The Commissar (47 page)

‘I’m a tank-driver, too,’ bawls Kostia, his narrow black eyes glinting. ‘I do no repairs either!’

‘Let’s go in and shoot some dice,’ suggests Porta, crawling down into the Panther.

‘Why not?’ grins Kostia, following him.

‘No you bloody don’t. I won’t stand for it,’ shouts the Old Man. ‘I said I’d have nothing to do with your gold robbery, but I’m still the goddammed Section Leader of 2 bloody Section! Out of there, Porta, and get on that differential! That’s an order!’

The only answer the Old Man gets is the smack of the hatch, closing down and being dogged on the inside.

‘Frostlips’ and Gregor crawl under the broken-down truck with a lot of cursing and swearing, but give up after a while, shaking their heads.

‘Can’t do a thing with it,’ says ‘Frostlips’, ‘it’s a total write-off! The Yanks knew what they were doing when they made us a present of those rotten Studebakers! Capitalist shit!’ he rages, kicking at the big tyres.

‘What the hell’s that?’ asks the Commissar, and listens tensely.

‘Crow,’ cries out ‘Whorecatcher’ nervously, staring up at the dark sky.

As if in reply an old scout biplane appears from the clouds and circles low over us. Then it disappears again into the cloud curtain.

‘If it’s us they’re looking for, they know where we are now,’ remarks the Old Man, uneasily.

‘It’s not us,’ says the Commissar thoughtfully. ‘I had some German equipment and weapons scattered about in the prison, and the Kübel with the smashed radiator I left outside. So they’re not looking for Russians. They’re looking for a German Brandenburg Commando
*
!’

The broken-down truck is taken on tow behind one of the T-34s.

‘We’ll get another truck all right,’ promises the Commissar, confidently. ‘But until we do we’ll just have to tow that Yankee shit.’

Six days after our departure from the Vladimir prison we halt in a deserted, forgotten village to make necessary repairs
to two of the vehicles. Their radiators are boiling so much that it is a wonder they have not split open long ago.

When the repairs are completed we sit down to play cards with the village mayor and the local OGPU chief, a man who got into political hot water twenty years earlier. We play in silence for a while, until ‘Frostlips’ accuses the mayor of cheating. When ‘Frostlips’ keeps on with his charges the mayor gets angry and threatens to cut off his ears if he does not stop talking such nonsense.

‘May God grant you the pains and tortures of a slow death, you immoral dog,’ snarls ‘Frostlips’ at the mayor.

The mayor goes pale, but still continues to cheat. Suddenly the light goes out, and while the mayor is gone to see what has happened, ‘Frostlips’ sweeps the money up from the table and hurries out into the kitchen.

When the fuse has been changed and the sleepy light again shines down over the table, the mayor discovers that his winnings have disappeared. He gives out a loud yell and looks under the table in the vain hope that the money has fallen on the floor. Of course, it has not.

‘And you’re the one who’s supposed to see to it there’s law and order here,’ he screams accusingly at the OGPU chief, as he realizes slowly that he has been robbed. ‘May the Evil One grant you thousands of cramps, pestilences and cankers, and so order it that these bounties not only fall upon you. but also upon your children and your children’s children even unto the twelfth generation, if you do not find my money!’

‘When we’re finished with this lousy war,’ scowls Barcelona, ‘I don’t want ever to see snow again! Damnation, how I
hate
snow! No matter where you look everywhere’s white! The only chance you’ve got of seein’ a bit of colour is to go out and look at your arse in a mirror!’

‘What did you do before you became a soldier?’ Kostia asks Porta.

‘Oh, a lot of things,’ answers Porta. ‘Beat up the mothers’ darlings from out in Dahlem, and fucked their girls; mugged a yokel now and then that’d come to Berlin to find out what it was like to ride on a tram. Had a job for a bit delivering for
the greengrocer on
Bornholmer Strasse
, and then went up in the world and went round with coke on a delivery bike. Used to measure up the coke in a wooden keg. That was 5 litres and cost 95 pfennigs. Every household’d buy one of them, and it was just enough to keep the place warm through the evenin’.’

