’t want things to go that far. It also occurred to me that I might fit in better at Dago’s circus. Who so artfully dodged all those chain-clanking bulls? Who knew how to reduce a slavering village hound to groaning submission with a swift kick to the jaw? Who used to cart buckets of slops out to the sows that would eat anything? And who could communicate with a little horse harnessed to a sleigh? It wouldn’t be work at all, dealing with animals again. I was desperately looking forward to meeting the circus. Everyone was.

But it came to nothing.

It was like this. Originally, the ‘Happy Song’ tank column simply put down pockets of resistance, then restocked with food from these captured positions. But things changed. Now we attacked every building we encountered, and because the Czechs wouldn’t voluntarily give us even a glass of water, it was best to take everything they had.

We went straight in with the tanks, because the efforts of our supply squads had proved a failure. As far as I could tell from the level-headed musings of Gunner Timosha, the Soviet supply squads sent into the villages and hamlets of Chapman Forest often came back with less than they had gone with, and their haul might be no more than a couple of jars or tins, and it wasn’t unheard of for them not to come back at all, and for the tank column to be surprised the next day by being cut off and fired upon by the valuable semi-automatic weapons taken from our dead soldiers.

Yet we had no way of stocking our field kitchen other than by stealing from Czech pantries. So our tanks always set an enemy building or whole village on fire first, then we would burst into the captured building or smouldering ruins of the village and grab anything that could be carried away, including water.

And we completely ignored the reports coming from the Radio Free Siřem transmitter.

And we also ignored the eyes in the forest, the entire forest having become bandit territory, and while we were still lords and masters of the roads and lanes, the forest was full of people who were watching us and meant us harm.

And we ignored the fact that painted on the white walls of houses and cottages, or on the tarmac of roads and lanes, were skull and crossbones symbols smirking at us, and that we were also being vilified everywhere by signs and insults scrawled in Russian.

For Dago this was all new. Until the rebellion had begun, his circus had experienced only triumph and lots of bouquets and applause. The Hygea Circus had travelled from place to place as an ordinary socialist circus.

From what Dago said, I gathered that the situation had changed after the East German People’s Army entered Czechoslovakia alongside the other Warsaw Pact armies to turn rebellious Czechoslovakia into a Soviet satellite. The circus, now under the protection of our East German comrades, headed for the Siřem zone, where it met with the full force of the uprising.

The migration of our column through the Bohemian countryside had been a battle. I’ve mentioned that often enough. But Dago was not used to a situation of relentless hostilities. I saw him cower in terror when we had to abandon our cosy nest on the front hull as the shrapnel rained down, and we eliminated the bandits who had carried out the assault with a recoilless gun.

The village near to where we’d been attacked was marked on my maps as Luka.

I stayed by the cowering and ever-shrinking Dago, while our sub-machine-gunners burst into the village. Dago made more baby noises and the only bit of him I could see properly was his huge head. We waited on the tank for the marauders to come back. We had nothing else to do.

I swore a lot and thumped my fist on the armour plating. I had no Kalashnikov, nothing! Little Dago trembled beside me, and it struck me that whenever he was afraid he shrank, whereas I grew bigger. I was growing. Several times already I’d had to loosen the pins on my uniform. I was on military rations and I always ate everything.

‘Let’s run away!’ cried Dago suddenly and, back to his normal small size, he slithered over the tank and entered the woods. I walked around the tank and set off after him, as if he were leading the way.

Was I pursuing a fugitive or doing a runner? That depended on who was asking the question, I decided. We walked quickly, very soon coming upon a footpath in the forest, and my heart pounded for joy at the prospect of having escaped at last.

We were in a clearing surrounded by the fence of an animal enclosure. We planned to dash across it and disappear into the forest. I was ready to strip off my Soviet uniform, because this was bandit territory.

I was about to clamber over the stakes of the fence — Dago was all right, he could crawl under them — when I stopped: the dwarf was kneeling in the grass, pointing at the fence.

The stakes looked a bit strange. The long spotted legs of some animal had been nailed to the crossbars of the enclosure, and I was staring at a nail in one of the hooves; another nail went through a joint in the long leg, and where stakes should have been there were a total of four long, weirdly twisted legs. Then I got a whiff of something: just a little way off in the grass there was the body of a large animal. I’d never seen one like that before. It was so huge that I might easily have mistaken it for a pile of blotched stones.

But it was a dead animal, covered in scars and scratches. I could hear birds scratching all over the wood of the enclosure, and because me and Dago were so still, the birds were climbing on the corpse, sitting on it and pecking at it.

Dago shuffled off and picked something out of the grass, then carried it back to me. It was a giraffe’s head. He went back across the clearing and I followed. A giraffe’s face is a bit like a roebuck’s, though its ears are quite different, I can tell you.

We didn’t speak. We went back towards the tank column. All we could hear was the odd round being let off, not sustained firing, and in no time we were back. We clambered onto the rags of my snug at the front of the hull, saying nothing. ‘Did you know the giraffe?’ I asked. ‘Da,’ said Dago. We didn’t run away that day after all.

Despite the success of the battle for Luka, the tank crews were glum, because the recoilless gun that had attacked them was part of the ordnance of the East German army.

Willy Dagobert was once again subjected to interrogation, but this time friendly and informal. Even I was present. Nothing new was discovered.

Dago talked at length about the charms of the bareback riders, and the grace and beauty of the circus girls, and he liked talking about the flowers and fruit showered upon him in the towns and villages that the Hygea Circus had passed through, and where he, Dago, had performed, although he was unable to give the exact position of the circus. He couldn’t even provide a satisfactory statement of the manpower and ordnance of the East German People’s Army units that were acting as the Hygea Circus’s military overseers.

Whenever the amiable NCOs mentioned, in the course of the informal interrogation, the fact that the situation now involved fighting, Dago began squawking and crying, whining and shrinking into himself, making the NCOs less amiable. Dago refused to surrender the giraffe’s head to anyone other than Captain Yegorov, biting and scratching several lower-ranking officers in the process. After which he was bound and left in my care on the front hull of my tank.

Earlier, during the interrogation, the giraffe’s head had been entrusted to me. Under the watchful eye of gunners Timosha and Kantariya I had carried it the length of the tank column to the supply pickups. One of the drivers held the tarpaulin aside and I saw Captain Yegorov’s sacks, and I saw some corpses. The corpses in the pickup were in the same kind of sack as Captain Yegorov’s treasures. The sacks kept the corpses in one piece. The soldiers of the tank column would put their fallen comrades under the pickup’s tarpaulin for safekeeping. Gunner Timosha gave me a prod and I stowed the giraffe’s head under the tarpaulin. So now the pickups with our fallen comrades were no longer a secret to me. I knew the Soviet soldiers trusted me.

We tried to live a normal life in Luka. My duties included feeding the troublesome Dago. I stuffed captured provisions into his mouth with my very own fingers. Shackled as he was, he amused both himself and me by cleverly shrinking and swelling. Slipping out of his bonds was child’s play to him. I didn’t report him, though I should have.

We were trying to live a normal life, but we weren’t very good at it.

Under the command of Gunner Kantariya I went to fetch some water from a well in this newly conquered territory. It was guarded by our sub-machine-gunners. Gunner Kantariya winched up the metal bucket full of water, then he staggered and it went plummeting back down the well. Gunner Kantariya leaned on the wall of the well and puked.

I stared down into the depths, which were lined with cold, wet stones. Rays of sunlight danced on the metal bucket and illuminated the water that had been churned up by its fall, and I saw an animal’s corpse. First I thought it was a gigantic, bloated pig, but in fact it was a hippo. The water wasn’t fit to drink.

The Czechs were treating our tank column to scorched earth tactics.

During the night we made a barrow.

*

For once Captain Yegorov didn’t need me on guard duty. No one in our tank column slept that night. Surrounded by a chain of guards, supported by a fan-shaped grouping of patrols, we soldiers of the tank column set out, under the command of Captain Yegorov, for the clearing in the forest, where we dismantled the animal enclosure. Then we dug a hole with entrenching tools, bayonets and knives. We worked quietly, the occasional clink when a spade hit a stone, or the noise of soldiers snapping or cutting through a root, didn’t even reach the patrols. The work was hard, but we proceeded without a word, as silently as the leaves falling through the darkness into the forest grass. I carried the dug-up soil to the spot designated and soon it was a mound as high as a man. That’s how to make a barrow.

At daybreak we placed the bodies of our fellow warriors into the excavated pit. I played no part in fetching their bodies from the two pickups; I didn’t have the strength. The corpses in sacks covered the bottom of the pit. The soldiers aside set their spades and bayonets and stood there motionless, weapons in hand.

Captain Yegorov strode around the perimeter of the hole and called his fallen men by name one last time: Sergei, Abram, Ivan, Ivar, Volodya, Igor, Mikhailo, Maksim, Lev, Evgenii, Nikita — a long string of names. I only ever caught the first name, never the — ovich part. I can’t remember them all. That wasn’t my job anyway. My task was to gather the spades where they’d been dropped into a sack and drag the sack over to the black mound of excavated soil.

I was teamed up with Gunner Kantariya. We were standing beside the heap of excavated soil and waiting until Captain Yegorov had spoken to all of our fallen comrades. Roots and branches poked out of the heap of excavated soil, and pebbles glinted in the pale light of day. Gunner Kantariya wept. I glanced sideways: real tears. I pretended not to have noticed. If Gunner Kantariya had caught me watching him cry, things might have become awkward. I didn’t want things to go too far.

The first to take up a spade and sink it into the pile of earth was Captain Yegorov. In total silence and with everyone looking on, he took it to the mass grave and tipped the dirt over the nearest sack. Following his example, the other soldiers of the column did likewise, one after another. I wanted to as well, but Gunner Timosha caught me by the sleeve and shook his head. I carried on guarding the sack of spades.

After every man had made a trip from the pile of earth to their fallen comrades, they came over to me, collected the spades and filled in the hole. The corpses were covered, and the soldiers went on heaping soil onto the grave. They worked hard and soon there was quite a hill rising over the corpses. To my short question, Gunner Timosha provided a terse answer: ‘It’s a kurgan, a burial mound.’ Then we tramped this way and that over the kurgan, treading it down. That was something I could do. Then on top of the kurgan the soldiers tipped old, dry soil and twigs and pebbles and leaves. They used their knives to cut away all the bushes around and about, and turfs and saplings, and they set them elaborately on the kurgan. Soon the mound looked like any mound in Chapman Forest and not like a burial site of fallen Soviet soldiers. My handbooks had mentioned nothing about this.

On the way through the woods we soon spotted the tanks. We exchanged greetings with the patrols and the despondency with which I had learned how to bury people fell away… Gunner Kantariya and I got back last, because we were dragging the sack full of spades; the others were already by the tanks. Suddenly, in a crazy burst of noise, the forest around us changed. Bushes and grasses turned white and pink, and towards us and over our heads flew a flock of huge birds with gigantic beaks. The shuddering noise was the beating of their wings. Gunner Kantariya dropped the sack, which landed with a thump on my foot. He started pulling picture after picture out of his pocket, and when he shoved a picture of a flamingo where I could see it — a picture I knew from a section in The Catholic Book of Knowledge about the lives of the saints — he didn’t wait for my verdict, but screamed, ‘Flamingo! Flamingo!’ Under the flying flamingoes we staggered along with the sack towards the assembled troops. Every soldier was following the stream of pink with staring, goggling eyes, focused solely on the flock as it vanished into the distance. If the Czechs had attacked us then, they’d have had us easy.

We had found the remains of the circus, that was more than obvious. And the murder of the giraffe and the hippo suggested that the Czechs had destroyed it completely.

A crazed Kantariya begged Captain Yegorov to let him skin the dead hippo, then cover the tank with its hide like a regimental flag, armouring our vehicle with animal skin. The hippo’s head in particular, he insisted, would put the wind up the Czech bandits should they attack us, but Captain Yegorov forbade him to turn our tank into a hippo, and Kantariya came very close to ending up in shackles like Dago. Kantariya’s railing merged with Dago’s wailing, as he expressed his concern in German and Russian for the girls who had performed with the East German circus. His words filled us with dread, as we remembered what had happened to the giraffe and the hippo. ‘It’s hard to believe they’d let those wondrously beautiful creatures go free like the wild birds,’ Dago moaned, and he banged his head against the tank’s armour plating. ‘They’re bound to be languishing in the insurgents’ smoke-filled cottages and underground bunkers, enslaved to those primitive yokels with no perfume or soap or applause!’ Dago screamed and stormed and cursed, and we were glad he was tied up.

Captain Yegorov gave orders to bivouac in the vicinity of Luka and check for any trace of the vanished circus.

I continued in my role of interpreter and provider of intelligence.

After several early clashes, the Czechoslovak People’s Army stopped attacking us. The actions of the armed gangs of Siaz also seemed to have come to a halt. The fighters had apparently withdrawn to the Prague — Beroun — Pilsen line, where the main offensive of the Czechoslovak People’s Army against the occupying armies of the five Warsaw Pact nations was taking place.

I took off my headphones and handed a report to Captain Yegorov. My axle grease-blackened face didn’t worry him. On the contrary. The forest seemed to be conspiring against us… in the area around Luka we were attacked by clouds of midges. The axle grease daubed all over my face didn’t keep them away, nor did it relieve the pain of countless bites, but at least the insects stuck to my face and could be easily neutralized. The rest of the soldiers in our column also started putting axle grease on their faces. The black of their faces was blotched with the squashed and bloody bits of dead midges. The soldiers’ teeth shone white, as did their eyes, otherwise their faces were a mask of blood and black. When captured bandits were being interrogated I discovered that it also had an undeniable effect psychologically.

Captain Yegorov decided to secure the entire area around the village of Luka. Interrogation of the captives would help us locate the missing circus.

And it began again. The sub-machine-gunners ran forward under cover of the tanks.

Shots crackled again in the village, where only dogs and cats were supposed to be still alive after the opening encounter.

The gunners plunged into the branching underground passages that went from barn to barn, attacked ostensibly invisible bunkers and sneaked up on concealed sniper positions, which they might never have found by themselves, and would have died in the crossfire one by one.

They were lucky that I’d been trained by Commander Baudyš.

Prisoners were marched straight to Captain Yegorov, and his axle-greased face was severe and grim, and all the NCOs wore severe, grim expressions, because the Czech insurgents spat in the venomously contorted faces of the Soviet occupiers, and had only one Russian word, which they repeated endlessly in answer to all questions: ‘Neznaju.’

And Captain Yegorov couldn’t stand that.

Before long, all the houses in Luka were ablaze, along with the ruins of houses hit previously, and anyone who could, fled from the village into the forest. The rebels carried their injured away, but no-one could help those we had captured. I attended the interrogations, although neznaju didn’t need translating. The last defenders were barricaded in a barn.

Later, I never wanted to talk about this. At the time, I had no-one to talk to. That could be why I picked up a pencil stub in one house and scribbled on my map documents everything about the interrogations and the fate of Luka. I covered lots of sheets. I even wrote down the names of the NCOs who conducted the interrogations. I wrote about everything I saw and everything I noticed.

I took the full sheets and hid them inside the wayside shrine, which by some miracle, perhaps, had survived the destruction. I weighed down the paper with a brick and placed it right at the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Next day the paper wasn’t there. I understood that there’d been further contact between me and the insurgents. I was very glad. None of the captives could say anything about me now, but I had no idea who might have seen me in Luka with the Russians.

15: Neznaju! Happy Song’s mission. Captain Yegorov’s concern. Mermaid

When we had successfully mopped up the area around Luka, our tank column moved on. We found no further traces of the Hygea Circus and our tanks proceeded to the accompaniment of Dago’s swearing and moaning, shackled as he was to the armour plating of the lead tank.

I had plenty of interpreting to do. I translated Czech news bulletins for Captain Yegorov, and when, bent over the tank’s transmitter or twiddling the knobs of the radio in the tent, I caught a hostile Czech broadcast, Captain Yegorov would lean towards me, his careworn features creased with wrinkles.

The first evening after our column left Luka, Commander Žinka addressed Captain Yegorov by name on Radio Free Siřem. He described the hopeless predicament of isolated groups of occupying forces in the Siřem region, as well as the hopeless plight of the Soviet parachutists fighting for their lives in the maze of little streets in the capital of Czechoslovakia, Prague, since from the basement of Prague Castle the heroic statesman Sasha Dubček had declared a nationwide mobilisation, and the highland battalions of Slovak eagles together with the forest battalions of the lions of the Bohemian Basin had the occupying armies in their clutches. Commander Žinka was jubilant and his voice thundered triumphally, and that evening Captain Yegorov punched the radio with his fist and made a particular point of asking me, ‘Who’s broadcasting this?’

‘Neznaju,’ I said.

I shouldn’t have said it. It wasn’t something Captain Yegorov liked to hear.

We listened to the news every day, and Captain Yegorov frowned and glowered, because the uprising was gaining ground.

Moravia and Silesia rebelled, and there was violent fighting in the streets of Brno and Ostrava. The focal point of the Brno insurgents was Petrov, which was transformed into a bastion of steel. Traditionally militant Moravian monks, released from Communist internment, teamed up with the people of Brno to form the Citizens’ Company of Saints Cyril and Methodius, and were pushing the occupiers out of the city. The fighters collected mummies from the Brno catacombs and these mummies, armed with the most up-to-date weapons raided from munitions stores, were guarding barricades. By day and by night, illuminated by the flames of countless candles, they formed mobile battlefield altars.

The Polish strategic formations sent into Silesia refused to carry out the orders of the Soviet high command. The heroism of the Poznań Workers’ Division shook the country. The officers were surrounded and, even after being bombarded for two days, refused to lay a hand on the military hardware and attack Czechoslovakia. Soviet palachi, butchers wearing leather aprons, decimated them. Poland was on the verge of an uprising and a state of emergency was declared. Mass activity was being engineered by the workers’ underground organisation Produktiwita.

There was so much news that all it did now was leave us confused. At times I couldn’t care less. Captain Yegorov kept going back to the Radio Free Siřem transmitter.

Captain Yegorov decided to destroy the Radio Free Siřem transmitter.

Its broadcasts referred to our errant tank column quite often. They criticized our actions and spoke of our encounters as massacres. They also spoke of country folk being locked in barns, which then got burnt down. Captain Yegorov must have wondered where the insurgents got their information from. The broadcasts would also make mention of the hoard of gems, watches and church treasures in the captain’s sacks.

I shouldn’t have said neznaju! But what could I do about it?

I trembled at the prospect that one day Captain Yegorov would finally discover the truth about my various detours.

After all, we passed through some places more than once. After a long detour we reached Strabov again, already burnt out from the last time around, and we drove through Tomašín, herding the few people, bandits, who were still defending it into barns

Our errant column pottered about the countryside and the constant killing made us all feel sick. But what could be done? The Russians were alone in a foreign country, and I was alone among them. What could we do?

Dago’s fetters were removed, but Captain Yegorov, infuriated by the dwarf’s inability to offer any explanation as to the fate of the Hygea Circus, kept him tethered to a rope. The end of the rope was entrusted to me.

We sat on the front hull plating, holding tight to the projecting metal and watching the landscape as it rolled by. We kept a sharp lookout for the circus, the soldiers keeping at the ready their picture cards of exotic animals.

It was only then that I learned about the ‘Happy Song’ tank column’s mission. The Soviet military high command had entrusted Captain Yegorov with the special task of making preparations to meet the troops’ needs for leisure and cultural activities in Czechoslovakia. In particular, he was to have created secure conditions for a model Soviet circus. His duty was to demonstrate to the Czechoslovaks and to the rest of the world that the Soviet invasion force was no barbarian horde, but in fact was a vanguard of the most sophisticated culture known to mankind. Project Socialist Circus was intended to prove that socialist circus performers are masters of their art, including the most humane taming and training of exotic animals.

‘Obviously,’ the dwarf said, getting excited, ‘no-one can expect the Soviets to carry libraries on their tanks. But what better means can there be for educating the masses or filling their spare time than a circus?’

I didn’t know. I’d never been to a circus, so I said nothing.

‘Brilliant Soviet thinking is fed by the powerful wellspring of those Eastern philosophical systems that anticipate a worldwide dominion made up of the brotherhood of animals and men. The new world empire, whose vanguard we are, will also include machines,’ said Dago, gently rapping the tank with his knuckles. ‘In the world’s new Eastern Empire no-one will ever again humiliate or enslave man, beast or machine,’ Dago continued, warming to his theme. ‘And a big top’s as good a place as any for the masses to swear their allegiance to the Soviet Union.’

I also learned that the East German circus had been the backbone of Project Socialist Circus. The zone secured by Captain Yegorov’s unit was to have gradually become a home to circuses from all five of the states involved in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The hippo found in the well was, for example, the first hippo to have been born in the zoological gardens of the Hungarian People’s Republic, while the dead giraffe had once been the star attraction of the renowned Warsaw Variety Theatre.

The mainstay of the circus corps was obviously to be the East German Hygea Circus, with its bareback riders — ‘the most beautiful girls in the world’ — and its clowns, because ‘German clowns are the funniest in the world, you know,’ insisted Dago. ‘But the cause seems to be lost,’ he added, wrinkling his nose sadly. ‘It looks as if the circus has been pulverized by Czech bandits. It’s a great shame! These Czech diehards are their own worst enemies. They’re depriving themselves of a magnificent, joyful show and they’ll be the laughing stock of the entire civilized world. I’m so sorry for the performing animals, but also for the performers who will perish in this dreadful country.’ Dago was least concerned for the Polish magicians, who probably felt quite at home in Chapman Forest, but as for the gorgeous East German trapeze artistes and bareback riders… every time Dago howled I had to choke him with a tug on the rope.

And I shouldn’t have been surprised that Captain Yegorov had been so foul-tempered of late, because he was very worried, as Dago enlightened me. If Captain Yegorov doesn’t execute his mission, he could be up before a tribunal.

‘What?’ I pricked up my ears, because I was quite familiar with the word ‘tribunal’.

‘’Fraid so,’ said the dwarf with a glum chuckle. ‘He’ll be sent to Siberia, the gulag. For twenty years, or life. Or he’ll get a bullet.’ And Dago fell silent. He craned his big head up on his thin neck, probably watching for signs of some animal moving through the bushes and undergrowth of Chapman Forest.

