Jachim Topol - Gargling With Tar

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.