‘Bloody hell!’ cries Kostia, in amazement, ‘I always heard you Germans were high finance people and that rich, you put notes in between your sausage and your bread!’

‘Don’t believe all you hear,’ Porta advises him, condescendingly. ‘In Old Moabitt we were that poor we used to steal the bottoms out of the beer-glasses when we went past a boozer!’

‘We were poor, too,’ says Igor. ‘I washed houses, and made just about enough so’s things could go round. One little vodka of a Sunday at the most, and even though it’s forbidden to be poor in the Soviet Union we were still poor anyway. But then I got a bit more rich too, and I would’ve been really rich if you rotten Germans had stayed where you belong. My young brother an’ me hit on a really great idea. We started holding up the deliverers from the meat market, and selling the proceeds on the black.’

‘Did you rustle cows then?’ asks Tiny, with interest. ‘That ain’t no good! I know all about that ’cos me an’ the fur Jew’s kid David pinched one of them things once. All we got out of it was all three of us landed up with old Nass in the David Station. Since then they don’t bring cows inside. They took the bleedin’ thing up to Nass’s office on the first floor, and then couldn’t get it down again. They ’ad to ’oist it down, and when it wouldn’t go out of the window they’ad to knock a ’ole in the wall for the walking milk-shop. They made it too little, and before they’d finished the cow got that scared of’avin’ been picked up by the coppers that it shit all over Nass an’ all ’is detectives!’

‘No, we did not take live cattle,’ explains Igor, with a cunning grin. ‘We waited for the ones who came to fetch meat on bicycles. When they went in to warm themselves with a quick early morning vodka, they’d leave their bikes outside. Then we would take the lot, bikes, meat and all.
They tried to come after us sometimes, but they never caught us!’

‘Did your kid brother join the OGPU too?’ asks Porta, interestedly.

‘No, he was eaten by lions!’

‘Eaten by lions?’ asks Porta, in astonishment. ‘How, then? I’ve never met anybody who’s been eaten by lions!’

‘Well, it was like this,’ sighs Igor, sadly. ‘We never used to pay to get into the Zoo, we went in over the wall. Sometimes, of course, we made a mistake and landed in with the sea-lions or the polar bears. We always got away with it though. The polar bears were that surprised when we came chasing over the wall that they never thought of eating us until we were out of there again. After a bit we knew all the animals pretty well. And they knew us, too. It was only the keepers who didn’t like us.

‘Well there was one day when we hadn’t had anything proper to eat for several days, and were standing there watching the big cats getting outside their dinners,

‘My kid brother was standing down in front of the lions’ cage watching the keepers putting great big lumps of meat in to them. When the keeper was out for a minute, my brother nipped into the cage and grabbed a big chunk of meat from right under the nose of a motheaten old lion. It gave out a terrible roar when the meat disappeared, and struck out at him. He got such a blow that he went flying up in the other end of the cage and landed on another lion that was having its lunch siesta. All hell broke loose. Round and round they went in the cage! The whole crowd of ’em after my brother. What a din! When the keepers finally turned up there wasn’t much left of him. Those mangy lions had eaten him all up!’

Kostia tells us that he has always been a headhunter, and has caught many prisoners who had escaped from Kolyma.

‘The
Jakaeirs
always told us when anybody had gone over the wall. They got ten roubles for the information. Bounty was a hundred roubles for every body we handed in. We were merciful. We never tortured a prisoner. We would shoot him sleeping, so that he would not experience the fear
of death. Winter was the best time. We could collect the bodies and store them until we had a sledge-load. In summer we had to get them handed in before they rotted and could not be identified. We got no pay for bodies unless they were identified at Central Camp, and there was another risk in handing in rotten bodies that nobody wanted. I know several who have been hanged for an unsolved murder. In that way the police got them off their lists and had less trouble with their percentage of open-ended cases.’

‘Hell’s bells!’ cries Gregor, spitting, as if to get rid of a nasty taste. ‘What kind of company’s this we’ve got into?’

‘But it was parasites on the body of the community we captured, ‘Kostia defends himself.

‘You’ve got to be a Siberian, to think like that,’ explains the Commissar, and sends Kostia a wicked look. ‘These slit-eyed monsters come into the world through Satan’s arsehole!’