I looked at my legs dangling over the side of the tank next to his, and I squinted at the pinned and rolled-back sleeves of my tank soldier’s jacket, hoping I might have grown a bit again. I must get over this childhood thing as soon as possible, I resolved as our tank trundled down the lane between Chapman Forest and a dust-covered field, where nothing grew that summer, and I clung to the tank’s front hull and waited for my childhood to end.

Captain Yegorov was still in a bad mood. He still tied my feet together at night and untied them in the morning, but he treated me kindly, although he could be very sharp in the way he spoke to the sub-machine-gunners. He went on more and more frequently about the sorry state of our fuel stocks, and he constantly scanned the horizon with binoculars, and he also pored over my maps, and it became obvious to me that he was looking for Siřem, because the provocative Siřem transmitter was getting to him more than anything else.

Thanks to regular radio reports of our whereabouts we encountered plenty of graffiti in Russian, abusive and mocking, which wounded Captain Yegorov’s pride, and it was solely due to these inflammatory broadcasts that we kept on being ambushed.

Then one day the cheerful Kantariya and the dour Timosha were sitting on the front of the tank, and Kantariya had just launched into a jolly song about girls. The sun burnt on our bare heads and the fresh breeze set up by the tank’s motion cooled us, when suddenly, rounding a corner, we spotted two vandals.

They had just been vandalizing a white wall — black paint still dripping from their brushes. Above the unfinished sentence YEGOROV IS A THIEF AND MURD was a picture of Czechia, scowling at the approaching occupying troops, her unkempt hair leaping about the wall like living, burning snakes. The daubers might have had time to complete their graffiti while our tanks were still clattering down the road, except that this time the sub-machine-gunners had run on ahead of us in camouflage dress, darting here and there among the buildings, and they soon caught the two vandals.

I clambered down inside the tank to avoid having to interpret, but I couldn’t get out of it.

The Czechs refused to speak, except when one of them shouted that he wanted to die for freedom, although Captain Yegorov hadn’t asked him about that.

The Captain did ask where their command post was, how to get to Siřem and suchlike, but they said, ‘Neznaju.’

Then the other Czech ripped open his shirt and shouted that he wanted to die for freedom as well. Captain Yegorov nodded his assent, and the sub-machine-gunners led the vandals out into the yard and shot them.

The tank crushed the paint bucket under its tracks, and the paint on the brushes lying about on the ground dried hard in the glare of the sun, and it looked like tarmac and no good for anything.

The graffiti-vandalized building was a village school, its doors and windows knocked out. It looked as if there had been fighting inside. The ceiling of one of the classrooms had come down and there were piles of rubble all around, but the building was good enough for a short rest break.

In front of the school there was a statue of the warrior Wenceslas. He was armed and equipped in the old style, with a lance and a sword and a shield. He’s our Czech patron saint, the champion of Christendom, as the nuns once explained to me. On the base of the statue the words LET US NOT PERISH, NOR THOSE WHO COME AFTER US were carved in large letters, and when I translated this inscription the Captain just shrugged.

The village appeared to be deserted.

The NCOs appointed patrols and anyone who could and wanted to found themselves a spot to sit down in the cool and shade of the school building.

I must have nodded off, because when I opened my eyes I was alone in the classroom with the collapsed ceiling, except for Captain Yegorov, who was hunched down on the dais in front of the board.

Lying all over the floor were books, torn exercise books, and in the corner a bundle of rags: red, white and blue Czechoslovak flags. It was like a den where someone’s dossed down for a night.

The Captain picked a thick book out of the pile on the floor, flicked through it, then carefully and with interest studied every page in turn. His scowling and grease-blackened face began to bear the signs of a sad smile. Captain Yegorov tore out individual pages, crumpled them and threw them on the floor. He stood up and, although usually so swift, walked slowly out of the classroom.

The book was Brehm’s Animal Life and each of those torn and tossed pages was a portrait of an animal.

I remembered what Dago had told me about what would happen if Captain Yegorov failed in his circus mission. I crossed the classroom and went down the corridor to the back, and through a little window I could see Chapman Forest. I could escape that way. I was only a stone’s throw from the forest.

Dago had spoken about a military tribunal, and I recalled the old fairy tale about Fedotkin that our commander used to tell us, the commander that Margash and I had killed, and I told myself, ‘Oh no! I’m not going to any fucking gulag with my captain, no way! When fathers fight, their kids have to join in, sure, but I’ve heard too much about the penal colony in freezing Vorkuta. I’m not going there for all the tea in China. I’ve got to get away!’

But if I did a bad job of running away from Captain Yegorov and we met again somehow, he wouldn’t be kind to me any more, that was for sure. And once I was on the run I’d have to keep my eyes peeled for insurgents too. Yet I knew I had to get away. The problem was that I only knew the world of my maps. And I had no idea how to get out of it.

The rest break was suddenly shattered by the stifled shouting of the sub-machine-gunners and a weird grinding noise echoing through the previously calm summer afternoon. I dashed out of the classroom.

Our sub-machine-gunners were pushing two scruffy-looking guys at gunpoint before them. And a cabin on wheels pulled by a little donkey. One of the scruffs sat astride the donkey, which plodded happily along, despite all the noise around it. The other scruff was dragging the beast by its reins towards Captain Yegorov and a knot of NCOs.

The cabin looked a bit like a rustic outdoor toilet, except for being gaily painted. The NCOs, packed defensively around Captain Yegorov, lowered their side arms. We all stared. I could tell that the colourful scrawls covering the cabin were supposed to depict a seaside scene. I knew the sea and the seaside — sandy beaches and palm trees and monsters that peeked out above the surface of the water — from The Catholic Book of Knowledge. The cabin was covered in similar scenes, except that next to the palm trees on the beach was a naked woman. It was definitely not Czechia.

The donkey stopped short. The guy who was sitting on it jumped down, and the pair of them dropped to their knees before the erect figure of our captain, then raised their arms and started jabbering.

None of us would have been at all surprised if the Captain had suspected it was all a Czech subterfuge and had had the men and their donkey shot on the spot.

But Captain Yegorov smiled and asked, ‘Are you circus folk? Is this a circus?’

And Captain Yegorov marched straight towards the slatted door of the painted cabin.

But the impertinence of the scruffs knew no bounds. They both kept waving their arms, babbling away, and politely, but firmly prevented the Captain from going inside.

‘Ilya!’ he shouted and I went to interpret.

But I couldn’t understand a word! And they wouldn’t talk to me anyway. They looked at me and I think they understood Czech, but they wouldn’t speak it. So by snatches I tried this and that from what I remembered of the foreign languages the other kids would cry all night in at Siřem. And Captain Yegorov grew impatient and started tapping his feet. And it had all been going on for too long and I was about to throw up my arms and tell the Captain I didn’t know their language, when the one who had arrived on the donkey, the one with a scar across his swarthy features, poked the other scruff and said, ‘We can tell this one,’ and to me he said, ‘You from Siřem, kiddo? From the reformatory?’

I nearly fainted. That was how Siřem kids talked.

‘You’re from Siřem, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah!’

‘So tell ’em we’re Bulgarian. Go on, and in this cabin here we’ve got the Mermaid of the Seven Seas. For gentlemen, geddit?’

‘Sure,’ I said, and found a way to translate for Yegorov.

‘Ah, my Bulgarian brothers!’ The Captain was happy, and so were the NCOs, and they started demanding to see the mermaid, obviously.

And the Captain asked where the rest of the circus was.

And the two scruffs were grinning… They were no longer being held by the soldiers in camouflage dress, who had lowered their Kalashnikovs. The NCOs were tittering and sticking their side arms back in their holsters and sleeves and belts and boots, depending on where each one carried his. And the scruffs realized that things had taken a turn for the better, so they were happy. Scarface winked at me and started talking, and I translated and explained that the Bulgarian circus folk had fled in the face of an offensive by Czech bandits, and that they were now fighting their way across the heartland under their own steam. As to the whereabouts of their Balkan circus, unfortunately they didn’t know and couldn’t guess, but they were happy to be able to be of service to the heroic Soviet Army. Then Captain Yegorov stiffened ever so slightly, because the two scruffs began to explain that there was a charge to see the mermaid, and that they accepted marks, leva, zlotys, forints, roubles… any of the currencies of the five armies, they didn’t mind which, and as for the mermaid, she didn’t care about anything at all.

Captain Yegorov’s blackened face went rigid, but only me and the NCOs could tell, not the scruffs, because of the axle grease he’d put on to stop the midges. Captain Yegorov had one more question.

He asked whether ‘you, my Bulgarian brothers’ knew the way to Siřem.

And the two scruffs started happily outshouting each other that ‘yes’, and ‘sure’, and that ‘you’re there in next to no time’! And would the officers, sirs, like to see their show now?

And I interpreted.

And Captain Yegorov was smiling again.

And I knew I’d had it, because I didn’t want to go back to Siřem.

Now the scruffs, helped by the gunners, moved the cabin on wheels into the classroom, leaving the donkey outside, and the school classroom was apparently now the scene of some important preparations, and there, alongside the silent Captain Yegorov, the excited gunners kept nudging one another, overjoyed at having found another bit of the Socialist Circus. After all, around every corner of this Czech land our column had so far been met by warfare and more warfare, and suddenly there were the leaps and somersaults of Dago the dwarf, and now they even had a mermaid all the way from Bulgaria.

They were all looking forward to the show.

Captain Yegorov went into the classroom first. And he was there for some time. The gunners nudged each other, then one gave his army belt a polish, while another dragged a comb through his hair; one or two of the others even washed the axle grease and crust of dead mosquitoes from their faces, which, pink and smiling, they raised towards the sun… The ordinary servicemen were also full of anticipation. They knew that after the sub-machine-gunners it would be their turn… And the ones whose turn to mount guard had just come were making fun of those ahead of them… and in all the argy-bargy there was plenty of the sort of good-natured pushing and banter that were the norm in our tank column during those moments of relief when ordinary life briefly reasserted itself… And Captain Yegorov came out of the classroom, smiling broadly, and over his shoulder he barked an order to the gunners to find the Bulgarian comrades a place in the column once the show was over.

Then the NCOs went into the classroom, one by one, and they were inside, then they came out… They were in there a long time, so it was no surprise that the simple sub-machine-gunners and tank crewmen and pickup drivers were mad with curiosity and excitement, and they formed a queue and waited, and there were a lot of them. Despite our losses it struck me that there were still plenty of us in our tank column… but that was possibly because I was the very last in line.

Dusk was falling. It was gloomy inside the classroom. The cabin on wheels was open and all around it there was a lot of trampled mud from army boots. I peeked inside. I could see a girl in a bath full of foam. Her hair was all over her face. She was mumbling and groaning, apparently not at all happy to be there. I wasn’t surprised… I got this idea that the girl in the filthy foam was a whore, and the lads at the Home from Home used to say that whores were the best thing for cuddling with, and I was astonished to find my cock inside my trousers was suddenly as big as that time by the barn… But when it dawned on me that my first time with a woman I’d be shooting my seed into a bath full of the seed of Soviet tankmen and sub-machine-gunners, my cock shrank back again. I looked at the girl in the gloom of the damp, filthy hut and she stared back at me, and suddenly my blood froze… If she had had a tracksuit on, and a scarf and cap!.. and was running towards me across a yard in gumboots!.. She wasn’t wearing any clothes — not yellow, red, green — nothing at all. Only the cabin was a gaudy mess. She lay in the bath naked. I could see her shoulders and I tried to make out her hands, but they were tied… her arms were spread out and she was tied down in the bath, so she had to lie in the water…

What should I say? I didn’t know. So I said, ‘Hi, how are you?’ In Czech, obviously.

She moved her head, which sent a ripple through the bath full of foam. I could see her lips moving. She was trying to say something, and at last a single word escaped her mouth, ‘Siaz.’ And straight away I said, ‘Czechia!’ and I dived at the bath and started dragging her away, but she was tied up. I scampered all around the classroom looking for something, but couldn’t find anything, so I flew back to the girl and gnawed at the rope and bit it, and it worked! It was done! I undid the other one with my fingers. It worked! She could hardly stand. She was dripping wet and naked. I was embarrassed. There was no time… I grabbed the flags from the corner — there was nothing else! — and she wrapped one around her, and then we were headed across the classroom and down the corridor to the back, and there was the little window. I helped her. In the window she bent down and briefly rested her face against mine, and I blushed under the axle grease… I reckoned she would make it safely into the forest.

I went back to the classroom and the cabin, and Scarface was there. He was examining the ropes and looked depressed. He had just fetched a bucket of hot water to add to the bath. He poured it on the floor, turned the bucket upside down and sat on it, saying, ‘You’ve gone and spoilt it!’

‘I’ll tell the Captain you’re not Bulgarians, and you’re for the firing squad!’ I told him.

‘You’ve gone and spoilt it, kiddo,’ Scarface said again.

And something occurred to me, so I asked him, ‘Do you know Još?’

‘Of course we know Još,’ said Scarface. ‘We was on the way from his place when we got caught up in the war between all them idiots, so we invented a circus, because circus folk can go anywhere, and we’re Bulgarian so we don’t have to speak Russian or Czech. But what was that big-shot soldier guy saying about some great circus he’s looking for? That’d be a godsend!’

I couldn’t decide whether to mention the girl.

‘We picked her up on the road,’ Scarface said, without being asked. ‘Some soldiers found some girls hiding, but this one escaped. So we saved her.’

‘Saved, eh?’ I said.

‘Think what you like, kiddo. Now we’ve got to stay with this column. We’ll say she’s asleep, or sick like, we just won’t let anyone in, see.’

So we were agreed.

And in the morning our column headed for Siřem.

16: A fantastic battle. Attack by demons. The egg. Third World War and last television

If Captain Yegorov thought — having integrated the Bulgarians into the ‘Happy Song’ tank column — that his luck had changed for the better, I knew mine had changed for the worse. And then I had my work cut out with Dago, who kept shouting ‘Bastards!’ at them in Russian. He absolutely hated them. For him they were a disgrace to all circuses, while he was a credit to them. Perhaps he was remembering those glorious moments when the soldiers of the column had gaped in wonder at his somersaults, because now they ignored his protests at the Bulgarian circus folk. And Dago shrivelled up. He retreated deep down inside himself again and ceased to care what was going on, though we still chatted together.

The soldiers of the column were very happy with our Bulgarians, and most of all with the mermaid, that’s for sure.

They attached the painted cabin to a tank at the safest position in the column, namely in the mid-rear, because they wanted to spare the mermaid as many of the consequences of any sudden attack as possible. They believed the girl was sleeping inside.

The two scruffs guided the column towards Siřem. They looked after the donkey nicely, it has to be said.

‘I’ve already been through one war. I originally trained as a musician, see,’ Dago told me during the easy ride of our lead tank along the tarmac road. ‘This wasteland we’re driving through’ — his free hand swept the Czech horizon — ‘is once more a battleground between East and West. I changed my name and profession in order to live again — too bad!’

I wanted to ask him what instrument he played in that other war, and who he was fighting and stuff, but he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgeways.

‘You might be little, Ilya, but you know lots of things. How old are you? You don’t know? You understand, though, Eastern man holds his little hammer in high regard, but he’s only got the one, its handle all shiny from use… And Western man has a whole cupboard full of stuff, all sorts of radios he’s got, rockets and ballpoint pens, all those twentieth-century playthings and it’s affected his brain.’

Now I had to laugh. I kept a few pencil stubs with my maps, and the odd Western ballpoint would have done me very nicely.

‘You know it all, Ilya. I’ve been watching you. When Eastern people lose a million loved ones in the war, they tell themselves, “Oh well, can’t be helped.” They hold each other by the hand and they make a kurgan of packed earth… With Western man, one of his nearest and dearest kicks up a fuss and straight away it’s on television, and there’s a great hoo-ha and tears all round… so who will come out on top?’

‘Well, who?’ I asked him, just to see if he knew.

‘Listen… You’re a saboteur. I’m a spy, an animal spy, see? We circus folk are close to the animals. We get these strange vibes from them… Something’s afoot. I think the Soviets, with things getting a bit tricky, are going to try out some new secret weapon, and that’ll really be something!’

I hadn’t heard about any secret weapon before then, so I let Dago go on, just tugging on his rope now and again, because sometimes he could get quite heated and I couldn’t let him get too noisy.

‘Listen, Ilya. We’re both up this Czech end of shit creek, stuck in this war between the Eastern Empire and the West! And you know what we who are in the middle have to do, don’t you? We have to survive, understand? And that’s not gonna be easy! If the armies of the Eastern Empire use their secret weapon against the Western forces of Nato it’ll be Armageddon, an incredible battle! Do you know what Armageddon is? No? Well, you’ll find out soon enough.’

I listened to Dago, at least it helped pass the time as we drove on, and since he didn’t get too excited I didn’t even have to lash him with his rope. All the way, Dago kept asking me riddles and inventing fairy stories… I did think he might be showing off… A spy might be more than a saboteur, but if either is caught behind enemy lines, they both go to the wall, no questions asked… It says so in black and white in A Manual for Saboteurs. So why was he getting so smart with me, this midget? I’d no idea.

We were advancing on Siřem. Captain Yegorov didn’t even look at me as he tied me to the sacks that evening.

I had a dream about sea foam with a girl tied up in it, and in my dream the foam in her bath changed into the tar water that the nuns used to serve us in mugs and make us gargle painfully for lying and swearing, but through the dreamy waves of greying foam I also saw the beauty of Sister Dolores, so it was a nice dream… I woke up and immediately realized how close we were to Siřem.

I could never have guessed that our tank column would be attacked by demons, that Captain Yegorov’s good fortune would rise again, and that the Third World War would break out.

That day we travelled through blazing sunlight and the battle-scorched land of the Czechs without a shot being fired, and we casually set up camp for the night in a village that we’d flattened only a few days before. It was only a stone’s throw from Siřem, only twice the tanks’ range from Chapman Forest, and Commander Baudyš used to run his field exercises all around here. Seated next to Dago and despite the fading light, I recognized the spot where Mikušinec and I had nabbed Šklíba in a wet field smelling of raw earth and handed him over for elimination. Oh dear. The forest track up to Fell Crag started here.

In the evening, we were allowed to make bonfires, and Captain Yegorov gave the order for Siřem to be taken the following day. His orders included the declaration that once Siřem had been captured work would begin on constructing a circus township and that the ‘Happy Song’ tank column’s battlefield meanderings would come to an end, and so a joyful mood reigned in the camp.

Dago refused to climb off the tank and join us by the fire, which the two scruffs were stoking with branches from Chapman Forest, but he kept leaning over from his post on the front hull, holding out his mess tin… There was a bustle of joyful activity around our lead tank’s bonfire.

Gunner Kantariya found a harmonica somewhere and, defying the censorious look of the dour Gunner Timosha, he uncorked a demijohn of meths looted from somewhere and probably kept for just such an occasion, and the sub-machine-gunners fraternized with ‘our Bulgarian brothers’, whose meths intake led to the revelation of such talents that now even the column’s NCOs took a shine to them, and nudges and jokes and questions about the — as all the soldiers believed — peacefully sleeping mermaid came thick and fast.

‘You’re not gonna recognize Siřem, kiddo,’ Scarface told me, though I hadn’t asked him about it. ‘The whole square is full of flowers, and there’s beautiful wreathes and burning candles everywhere — like a cemetery, it is, but beautiful!’

‘Come and join us,’ the other one said, offering me a gulp from his mess tin, ‘and you can stay at Još’s place, with them other kids of yours, like.’

‘Our kids, you mean,’ Scarface corrected him. ‘And who are you exactly? You a Russki?’

That was a question I didn’t fancy answering. I’d been going over what he’d said, that Chata and Bajza and perhaps a few more from the Home from Home were living in Još’s cottage somewhere in the forest. And to the doleful strains of Kantariya’s harmonica it crossed my mind that I probably ought to make my escape then and there and find the lads. But I didn’t do it, because our camp was attacked by demons.

Before we caught sight of their vile, diabolical snouts, and before the evening calm of our forest retreat had been riven by the horrible snorting and baying of these strange creatures, and our ears deafened by the clatter of their approaching hooves, something whizzed through the air and Kantariya’s harmonica groaned and fell silent. The gunner leapt to his feet and yanked a long arrow from the instrument, its sharp tip glinting in the firelight. Obeying every instinct of a commander of saboteurs, I grabbed Scarface’s full mess tin from him and poured it on the bonfire, which blazed up with a blinding flame, me knowing nothing of the properties of meths. Unfortunately, it looked as if I’d given our attackers a signal, and they were upon us.

Fearsome animals with wailing devils’ heads spat gobbets of white foam at us. The warriors who sat astride the jagged backs of these monsters screamed deafeningly, but the sub-machine-gunners kept up their fire. With all the shooting we might have gradually killed each other. The enemy cavalry rushed past and over us, and in no time at all the thunder of hooves could be heard far away, towards Chapman Forest.

The bonfires were scattered on the instant and the darkness rang with the commands of the NCOs, and above all the smooth, perhaps slightly tense voice of Captain Yegorov. The tank commanders called in their positions, and in just a few moments the column had become a dark, silent wall of steel and armaments.

We might have held on like that until daylight, but after a short while Gunner Kantariya returned from a recce and, to the relief of all who saw him, the corners of his mouth were twitching mischievously. Gunner Timosha went along with him to report, and only when we saw his placid face and direct, proud gaze did we heave a sigh of relief.

Soon, from the obsurity over by Chapman Forest, we heard the odd clink, or possibly the sound of a pebble sent flying by a hoof, but the commands barked out in muffled voices by the NCOs kept us in the dark and silence. Snuggled up to Dago on the front tank, I listened out intently, when suddenly the night sky high above us turned bright. Dago’s cry of amazement was punctuated by a rapid pop-pop-pop… the sound of flares going off, and the darkness ahead of us burst into a myriad lights, Captain Yegorov having ordered the simultaneous deployment of all the searchlights and floodlights and signal lamps and any bright lights the tank column possessed. And we, thunderstruck, were treated to an incredible sight, because approaching across the field that in the darkness had merged into one with the rustling forest came a great, jagged, un-horselike, cavalry monstrosity, high above the beast’s wobbling humps were two heads on necks that reminded me of some fat snakes in The Catholic Book of Knowledge, but the really horrible thing was that little human heads were poking out everywhere from the monster’s body. I yelped and Dago shrieked, which wasn’t surprising, since we had no idea anything like that lived in Chapman Forest.

