Jachim Topol - Gargling With Tar

‘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.