Jachim Topol - Gargling With Tar

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.