The privates in our column were also all agog and sort of entranced. You couldn’t hear a single shout or shot as the many-headed creature proceeded towards us in the blinding light, slowly and seemingly inescapably. I was all set to slip off the hull plate, and I would swear that for the first time during our operations on Czech soil one or two of the other men in the column were tempted to make a run for it… It came towards us… The quiet that surrounded the slow march of the multi-beast towards the tanks was suddenly broken when the dwarf Dago let out a joyful yelp, and whistled and cried ‘Hurrah!’ and ‘Bravo!’ in Russian, and our scouts Kantariya and Timosha now went among the tank crews bringing calm and reassurance to the men, who were still paralysed with fear… We’d only run up against more shattered remains of the Socialist Circus Project: two riding camels and the Mongolian boys who looked after them.

Illuminated by all those lights the riders dismounted from the camels, of which you could now tell there were two. They were young boys, no bigger than me, and as I saw them, one by one, surrounded by brightness, I remembered that vision of long ago, that night when Dýha and I and the little choirboys came out of the basement and stood face to face with Commander Vyžlata, and I first saw Margash.

The camel boys formed a circle around their snorting animals and tried to calm them down, since they evidently didn’t like our silent wall of tanks.

And then I saw Captain Yegorov come striding along with the two gunners by his side. He had left the safety of the tanks and was heading straight for the lads swarming around their camels. Not bothering about Dago, I ran off after Yegorov. Exploiting my position of interpreter, I offered my services. Kantariya and Timosha seemed impressed by my bravery, but in truth I was dying to find out who these people were, and all about their camels.

Some of the boys gathered around the animals held bows and arrows, others had knives at the ready, and they all spoke Russian.

Yes, they were part of a broader contingent of the Socialist Circus Project, they replied to my first question. Asked why they had attacked us, they said that they attacked anyone and everyone.

Then Captain Yegorov barked out a command, and the camel boys fell sheepishly silent. He left them in no doubt as to his rank as commander-in-chief of the Socialist Circus Project.

The boys briefly discussed the matter in an unintelligible language, but they seemed to be convinced when they saw the pips on Yegorov’s tank-brigade jacket, and also, more likely, by the fire power of his sub-machine-gunners. Their knives abruptly disappeared.

Then they unloaded a huge steel cage covered in skins from the back of one of the camels, and with the cage safely set on the ground they tore off the skins and we could see, inside the cage, an animal blinded by the blazing lights: a massive wolf with white fur.

Captain Yegorov snatched a riding crop from one of the boys and lashed the wolf across its snout. It gave a whine and pressed back against the mesh of the cage. Captain Yegorov inspected the straw the wolf had been lying on, then pushed both hands into it, while gunners Kantariya and Timosha aimed their Kalashnikovs at the wolf. Captain Yegorov held his hands aloft in the glare of all the tank column’s lights, and we all saw that he was holding an egg.

It was a huge egg with a grey shell that looked leathery and was covered in cracks.

Captain Yegorov’s face, his dust-covered face, gaunt and haggard with lack of sleep, his face on which fatigue and responsibility and privation had etched their maps, now glinted with a trickle of tears. I preferred not to look.

Another sunny day found me full of cares, sitting on the forward armour plate of the tank’s hull.

We had added yet another circus contingent to our column, and all the signs were that Captain Yegorov’s mood had improved again, and that we could take the shattered remnants of the Socialist Circus Project and at least make a half-decent variety show out of it, as the dwarf Dago put it.

However, Captain Yegorov failed to put in an appearance. That day I didn’t even perform my duties as radio interpreter. Dago and I bounced along on the armour plating. He was still under my orders. The pseudo-Bulgarians and their donkey kept to their position in the mid-rear of the column, their happy dispositions making them well liked among the privates. They dutifully kept the secret of the sea cabin, and surreptitiously took payments from the privates for first place in the queue. The camel boys spoke better Russian than me and before long they were larking about and discussing stuff with the soldiers up and down the length of the column.

When I saw them, it was just like the time I met Margash. Suddenly here was somebody who was like me. But they weren’t like me.

It was my fault, and mine alone, that I had been through so much.

The more attention I paid to the camel boys, the more acutely I sensed the difference between us. I had almost grown into my torn and dusty tankman’s uniform. At least at the points where it was pinned together. I couldn’t mix with their happy band. Somewhere inside me I seemed to have stopped thinking about Margash’s land. Inside me there were still all those things that had happened at Siřem.

That day I was summoned to a short conference of commanders.

Captain Yegorov remained in the bowels of the lead tank, nursing the giant egg on his lap. Gunner Kantariya told us that since the egg had been found Captain Yegorov hadn’t stopped smiling at it. He hadn’t been giving any orders either. The NCOs were of the view that we should press on against Siřem.

As the interpreter and an expert on the methods of saboteurs, I was invited along to a meeting about the Czech bandit gangs. The contingents of the Czechoslovak People’s Army had apparently been re-deployed away from the area of the Siřem Autonomous Zone, so we were being ambushed less often. Apart from Captain Yegorov’s sacks our pickups were empty. We’d had next to no further contact with the enemy since executing those two vandals. The inflammatory radio transmitter appeared to have fallen silent. During our encounter with the camel team we had encountered sniper fire, but nothing had come of it.

So was it conceivable that the resistance of the Czech bandit gangs had been quashed? Or were they laying a trap? Such were the questions raised.

So it was decided that after a short rest, chiefly for the sake of the animals, which were now fully-fledged members of our column, we would carry on towards Siřem. Captain Yegorov would re-assume command as and when he saw fit.

A cheerful mood reigned among the soldiers now. They were all of the view that the capture of Siřem would not be difficult. And once the conditions were right for the Socialist Circus Project, we could all have a proper rest. Dago explained that the soldiers were relieved, because they no longer faced the more or less certain prospect of being sent to a Siberian gulag for failing in their mission. A question mark still hung over their commitment to a life of continual hardship in uniform, but they were used to that.

‘Damn column!’ Dago shouted down from the tank. ‘Drifting column!’ he muttered, yet he was happy at the rise in our numbers.

‘The Mongolian camel riders,’ he began explaining, ‘could give the mess we’re in a turn for the better. They’re the real elite of the socialist circus. Ilya?’

I opened my eyes. I remembered how Mr Cimbura would also keep me awake with his endless cock and bull stories. But you can’t really sleep on a moving tank anyway.

‘It looks as if we’ve got it, Ilya!’

‘What?’

‘The secret weapon… the dinosaur egg from the Gobi Desert, hidden in the hot sand under which the mountains of the East are buried. Listen to me, Ilya! In the desert, nature cast a dragon, steeled by the fires of millennia. In its bowels the desert forged the dragon egg on the anvils of the ages in the farthermost wildernesses of the East… Ilya, look!’

I barely glanced up. We were passing a few bullet-riddled, burnt hovels. They might have been destroyed by us or by some other company, I couldn’t remember. Dago poked me in the shoulder, and said, ‘What the insurgents call the Siřem Autonomous Zone was meant to be the setting for the Socialist Circus Project, a joyous window display for the five nations… all our socialist animals and the men-in-arms of the five nations would have breathed in peace on the dragon’s egg… but the Czechs shattered the alliance of the Eastern Empire and must pay the price.’

And then, through parched lips, Dago asked me to look about to see if there wasn’t at least a drop of meths somewhere, because he had had a splitting headache since the events of the day before. And he remarked that whereas he had survived his first war thanks to music, this time it could be as a dancer, and next time he would certainly become a poet.

‘Ilya!’

‘What?’

‘That is, if there is a next time!’

I looked at my fully grown arms and legs, remembering how, one winter, Mr Cimbura had regretted I was still a shrimp and that I couldn’t go off through the snow to fetch him a bottle, after he’d talked himself hoarse with his yarns about Czechia…

‘Yes,’ Dago wheezed again, ‘the dinosaur egg might save Captain Yegorov from being court-martialled… Since if the egg did hatch into a dragon it would be seen as a magnificent victory for the armies of the Warsaw Pact, and Communism in general. Yes, an actual dragon could turn the situation in favour of the Soviets,’ the dwarf muttered, ‘and… we might meet someone else. What do you reckon, Ilya?’

An order was given and we stopped in the middle of a sun-scorched field, stretching away from the road to the dark knots of forest trees. I slithered off the tank and left Dago to his own devices… He didn’t know the Captain, but I did, so it was obvious to me that Yegorov had been puzzled by the egg and had picked it up for its very oddness, just as he picked up many other useless oddities from churches and cottages. He had subdued the little arrow-wielding boys with a command. Only if they gave him the egg would he accept them into the tank column. That’s how it’s done in an army. Dago’s just ignorant… I was happy we’d stopped. I’d had quite enough of the tank’s bumpy progress and Dago’s endless wittering. But I would still look around for a nip of something for the midget, I promised myself.

I passed along the column and exchanged greetings with the servicemen, acknowledging their salutations and shouts, and the soldiers were tightening their belts, and those who didn’t have helmets but caps on were mostly taking off their caps and putting on their helmets, because having your cap on meant taking a chance, and this close to Siřem no-one wanted to take chances. We expected that in a place where there was an inflammatory radio transmitter there’d also be armed men guarding it, and the soldiers in our column wanted to destroy that pocket of fanatical bandits once and for all. Many took advantage of the stop to put their arms and equipment in order, some were ambling about in the grey dust a few feet from the tanks, stretching their limbs, but they always remained vigilant. Unless the bandits had withdrawn for good… or perhaps surrendered to some other Soviet units… but we didn’t think that was very likely… We knew by now that Czechs don’t surrender. So we carried on as if they were all around us.

I got to the very end of the column, next to the cage with the wolf in it. This was where the camel boys were posted. That it was a wolf had been obvious to me when all those lights were blazing. I’d never have guessed that the first wolf I’d ever see would be such a wasted creature. It was cringing there on its pile of straw and blinking. I pulled a face at it, and narrowed my eyes to a squint and growled at it, but it didn’t react. Its coat was all thin and moulted, and it probably couldn’t care less that they’d taken away the egg it was keeping warm. Its eyes were all watery. I had to chuckle inside and thought to myself, ‘So this is Margash’s dad? And Margash’s country where we were both supposed to go… it was probably about as beautiful as this here father of his was strong and mighty… ha, ha, ha!’ I laughed at the wolf in a mighty voice, the kind of voice me and the boys had laughed in when we were making peace with the altar boys… Then one of the camel lads strolled over to the cage, and I pointed to the wolf and I said in Russian, ‘Is that your dad?’

‘Yeah,’ said the lad, and made to push something into the cage.

‘Is he the dad of all of you?’

‘Yeah.’ He nodded and looked at me, then he went off into some foreign language. He was younger and smaller than me. He had coarse black hair and his eyes were reduced to slits.

‘I don’t understand,’ I told him.

‘And who’s your dad?’ he asked in Russian.

‘My dad’s the military commander Captain Yegorov!’ I said, and the lad pursed his lips and nodded, saying, ‘Hmm…’ and I got to thinking he was, like, envious of me. He stuck his hand through the bars and tossed a mouse into the cage. The wolf’s mouth twitched. He bit the mouse in half and started chewing the spurting entrails and bristling skin.

I turned away and left. I hadn’t found any meths. Dago was gonna have to get by without. Perhaps he’ll give his tongue a rest, I thought to myself. If I’d had any inkling that I’d never see Dago again, I’d have thought something different.

I heard a shot, then another. Warning shots fired in the air. A group of women and children was coming towards us across the dusty field, their clothes grey with earth and dust… They were getting closer. Then they were quite close to the tank column. They were carrying sharpened sticks. They were poking in the soil… Captain Yegorov had probably left the egg in the inner recesses of the tank in the safekeeping of handpicked NCOs. He went up to the crowd of women and cowering children, looking around… and he was looking for me!.. I crawled through a gap in the tanks and followed my captain into the field, my tankman’s jacket flapping around me as if I were some longshirt, but I hadn’t been a longshirt for a pretty long time now… I followed the Captain, and the women made way for us, and they weren’t looking at us, and the Captain asked them things. He put the questions and I followed in his footsteps and said all the questions after him in Czech, which was dead easy. Captain Yegorov asked them, ‘Where are your men? Where are the bandits?’ and the women replied, ‘Neznaju,’ so there wasn’t anything for me to interpret. And suddenly I was standing in front of Mrs Kropek, and she was so grey in the face I wouldn’t have recognised her if she hadn’t said, ‘You poor blighter. They should’ve finished you off with a stick inside your mum’s belly, you double-crossing Tatar monkey!’ A girl stood next to Mrs Kropek, her face white and grey, and she was all haggard and worn, and I couldn’t believe I’d once had her warm and soft and firm breast in the palm of my hand… Mrs Kropek carried on swearing at me, and some of the women had stopped retreating from us and our questions. They were laughing… ‘You sodding treacherous little piece of Russian shit!’ Mrs Kropek went on at me, and she gave me more of the same. I was looking over her shoulder at Hanka, who just stared at the ground and hid behind her mum. ‘You twisted little rat!’ said Mrs Kropek said. ‘Go and die alone somewhere — and I hope it hurts, you filthy bastard!’ That was a curse and they all knew it in Siřem, but they should never have used it… Captain Yegorov came over to us, asking what the Czech woman was saying, so I told him she was hungry.

Captain Yegorov gave an order and the field kitchen was brought from the supply train, and the women and kids got some army rations, today’s gruel, and the whole grey crowd jostled around the kitchen, and we in the column were ordered back to our tanks, because Captain Yegorov had announced a midday break, and during the meal Captain Yegorov went about among the women and personally gave them second helpings, and carried on amiably asking his questions unaided, because the questions kept repeating themselves, the women already knew them, but they wouldn’t tell him nothing.

While the mess detail packed the field kitchen away again, I sat behind the tank to check that my eyes weren’t swollen or my belly dried out or my leg gone rigid — all of these could be brought on by that curse! But there was nothing wrong with me, so I gave a sigh of relief and got to thinking how good it would be if the mermaid were there among all those women and girls and kids! She’d tell them I’m different, that I’m a good guy… But I couldn’t see anyone in the field wrapped in a blue, white and red flag, though I really strained my eyes. I went looking for Mrs Kropek and Hanka, because they must have finished eating by now, and Kantariya was dragging a girl out from the pack of women and kids who were still stuffing their faces. I couldn’t tell it was a girl until I saw how she moved, lashing out with her bare knees when her dress rode up her legs, and also from how she shouted as he dragged her along. Another sub-machine-gunner had grabbed another girl from the crowd. He was pushing her ahead of him. If she fell, he picked her up. Then the women formed a wall around the other girls, who lay flat on the ground in the field, but for all their swearing at the soldiers and threatening them with sticks and fists, it did no good. The sub-machine-gunners dragged another one out. She twisted and turned and jerked her shoulders like she didn’t want to go with them, but she had to.

I expected Captain Yegorov to bark a command and tweak Kantariya, who was dragging the first girl, by the ear and give him a slap, but Captain Yegorov did no such thing and Kantariya dragged the girl off behind the roadside bushes. The soldiers took away whatever girls they wanted to the same spot.

After a time, Captain Yegorov stood up, slid deftly from the tank and went into the bushes as well.

I was glad that Hanka looked so haggard and gaunt that they didn’t want her. At least, I didn’t see anyone grab her.

It took me just a few hops to get across the road and fly into the field. I dashed about looking for them. I knew I had to find them. If I didn’t find Hanka, it would be terrible. I’d beg the Captain to let her come with our column. Hanka and the other girls might be able to perform in the circus, as Czechs. Why not? I roamed and ran about the field, looking for Hanka, but I couldn’t find her. Had they run away while I was checking myself over behind the tank? I didn’t know.

The women stared at the tanks and the tank men gawped back at them. It was quiet now. The almost still air was riven only by the loud wailing of some kid. The huddle of women, surrounding the one who was trying to soothe the bawling child, moved off towards the forest. Perhaps that was where they lived. Tank columns are equipped with lots of stuff, but nothing for calming screaming infants. The women left.

I never saw Hanka again. Or Mrs Kropek. They did a runner or something. That was the worst thing. I kept losing sight of people. Not like round a bend in a corridor or behind a tree. People were suddenly gone for ever.

The girls in the bushes came crawling out quite quietly. The soldiers were chatting very loudly, and they were laughing and dusting themselves down from top to bottom. The girls who’d crawled out of the bushes went and joined the others in the field. Then they all moved off, leading the children by the hand, carrying the tiniest ones, going further and further away into the dusty field, where there was nothing.

I returned to the lead tank. The ropes were there all right, but Dago was nowhere. He had gone. I was lucky nobody asked about him. After all, he’d been in my care.

The hamlet of Ctiradův Důl was the last stronghold before the final attack on Siřem.

The soldiers, excited by the women, were now hurriedly preparing their arms and equipment. We were about to break into Siřem and destroy all resistance, assuming there was any.

Well, I wasn’t looking forward to that one bit. I wasn’t feeling my best. After all, I’d lost Hanka again. And Dago, who was under my guard.

And to top it all, the Third World War broke out.

The Czechs unleashed it.

Once again, I heard about Commander Baudyš.

It was like this. Captain Yegorov and Gunner Kantariya and several of the NCOs and me were bivouacked in the only cottage that hadn’t been burnt down, and where the Czechs hadn’t even had time to switch off the television. And that, before we went on the attack, was something we welcomed, because the Radio Free Siřem transmitter had stopped transmitting and we lacked any reports from the Siřem military district.

On the Captain’s orders, we surrounded the overheated television, each sitting or squatting down wherever he happened to be.

And we learned that the Third World War had broken out.

The Czech announcer said that the Czechoslovak people had been betrayed. He spoke of Czechoslovaks dying for the civilized world of Western Europe in an unequal contest against the Eastern hordes, all the while expecting that the former would come to their aid. They were standing up to an invasion from Russia’s Asian steppes, just as their forebears had stood up to the invasions of the Tatars, and they were dying with their proud Czech or Slovak heads held high, having believed that the betrayal of civilized people would not be repeated, that there would be no repeat of Munich.

I translated and the NCOs muttered their displeasure and rolled their cigarettes, and then the news continued and now all the tankmen were cursing and swearing, and Kantariya even spat at the television, because it reported in words and pictures that many army corps of the Warsaw Pact nations had struck at the rear of the Soviet Army, alongside gangs of Czech bandits.

Many Polish and Hungarian divisions had torn up the Warsaw Pact and were engaged in battle with Soviet divisions. The numerically weaker Bulgarian and East German corps were fighting their way back to their own frontiers, or surrendering to the Czechs. But more and more new guards units of the Soviet Army kept rolling in and dealing severely with the betrayal.

Then we saw on the screen various army groups in various states of collapse and misery. We didn’t find that funny… But then I stiffened and almost yelped, because there on the screen was a smiling Commander Baudyš!

He sat on a tank, waving a Czechoslovak flag on which was written THE TRUTH PREVAILS… and sitting next to him on the tank was Karel! I’d never have guessed I’d see one of the Bandits again one day.

It was Commander Baudyš and his partisan unit that had attacked West Germany. The thing was that Czech and Slovak partisans were impatiently looking out for the Americans and the forces of the Free World allied in the Atlantic Pact, Nato, and couldn’t wait to get bedded down in suitable spots among the rocks and shoot down Soviet helicopters with American Redeye rockets, but the Americans hadn’t shown up… The Americans and the forces of Nato weren’t showing up… So Commander Baudyš had invaded West Germany to provoke a Third World War, at last giving the Americans and the Atlantic Pact a perfect opportunity and excuse for self-defence, and for stamping on the necks of the Soviet Communist hydra. And our heroic Czech and Slovak lads were making incursions across the western frontier on tanks and even in Soviet-made jeeps, carrying their recoilless Kalashnikovs, to tell the world about Communist atrocities so that the Free World would finally stir itself and not just stand by and watch Czechoslovakia’s heroic resistance against the tide of brutal sovietization, but the world cared damn all and sod all and bugger all about Czechoslovakia.

The Atlantic Pact wasn’t going to upset its tense relations with the Warsaw Pact over Czechoslovakia, so all sides agreed with all sides, and they hurled the rebels right back into the jaws of the Soviet hydra, and the situation changed for our Czech boys in the attack divisions that went into Germany. German bullets started whistling around their heads, and our boys tried in vain to show that their hands were up and that they’d come armed with nothing more than the Idea of Freedom… West German troops and the forces of the Atlantic Pact and American soldiers from bases in West Germany were now driving our boys back towards the Czechoslovak frontier — where, of course, the Soviets were waiting for them, as, having seized control of the situation, they had brought the rebellious Hungarians and Poles to heel. And our boys, who had attacked Germany to provoke a Third World War, were now being thrown back by the Germans towards the Russians, and the Russians were furious at their losses, so our boys really copped it, squashed between German and Russian millstones. The ones who weren’t killed surrendered.

Only a single Bohemian lion did not surrender: Commander Baudyš and his division of specially trained saboteurs… After the renewed Soviet occupation of Prague, and the hero’s death of the statesman Dubček, Czechoslovakia declared her unconditional capitulation, dictated by the supreme authorities of the Eastern Empire. Baudyš and his division alone did not accept it, and now he was hiding somewhere in the disorderly heartland of Czechoslovakia. And the guards units of the Eastern Empire, reinforced by Nato peace-keeping forces, gripped defiant Czechoslovakia in a ring of steel, and salvaged peace for the world and strangled the terrible Third World War before it was born… And the NCOs and Captain Yegorov cheered and clapped until the cottage shook, and they ran outside and gave the good tidings to the others — that it was the end… that there was peace at last!

The sub-machine-gunners shouted for joy and the ones who had steel helmets banged them on the tanks, and the ones who had caps tossed them joyfully in the air. The animals in our column added their neighing and braying to the jubilation, and the sub-machine-gunner standing next to me also tossed his cap in the air, and as he tried to catch it he staggered and I saw blood spurt from his neck, and then we heard a shot and another and then Vrowwww! and the cottage and its overheated television screen disappeared in fire and smoke. The cluster of cheering sub-machine-gunners was reduced to a jumble of crawling, groaning bodies… I looked for any sign of Captain Yegorov, but everyone had withdrawn to the tanks, and any minute now their guns would start spouting flashes, and I would be saved from the attackers, or torn apart by the gunfire… I jumped headfirst into the bushes, then I saw crouching shadows moving quickly around the ruins of the cottage, among the dead and injured. They must be the partisans who’d carried out the attack, but they didn’t look like partisans and even in the thickening gloom it was obvious that they weren’t soldiers of the Czechoslovak People’s Army either… I propped myself up on one elbow and called out weakly, ‘I’m here!’

