Jachim Topol - Gargling With Tar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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