Kostia laughs long and loud, and does not appear the slightest bit insulted.

‘It’s snowing like all get-out,’ says Barcelona, looking out of the window. ‘We’re not going to get any further. Those snowdrifts are thirty feet tall!’

‘I’ll get a snowplough,’ promises the Commissar, shrugging into his long fur coat. He slings his
Kalashnikov
across his chest, and waves to Kostia who follows him with a Siberian grin.

‘Snowplough!’ jeers Heide, who is sitting by the stove, looking insulted.

‘He doesn’t mean an ordinary snowplough,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’. ‘He means a snow
eater
!’

‘Never heard of such a thing,’ says Porta, shuffling the cards deftly. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a machine which swallows tons of snow a minute,’ explains ‘Whorecatcher’. ‘If you let a couple of ’em loose at the North Pole there soon wouldn’t
be
a North Pole any more!’

‘And he’s going to find one of them in this hole in the ground?’ Porta screams with laughter. ‘What a bloody optimist!’

‘He’s a three-star commissar!’ says ‘Whorecatcher’, and does not feel that any further explanation is needed.

After some time the Commissar and Kostia return.

‘Get ready,’ snaps the Commissar. ‘The snowplough’s here, and we have to follow close up behind it. T-34 first, Panther behind!’

‘Tell me,’ says Porta, blowing smoke in his face, ‘you always want me in the rear! Don’t you
trust
me?’

The Commissar gives out a long, long laugh.

‘You’re a funny bloody chap,’ he says, between bursts of laughter. ‘Anybody who trusts you ought to be kept in a padded cell! You don’t mean to tell me that the thought of doing us all in the eye hasn’t even crossed your mind!’

‘Oh, well! There’s a lot of things a fellow can meditate on.’ Porta forces a smile.

The snowplough is an enormous machine which really does ‘eat’ snow, as ‘Whorecatcher’ has told us We have never seen anything like it. The tallest of drifts disappears in minutes when it starts work on it. But shortly after we have passed by new mountains of snow lie behind us. making the road completely impassable.

‘Makes us safe from possible pursuers,’ grins the Commissar, with satisfaction. ‘This was the only snowplough in town. If anyone wants another they’ll have to get it from Irgorsk, and that’s where we’re going!’

‘Smart, smart!’ Porta admits. ‘A man doesn’t even have to pretend to be thinking about it to be able to see we’re home and dry!’

A militia man shouts at us halfway inside Irgorsk. The Commissar waves him off in a manner which only people who are in a position of power can permit themselves.

‘He was scared of our red-painted faces,’ grins Porta, exaltedly.

A row of searchlights send their rays up into the pitchblack night. They cross one another and play nervously over the dark clouds.

‘What the devil!’ cries Porta, in amazement. ‘An air raid? Who the hell’d bomb this place? Must be some mistake!’

The thundering roll of an explosion makes the air shake.

‘That a mistake too?’ asks Gregor. ‘Sounds real enough to me!’

An enormous column of fire goes up, sending a sea of white-hot sparks out over the whole town. Battalions of flames dance whirling along the rooftops. Melted lead drips into the streets, and whistles and bubbles in the snow. The heavy rafters of the large buildings begin to sink down, cracking and splintering. Gargoyles, cut in granite, fall from on high, smashing everything they land on. A granite head with a long tongue hanging from its mouth rolls along the street and ends up with a ringing sound against the Panther’s tracks. An old-fashioned fire-waggon with solid rubber tyres breaks up under the rain of bricks. Firemen sitting along the sides of it do not even realize what is happening.

We stare, in fascination, at a concrete wall. The building is expanding like a balloon, slowly being blown up. The huge flat roof falls down through the inside of the house, which is one seething bonfire. Sparks fly hundreds of yards up into the air; steel girders bend as if they were made of soft rubber.

Two screaming girls come running down the street, with their hair and clothes in flames. A fireman aims his hose at them. They are thrown back down the street, and stick to the boiling, bubbling asphalt.

‘Get
on
! Hell, let’s get out of here,’ shouts the Old Man, hysterically. ‘That’s all we needed! To get killed by our own air force!’