17: Who got burnt? Hero in the hills. Czech sea. What’s round the corner?

We were deep inside Chapman Forest. From the edge of the forest, where I sensed the tank column was, I could hear bursts of sub-machine-gun fire. And I could hear the lads chatting.

Martin said, ‘It’s that new lad. It’s Margash, it is!’

But Dýha said, ‘Bollocks! It’s Ilya. I heard him say something.’

I sat up.

‘Who are you?’ someone asked, leaning towards me out of the darkness.

‘Ilya.’

‘And what’s that stuff you’re wearing, man?’ asked Dýha. ‘Russian clobber!’

They were wearing uniforms with the trouser legs cut off, and some had the sleeves cut off too, and they were all pinned up here and there, and some wore T-shirts and anoraks and trackies from the Home from Home, and various kids’ clothes. But the main thing was how they were all hung about with weapons, sub-machine guns and Soviet pump-action guns, and almost all of them had knives. Not kitchen knives, but really nice knives, hanging from their belts in sheaths, like they should be.

Karel thrust his canteen in my hand and I had a drink. It was hard stuff. I didn’t spit it out, but swallowed it slowly.

‘What were you doing with the Russkies?’ Dýha asked.

‘Leave him alone!’ said Karel. ‘They probably captured him!’

I nodded and looked through the gloom. At the edge of the clearing was Freckles and some other altar boys. I recognized Pepper.

‘Good God, Ilya!’ Dýha exclaimed. ‘If we’d known they was interrogating you in that cottage as a prisoner, we’d never have bazooka’d it, you know that!’

‘We’ve been to Germany,’ said Karel, sitting next to me. ‘Do you want some chewing gum?’

We sat in the dense grass of the clearing, the tall trees around us looking like guardian spirits. It was still warm and the grass was teeming with insects. Suddenly I felt so tired that I stretched out on the ground. I lay in the grass, utterly defenceless, and took a close look at the boys’ familiar faces. Some were missing, probably out on patrol. They were clutching their weapons, sitting and standing around me. Dýha, Karel, Martin from the Home. Some of the altar boys. They were lads that I knew — and they weren’t. I was glad we were together. I think they were all glad.

Someone spat, someone else coughed, someone squatted down. I sensed that the tension there’d been in all of us had gone. It had been left behind on the path through the forest they’d dragged me along, and where we’d got stung by nettles and cut by the sharp tips of the long grass. The tension of combat sometimes falls away from men quite suddenly, like when you poke your head above water. The lads opened some tins and they’d also got bread. I had some as well, there was plenty of it. They nearly all had a canteen of water.

Dýha came and sat by me. ‘We’re drumming the Russkies out of the forest,’ he said.

We were joined by Pepper and Freckles. ‘Hi,’ said Pepper. ‘Hi there, man’, ‘Ilya, hi,’ said some of the other lads as well.

‘Hi, Martin,’ I said. I only remembered him in a torn black smock, but now he was in camouflage gear. I used Czech. Talking Russian would have been stupid.

‘I’m glad to see you,’ said Martin. ‘If you really are Ilya!’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘Have you run into Šklíba?’

That was a stupid way to ask. I realized that at once, because Martin turned and left.

And then Dýha fell onto his back, he fell into the grass as if he’d suddenly been shot, but he was laughing. He’d made a lightning grab under my tank jacket, and from under the shabby trackie top I’d had at the Home he yanked a fistful of now well-thumbed documents with my maps on, which he must have spotted poking out. He was waving them around and through tears of laughter he said, ‘Ilya’s back… and his mission’s accomplished! He’s brought these!’

The lads started roaring and giggling, and some might have been imagining me disappearing through the door of the Home from Home to go on a combat mission… ‘He has and all!.. Accomplished his mission, ha, ha!’ they laughed, and I hoped we were surrounded by really alert sentries, because that’s how it has to be every time, even after a successful attack.

We sat in the grass together, just like old times, but there was no chance of making a fire, this was a powwow… There was lots of stuff I needed to know. I was pretty stunned to learn that Commander Vyžlata had been declared a national martyr, and it gave me quite a jolt that Commander Žinka had been executed for Commander Vyžlata’s murder by the Home Guard, and that the Home Guard was made up of Holasa and Moravčík and Kropáček, and other Siřem men, obviously.

And Dýha told me that Vyžlata’s body was lying in state on the square at Siřem surrounded by a wreath of candles that were kept burning and by a mountain of floral tributes, and I let out a little squeak of horror, which is something no saboteur should ever do… Dýha told me that Commander Vyžlata’s tortured body had been found in a wash-tub by the new lad, Margash. Soon after that Žinka had confessed under some really tough interrogation, and because Margash had testified against him as well, Žinka was given short shrift by the People’s Court. They shot him outside the Home from Home. It had happened fairly recently, which explained why the transmitter had fallen silent.

‘The locals didn’t want him as their commander anyway, see? They don’t want anyone as their commander, see?’ Dýha said. I nodded.

From the rest of our discussions I gathered that the lads were most concerned about the truce between the Nato forces and the troops of the five armies, now safeguarded by an army of new Russians of the Eastern Empire, a truce I only heard about on television in Ctiradův Důl, which was captured by the Soviets, then immediately lost again.

I was really pleased the lads were so full of their own adventures and so unconcerned about the details of my sojourn with the tank column.

‘We were in Germany with the Yanks, like,’ said Karel. I had swallowed his chewing gum ages ago, so he gave me another piece.

‘And now the Nato lot’s here and cosying up to the Russkies,’ said Dýha.

‘But our commander’s never gonna give in to ’em,’ Martin spouted.

‘Nato’s got men at all checkpoints along with the Russians, enough to make a decent chap afraid to poke his nose out of the forest,’ said Karel.

‘They’re lookin’ for weapons,’ said Dýha. ‘That’s why they’re turning over every chicken in the coop, and picking up every dog hair and stuff like that. They’re scouring every village, man!’

‘It’s biological weapons they’re lookin’ for,’ someone said.

‘We’d have managed a war with the five armies by ourselves, us Czechs, with the Slovaks along as well,’ said Dýha, ‘but now the Russians have got all Nato on their side… well, who knows!’

I wanted to put my own oar in, and I couldn’t carry on saying nothing, so I told the lads that some people in the tank column believed in a new brotherhood of machines and people and animals — and I was also wondering, since the war was over, whether we might not take care of the animals in the Socialist Circus Project. It was something we all knew about from working in the village…

‘The brotherhood of people and animals? That was Eden,’ said Martin. ‘Nothing new! But with machines, man, that’ll be Armageddon, believe me!’

‘What’s that?’ I asked him, because I’d heard it before.

‘The nuns taught us about it, man,’ said Martin. ‘You were always buried away somewhere with Monkeyface.’

I didn’t want to hear about that, so I quickly started on something else… I told the lads about the wolf and the dinosaur egg, and they found it funny. They laughed, and I’d also found it funny when Dago told me about it on the tank.

So I told them all about the circus zone that was supposed to come into being under Captain Yegorov’s command at this very spot, around Siřem. But the uprising had put paid to it!

The lads told me a group of Ukrainians had recently passed through with a dancing bear and that they’d let them pass. That could have been the circus.

Then the lads talked about running into a band of women one day in a forest clearing… They’d surprised the women in the forest, and a weird lot they were, because the women, wearing colourful clothes, leapt onto horses and charged off. I gathered that these women on horses had slipped past all five armies and the insurgents. The old people holed up in underground bunkers in the forest claimed they were wood nymphs and that it meant the end of the world, because whoever heard of nymphs on horseback wandering about among gangs of armed men?

That’s what the lads told me, and I said nothing, though only I knew who those lady riders in motley circus attire were.

We simply chattered away.

‘Say, though, Ilya, what did the wolf look like?’

My news about the egg and the wolf had provoked interest.

‘I wonder if Nato and the new Russians are tightening the noose round Siřem because of the dinosaur egg.’

‘Imagine,’ said Karel, ‘what a dinosaur attack could do to an American base! Reduce it to smithereens, I tell you.’

‘But suppose it’s not a dinosaur inside the egg, but something else. A secret weapon. Could be a live secret weapon,’ I told the lads, and for a moment they were silent.

‘Gosh!’ someone gasped.

‘It’s something so terrible they thought it best to make a truce!’ Martin panted.

For a moment we sat there saying nothing, then Karel ordered, ‘To the crag! On your feet!’ The lads stood up immediately, stuffed their spoons down their boots and the empty tins in their knapsacks, and cleared everything up, making it so tidy it looked as if no-one had ever even been there. Then Karel dived into the undergrowth of Chapman Forest, followed by the others. Only Dýha stayed seated.

‘Look, the Šklíba thing,’ he said. ‘The altar boys that go and join their families in their shelters say that someone has seen a lone boy in the forest. What do you reckon?’

‘Dunno.’ I shrugged.

‘And they say he was praying!’ said Dýha. ‘It could have been him.’

‘Could,’ I said and we both shrugged.

‘Karel’s an orderly, see,’ Dýha added. ‘I should be the one with the higher rank!’

‘Obviously!’

And I told Dýha that we needed to warn Commander Baudyš, because Captain Yegorov’s tank column meant to attack Siřem.

‘Hmm, well, that Yegorov of yours is in for a hard time. The whole area’s being taken over by Kozhanov’s 1st Tank Brigade of Guards, ain’t that something?’

‘Aha!’ I said, though I hadn’t a clue what he was on about.

‘You’re very lucky to be with us, Ilya,’ Dýha said. We stood up and set off through the forest. I kept a close eye on the bushes and branches ahead of us, which were stirred ever so slightly by the lads who’d gone on ahead.

‘Your pals in the tank column are headed straight for Siberia, you know, since they let their formations get knocked out by peasants,’ said Dýha, and he laughed.

‘What?’

‘Yeah. The only ones in charge around here are gonna be Kozhanov’s tank guards, and the Eastern Empire’s new command’s gonna sweep any other Russkies off to the gulag.’

For a while we just walked on.

‘By the way, Ilya, that crap about dinosaurs and a secret weapon, that’s just longshirts’ horror stories. The Russians and Nato have reached an agreement. We’re done with war before they do for us. The altar boys are gonna stay in the forest. They’ve got families here. But we ain’t got no-one. I’m joining the Foreign Legion. You coming with me?’

I said nothing and kept walking.

‘You left that paper in the wayside shrine, man,’ Dýha was breathing down my neck. ‘You did just the right thing! Baudyš was pleased. You’re a great saboteur, man! But then if you weren’t, we’d have done for you first, there on your tank, you realize that!’

‘I’ll report everything to the commander!’ I said. I didn’t want to say any more to Dýha. He was just like the soldiers on the tanks who liked their jobs in the column. He even smelt like them.

‘You can’t report anything to Baudyš.’ Dýha laughed in the darkness ahead, where he had overtaken me. ‘And what about the giraffe head?’ he asked. ‘Did it give you a fright?’

‘Yeah!’ I said.

‘I bet it did.’ Dýha was walking so fast I could hardly keep up, and he was carrying three Kalashnikovs, a full knapsack and ammunition. He knew the way, of course.

*

And then we were on Fell Crag. Part of the way we crawled up a steep hillside, and it was dead true that Dýha was a bright, nippy little guy, and as we crawled up through a cleft cut into the cliff overhang, I’d probably have got smashed up more than once without his hissed commands, like ‘Toehold, man! Your foot this way!’, and that wouldn’t have been good for a saboteur redeploying to a new site. But I hadn’t been waging war in the forest. I’d been on a tank.

Having climbed over the rocky ramparts, we were right there among the lads. They’d settled down on blankets and groundsheets around a little campfire, and those who wanted to were stuffing their faces again, and I said hello to Mikušinec. He gawped at me. Probably couldn’t make up his mind whether it was me or not. The only one missing was Páta, but that our gypsies weren’t there didn’t surprise me a bit.

I’d been really lucky that they took out the cottage with a bazooka that day. It was their farewell night. The altar boys were off into the forest to their mothers and kid sisters, while Dýha and Mikušinec were already packed and ready to go off to join the Legion. I hadn’t said yet where I was going, though I knew. ‘And you, Martin? Karel?’

Martin told me he had one big task ahead of him still. Karel just sighed. There was water boiling in a battered kettle on the fire. Someone shoved a canteen in my hand, and I took a drink of hard liquor. I was to take part in the last night of the battle group, since Czechoslovakia, squeezed by the five armies, had capitulated, and I learned that the new Russians — that is Kozhanov’s 1st Tank Brigade of Guards — would be here very soon to start picking up anyone who refused to lay down their arms, including recalcitrant Bulgarians and Poles and Germans and Hungarians, and the old Soviet occupying forces who’d acquitted themselves badly, and so it really was time to do a runner, because anyone who stayed could expect to face a military tribunal! — and Siberia! — and that’s if things went well! It’s always been the same.

And the lads were earnestly talking about winding up their combat activities. Now and then they looked up towards the mountain high above our post with its defensive rocky ramparts, and some kind of saboteur’s instinct told me that’s where our Commander Baudyš was lurking. I wasn’t wrong. In my mind I began to put together my report to him. I needn’t have bothered.

The lads swished the liquor from their canteens into the hot tea, and reminisced about all the fighting. They were laughing and talking about people suffering in coarse, husky voices that broke now and again into a squeak like some mouse or bird, and again I was glad that Dago had done a bunk, disappearing before the bazooka attack, because he could easily have copped it… I wanted to tell the lads about the funny little dwarf, they’d like that!.. But now wasn’t the time, because Freckles, Holý, Pepper, all our altar boys were saying goodbye. We exchanged manly handshakes and, if we’d had stubble on our cheeks, furtive manly tears might well have run down it — that’s allowed when the fighting’s over! But our cheeks were still soft and whisker-free.

Now the altar boys quickly and quietly took off all the various bits of their uniforms and tossed them on the ground, and put on sweaters and trackies and other normal clothes which they had ready, so it took a while, and they also put their sub-machine guns and rifles and grenades and their cool knives in a big pile. Some had Siaz marked on them. Some were quite nice. Then one after another they clambered over the ramparts. It crossed my mind that one of them could be my lovely Hanka’s brother, but I couldn’t ask! I was just a reform school kid who’d skipped his tank unit! They didn’t want me on the crag… I didn’t dare risk it.

So I was sitting with the Bandits, just like old times, listening to all the tales about what had been going on. What surprised me most was the news that since his hero’s death old Mr Cimbura had also become a superstar.

‘What with Vyžlata being a martyr, that makes two Siřem saints,’ Martin called out faintly. ‘Think how happy that would make the sisters.’ And in the glare of the fire he clapped gently, just patting his palms lightly, his cheeks ablaze.

Martin was glad I asked him things, so off he started and the other lads just chipped in now and then… I heard that the extraordinary wartime beatification of Mr Cimbura was decided by no less than the auxiliary bishop of Louny… and that the hero Alexander Dubček was still alive, and he’d sent a messenger to Siřem all the way from Prague with his personal greeting. After all, the entire Czechoslovak uprising — in the suppression of which the best combat troops of five armies were nearly bled dry — broke out in Siřem right after Cimbura’s great act… ‘Dead right,’ the lads chimed in, and here and there one of them tossed a twig on the fire, and Martin handed me his canteen and carried on talking…

‘First they wanted to turn Siřem into a model of collaboration, right? The Radio Free Siřem transmitter really got up their noses… In the five armies and all over Czechoslovakia people had heard about how brilliantly organized our Siaz was, and all zones in revolt looked up to us… We was held up as an example! So that’s why the Soviets decided to bring Siřem to its knees,’ said Martin, and the lads lapped it all up, and it crossed my mind that he wasn’t telling this tale for the first time…

‘The five armies’ TV — the eyes of the entire world — were supposed to see us brought down and made powerless. There were platforms on the square in Siřem for all of them bigwigs and officers and top brass, and, just fancy, collaborators came up to them (they must have brought in actors or something, because a Czech collaborator? That don’t make sense! They hired people) and the collaborators come up and they bring the keys of the town to them cut-throat generals with uniforms all covered with spangles, but it didn’t happen, man… Siřem was meant to be a model of collaboration, but instead it came to symbolize nationwide resistance!’ As he talked, Martin waved his arms about as if the words were straining to get out. He told his tale, but it was not like when Commander Vyžlata told stories to send us to sleep. It wasn’t like Commander Baudyš giving instructions, and it wasn’t like Dago’s babbling on the tank. The lads hung on his every word…

‘Suddenly, Cimbura rides into the square on his wheelchair, pushed along by some old woman. He’s brandishing his crutch and he bellows, “To Moscow!” and he hurls his crutch and sends the collaborators’ keys of the town flying into the dust, honest! And Cimbura wheels himself away from the old biddy, then pours petrol over himself and with everyone looking on sets fire to himself and rides straight at the platform and the platform goes up in flames as if hell itself had opened up!’

Martin spoke very fast, sweat streaming down his face. ‘And so it started! People remembered their oaths and pledges, their dear Czech homeland, and the whole green rang to the tune of “Arise, Ye Holy Warriors of Blaník”, and the Home Guard, headed by Holasa and Kropáček, and Moravčík and Dašler, got to work with a will, and before the anthem “Where is My Home?” came to an end all the Russians were gone from Siřem, at least the ones who were alive; the others were lying around the green in the acrid stench of the charred remains of the generals… The nation rose up after the great Cimbura became a living torch. I saw the live broadcast. The rest you know, eh, Ilya?’

They were all silent. I nodded earnestly, because what could I say? The tank column? Snipers? The gangs in our sector? There was no point.

I sat and watched… then I grabbed a handful of grass and rubbed the mask of axle grease and the blood of insects from my forehead and cheeks. The tea had gone cold, so I used that too… Martin tossed me a sweater he’d picked from the pile left by the altar boys. I stood up, pealed off my tank jacket and hurled it into the flames, then I wriggled out of my tankman’s trousers and tracksuit, which was so covered in oil, sweat and blood (not mine) it was as vile as an old scab, and tossed everything into the fire. It was a good thing nothing was cooking on it.

Martin gave me a nice T-shirt to go with the sweater. I also got an army shirt with the sleeves cut back, and from the pile by the fire I chose other items, big and small, to cram myself into, and I was dressed like the other boys, and that was good. I kept the case with my maps, and the sad remains of the Manual and the Book of Knowledge and put them where they belonged. And when Dýha hung his canteen around my neck, the lads all laughed, and so did I.

Then a sound came down on us. My ears were muffled by that strange sound. I turned towards the heavy sigh that I could hear for the first time: Ooaaargh! And again: Ooaaargh!

It was coming from the mountain above us. I could have missed it, because Martin was talking. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and a shiver ran down my spine. I glanced at the lads. They were all silent.

‘They’ve got prisoners up there,’ it crossed my mind.

‘It’s Baudyš,’ Dýha told me.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked.

‘He’s groaning with pain, man,’ Dýha told me. ‘Moaning with the pain, our hero,’ someone whispered. I was still shivering at the sound. ‘The commander’s studded with all sorts of injuries,’ said someone else. There was another almighty sigh, so loud it seemed to fill the whole dark mountain above us, escaping like air from a giant balloon.

‘We sank a shaft for the commander, just like he wanted,’ Martin said in a whisper.

‘We did it with dynamite,’ whispered Dýha.

‘And people decorated it,’ said Martin quietly, ‘with branches and flowers. The womenfolk swept all the odd bits and pieces of rock out, so it’s all clean and cosy, like in church. You’d never believe it!’

‘Kids took their toys to the shaft to honour the commander,’ Mikušinec said.

‘But now nobody’s allowed near,’ said Karel.

‘At first,’ Mikušinec said, throwing a few branches onto the fire, ‘when our commander breathed like that, the whole mountain shook.’

‘And even animals from Chapman Forest would come!’ said Martin.

‘I never saw none!’ said Dýha.

‘But I did,’ said Martin. ‘And eagles circled over the mountain.’

‘Come off it, man,’ said Dýha, ‘where do you find eagles around here? Magpies maybe.’

‘When our commander ordered us to dig out a shaft, there was birds circling over the mountain!’ insisted Martin.

And again we heard sighs coming from the mountain. Now and again a twig crackled in the fire. I took a sip from a fresh brew of hot tea. All around, beyond the rocky ramparts, darkness was sinking into the forest. My old uniform on the fire had stopped stinking. It didn’t stink for long.

‘He’ll let us know when we have to blow him up,’ said Martin.

‘You what?’ I said, spilling tea all over my nice new clobber and scalding myself into the bargain.

‘We’ll blow him up with dynamite. So he stays up here for ever,’ Martin tried to explain.

‘So his hero’s body can’t never fall into enemy hands,’ said Karel.

‘So his hero’s grave may kindle new resistance,’ said Mikušinec.

‘That was the Commander’s instructions,’ said Martin.

‘That’s right,’ Dýha yawned. ‘Our final mission, lads.’

‘Yep,’ someone else said.

Only after the sighs from inside the mountain had abated did we wrap ourselves variously in blankets and groundsheets, sitting or lying around the meagre flames of the fire, as if we wanted to protect it with our bodies from the damp and dark of the forest beyond the boulders all around our post.

I wondered about the watch rota, but no-one had said anything. Mikušinec was repacking his backpack. He too was about to head for the Legion.

‘You haven’t got much with you,’ I said for the sake of something to say.

‘They’ll give us everything in the Legion,’ Mikušinec replied. ‘The main thing is to get as far as the first port.’

‘Where’s that?’ I asked, though I didn’t want to go.

‘On the edge of Bohemia,’ said Mikušinec, ‘by the sea.’

‘Right. And where’s Páta?’ I asked, and Dýha said, ‘He refuses to budge from Siřem cemetery. Likes the peace and quiet, he says.’

‘Right,’ I said again, and, even though as a saboteur I ought to have known, I asked him where Još’s gypsy hut was, because that’s exactly where I wanted to go once things were finished with on the crag, and Dýha told me.

‘It’s still odd, you know,’ he went on.

‘What?’

