Jachim Topol - Gargling With Tar

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.