‘Chata and Bajza and the other gippos tracked down their kid brothers, and are said to have carried out a raid on a children’s camp to take them back to their shack. While we,’ he propped himself up on one elbow and looked at me, ‘we cared sod all about our longshirts.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, and in my mind’s eye I could see the little mugs of the little lads, and I could see their feet, bare or in battered old boots, their white shirts flapping around their ankles. I thought of the longshirts screaming in fear without the nuns, and padding around within the darkened walls of the Home from Home… I would sometimes remember them wandering around even during breaks in the fighting, if I heard tiny birds scrabbling about in the trees of Chapman Forest, and once, when I spotted some abandoned toys in one of the pockets of resistance that we smashed to smithereens, it crossed my mind that I could pick up the odd soft toy for the longshirts, but I had no idea where the little ones had gone.

‘Gypsies,’ said Dýha. ‘Gypsies don’t wage war on anyone,’ he said, yawning.

Then I heard Mikušinec laughing quietly. He’d already snuggled down, wrapped up in blankets. ‘That bear was so funny… me and Dýha here were in the forest and suddenly this bear! Made us jump, it did! And the bear gets up on its hind legs and sticks its paw out! Ha, ha! He were a performing bear, Ilya. You’ve never seen anything like it!’

‘That’s right,’ Dýha mumbled, ‘and he made you jump too!’

‘Hey, Ilya,’ said Mikušinec, sounding very sleepy, and suddenly I found it strange, all those years we used to chat together just like this in the older boys’ dormitory, and I’d barely become a Bandit again, and it would all be over with on Fell Crag. Ah well… ‘Ilya, kid, you noticed anything odd?’

‘Like what?’

‘You know, down in the forest. Like something’s happened in the forest, man. Looks like the animals have done a bunk.’

‘I haven’t been in the forest much.’

‘Right.’

Then Dýha chortled, ‘Anybody would take fright at a bear. Anyone! But Mikuš here, he got kicked by a rabbit. Funny, eh? Ha, ha!’

Mikušinec was suddenly wide awake and said, ‘But it was huge! A giant rabbit, man,’ and he went on about rabbits the size of dogs that got up on their hind legs and tore through the camp when he was on sentry duty, and one of them gave him an almighty kick. It did!

Me and Dýha laughed until we howled, and Mikušinec said the giant rabbit that kicked him had a tiny little rabbit in its belly, and Dýha said, ‘Now you’re talking bollocks!’ and I was watching the clouds as they crossed the sky, passing over the moon, which was dripping light. I was nearly asleep, but I still asked Dýha, ‘What about sentries?’ and he just mumbled that I could forget it. The Russians wouldn’t venture into the forest. They were still scared of the Commander.

So we fell asleep, and that was a great mistake, because we were attacked in the small hours by the panzer grenadiers of Major General Kozhanov’s 1st Tank Brigade of Guards, supported by the motorized riflemen of the 24th Samara-Ulyanovsk Division, and covered by the motorized riflemen of the 30th Irkutsk-Pinsk Guards Division, holders of the Order of Lenin and two Orders of the Red Banner; and we, up on our high point, were also pitched into by soldiers of the 1st Proletarian Moscow-Minsk Motorized Rifle Guards Division, holders of, among others, the Order of Suvorov (second degree) and the Order of Kutuzov (second degree); and on top of that the assault lines of those sent to butcher us were reinforced by observers and specialists from the Atlantic Pact forces. So we nearly missed blowing up our Commander.

Who the buggers were who were hell-bent on killing us that day I only discovered later. Early that morning there wasn’t much time to find out. It was all I could do just to survive.

The first thing I’d seen at the dawning of the new day was Dýha’s face, so screwed up that it scared me.

He was holding a finger to his lips.

It was quiet, not a bird tweeted and mist was rising from the woods beneath us, creeping towards us from the treetops, dribbling towards us over the rocky ramparts and through all the cracks in them. I saw all this because I’d rolled over on my front. The canteen Dýha had given me was poking into me. The lads were crouching behind the rocky ramparts, holding all their various machine guns and sub-machine guns and pump-action guns at the ready.

Me and Dýha crawled over to join them.

Down among the trees, amid the creeping shreds of mist, I caught a glimpse of something moving. It could have been a hind, but it was this guy in a black uniform, and behind him were others in camouflage gear. They were hopping through the mist, jumping between the trees and getting closer by leaps and bounds.

The forest was full of them.

Yet it was quiet. I turned to see the Bandits. They were kneeling, ready to shoot. The mist swirled around Martin’s body. In no time he was just a black silhouette in white milk. The rock was digging into my knees. The last time we’d knelt together like this was in the gloom of Siřem church amid the acrid smoke of candles. Dýha was next to me, smiling. I thought he was enjoying himself.

And it was cold, just like in the church. When the rocks got warmed up in the summer’s heat, they’d be riddled with bullet holes. I was unlikely to see that. I didn’t care that I didn’t have a weapon. In the first sunlight, I saw in the forest below us those familiar glints and it dawned on me that there were so many weapons down there that whatever we had we were done for. And I’d seen no sign of a bazooka or any other decent bit of kit among the boys. They’d probably squandered everything worthwhile back in Ctiradův Důl. If I hadn’t burnt my tankman’s uniform, I might have been mistaken for a prisoner of the Bandits.

Then I started to hear sighs from the mountain again, and suddenly I couldn’t give a damn about anything. I think I just wanted everything to end.

In the quiet of early morning, the sighs and groans from the mountain sounded louder than in the evening. The Commander’s breathing thundered and whistled in the stone throat of the shaft, and all those cut-throats and sharpshooters down below couldn’t fail to hear it. The sighing and groaning inside the mountain went on and on, as if someone was being interrogated by mountain goblins. The Commander must have been in great pain from the wounds covering his heroic frame. For an instant I had this notion that the Commander’s agonized breathing would sweep the attackers back down the hill, but that must have been my mind wandering off into some fairy tale.

Karel crept across to us, dragging a pump-action gun behind him over the stones with his left hand, which struck me as not very careful. In his right had he was clutching a thin black flex. Dýha turned away from the rock embrasure, and he said, ‘Now?’

Karel nodded.

Martin peeped out of the mist, pulling a silly face, and with his mouth agape he silently asked the same question. Mikušinec came crawling through the mist to join us, pushing ahead of him the backpack he’d got ready to take to the Legion, and to his questioning expression Karel whispered, ‘Yep!’

The flex in Karel’s hand was fitted with a switch, something I knew about. So I waited for the big bang, and just hoped the lads had made a first-class job of laying the mines.

We waited. The men down below didn’t. Now and again we caught a jangle from the equipment of some careless twerp, or twigs cracking. These were no performing bears or jolly kangaroos climbing up to inspect Fell Crag, no sir!

But Karel suddenly whispered, ‘I can’t do it!’ and to my amazement I saw our orderly quietly blubbering.

‘Well I can!’ said Dýha, and he reached for the switch… One mighty sigh from the bowels of the mountain had just turned into a groan, as if the Commander was spurring us on… Suddenly this fire came hurtling at us out of the forest, igniting the air above our heads with a deafening crash. Around and above us, rocks were flying and stones smashed into boulders on every side, splitting into bits. I couldn’t hear a thing in that hail of stones. I could only see that Dýha was no longer next to me. Part of the cliff had broken away and collapsed into the mist. I couldn’t see anyone or anything. I lay down for safety and covered my head, the canteen digging painfully into my chest. I thought it was the canteen, but then I saw it was the black switch, and I’d rolled onto it by accident, and so it had come about that our Commander, and with him the whole of Fell Crag, was in all likelihood blown up by me.

I didn’t worry about it. I dashed into the dark of the forest undergrowth, which, as I have already noted several times, surrounded our post on Fell Crag.

I can’t relay much about my wanderings in Chapman Forest. Stuff grew in some places, but not in others, and although I wasn’t hungry, I was plagued by the most embarrassing gastric problems, and that’s bad form for any fighting man. All I had was my full canteen. I didn’t drink hard liquor, not till later, when I was talking to the gippos.

How I broke out of the encirclement and found myself alone in the forest, I’ve no idea. I could have fainted and lain in some thicket long enough for the soldiers to have withdrawn. It’s hard to say. It did cross my mind to let myself be found by the soldiers. I knew how to cope with that by then. When all’s said and done, I was just a poor orphan and I’d lost my way. But I gave up that idea after I saw the villages. I reached the villages later.

Moreover, I’d been engaged in battle in a combat unit. They’d be able to tell that from the way I moved, the way I walked, from all the things I did and knew. They’d ask questions. To be under interrogation on the opposite side from before wasn’t something I fancied.

In the thicket where I came round, I inspected the terrain, sniffed the air and also hoped I’d meet one or two Bandits. At that point I’d have welcomed an invitation to go and join the Foreign Legion. But none of the lads showed up.

Just like a Soviet scout, I looked closely at the colour and humidity of the grass, and at everything else that was there, to see if the rocks were big and without odour and scarring or, conversely, riven by ancient waters and sweetly scented. I even scrutinized the heavy clouds that merged with the waving motion of the trees. So it wasn’t at all hard to find the brook. Beside it I counted up my aching bones and I drank from it. I ate frogs and stuff.

Then I started having more dreams about Hanka. Her battered body came back to me, and with it a thrill. I imagined her wandering around Siřem, and I grew tired of life in my forest hideout. It was my first time alone, and I talked and snuggled up to Hanka all the more. It was nice in my dream. But I knew I’d have to leave.

I decided to find the gypsy shack and become a gypsy. I guess anyone who had spent part of their life on the front of a Soviet tank with his face blackened with axle grease would think that was a good idea.

I knew that Još’s valley was not far from Siřem, where the old buzzard often went in search of work.

When the lads were working on the rocks by the footbridge they would disappear to his shack. And Dýha had told me which way to go. So I followed the stream. It would bring me to the bridge, as I believed, but I mustn’t turn off into Siřem.

The stream led me to some forest ground covered in dark green, dense tussocks of grass, and the forest moss became springy underfoot. At the Home from Home we used to while away our childhood telling spooky tales about various villains who’d met their end by wandering off the poachers’ paths and getting swallowed up by the mire, so I took extra care. It was good to know that wherever I could wade through, any army vehicles, or even a pursuit platoon of giant paras, would nosedive into a deep squelching hollow of ooze. The forest was a safe place to be.

Then I saw the women trees. The frog zone had come to an end, but I was still hungry, and I had this idea that since I was so small it would also be all right to eat the smallest animals, but those ants were evil. They stung the inside of my mouth and throat real bad. Gargling with tar was nothing compared to that onslaught. I was at the spot Mr Cimbura had once told me about, or maybe I was just dreaming it, because of the ants’ poison, and this spot had no mercy on me. Mostly I’d seen the face of Czechia, whether in pictures or my mind’s eye, as lovely, but those masks of a woman’s face carved into the hard wood of the trees were meant to scare the pants off you, and they did.

The Czechia war masks were cut into the trees at about my height. Perhaps the old people that carved them weren’t very tall either. When I saw the first mask, I screamed and fell over, and felt a painful prick in my bottom. It wasn’t another ant, but an ancient arrowhead, the sort of weapon foreign armies used to use. There was something about that in The Catholic Book of Knowledge, in the chapter about the boy Sebastian. If I stamped my feet in the nettles and thick undergrowth, I’d probably hear the crunch of the rotten shields of ancient marauders, driven mad by Czechia here in her grove. I looked back at the evil face of she who was supposed to bring comfort, and headed out of Czechia’s grove, guarded by its tiny warriors. I was afraid I wouldn’t get out of there, and I’d end up going round and round in circles, and then I’d drop down and die, but I managed. Czechia had recognized me as one of her fighting men. But I lost track of the waterway I’d found. Which is how I arrived at the villages.

The cottages in the captured territory looked like they were dying. Pockmarked by bullets, burnt. An isolated shot-up cottage at the edge of the forest resembled an injured cow. I’d forgotten if the signs with the names of the villages had been shot through by the insurgents to put the fear of God into us, or if we’d fired at them for the same reason.

A village always means noise. It’s a living confusion of honking geese and waddling ducks, squabbling hens and ganders. But there was no sound. Not a hoof clip-clopped. There were no cats or dogs either.

The Bandits had talked about checkpoints, where Nato and the Russians inspected anyone left alive. I hadn’t run into any such checkpoint, so I didn’t know if the lads were talking rubbish or not.

I entered these villages by roundabout ways, across a field or through the forest.

The first one was a shock. I was following the route Skryje-Bataj-Tomašín-Luka-Ctiradův Důl. I didn’t need to consult my maps. Our chain of tanks had rolled through this way. Someone had to have survived the passing of our column. There must be people somewhere in cellars, woodsheds, or the underground passages beneath the cottages. If I got collared now by someone who’d seen our attack or even spotted me scuttling off to report or something, that wouldn’t be good. But there was nobody anywhere. I was on my guard. My nose sniffed the air, even while I was asleep. I couldn’t smell either food or smoke anywhere.

The ruins had burnt out long ago. Things lay around here, there and everywhere, but only broken pots, smashed settees, general mess, rubble, rags, refuse. It looked as if someone had picked over things. The women with Hanka hadn’t been carrying anything when we saw them in the field.

I picked up various rags and tatters, and made myself a snug for the night at the edge of the forest. I carried my rag bed on my back. The nights were cold. I wanted to get to Još’s. And I don’t mind admitting, I wasn’t feeling my best. Which is why I drank that strong liquor one night. I was talking to the gippos. Later on, I heard about the women and saw some guys eating a guy. That was on captured territory. Oh dear!

In the evening I reached a school. It was the one where we’d met the Bulgarians with the mermaid. They’d guided us direct from there to Siřem. Somewhere in a classroom there must still be the pages that Captain Yegorov had torn out.

I sat down in the school entrance under the graffiti that got up Captain Yegorov’s nose. I started crying when dusk veiled the statue of Wenceslas, the patron saint of the land of the Czechs, along with its inscription.

I was wondering when my shitty childhood would come to an end, and what things would be like afterwards. I was disgusted with my own genes. I uncorked Dýha’s canteen, saying, ‘I reckon you’re already with the Legion, guys!’ and started drinking. I thought long and hard about the boys from the Home from Home, and then realized I was sitting bawling my eyes out on a war road, where there was no traffic and Chapman Forest all around me, and that I’d have to become a lone bandit in a region of Death. Death, who I’d tried my very best to keep fed with people. I tried to empty the canteen at the same rate as the twilight changed into darkness, and I cursed into the dark, and because I was trying to find the darkies, I spouted all the gypsy words I knew, and my swear words and foul curses were like the noise from the longshirts’ dormitory when they were scared. But somewhere amid all the dylinos! and degeshas! I must have garbled some gypsy fairy-tale magic spell, because I was suddenly inside a gypsy shack!

It was Još’s shack. A big place, full of rags and smashed crockery all over the floor, broken things, half-rotted straw. There was nobody there.

‘So I’ve found Još’s valley, and they’re gone!’ I said to myself, and I reached into the vast hearth, where there were a few scorched cans and masses of little bones, as well as a big pile of white embers, and it was completely cold. I leapt to my feet and started jumping up and groping behind the beams as well and sure enough they did have her there! But she’d been painted over. She had black hair and she was all swarthy, this Czechia of theirs. So I left her where she was behind the beam; I couldn’t go around with one like this. I went outside and I saw Chata coming out of the forest towards me, and my hair stood on end, because it was Chata and it wasn’t Chata.

And Chata said, ‘What d’you want?’

‘I’ve found you!’ I said, and I wanted to go with him, but I couldn’t.

‘Listen Chata,’ I said, ‘I’d like to stay with your lot. Can I go with you?’

‘Tricky!’ said Chata.

‘Dýha says you wanted to liberate the darkies… er… your brothers, who’d been taken prisoner!’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but that’s the thing, we didn’t manage to.’

‘Listen, Chata,’ I told him. ‘I’m lost round here. Can’t I stay with your lot?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Chata said with a smirk.

And now old Još was standing next to him, and I could sense I couldn’t go with him either. Još said, ‘You wanna be with us because no-one makes war with the Gypsies, right?’

‘Yeah.’

And old Još said, ‘But they can kill us anyway, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So there you have it!’ said old Još.

‘Like I said, we failed. To free our brothers,’ Chata said, pretty impatiently.

I’d completely had it by then. Još was old and the skin on his face was all crinkly like the crocodiles in The Catholic Book of Knowledge. I had a feeling he wouldn’t laugh at me, so I asked him, ‘And can I be all on my own for all time?’

‘’Course you can’t,’ said old Još.

‘So, what am I supposed to do then?’

‘Look, we’ve gotta get going,’ said Chata. ‘The brothers are waiting!’

Then they were gone. They weren’t there any more. All I could hear was Chata laughing: ‘Saying he wants to go with us… ha, ha, ha!’

I sat outside the school again and tried to put the stopper back in the canteen. I managed, then I started to fall over backwards, but because I’d got a bed of rags on my back, made up of stuff picked up at the cottages, I landed softly and was asleep in no time.

And that’s how I was found in the morning, asleep, curled up like a dog, my thirsty tongue hanging out, by Peter, who was in charge of a machine gun-armed Soviet jeep. He was also inspector of reservoirs.

He kicked me in the leg and I yelped, and from his uniform and really weird Russian I gathered he was from the army corps of the Hungarian People’s Republic. He wanted to know how to get to the Little Supremo.

I soon realized that Peter was crazy. In turn, he took me for some stupid peasant kid. He was quite happy to sit me in his jeep and give me something to eat and drink, and we chatted together. I picked up his semi-automatic from the back seat, and all he did was laugh and tell me to be careful, because it was loaded. I showed an interest in the two machine guns mounted on the back, so he explained how they worked, and he also boasted about the ones mounted in front. Next I wanted to examine his Nagant revolver and dagger, so he lent me them both and I laughed, because I assumed that was how a stupid peasant, especially one who’s still just a kid, would laugh, and then I really was very happy, because this guy wasn’t teaching me or training me or interrogating me, and if it came to that, well, he’d already offered me a way to take him out with a variety of weapons.

Peter questioned me as to what I was doing within the reservoir project catchment area. I told him I’d come out of the forest.

He nodded and said it was because of people like me that the Soviet command had appointed him inspector. He’d been driving around collecting leftover people, because here in the forest region even rural life had come to an end. But now he was looking for the Little Supremo. Otherwise there was nobody here any more. They’d all been evacuated.

I told him I’d noticed all the villages were abandoned and generally odd.

‘Yes,’ Peter nodded, ‘this region is to witness the realisation of the ancient dream of the Czechoslovak masses. There will be a sea here. It will be the Czech Sea, as a gift from ordinary Soviet people to the ordinary people of Czechoslovakia.

‘I see,’ I said.

‘There will be this second Central European Balaton, which is why the main engineering works are being carried out by experienced Hungarian comrades — inlanders,’ said Peter, and I didn’t have a clue what he was on about, so I asked him where all the people had gone.

‘Most of the population has already been evacuated,’ Peter said. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded pretty stupid.

‘All around here will be flooded,’ Peter went on, and he waved an arm, and that wave across the area around Siřem was probably meant to take in the deserted villages left over after the fighting.

Then Peter talked about women. He didn’t mean the poor women that toiled in the fields, but described some gorgeous women on horses. He said he believed the riders were part of the Little Supremo’s contingent. He talked about women jumping right over his armoured jeep on their horses — black, grey and piebald. He didn’t manage to talk to any of the women and they rode off. He wanted to inform the Little Supremo about the reservoir project. He believed the Little Supremo and his contingent were detained in some inaccessible regions. He would be grateful, assuming I was a local, if I’d conduct him to the Little Supremo.

I hadn’t a clue what he was on about, but I wanted to make him happy, since he’d found me, so I nodded.

‘Be a good lad, Ilya,’ he said, ‘find the Little Supremo.’

Now Peter and me were sat next to the statue of the Czech patron saint, who was armed, in a village where some of the men had probably been killed and the women run away into the forest, and the remaining folk evacuated, whatever that meant, and Peter struck me as the craziest soldier I’d ever met. The thing about him was, he was happy. He was obsessed with finding the Little Supremo, who I knew nothing about. Peter said I seemed like a godsend, just when he needed one. ‘Together, we’ll creep our way through each and every army to the inaccessible regions,’ he said, ‘and we’ll find the Little Supremo.’

I nodded. Then everything went so fast that I didn’t have time to regret the brevity of our alliance.

I told Peter that I’d noticed the odd hoofprint from time to time in Chapman Forest, and once I’d heard female laughter. Peter was overjoyed.

We mooned around there, chatting. I translated into Russian the inscription LET US NOT PERISH, NOR THOSE WHO COME AFTER US on this statue of an older style of fighting man, and I told him that before long the only thing left of the Czech land would be its name, a fate that has befallen many other foreigners as well, as history shows. Peter started laughing and assured me I was totally wrong, then he span me such a yarn that if the nuns were around he’d have had to gargle a whole bucketful of tar.

He told me about the Little Supremo. His army corps’ scouts had learned about the Little Supremo from their women prisoners.

Apparently, it was all about some new tactic in the fight against sovietization. ‘It’s the only way for smaller nations to prevent themselves from being totally submerged in the Eastern Empire,’ said Peter.

When stories about the Little Supremo spread among the divisions, the number of deserters rose. After the Czech insurgency had crushed Peter’s division, he decided to find the Little Supremo and offer him his services.

Peter had first learned of the Little Supremo from a female prisoner. She even came, apparently, from a place I’d mentioned — a Siřem girl!

‘What did she look like?’ I gasped.

‘Pretty, young and wearing a tracksuit,’ Peter said, but he didn’t know her name. After the Siřem girl had filled the other prisoners’ heads with silly ideas, talking about the Little Supremo, they escaped. All the women who had refused to be evacuated wandered off into the forest.

‘What had she told them?’ I asked.

‘They call it the Prophecy of the Little People,’ said Peter.

And off he went, though because he told me about the prophecy in Hungarian Russian, it’s possible I didn’t quite grasp it all. But what he said was roughly this. The heroic Czech men having fallen in battle against troops from the five armies despatched by the Eastern Empire, their womenfolk were left forlorn and weeping. They walked on and on through dusty fields on a terrible journey, attacked and violated by enemy soldiers. There was no-one to stand up for them. Then suddenly the women found their hero: a tiny man, who, all by himself, was pulling along a captured enemy tank on a rope. They were amazed at his strength and virility. He took pity on the women and went with them into the forest. Since that day, the bellies of the widows of those heroic warriors, as well as the bellies of young maidens, have been growing and rounding out, and many of them will soon bear little warriors. So little that it will be easy for them to slip between the checkpoints of the five armies and continue wreaking havoc on the enemy until his total annihilation. They would dwell in caves and forest hideaways, and they would be impossible to track down.

Peter laughed, waiting to see what I made of it all.

‘You’ve really never heard of the Little Supremo?’ he asked, un-believing.

I thought he’d been wandering about that deserted landscape for too long. He was hooked on a fairy tale. It was obvious what had really happened, although there is a big difference between pulling a tank along and jumping over it. But it was entirely possible that Dago had been snatched by the women.

Peter was still laughing. He was really looking forward to this Czech boy leading him into the inaccessible regions of Chapman Forest. He was a deserter. He had no idea that the Siaz zone was trapped in a ring of steel by the armies of the new Russians. If I’d told him, perhaps he might not have bled to death later on my shoulder. After all, I liked being with him. I wanted to go on further with him. It had also crossed my mind that our progress would be safer in an armed jeep. Except I was wrong, as so many times before.

Peter slept in the jeep, between the machine guns, me with my bed-roll at my back. I went behind the school, not wanting to be too close to the road.

Somewhere in the grass, among some titchy little apple trees, I curled up in a ball and fell asleep. When I opened my eyes again, there beyond the school orchard I saw the flames of a campfire flickering and, because I’d had the training, I was wide awake at once and crawled silently towards it.

Unfortunately, what I saw was the ghastliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life: two men were carving up a third, who lay on the ground.

These guys had sticks, on the ends of which were chunks of meat freshly cut from the carcass. I could only see the outline in the grass, dancing in the glimmer of the fire. They didn’t speak Russian or Czech, but something similar. I could understand them. It was how Mikušinec or someone used to witter on in the night.

They were just saying that a bottle of something with a bit of a kick to it would slip down nicely with Teddy.

Then one of them took a pinch of ash from the fire and scattered it over the bedarkened grass that lay all around, and said, ‘We thank thee, Uncle Ted!’

The other did the same, also thanking poor Ted, who was lolling about in the grass, but also disappearing inside their bellies.

And they stuffed themselves.

Perhaps my tummy rumbled or I made a bad move or they’d had the right training, but suddenly they were beside me and dragging me, unarmed, across to the fire. Their grip loosened and I sat on the grass right next to what was left of Ted, and they observed, in Russian, that I was only a boy, and heaved a sigh of relief. I probably startled them, and I heard myself saying, ‘Tovarishchi kanibali, ya ne vkusnyi malchik,’173* which was supposed to mean they were to leave me alone, because I wouldn’t taste nice.

They were big men in rags. They must have got what they were wearing from around the villages. They were scruffy, unshaven. It crossed my mind that these forest folk were following in the wake of the tin armies of the new Russians, and that they just ate Czechs. That would have crossed the mind of anyone in my situation.

One of them lunged towards me, and there and then he had my canteen in his huge paw. He opened it and took a gulp, and I was so glad, because I couldn’t drink that stuff.

I was sitting between them and to my amazement I heard them muttering something quite friendly. Then one of them knelt down next to Teddy, or what was left of him in the grass. A knife flashed through the air, and he offered me a stick with a chunk of meat stuck on the end. They didn’t give me back my canteen.

I just sat there, saying nothing. I well remembered what Sister Alberta used to tell us: the Devil’s most evil magicians eat human flesh and have yellow wolf’s fires — lamps of the Devil — instead of eyes. It wasn’t just the campfire that blazed in the eyes of these two. I was watching the chunk of meat roasting in the flames, when suddenly darkness around our campfire was illuminated by a powerful light and the furious roar of an engine. It was Peter, who had found me and was charging to my aid with might and main and the thunder of his machine gun-armed Soviet jeep. He felled a couple of the apple saplings.

In an instant he was in front of us, and the two men had their hands up, a machine gun pointing at each of them. Peter jumped up and with a gun in his hand he came running towards us, asking if I was okay. I said nothing, because in the brightness of the jeep’s searchlights I could see in the grass a big bear’s head with its fangs bared. I had run into another bit of the Socialist Circus.

We made friends with the two Ukrainian circus bear trainers. We heard their tale of woe concerning their journey through Chapman Forest, and the fate of their bears. ‘Some of them might have fought their way through the battle lines and could be free by now, others were not so lucky,’ said Vasil, the manager of the bear menagerie.

‘Ted here,’ said Grishka, indicating the creature on the grass, ‘couldn’t go on. He wanted us to carry him. He missed his native forest so much.’

‘Now he’ll become us, and with a bit of luck we’ll travel back home together,’ Vasil added, stroking his paunch and handing Peter a chunk of roast bear.

Peter took the two bear trainers aboard his jeep, telling them it was their last chance of escape before the entire region was flooded. The whole area, he informed them, was to become the Czech Sea, but I knew that already.

As our little group grew in size, I was sure Peter thought it would make us more interesting to the Little Supremo. He also told us that in the event of an attack he would not be able to man all four machine guns alone, something he was sure we understood.

The elder of the two, Vasil, scratched his head and said that they felt better now, because they had been worried by all those empty villages. ‘So you say there’s going to be a dam here, comrade?’ the bear trainer said to reassure himself.

Peter nodded.

‘And where are the people?’ asked the other trainer.

‘They’ve been evacuated to the Soviet Union,’ said Peter.

‘Dalshe Sibiri nepovezut,’ the older one said: ‘They won’t take them any further than Siberia,’ I translated mentally.

And I really stuffed myself with bear meat. It was my first solid meal in ages.

But I kept glancing at the eyes of the two men, and I reckoned that the little lights that blazed in their eyes were brighter than any reflection of the red-hot embers in our kitchen fire.

The next day found us once more by the statue of the patron saint of the land of the Czechs. Peter had got into an argument with the two Ukrainians. He thought that the great pile of bear meat, stacked about the jeep, would prevent the machine guns from being used to best effect in combat.

The Ukrainians maintained that the most important thing of all was a good stock of food. They also had some sentimental reservations about leaving Ted behind. Peter was most likely reassured by the belief that we’d find the Little Supremo in next to no time, and that a mountain of bear meat couldn’t fail to raise spirits in the women’s camp. It made sense to him.

The Ukrainians settled in next to Peter. I had to fit in the back with Ted, and soon we were whizzing along under my guidance, down the tarmac road in the sector of Ctiradův Důl, Tomašín, Luka, Bataj… away from Siřem, and I could almost hear the splashing of the sea that was going to be there, and I tried to nod off and the sea obliged, rising out of images remembered from The Catholic Book of Knowledge, accompanied by the sound of the creaking wood of the cabin on wheels of the girl I’d seen naked, and I imagined Dýha and Mikušinec’s amazement when, once they had recovered from their cuts and scratches, they stood on top of Fell Crag and the tide lapped at their feet, and they would probably steal a boat to take them to the Legion… But I couldn’t nod off and dream in the jeep. I couldn’t work out why Peter kept sounding the horn before every bend in the road, and sometimes a rat-a-tat came from the barrel of one or other of the machine guns. I thought he was firing at deer, but he was firing at the bends. It seemed to me like an invitation to any enemy waiting in ambush to make mincemeat of us, but Peter thought it would frighten them away.

I soon realized that Peter knew absolutely nothing about waging war, and for the first time I recalled with regret my snug on the lead tank, and also the soundless interplay of battlefield gestures as used by gunners Kantariya and Timosha, who, although they were practised killers, also excelled at saving their own skin. And mine too.

Unfortunately, we made frequent stops in the villages. Peter claimed to be looking for any trace of those mysterious women. I hated these stops in the shot-up villages and always volunteered to guard the meat. The Ukrainians searched the houses, even the lofts and sheds, and although they smiled at first and obviously looked forward to looting, and boasted about turning our armed jeep into a supply truck, they began coming back more and more downcast and showing their empty hands in disbelief, and saying they couldn’t find so much as a snail… Then Vasil, the older of the two, said, ‘It’s not all that bad. There’s plenty of grass and bark on the trees in these Czech villages of yours — the Soviets haven’t taken that.’ And Grisha, the younger one, said that the earth around the fruit trees wasn’t that bad either, and that the people round here had been doing very nicely, because they could live like kings off the nettles, ferns and all the other weeds… We were having a longish break, eating Ted, when Vasil told me I hadn’t been very bright, telling them that I wasn’t a very tasty boy, because when a chap’s starving he’ll eat anybody. And then I knew for sure that those yellow wolf eyes came from more than the flashing of the fire.

Except… the longer they went on about the terrible famine that led to their villages being incorporated into the Eastern Empire, and the more horrors they described, the less I felt like listening to them. They talked about how troops had surrounded the starving villages, where eventually people even from the same family would eat each other… There is no way of shutting your ears to such things, and yet again somebody was telling me ghastly fairy stories… I tried to hide from those yellow eyes behind the pile of bear meat, and I stopped watching the road, which was a big mistake… And I made up my mind not to stay with them any more. That came about anyway. I would never have guessed that by evening we would be as far apart as it is possible to be.

Then we drove through Ctiradův Důl and in a flash I knew that Peter not only knew nothing at all about waging war, but that he couldn’t even drive: he was accidentally going back on himself… The whole time I had been thinking we were going away from Siřem, but I was wrong… I raised my head, saw what was around the corner and shouted.

* ‘Cannibal comrades, I’m not a tasty boy.’

18: Scrap iron. Squire of Siřem. The wayfarer.’ Margash’s dream. It is me, it isn’t me

I spotted the tank guns the second we hurtled around the sharp bend towards the little bridge, and they weren’t the guns of the ‘Happy Song’ column. They had to belong to Major General Kozhanov’s 1st Tank Brigade of Guards. Peter, as was his habit, had been firing into the bend, so it came as no surprise that the tanks gave us a welcome of hot iron, as if they’d been expecting us.

The explosive shells hurled Peter backwards, away from the steering wheel. He landed right on top of me. Sadly, I could hear the bullets ripping him to shreds, but if he hadn’t been there it would have been me who caught it. I rolled up in a ball under Ted.

The jeep smashed into some rocks — probably the very rocks I’d once carried this way, in and out of the water. It hit the dark surface under the bridge, bounced off the bottom, and, while the shouting sub-machine-gunners blazed away at the bear meat, and quite likely at the men who had called the animal Uncle Ted, I knew nothing about it, because I had got into deep water and was being carried away by the fast current. I tried to float and only just made it through the big rocks. Then I remembered that I couldn’t swim, so I began catching my belly against more stones. It all happened so fast.

I was in a reedbed. Something gripped my leg. It wasn’t alive. I was caught up in the scrap iron in the tip. I banged my head against some metal sheeting, then fell back into the water. When I prised myself up again I was stuck there, held fast by the scrap metal, water up to my chin. I heaved my shoulders and arms into a space surrounded by metal walls with just enough room to breathe. I was just starting to fight for my life when I found myself among rotten branches and reeds that cut like arrows.

I could hear shouting and calling coming from the bank of the stream… It was probably the sub-machine-gunners leapfrogging from their posts behind the tanks to find out who it was they’d shot to bits. They were running up in an assault line to comb the bank… The reeds pricked at my belly from below. This was a shallow bit. From my waist up I was clamped in iron sheeting. I groped around among the reeds and branches, making myself some space. I could smell a lot and see a bit, so I quickly got used to being in that metal air-pocket in the water and reeds. I was scared of the men on the bank.

The moon shone through chinks in the twisted metal and was reflected on the water in which I quietly fidgeted. It occurred to me that I could be in the cab of some sunken truck. But trucks don’t have wings. The wings were twisted metal overgrown by reeds. Wherever the reeds moved under the joint forces of wind and water, the metal surface gleamed. I’d never been in a plane before, I thought. This small, battered plane was the biggest piece of scrap metal in the tip. I’d sometimes seen its iron skeleton from across the dark winter water.

Now in the summer the reedbed was shallow. No doubt all the shelling and numerous fires all over Bohemia had boiled away the water of the rivers and streams.

The seat was stuck fast on its side, crisscrossed by perished straps. Sunk in the mud and washed by the water, the plane was completely overgrown with reeds.

So I had plenty of fun fighting with the reeds as I waded through the cold water to the bank. I have no idea how long I stayed in that air-pocket. I waited for the sub-machine-gunners to finish their work before leaving to clear another sector. Then I made a move. I can always tell when a forward patrol has finished its task.

I scrambled onto the bank, slithering through the darkness. The cottages I could see didn’t look battered. I heard a dog barking. A rooster swore at his hens, even though it was night-time.

In Siřem I wanted first of all to find an ally, so I set off for the cemetery using footpaths and detours.

I found Páta easily. I had just pushed through the large rusty gates, heading straight for the toff’s tomb, which stood out white amid a field of crosses, when Páta jumped me and floored me right there among the graves, and we rolled about on the ground and neither of us had the smell of the Home from Home in our hair or on our clothes. So for a moment I worried that it wasn’t him but a stranger. Wrestling in silence, one on one, we fell through the earth and I got a bash on the head. Only then did Páta recognize me by the light of some burning candles, crying out ‘Ilya!’ and that brought me round from my sudden descent into the bowels of the cemetery. Páta was glad to see me there.

And Mr Cimbura was glad as well. He lay in some blankets, and said straight away, ‘Hi, sonny… you made it!’

He propped himself up on one elbow. I had recognized him in the flickering candlelight, even before he had spoken. So Mr Cimbura and Páta have made up, I thought to myself.

Then Mr Cimbura yattered on, ‘So, sonny, you thought you’d escape from your very own village on a tank, did you? Just like your old man, though he tried it by plane.’

In the bunker-like darkness, relieved only by the candles, I checked again that it was Mr Cimbura that I was seeing and hearing. I clenched my fist. I didn’t want to hear any more of his or anyone else’s fairy stories… Then I saw that there was somebody else there… I was so glad to see Sister Alberta again. She was sitting in a snug of rags, looking at me. She was pleased too, I think.

‘Well, here we all are, come together like one happy family,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘You know, sonny, how I used to look after you as best I could, seeing as you’re the bastard sprog of an aristo, but I couldn’t look out for the little ’un, you know that yerself.’

‘I saw it! I saw Monkeyface fall all by himself!’ Páta blurted out, and I said, ‘So did Karel!’ and I stamped my foot.

‘Ah well, we looked after you under all them bosses that evil times inflicted on us, sonny. Everyone in Siřem took real good care of you… but then, you’re our lord and master, kid… We always kept an eye on you, ever since I dragged you out of that plane in flames as a screaming wee thing. The eyes of all us folk, Siřem folk, kept a close watch on you. I was afraid you’d never ever get over all that gormless gawping you did, but you have. Our Hanka used to keep us up to date! It weren’t easy for her, obviously, to keep up with some neglected, delinquent kid. She’s a lovely girl really, but then she had to see to the wellbeing of the young squire. She had that explained to her proper like!’

Mr Cimbura sat up. I could see his face was terribly burnt, the light from the candles gliding over the craters in its ancient skin. He was covered in filthy bandages, and though it probably isn’t right to say this of an old person, he stank. No matter how many times I’d been in combat, I’d never realized that burns could smell so bad.

‘Well, sonny, you never needed as much protecting as when them red communards betrayed the Czech people and threw in their lot with the Moskies. If you’d been a growing, aristo orphan, you’d have been for it. Much better to be a retard. That was a damn good idea we had! And the popular masses put the frighteners on the Muscovite and now our victory’s in tatters, but we’ll pull through. We’ll lie low in our cellars and pull through. There’s always someone survives, that’s a known fact. So, sonny, you’ve grown into a fine upstanding son of Czechia, a stalwart soldier in the Czech cause. You didn’t get far from your native Siřem on that tank. And now you’re back with us. Welcome home!’

Sister Alberta was smiling, like she was welcoming me back too, and she pat-patted her ancient hands. Páta was laughing and invited me to sit. I sat down on a length of timber. It was the shelf which had collapsed that time when I kicked everything off it. Mr Cimbura struggled across to me. He was offering me something… and he straightened up and bellowed, like he used to in the square, when everyone gathered round him: ‘Little Ilya’s the squire now!’ and Mr Cimbura spluttered with laughter as he spoke. He could probably see I was looking at him real angry, like, so he pretended to have a bad coughing fit. But he stuck a half-rotten cucumber in my right hand and a potato in my left, and he started messing about. He bowed to me like I was a king being crowned on the telly in some fairy tale for the masses. Páta was giggling and did the bowing-before-the-king thing after Mr Cimbura, while Sister Alberta kept on clapping, and then she said, ‘Welcome, lad!’

‘Your dad, sonny,’ said Mr Cimbura, ‘brought back from his travels this weird woman. God alone knows in what deserted wilderness he picked her up. Your mother was a vile-looking creature, I can tell you… Well, because of that ugly mug of hers, you and your kid brother turned out how you fucking did — not your fault, my lad… The Jerries wanted to chop your dad’s head off, but he got round ’em by letting on about all sorts of secret hideouts. But he couldn’t get round the Commies. They went after his aristocratic blood like leeches… So, now he’s enjoying his eternal rest in his Siřem tomb.

‘The truth is, your dad decided to make a run for it, but his plane flopped down into the mud, and the mud of Siřem and the water of Siřem put the flames out, and we, the people of Siřem, we pulled you and your kid brother out. Your brother came off bad, like, we know. Your parents died inside the plane. It ain’t true they didn’t give a damn about you. All they did was die, and that’s all there is to it!’

There were masses of candles in the vault. It had been a long while since I’d seen people sitting in the half-light, their shadows flitting all over the wall whenever someone moved… The shadows were bigger than the people… My own shadow looked enormous above me the moment I changed position… It crossed my mind that as soon as I grew as big as that myself, all these fairy stories would finally come to an end.

‘How come my dad crashed his plane?’ I asked, putting on a really deep voice.

‘Good question,’ squeaked Mr Cimbura from his pallet of rags. ‘Rumour has it that all the Siřem folk took it real bad that the squire wanted to do a runner and leave us here. That wasn’t right, now, was it? So you see, it turned out we were right. He shouldn’t have run away from his people… He came a cropper! It’s possible someone drilled a hole in the fuel tank, making it burst, so the plane took off and fell right back down in a blaze… Who could have done such a thing? Wicked undercover fascists? Evil commies? Some local with a grievance?… But listen, sonny, that was all a long time ago!’

‘How long?’ I asked.

Mr Cimbura said that we were not going to argue over time. When the Good Lord — or whoever it was — had created time, He had made plenty of it, and Mr Cimbura went on to say that all that mattered now was that I had survived everything and that I was finally home, and when the Czechs were once more their own masters, I would be the one and only lord and master of Siřem — me and me alone. ‘And that’s exactly what we’re celebrating right now, sonny,’ said Mr Cimbura.

I was squatting on the collapsed shelf, the cucumber in one hand and the potato in the other… and Mr Cimbura bowed to me again, as if to his lord and master, and giggled, though I well remembered how he had always hated the nobility… I didn’t believe a word Mr Cimbura said. I wanted to get away.

So I didn’t toss aside the things they had used for my mock coronation, but I placed them on the ground next to me. Páta handed me a jar of sweetcorn. They had tomatoes and bread and salami as well, so we ate.

I put some salami and lots of bread in my pockets. I watched Páta while I did it. He gave me the nod. So they had plenty. I grabbed the cucumber and potato while I was at it.

Once we had finished eating I asked Mr Cimbura, ‘Where are the girls?’

‘This here is the girls’ bunker, sonny,’ he said, ‘but you went and frightened ’em off, staring in on ’em like that, just as they was working on it.’

‘Where are the girls?’ I asked again, because he hadn’t answered. Obviously, I had only one girl in mind.

‘Every decent village built shelters like this one for the protection of young girls — they’ve done it ever since the Tatars invaded,’ Mr Cimbura muttered, ‘but these Russians with their modern spy satellite technology, they can ferret out any woman anywhere, even underground. Never used to be like that, no sir! This time we failed, that’s all there is to it!’

‘So the Russians found ’em?’

‘Some they found, some they didn’t, sonny. This time we just failed,’ said Mr Cimbura.

Páta said it was not a bad place to live, here in the girls’ bunker. He’d known worse… and he and Sister Alberta tended to Mr Cimbura’s wounds, since a symbol of national resistance like Mr Cimbura should never fall into Soviet hands!

‘And what about the sisters?’ I asked Sister Alberta, and she murmured that the Lord of Heaven is competent at His job, and every peasant is mindful that ‘dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’, and so the Lord returns human lives to nothing, as He sees fit.

I hadn’t a clue what she was on about.

And Páta said that only Sister Alberta had come back to Siřem, because she was a local and her papers said that she was a resident of the village, so she had to wait there to be evacuated. And Sister Alberta said she couldn’t care less about any evacuation — that there in the vault they made up the last cohesive Siřem family, taking turns to tend to the old man’s wounds. Mr Cimbura would only emerge into the light of God’s day when he was fully fit again, and as a symbol of national resistance his miraculous appearance would provoke another uprising. All three of them said this at once.

Then I told them about the villages with no people in them, and I asked, ‘Where have all the people gone?’

‘Look,’ said Páta, ‘when I saw you up top, I attacked you… I thought you’d escaped from a train. I’m sorry I went for you like that. Those runaways steal all the time, because they don’t have nothing… and there isn’t room in the girls’ bunker for everyone… I didn’t know it was you. I’m sorry, okay? You forgive me now, don’t you?’

‘What are those train runaways running away from?’

‘Don’t you know?’ asked Páta, amazed. ‘Everyone who lived here has been put on a train to Russia. Everybody from the insurgency zone. They say you get given a new cottage and stuff, but I’m not so sure… I don’t wanna go!’

‘Me neither,’ I said.

‘So stay,’ said Páta, and lay on his back. Then we were silent. I lay in some rags, the steam coming off me. It was hot in there. The candles flickered. I lay still and dried out. I didn’t think about what Mr Cimbura had said about my parents. I was thinking about what he had said about those Russian satellites. Maybe they can’t see Mr Cimbura and Sister Alberta because old people don’t have as much body heat. But they could pick up me and Páta. A platoon of Soviet paras could burst in on us at any moment. I wasn’t going to hang around. I didn’t care what Mr Cimbura said about my parents. Not one bit!

Now I sprawled out in some comfort. I heard Páta yawn. It was a good thing the girls or someone had brought in so many blankets. Down here you couldn’t even hear the shellfire or anything. If the new Russians had joined Yegorov’s tank column, we knew nothing about it.

I looked at Páta and remembered: Gypsy cowboy. I couldn’t help laughing.

‘What’s up?’ Páta said.

‘Oh, nothing.’

Then Mr Cimbura piped up, and I, just as I had in my childhood long ago, ensconced in empty tar-soap boxes, listened, half-asleep, to Mr Cimbura’s fairy story. In those bygone days we weren’t hiding in a vault in the cemetery, while tanks and planes bent on our destruction rumbled overhead. I listened to the story of the dragon’s egg for the first time.

‘So, lads, I’m going to tell you how this Siřem of ours came into being, and who founded it hundreds and hundreds of years ago,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘I’m telling you so that our squire here and his most esteemed delinquent brother know about it. Seeing as all the other locals have gone, you two stalwart sons of Czechia are the only ones left to keep alive this ancient legend… So listen carefully and stop fidgeting. Bullets are whizzing about outside and disorder reigns, but we’re here, tucked away in our snug little hole, so I’m going to tell you about the wayfarer…

‘Once upon a time, long, long ago, the wise men and militant boyars of the czar of the Eastern Empire decided they weren’t going to leave the world until it was all theirs. So they sent out this wayfarer to find the weapon with which they could subjugate the whole world… And the wayfarer rode away, until he came to a soot-stained signpost, on which it said: CAUTION: BOHEMIA! Well, the wayfarer wasn’t afraid, so he spurred on his horse… After travelling far across the wilderness, he came to a cottage, see? Inside it was a man and a woman, and their son, a chubby little lad who was a delight to behold.

‘And who else does the wayfarer see? A beautiful girl… She’s got these great big eyes, the skies float in them; her hair shimmers halfway down her back; and she’s got this gorgeous figure, a neck as white as snow, full breasts rising under her blouse, and a throat of radiant alabaster… She’s the purest of maidens… but then, there are no blokes living anywhere nearby, because they’ve all killed each other fighting or gone away or something!

‘The girl was sitting on a little stool, sewing. She was embroidering a white shift, and that shift was for her wedding day! Well, they welcomed him in: “A wayfarer’s arrived!” The girl gave him something to drink, and they all said, “When Grandfather returns, he will rejoice!” And the wayfarer learned that the old man had been in the forest for two days, hunting a wolf, but was expected home soon.

‘After dinner they went to bed. They all slept in the parlour, though they let the wayfarer have the lumber room, him being a guest. Only the little lad slept in the lumber room, and he didn’t disturb anyone, he just whistled gently through his little nose.

‘Well, that night the wayfarer’s mind turned to that gem of a girl, but he was all worn out from his journey and fell asleep.

‘Next day, they were working in the fields and the wayfarer helped out. They appreciated his strength and skill, which was good news for him, because a powerful love was growing in his heart for the beautiful daughter!

‘That evening, the wayfarer played with the little boy, and he was full of high spirits, and they all appreciated how good he was with children, which was more good news for him, given as how all he could think about was that girl!

‘Well, there they were, having dinner again, only in silence. And when the meal was over and they had blessed themselves with a crucifix, the wayfarer took the Cross and put it outside the door. Then they told him about the grandfather.

‘The old man had said that he was going after a wolf. “If I’m not back by nightfall on the third day,” he had said, “or if I’ve been at all mauled by the wolf, don’t let me in. It’ll be me, but it won’t be me.”

‘“I see,” said the father, and he picked up a wooden stake and started sharpening it with his knife.

‘Come the next evening and they heard this scratching at the door, and the little lad jumped up and said, “Grandpa’s back!” and they heard the loud voice of the old man saying, “Open the door!”

‘And the father said, “You’re too late, Dad.”

‘Well, the woman and the boy begged him to open the door, as Grandpa was only a teeny bit late for dinner! He’d been chasing a wolf for three days! He was worn out!

‘The father half-opened the door and said, “Show us the wolf’s head, Dad!” But the moment the door was open the old man came inside.

‘The father said, “Where’s the wolf’s head, Dad?” The old man let out a terrible groan — “Ooooaaaaaaa!” — and lifted his head, and through his whiskers they could all see his mangled throat.

‘The father grabbed the stake and took aim at the old man — his very own dad! And the grandfather ran out of the cottage and was gone. So they all went to bed.

‘Well, the wayfarer tossed and turned in bed, and told himself he’d be better off getting out of there, but then he remembered the beautiful girl. Then he heard a sound — tap! — at the window. The little lad sat up in bed. It was the old man tapping at the window, and he was ever so pale, and he said, “Grandson, come out to play.” So the boy climbed out of the window. This family is weird, thought the wayfarer to himself.

‘In the morning, the lad couldn’t walk straight. He was all pale and he picked up the sharpened stake and tossed it down the well, making a splash. Then the boy died.

‘“There’s something odd going on here!” the wayfarer told himself. He wanted to leave for the Eastern Empire and go back to his czar — without the weapon — but he also wanted the girl. He asked her to come to the lumber room, just for a quick word.

‘The girl came and the wayfarer prevented her from leaving. She stayed there all night, and in the morning the wayfarer left.

‘He travelled home, and stood before the czar, who commanded him, “Come thou not back without the weapon!” So back went the wayfarer.

‘The land was dark. The villages were deserted. Not a dog barked and no bird sang. The wayfarer met a priest, who asked him where he was going. The wayfarer told him he was going to Bohemia.

‘“Turn around and go back!” cried the priest, but the wayfarer said he wouldn’t. So the priest blessed him and gave him a crucifix. The wayfarer hung it around his neck, then off he went.

‘He heard wolves howling, and by now it was getting dark. He arrived at the cottage and there was nobody anywhere. He entered the building and behold: the girl was sitting on her stool, sewing, but what was she sewing, what was she mending? A shroud made from the pelt of a wolf. Strong was the odour of wolf from the skin.

‘The girl smelt strange, she smelt earthy. She stood up at once, opened her arms to embrace him, and drew him to her tight. The wayfarer couldn’t catch his breath!

‘And the girl said, “Come, my dear, our little one is crying.” She led the wayfarer into the darkened parlour. And what was that in the cradle? A dragon’s egg! And the egg was making a tapping sound and changing colour.

‘And at once the wayfarer knew that this was what he should take to the czar. He grabbed the egg and wrapped it in the wolf-skin shroud. He no longer wanted the girl. He was in a hurry to return to his native soil, to his czar.

‘The girl was pale. She asked for a kiss. Her lips were motionless and her face cold, as if she were not alive. She held the wayfarer tight in her embrace, and then she said, “They’re here!”

‘The wayfarer looked and behold! Outside the window he saw the old man, his son and daughter-in-law, and his grandson as well. They were scratching at the windows with their nails. They wanted to come inside. And they were all dreadfully pale.

‘The girl hugged him so powerfully that she was crushing his ribs. “My name’s Czechia,” she said. The wayfarer grabbed the crucifix at his throat — the priest’s gift — and the girl leapt away, as if cut by a sword.

‘The wayfarer rushed out of the cottage and he jumped on his horse and galloped away.

‘Soon he heard pounding footsteps behind him, and he heard wolves howling. They were all running after him: the old man, his son, the woman, the boy and the girl called Czechia. And now the grandfather had overtaken the horse and was blocking the way, but the wayfarer rode over him! He clasped the dragon’s egg, our wayfarer! Then the father leapt at the wayfarer, who knocked him down, his horse stamping at the dust. Then the woman grabbed her little boy, whirled him round and around in the air and hurled him. And the lad went flying and landed on the horse, and sank his teeth in it. The horse shook the lad off and stamped a hoof, then galloped onwards. And now the lad’s mother came flying through the air, howling like a she-wolf. She leapt towards the horse, but it ducked and she smashed her skull on the ground. Finally, the girl called Czechia came flying through the air, descending on the horse’s rump, just behind the wayfarer! She bit the wayfarer and the horse dropped, breathless, to the ground, followed by our wayfarer. And he clutched the crucifix at his throat, but the girl had gone. The horse was dead. And the wayfarer’s hand leapt away from the cross of its own accord — the flesh was burnt!

‘The dragon’s egg in the wolf-skin had gone! He had lost the love of Czechia, and the czar would chop off his head. He was all alone in that ill-fated land.

‘The wayfarer thought, “Am I still me? After all I’ve seen?” He didn’t know. And at that very spot he pledged to erect a church.’

I was glad he’d finished! Páta was too, I reckoned. But Mr Cimbura went on, ‘And I’ve honoured that pledge. Fair busted my guts on that church, too. Anyway, it’s Catholic now.’

Then he started mumbling something into his blankets, and grunting and groaning, and it would have been nice if he’d been quiet at last, but on he went: ‘The shooting’s died down outside, right? There, we’ve come through safe and sound.’

I looked at Páta, and Páta looked at me.

‘Okay, lads, you might be thinking I’ve been making fun of you! I’d happily show you the scars where that girl bit and scratched me, but here’s the rub — my flesh being burnt, you can’t see ’em.’ And Mr Cimbura raised himself up on one elbow on his couch of rags.

I sat down. I looked at Páta. Had he heard? Cimbura had said that he was the wayfarer: non-human, tooth-marked. It crossed my mind that we ought to kill him straight away. Then it occurred to me that if Mr Cimbura was the wayfarer, we couldn’t kill him anyway. It wasn’t going to be easy! Anyway, he was probably just talking rubbish again… I glanced at him. He was staring at me too — staring right into my soul through the candles. It gave me goose pimples all over. Mr Cimbura knew what I was thinking. He didn’t want to bite me, though he could have long before now! A thousand times. Yet he used to look after me so nice, like, when I was a defenceless kid. That was ages ago!

Mr Cimbura dropped his sharp gaze, lay back, wriggled a bit in his blankets and carried on talking: ‘Right then, for crying out loud, you black-arsed moo, get a move on with them last rites!’ And Sister Alberta stirred, though not towards Mr Cimbura; instead she came and sat with me, as if nothing had changed since the days of the soap store, except that now Sister Alberta was horribly fat and old. I was older too. I was so big I wouldn’t fit in her arms any more. ‘God brought you to us,’ she said, ‘let’s have a cuddle the like of which the world has never seen!’

Afterwards she stood up and went over to Mr Cimbura.

There was this huge silence throughout the whole cellar, because nobody was talking. Páta was also next to Mr Cimbura, and he knelt down beside him. Mr Cimbura was lying there and he was quiet, which was one for the record books. I stood up and made a move into the darkness to where I remembered the door was. I went through it and climbed the steps, along the passage and past the kitchen and the best room and, hey presto, I was outside.

Mr Cimbura’s storytelling had crumpled time. The thing is, he had us caught in his fairy story as if in a noose. This explains why I ran back out into the night. Was it the same night as when I was hiding in the plane? Or the next one? I didn’t know.

There were no lights anywhere. I spotted a cat on the roof of a house, which was odd. They don’t like to be seen. The cat shrieked and knocked a big black tomcat off the roof. He fell on the hard soil, leapt sideways and vanished into the weeds that propped up a fallen fence… Otherwise, not a soul in sight, but it was obvious there was life in Siřem… The tanks of Kozhanov’s army had to be around somewhere. I sniffed the air for a whiff of petrol and listened for the growl of engines. If I bumped into the guards unit’s sub-machine-gunners, running bent double with their Kalashnikovs at the ready and clearing the ground for a tank assault, that would be the end of me. All I could do was advance by leaps and bounds between the dark cottages, and so I got to the square, which is where I wanted to be.

Candles flickered in the wind. Lots of them had burnt right down. Some had been snuffed out by the wind.

A pile of wreathes reached up to his knees. I still remembered him in the wash-tub. The coffin stood propped against the church door. The church rose black above him, the whole building. It looked like it had been lowered down from heaven, as if hanging from the pitch-darkness. Commander Vyžlata was tied to the coffin. The lads hadn’t told me that. Perhaps they didn’t know.

His arms were spread out, tied to the coffin at the elbows. His fingers were all sticking out. So Kozhanov’s guards hadn’t been here. They’d never have left him like that, like some Lord Jesus Christ with his arms outstretched! I’m pretty sure they don’t like that kind of thing, any religious stuff. No way! They’d have taken him down, dead or alive, with the first volley, they wouldn’t care. So they were behind me, somewhere.

I didn’t look into Vyžlata’s face. Didn’t want to. But then it was inside the coffin and it was dark. All I needed was to know he was there, because apart from me there was only one person who knew where Vyžlata had been before: Margash. And only Margash knew who and what were still in the cellar.

I detached myself from the coffin’s shadow, so as to slip into the mightier shadow of the church, and scuttle down the few streets to the pond, then make myself scarce somewhere in the countryside around Siřem, but then I heard them… First, a distant grinding noise and then the rumble that tanks make as they rip up the ground. They were getting closer… Now I was being chased to the Home from Home by the tanks of Kozhanov’s army. Fortunately for me, they hadn’t sent out a scouting party on foot. On the other hand, that meant they were on the attack.

I ran past the dark and silent farm buildings that marked the end of the village, immersing myself in the slow breaking of the day, as if I were carrying it. Next I ran past a tank. Its tracks were done for. It was burnt out, sadly. It smelt of burnt flesh and vomit. I knew it was part of the ‘Happy Song’ column… The Home from Home was surrounded by a solid wall of tanks. The ‘Happy Song’ tanks had formed a circular defensive line the whole length of the hillside, and beyond the tanks with their red stars pockmarked by bullets from all the village Home Guards in the sector that went from Tomašín, Luka, Bataj and so on, there’s this barricade, a long inner defence barricade.

There’s a lot going on between the Home from Home building and the barricade. Behind the barricade — piled high with bundles of paper, school desks, chairs and anything else that could be dragged outside the Home from Home — giraffe heads perched on long necks were waving; and beyond the barricade, which in the grey light of dawn seemed to be getting higher and higher, ‘Happy Song’ soldiers were flitting about, dragging bundles of paper and various other things. I couldn’t recognize their faces at that distance. All I could see beyond the rampart were vague flittering figures in uniform. Crouching low I carried on… and I had to slip past the first tank of the chain of defence that had lined up ready to fire. They must have been able to see me! So I walked on slowly, just walking… At the very moment when I felt a gun barrel in my back, I heard, ‘Eto Ilya — it’s Ilya!’ Timosha looked closely at me from under his tin helmet. He was worn out! A second gunner in a raggedy sailor shirt and camouflage dress was just as tired-looking. They stared at me, but without really trying to work out where I’d been all that time… ‘Great to see you! Off to the captain with you!’ said Timosha, severely. He was staring at my tracksuit top. Perhaps he wondered why I wasn’t wearing the tankman’s jacket that he had pinned me into with his own hands. With a wave of his gun he chivvied me round behind the tank in the direction of the barricade. The other one never opened his mouth. They were saving their breath, and saving on movement. I knew this kind of stiffness. They could scent battle in the air, and wanted to be prepared. I went where they told me.

The first light from the sky had diluted the shadow of the Home from Home into wisps that the gunners shredded as they moved around in it. They were pouring water onto the bundles of paper they’d piled up as defensive mounds — a burning barricade is hard to defend. Also on the barricade they’d put the stove from the kitchen workshop, and piles of wood from the cellar. They’d gone and chopped up the cubicles! There were all sorts of boxes and piles of bricks. They must have gutted the insides of our poor Home from Home… I walked slowly over to the barricade, walking as tall as possible, so as not to be mistaken for some enemy saboteur on a recce and killed by a burst of gunfire. But the helmeted gunner on sentry duty just waved to me. He recognized me… I skipped over the paper bundles in his sector and there I was, standing outside the Home from Home.

In my head I sorted out what I was going to say to Captain Yegorov. It was obvious from the unit’s combat situation and the dead tank that the Bandits hadn’t been fibbing: the new Russians didn’t want this lot.

It crossed my mind that the ‘Happy Song’ tankmen and gunners were digging their own graves, and that inside the barricade, surrounded by the winds around the Home from Home, I was about to enter my own grave. The poles we had used to break cinder strips into crushed ashes, and to catch flying scraps of charred paper with, had been used to reinforce the barricade. I stepped aside for some soldiers, getting a nasty bang on the knee when I tripped over the wash-tub… The company sergeant, whose face I couldn’t make out in the morning mist, gave me an earful. Accompanied by two gunners, he was dragging the tub along, filled with broken bricks, to add to the barricade. The bustle of work was mixed with the cries of small and fully grown animals, and it was obvious that more refugees from the Socialist Circus had arrived. I really wanted to take a good look at the animals, but there was no time, because I wanted to get inside and straight down to the cellar before daybreak, when everything is visible.

I edged at a snail’s pace through the pushing and shoving mass of bodies. The soldiers were getting on with building the barricade, and the animals kept getting under their feet. I edged towards the front door of the Home from Home, stepping over and sometimes tripping on the hosepipes they were using to fill some buckets with stinking water, and then I realized that they were dousing the barricade with water from the cellar… They had even chopped up the Bulgarian seaside sideshow and tossed its painted planks on top of the bundles of paper. The camels were hobnobbing with some other animals, including the seaside donkey — well, that was no surprise! There were some big fat does, too, like I’d never seen running around here. They were gobbing at everything and lashing out with their feet. Some gunners were dragging them along with ropes behind the Home from Home, and I heard a sharp burst of automatic fire, followed by another. I had barely got a decent look at them and they were already being executed. Tough luck. Nobody took any notice, and they didn’t take any notice of me either. How come, when I hadn’t been with them for so long? They didn’t care a damn about me… Then suddenly I heard ‘Ilya!’ and again ‘Ilya!’ and there was no mistaking the voice of Captain Yegorov. I stiffened to attention, then the cloud of dust kicked up by the fat deer in the haze of daybreak dispersed, and right there in front of the door of the Home from Home I saw a knot of people, and my captain was calling me from the middle of it! Soldiers were jammed around the wolf’s cage, which was wide open, and the wolf was just lying there on its side. He was huge, lying there as if at death’s door. I stepped forward, since it was my captain calling, then suddenly I was overwhelmed by an image that escaped from my head.

I saw myself in my torn tankman’s jacket. I was running out of the door of the Home from Home in answer to my captain’s call. I dashed outside with a kitchen knife in my hand, a great long carving knife pointing down… ‘Ilya!’ Captain Yegorov called again, and at last I saw him, squatting down next to the open cage. Margash came running from the kitchen to the wolf with a knife, and before the other soldiers gathered round the cage blocked my view, I saw Margash lift up the wolf’s head. I saw the wolf’s tongue flop out of its mouth, and I saw Margash cut its throat. But everyone thought it was me doing it…

I got past them easily. I slipped inside the Home from Home. I ran alongside the hosepipe that was snaking down the steps. I ran into the cellar. I was there in no time.

The hosepipes had sucked gallons of water out of the cellar. Footsteps echoed down there, as if you were not alone. I didn’t need a light to get to the grave cubicle. The grating was down on the floor. Little Monkeyface lay under a dreadful, grubby sheet on the iron manhole cover. He was completely covered up. I could hear a droning sound. It was the wind from the bottom end of the cellar, where there were more cellars. I reached out and touched the sheet, and I was glad it was too dark to see.

I wasn’t thinking about anything. My head was full of the churned-up leftovers of everything I’d been through. Yeah, I got the idea of staying there with him. But then I made up my mind to live as long as possible instead. I decided to wait until I grew up and to see what it was like. In the meantime, I’d gone there to hide with Monkeyface, because there was nowhere else in the world for me to go. Then the drone of the wind was interrupted by some volleys from outside. The walls of the home shook. Bits of plaster fell into my hair. Kozhanov’s army had attacked.

I patted the sheet in various places to find where his foot, shoulders, knee were. I was with him. He couldn’t forgive me. Nobody could forgive me. I could have waited until the end of the battle, then turned myself in for them to execute me, though they would probably just finish me off without any fuss. There wasn’t any point in that. I went back to him. I was guarding him, my little brother, keeping a lookout in the dark. What more could I do?

Then some more volleys cracked. They were coming in waves. They were probably still blasting away at our tanks in the circular defensive line. Then, in a break between volleys, I heard him. But he only made me cross. Considering everyone in the column thought Margash was me, he could at least have learnt to move like a saboteur! He blundered through that cellar as if he owned the place. The camel lads were close on his heels. Some had torches. We could see each other.

He stood in front of me in a tankman’s jacket that really belonged to me! He was covered in blood, breathing fast. I was surprised he was not surprised to see me. They must have come to get Monkeyface. They had hauled him out before, after all! Now two of the camel lads pounced towards him, but I wouldn’t let them near.

‘Ilya!’ said Margash. ‘I’m glad to see you! It’s great you’re here.’

‘Sure,’ said I. ‘So you’re off to that beautiful land of yours now, are you?’ I said it to show him I hadn’t forgotten anything. I spoke Russian so the camel lads — the cellar was full of them — could understand. Margash wasn’t carrying a knife this time. But he took off his jacket and handed it to me.

He stood in front of me, stripped to the waist. He handed me the jacket and tugged at my tracksuit top.

‘Quick,’ he said, ‘we’ll take him away!’

‘You’re takin’ Monkeyface away?’ I shouted back, because the cellar walls were shaking with further bursts of shellfire.

‘Yeah!’ shouted Margash, because now the pounding was non-stop. Some of the camel lads were over by Monkeyface, and I couldn’t stop them doing anything. I turned round quickly, because they had whipped the sheet off him and were covering him with some skins they’d brought along. And Margash tossed one big hairy skin right in my face. It was the wolf.

‘I had this dream, listen!’ shouted Margash.

‘No!’ I shouted.

‘You’re gonna kill Captain Yegorov,’ Margash said in his normal voice, because the tanks had stopped spitting shells. Outside there was just the crackle of light arms and the chatter of machine guns, so we could hear each other… If he had told me this in some sun-dappled clearing in Chapman Forest, or even in my dreams, say, I’d have laughed, but he was telling me back there in that cellar, and my whole body was covered in goose pimples. The Home from Home was shaking from shellfire and my tank column comrades were dying.

‘You said your dad was a wolf!’ I said to Margash, hurling the wolf skin back at him. ‘Why did you do this?’

‘Captain Yegorov ordered me to,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to kill him.’

The camel lads were saying something to Margash in their incomprehensible lingo. They gently raised up Monkeyface. He was still lying on the floor. Five or six of the camel lads picked him up and set off out of the cellar.

Margash was buttoning up the tracksuit top I’d given him, and explaining that they were going to take Monkeyface to that wonderful land where there was lots of grass and where all boys are brothers.

‘Are you glad?’ he asked.

I nodded, because I did want them to take Monkeyface away, and I put on the tankman’s jacket. It had splashes of wolf’s blood on it, but that would soon dry out.

‘The Captain’s waiting for you,’ said Margash.

He stooped, shifted the iron plate over the former grave to one side, fished down below, and handed me something wrapped in a rag: it was Commander Vyžlata’s black pistol.

The camel lads were going down the passage ahead of us. We had become Monkeyface’s funeral procession. We were taking him outside. I stuffed the pistol in my belt. I had no idea what would happen next.

We’ve came out of the dark of the cellar into the daylight. We stood outside the Home from Home, blinded and deafened by the explosions. The ‘Happy Song’ servicemen lying or kneeling inside the barricade were blasting away with their guns. I could tell the circular defensive line of tanks beyond the barricade hadn’t been broken yet, but it wouldn’t be long, because assault tanks were rolling towards the Home from Home from all sides. The mist had cleared. The light falling out of the sky onto the fighting men was dotted all over with pinpoints of smoke, and those manning the barricade were setting off yellow and dark-blue smoke flares to make themselves less easy targets. So I was coughing, defenceless and exposed to the gunfire, but what happened next?…

If I were being told this by some stranger — even one who knew all about combat scenarios — I’d laugh in his face. I would know that telling lies in childhood had never led to him gargling vile, dark tar… but this is what happened: there, outside the door of the Home from Home, despite the clangour of battle and in the very thick of it, the camels calmly stood, all harnessed up, gently bobbing their heads, and then, right there in front of Margash, the lead camel, a truly gigantic beast, knelt down and Margash hopped onto its back, and the camel lads passed Monkeyface… his relics… up to him; then they calmly took up their positions on the wooden seats, and the kneeling camels, laden with lads, got to their feet and towered over everything, ignoring the shooting, the shouting and the choking of the injured; they ignored the bits of iron whizzing through the air; they walked on as if they really were part of one of Margash’s dreams and not reality… I had an idea that Margash was dreaming right then, and that the dream was happening. But I wasn’t dreaming, so because of the whistling bullets I hurled myself to the ground. The camels walked on through the shellfire. Suddenly part of the barricade was ripped out by an explosion. I could see and hear soldiers screaming. Just a few paces from me one of them reared up, but it was not Kantariya! He dropped his Kalashnikov and fell headlong into a sack of paper. Shrapnel and odd bullets drummed into the barricade, into the paper saturated with cellar water, and now blood as well. I could see that the fat deer had been killed by the defenders, who had used their bodies to pad out the bulwarks around a machine-gun nest. The camels walked on through it all, slowly up the hill, striding along serenely with their load of lads, and I got this idea that of all the people there I was the only one who could see them, so I was becoming part of Margash’s dream… The camels strode uphill, unnoticed by the fighters. Untouched by any of the projectiles, they vanished in the clouds of smoke.

I had no idea that instead of instant death — and with it the kingdom of heaven — camels were capable of passing through sustained fire into a dream landscape of peace and quiet. I was glad. I never saw them again.

I was floundering about outside the Home from Home with the bloody wolf skin in my hand, and because the gunfire had eased up briefly, again I heard ‘Ilya!’ It was my captain calling. I went looking for him.

I hoped little Monkeyface would be safe in the saddle of a dream-world camel. I hoped he would travel all the way to a wonderful land. Then I resolved that another of Margash’s dreams would come true, and I pulled out the pistol. I released the safety catch and went in search of the Captain.

Captain Yegorov loomed in front of me so abruptly that I dropped the raised gun. Then Kozhanov’s lot started firing again. Captain Yegorov stood there as if there was nothing going on. He looked at me, fixing me with the searching stare of a seasoned, front-line warrior.

I hoped that the Captain would attribute any small differences between myself and Margash to the rapid changes that come about during an adolescence spent under fire… I half-crouched and tried to protect my head at least. The Captain stood motionless. He glanced at the wolf skin I was clutching, and his lips rippled into a tiny smile… He was glad he had found me! Shots crashed all around us, taking splinters out of the door of the Home from Home. We were veiled in a cloud of smoke, this time from a red flare. The Captain made a move towards me, not bothered by the black pistol I was offering him. My captain hugged me briefly, clutching me to him… It was just like that moment when the legend of Fedotkin and his boy came to life and Captain Yegorov embraced me on the burning tank… I couldn’t bring myself to squeeze the trigger. The Captain took the wolf skin from me. I stuffed the gun with the safety catch back on down my trousers, and ran after the Captain. The wolf skin full of its gobbets of dark blood led me through the smoke of the flares as I chased after him.

We ran around the Home from Home and came up against a funeral pickup. Gunner Kantariya was gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles. Gunner Timosha stood on the runner, his sub-machine gun slung across his back. He was holding a sheet that had probably come from some nun’s bed. At a sign from Captain Yegorov, I swung onto the back under the pickup’s tarpaulin and landed on something soft. It was the entire wealth of the supply train they had there. I recognized the carpets I used to be tied to at night, and the grandfather clock and statuettes, and the washstand and mirror, the piles of knick-knacks, sacks full of watches and church treasures. Captain Yegorov’s entire wealth, the column’s treasure trove… And then the Captain knelt in the middle of it all, and right there on that mountain of carpets he spread out the wolf skin and ever so carefully placed the dinosaur egg in the middle of it. It was bigger than my head. He flipped the corners of the blood-soaked pelt over the egg, tied it into a bundle and carefully stowed the egg away… He had put his most treasured possession onto the pickup, and he had chosen me to be there! The pickup gave a jolt and I collapsed on all fours in front of Captain Yegorov, banging my head on the grandfather clock. Luckily, I caught it as it fell… Yegorov thumped on the cab. Kantariya tapped back and the pickup’s engine roared…

Around the gap blown in the barricade, our sub-machine-gunners stood and knelt in various firing positions. Some of the injured ones had got stuck in the barricade, and as I looked about me, two or three were completely lifeless… Animal legs poked their hooves up into the sky from where a machine-gun emplacement had been camouflaged with bundles of paper. We set off through the gap and in no time we were passing our tanks. The chain of tanks in the circular defence line was unbroken, although a few machines had come off their tracks and one tank had had its turret blown off. Gunner Timosha was holding the sheet, which was blowing in the breeze, and the sub-machine-gunners and tank crews looked at our white flag and raised their arms to greet us. They were glad we had come out to negotiate a truce… Bodies in black tank troop uniforms lay in the grass on the hillside. The canvas tarpaulin covering the back of the pickup flapped in my face. I kept a frantic hold on the bench-seat — we were driving across the wild terrain of the slope, over potholes and the pits left by shells. Captain Yegorov let out a shout of rage, because the big mirror on the washstand had cracked. He was cursing and clasping the grandfather clock to protect it, and he only fell silent when we were brought up short by the barrels of Kozhanov’s tanks.

The whole hillside was rippling with the activity of the sappers. Whole squads of motorized riflemen were scurrying into position. We passed by the dark-green wall of tanks, each protected by its red star. The tanks overshadowed a host of men toiling away with their entrenching tools, urged on by roaring NCOs. We passed all those new Russians in the trenches and gun emplacements, and I could tell they were in spanking new camouflage gear. Their trenches were bristling with weapons, light and heavy, and they struck me as rested, not worn to shreds and all battered and bruised like the ‘Happy Song’ men… It cheered me that along with Captain Yegorov we were off to negotiate a truce and the redeployment of the ‘Happy Song’ soldiers under the banners and battle colours of the new Russians, because what other option was there? We drove slowly through an armed human anthill. They reinforced their positions during breaks in the shelling, and there was no point trying to count the number of machine-gun nests. I had almost given up trying to keep such data in my keen saboteur’s head. Instead I was more concerned about getting myself a new tracksuit top to wear under my tankman’s jacket, so that, in the event of our making a move to clear Czechoslovakia of criminals, should the need arise — like if bandits launched an offensive — I could become a young country bumpkin, someone’s prisoner or something. It crossed my mind this would be a good preparation for the next stage of my wartime life. But I was wrong again.

Vyžlata’s pistol was digging into me and having such a thing on me could arouse suspicion, so I shoved it in among the carpets on the pickup. A swift kick sent it sliding as deep as possible into the Captain’s treasure trove. Not knowing where it was made me feel better straight away.

The shellfire of the ‘Happy Song’ tanks has wreaked merry hell, and not just with the terrain. We drove through a veil of insects. Armour-plated bluebottles and greenbottles were even getting in under the tarpaulin. We passed a dressing station. We could hear sighs, groans and weeping, and sometimes the occasional scream. It all came drifting through the air. It was the way they say things always are at dressing stations, especially at the front. I got that from the other soldiers of our column. We didn’t have one. But then, one tank column doesn’t make an army corps.

We came to a halt above the dressing station. We were at the top of the hill. If I stood on tiptoe I could see the whole village. We clambered out, the Captain first.

The command post was made up of a black awning on stakes. So the officer in a black uniform spangled with decorations had to be none other than Major General Kozhanov. I gathered that the numerous lances stuck in the ground were the battle colours of his unit. I got a bit of a shock, because women’s hair was attached to the lances, blowing in the wind whistling up the slope. There was fair hair and dark, and it had all been twisted into thick plaits. As we got closer it occured to me that they might be horses’ tails instead. I was right, they were horsehair.

Kozhanov was tall, taller than Captain Yegorov. Outside the tent on a folding desk there was a pile of maps — real maps, not like mine.

Captain Yegorov gave his name, but I didn’t. Nobody expected me to. Timosha stood to attention on the pickup. Kantariya got out only when the Captain barked the order at him.

Kozhanov was standing in front of us, and for a while he didn’t budge. Then he snapped his fingers and suddenly there was a line of paras behind us. I recognized the uniforms. They were from the regiment of guards, not just any old squaddies, and they were all huge.

‘Someone kill that kid and the two drivers,’ said Kozhanov, and I heard the paras release the safety catches on their rifles.

‘No, hang on. Don’t kill ’em just yet,’ said Kozhanov. ‘Let ’em say goodbye to their unit.’

Kozhanov waved an arm and we turned around. We looked at the massed tanks just crossing the barricade under continuous shellfire. From this distance and facing downhill all we could see were the tanks. The actual battle looked like ants scurrying about in the flames. I knew the barricade was there, with men and animals in it.

Then Kozhanov came over to my captain and hugged and kissed him.

The Captain ordered me onto the back of the pickup. It felt good to have at least the tarpaulin between me and the paras. The Captain ordered me to fold it back.

Kozhanov and Yegorov climbed inside, and Kozhanov patted the sacks full of watches and valuables. He even gave one large glass stag a slap of his hand. Looking around in the gloom he said, ‘Souvenirs, hmm…’ He caught his foot on the cracked mirror with washstand, cursed, then bashed it with his fist and shouted something, and a couple of the paras came towards us. Kozhanov pointed to the sacks and they picked them up and offloaded them, taking them away somewhere… And all Yegorov had left in the pickup was three sacks, which wasn’t fair, anyone could see that. So Kozhanov hollered and the paras put a sack, the smallest one, back under the tarpaulin. Then Yegorov handed Kozhanov the wolf-skin pouch, undoing it to show the Major General the dinosaur egg, his most prized possession.

Kozhanov stroked the wolf pelt, and said, ‘Very good, comrade. This’ll make some excellent wolf-skin caps for our Russian winter. Very good.’ Then he ran a finger across the rough surface of the dinosaur egg and said, ‘This is an outstanding souvenir, comrade. Take good care of it… Of course, you don’t need the drivers, or the lad!’

Timosha and Kantariya were hunched under the pickup’s tarpaulin. I stood to attention. Captain Yegorov placed a hand on my shoulder, looking down at his feet, at the carpets we were trampling on, and said, ‘This is my son. All his companions died in battle.’ And Captain Yegorov gave a little snivel.

And Major General Kozhanov said, ‘Ah, comrade of mine! Such is war, motherfucking bitch that she is!’ and he also started snivelling. Then he said, quietly, ‘Keep the lad then, and fly to safety! Fly like eagles!’

Kozhanov suddenly squatted down among the carpets and produced a flask from his coat pocket, uncorked it, took a swig, then passed it to Yegorov, who also squatted and drank. The Major General stroked the wolf skin and said, ‘Go ahead and make a nice warm cap for yourself, and one for the lad.’

After a while, Kozhanov said, ‘Well, we’ve had a little sit-down before the journey,’ and he stood up and climbed out, followed by Captain Yegorov. I hopped out as well, the tarpaulin clipping me across the head.

Major General Kozhanov was smiling now, and he told us, ‘The way is open, but just wait a moment…’ He disappeared under the black tarpaulin of the command post and reappeared almost at once. Inside he had taken off his flat officer’s cap and replaced it with a helmet with a metal spike. The helmet, decorated with a red star, looked old-fashioned and it was all shiny… ‘Nice, eh?’ Kozhanov laughed in our direction, but his paras weren’t laughing. They were rigid, holding their rifles. The horses’ tails on the lances were flapping in the wind, and Kozhanov said, ‘Kill just the drivers.’

There was a burst of gunfire, then another. They merged into one. I didn’t turn around, but out of the corner of my eye I could see two paras dragging Kantariya by the legs. He had a hole in his head, his arms trailing across the ground. Then I heard a revolver crack. That was them finishing off Timosha. It made me feel sorry.

Captain Yegorov felt sorry as well. Anyone could see that. Major General Kozhanov put an arm around his shoulders, gave him a bit of a shake, and said, ‘I know what you’re feeling, dear comrade. Your unit’s been destroyed. I’ve been through all that several times… See it as a necessary rearmament of our forces. We won’t be lacking tanks any more anyway. All around here,’ he swept his arm over Siaz, ‘will be one big storehouse for our nuclear arsenal.’

We sat in the driver’s cab, the steering wheel still warm from Kantariya’s hands. We would soon be beyond the sectors I had described and drawn in my maps. We were waved through crossroads and junctions by traffic controllers with signal flags, and here and there I spotted boards nailed to trees saying Louny in Russian letters, and an arrow marked on them, so I reckoned that was where we were headed, and I thought of Dýha and that I was also seeing this part of the world from a truck, and like him I was sort of under escort, though not with some Czech coppers! I was with a Soviet captain, not going to some sort of young offenders’ dump, but to a real home, if Captain Yegorov was really going to take me as his son.

But I couldn’t ask the Captain about anything. I clutched the shaggy wolf pelt tight around my knees, doing my best not to get covered in blood, which had already clotted in parts and was flaking off under my fingers; and because the skin was so very shaggy, I couldn’t feel the rough, crinkly egg through it. The Captain said we were going to fly like eagles to a faraway and glorious country to the east, a country so glorious and vast that I couldn’t begin to imagine it… but then I got pissed off with the Captain going on and on! It sounded like yet another fairy tale and I was too old for fairy tales. But I couldn’t tell the Captain that, could I?

Then the Captain started singing, tooting his horn and generally carrying on. He stamped his feet — all to show how happy he was! His singing grated on my ears, deafened by countless battles, and on my guts, which were empty except for hunger. Then he was chattering on about some Katyusha bird, most likely some cuddly whore, creeping about somewhere on a river bank. Then in his deep voice the Captain started singing about a glorious, faraway land, a homeland full of dense forests and stuff. Next he was cursing Chapman Forest, this murderer of his own men, who sold them down the river so that that other murdering bastard, Kozhanov, would let him keep his trophies — stolen, regrettably, with my help, from ordinary village folk… I was just thinking his face was dripping with sweat, when I realized my captain was crying — and laughing at the same time. It crossed my mind to jump off the pickup, but that wasn’t a good idea, because we were moving fast on a tarmac road. I’d never travelled so fast! Riding on a tank was nothing compared to this!

It could actually have been the speed that made faces in the landscape flash past the cab window. They kept surfacing in my mind. I was getting all of the people in my mind mixed up with real people. Soon we were passing just the odd, isolated traffic controller, which meant the fighting was over! Otherwise they wouldn’t be standing there on their own! The bandits would have liquidated them! We flashed through some village where there was a herd of pigs rootling around in the puddle on the green and all the windows were curtained. I was beginning to see that my Czech homeland was truly massive! Much bigger than the piddling area shown on my maps! We passed other traffic, military vehicles with red stars and tiny private cars full of Czechs gawping, and they gave us some real dirty looks, I can tell you! But they didn’t say anything, didn’t even sound their horns when they got a sight of Yegorov’s tattered, battled-soiled uniform, and mine too perhaps! They were frightened, these civilians… Then the Czech countryside was flashing past again, in various degrees of sludginess and batteredness. So I shut my eyes tight and over the Russian chit-chat and Captain Yegorov’s singing and shouting I saw the faces of the people from the village… and I could see the men of the Home Guard, and the faces of the nuns, who were probably all dead. And I could see other people from the village. Some of them waved to me as if I were leaving for ever and running away, and they were happy! I could go, for all they cared, and they made it obvious they would never ever forgive me for what I’d done… I saw the faces of the people of Siřem that I used to know — who are probably all in Hell by now, or on their way there — being evacuated. They were lurking behind every tiny little stone in this Czech land that we were passing at a fiendish speed, and they were shouting at me, angry and spiteful… Everywhere I saw the faces of those people who were cowering in the barn, anywhere in that sector Tomašín, Luka, Skryje, Bataj and the rest… They shouted out how much they hated me and that they would never forgive me. Then we started down an avenue of trees, but there weren’t any heavy branches flapping about laden with this summer’s sweet cherries — no, they were women trees and here were the frozen masks of Czechia that ancient savages had carved in the trees in the days when Chapman Forest was everywhere. They were the battle colours of hate… The women trees vanished and suddenly I saw Hanka. Her lips were moving and she wanted to tell me something, so I leant across to her and bashed my face on the glass, because the pickup had stopped and I woke up, and Captain Yegorov tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Bystro!’ We had been in some hurry to get away from Hanka’s country.

We unloaded the trophies from the pickup, dragging the few sacks that were left. We had driven into some hangar, and Captain Yegorov stopped shouting and singing, and he wasn’t crying either. He was making out that he was strict and tough, as a commanding officer should be… From under the limp tarpaulin I dragged out his pictures of stags and his statuettes of stags, big ones and small ones, and a hip bath and those carpets, lots of carpets, and I took it all away and stacked it up and crammed it into this small plane! So we must have been at our airfield at Louny.

Captain Yegorov was cramming even the cracked mirror with the washstand into the plane, but it just didn’t want to fit! So, following the Captain’s orders, I rearranged the sacks of money and watches and the carpets — but the mirror still refused to fit! We would have to leave it behind. Captain Yegorov kicked it to pieces.

He ordered me to climb into the plane’s cargo space on top of the pile of carpets and other trophies, then he passed me the wolf pelt, ever so carefully. It was on my lap and the wolf hairs tickled my throat, but I held on tight to the egg… The Captain put on his pilot’s helmet with lots of attachments sticking out, then he strapped me to his belongings! He must have lost the ropes that he used to tie me up with at night during some battle somewhere, or maybe he’d forgotten where he put them… There were these straps hanging from the sides of the cargo space inside the tiny plane, and it was these my captain tied me up with… I was already half-choked by the pile of carpets around me, and with the dragon’s egg on my knees I was coughing up wolf hairs… and he still had to tie me up! A fine start to my new life, I thought to myself… The little plane set off at a crazy speed, and with the engines roaring we rose up and then hit the ground with the wheels again. We did a hop. My captain couldn’t hear me, though I was shouting and hitting my head on the steel walls. The wolf pelt slipped off me, the egg rolled out and it was bashing against the walls of the plane, bouncing like a ball. My brain had almost turned to porridge when the egg came flying past me. With my free hand I dipped into the sack of watches to throw handfuls of them at the Captain’s cabin to get him to stop — to get him to tame the egg! The other trophies also put my life at risk, the biggest stag with its massive antlers shattering against the walls of the cargo space. I kept dodging the bits and pieces flying everywhere like exploding shrapnel. I spotted the pistol that had slipped out from under the carpets somewhere: now it lay at my feet. I couldn’t cut through the strap with a broken piece of the stag, but I did manage to snap it bare-handed, such was my strength born of sheer terror at the way the plane and the flying egg kept leaping about. I wanted to warn the Captain, the confusion being the same as if we were in a battle… Over all the noise the egg made as it banged into the walls — destroying a trophy here and there — the Captain couldn’t hear me shouting… only after a deafening gunshot did Captain Yegorov look back… and just then the little plane left the ground and we were flying straight into the sun… Captain Yegorov shouted something, leaning back towards me into the cargo area. The egg ricocheted off the wall and bopped me on the head, and then there was another shot… Regrettably, I had shot my Captain Yegorov right between the eyes. He must have fallen backwards onto the plane’s control stick, though I didn’t see that, because soon afterwards we crashed.

When I came to, it was night. My captain and the entire cargo lay in the wreckage of the little plane. It was easy to yank off a bit of twisted metal. Then I started digging.

I spent three days and three nights making a kurgan for the Captain and the plane. I had some provisions from the wartime shelter. Once they had gone I stopped eating.

After I had trampled down the earth all around the kurgan, disguising it with turf and young saplings, I lived there for a while. I might have been guarding my captain. I might have been on the lookout for some new army to join. Then I realized I had to go. I consulted my maps. I began writing.

When it comes to the writing, it is me and it isn’t. I’ve written over the maps and pages torn from books. I’ve written down the truth about everything I’ve been through. I’ve written about the war of the Czechs and Slovaks with the armies of the five states, and it’s all true. There isn’t enough tar water in the world for me to gargle if I told a single lie. I covered every bit of paper with my truth, and then I set off for Siřem.

Only I know where the kurgan — my captain’s grave — is. And where the egg is. I haven’t marked it on any map. I’ll put these pages I’ve written inside my parents’ tomb. Maybe someone will find them one day. Maybe someone will still be able to read Czech.

I’ll also take a look at the wartime shelter, to see whether the last Siřem family is still living there. I’m just about to set off.

I’m going home.