The Commissar (9 page)

I watch him through half-closed eyes. As long as we have the Old Man as our Section Leader we still have a tiny chance of getting out of this madness reasonably unharmed.
He doesn’t want to see any of us killed uselessly in some idiotic caper devised by a madman a long way behind us, who is only looking for medals and a new row of salad dressing on his chest.

A 37 mm strikes and ricochets off with a howl, but does no damage.

Porta leans tiredly against the still-warm ruins of the silo and spits foolishly into the wind.

‘Holy Saint Agnes, is there anything as beautiful as a fucked-up world war which loses its breath for a minute, and has to take a break? What d’you say to coffee with somethin’ a bit stronger in it?’

‘Got beans?’ asks the Old Man, lighting his silver-lidded pipe.

‘What do you take me for?’ Porta laughs, hoarsely. ‘The day I
haven’t
got beans enough for a cup of coffee, that’ll be the day they pull the world from under my feet.’

‘We haven’t really got time,’ says the Old Man, puffing away at his pipe. ‘But to hell with it, make it anyway. We’re not the blasted Moscow Express, we’re only 2 Section!’

With nimble fingers Porta rigs up his American petrol-burner.

‘The people who sailed across the Polar Sea with this nice little thing couldn’t ever’ve dreamed that Obergefreiter by the grace of God Joseph Porta’d be makin’ coffee on it some day,’ he grins with satisfaction.

‘That blasted silence,’ mumbles the Old Man, blowing into the metal cup attached to his water-bottle.

‘Nothing like a “little black”
*
on a cold morning,’ says Porta, adding a dash of vodka to each cup.

Albert takes a big gulp of his coffee, to leave more room for the vodka.

‘If I do thirty years in this war, I’ll never get used to them rotten flares.’ he says, thinly, cupping his hands and blowing warm breath up along his cheeks. ‘They make me think of corpse candles. Life ain’t nothin’ but one great bigshitter,
man, an’ it gets blown out from under you’fore you even know it, an’ they still say “God is good!” Enough to make you grin your tripes into knots! In all my black life I never learnt as much about bein’ scared as since I got into this rotten excuse for a war, and always soakin’ wet I am, too! If only a man could get pneumonia, at least he’d have a temperature an’ all that, but the good God has decided otherwise and here a feller’s got to go creepin’ around on the stinkin’ face o’ the earth and waiting till the neighbours shoot his black arse off!’ He takes a slug at the vodka coffee, and looks around him mournfully. ‘Sometimes I wish they’d just come and kill me an’ get it over with. When it comes to it, man, life ain’t worth livin’ with, anyway!’

‘
C’est la guerre, monami
,’ sighs the Legionnaire, the eternal
Caporal
bobbing between his lips. ‘You are no more than the garbage which goes to make up the military muckheap. That is as Allah has willed it!’

Porta laughs quietly and pours more coffee and vodka into our cups.

‘Heide’s Führer certainly took us for a ride when he promised us eternal peace and
Kraft durch Freude
with all the trimmin’s!’

‘Shall we place the machine-guns?’ asks Barcelona, stretching out in the warm corn.

‘No, sod everything,’ says the Old Man, uncaringly. ‘Let the neighbours come and beg us to shoot at them for once. I couldn’t care less!’

It is still dark when we turn out again, and wriggle into our wet capes. They smell of mud and ancient sweat.

The Old Man is standing outside in the clammy morning mist, waiting for us. The flaps of his field-cap are turned down over his ears, and the silver-lidded pipe hangs slackly at the corner of his mouth. It is one of those miserable mornings, which Russia has such a wealth of. A morning fit to draw both the soul and marrow out of a man.

Grumbling and moaning at one another we pull our equipment together. We seem, by now, to have assembled a fantastic collection of gear. Light and heavy machine-guns,
clumsy gun mountings, machine-pistols, combat knives, collapsible spades; cartridge belts criss-crossing our bodies, grenades filling our pockets and stuffed into the tops of our jackboots. Add to this, wire-cutters, magnetic charges, batteries and signal telephones, field-lamps, map-holders and compasses.

‘God what a load of shit,’ pants Porta, struggling with his gasmask pouch. ‘Stay here, while I bring up the limousine!’

‘That’s in order,’ answers the Old Man. ‘Drivers pick up their waggons, but quick’s the word, mind! Let’s get this lousy war over with, so we can go home again!’

‘Let’s hope the neighbours’ nasty boys haven’t pinched the chariots out from under us in the course o’ the night,’ chuckles Porta, as he goes off whistling with the other drivers of the section at his heels.

‘If anybody wants my opinion,’ says Tiny, importantly, ‘I reckon we ought to set a guard on them waggons when we’re in the sack. If we don’t the insurance won’t cover us. Well that’s up to you fellers. I’m goin’ to go down an’ get the bleedin’ pigs.’

‘You’ll stay here,’ the Old Man flames up, furiously, but Tiny doesn’t hear him. He is already out of sight, with a grenade in one hand and an mpi in the other.

After a while the days and nights flow together into one grey blur. We cannot remember the difference between one town we have stormed through and another, and it is a long time since we stopped counting the dead. There are too many of them for us to keep up any interest.

Out in the fields lie the carcasses of piebald cows blown up like balloons and with legs jutting upwards stiffly.

Porta almost cries at this insane waste of good food, and embarks on a lecture on the correct preparation of
Osso Buco
with rice and a piquant sauce.

27 Panzer Regiment
is withdrawn from the attack. Most of its companies have shrunk to reduced section size. Our company has three vehicles left. The rest are junk.

*
Panjemajo
: Russian for understood?

When we left the soil of our fatherland, they told us that we were going out to defend the holy rights
.

Marcus Flavius

It was early in the morning. He ran wildly down through the valley. He was the last man of his section. Most of his comrades had already fallen, crossing the stream, when a Russian SMG which was covering its banks opened up. The water rippled a deep red behind him. He reached the top of the hill, and felt a burning pain in Ms side. It had been ripped wide open. Everything went black
.

Well into the afternoon he came to himself again, The air was shimmering with heat, the sun burning down on him. He attempted to turn his head away from it. His greatcoat was torn open. Buttons gone. His right side was one bloody mash; minced flesh, crushed bones and tatters of uniform
.

‘
Water,’ he groaned. ‘Water,’ he repeated, but nobody heard him
.

The battlefield was silent
.

A short distance from him lay two Russians. One of them had died several hours ago. His face was a mask of blood. The other soldier still moved slightly now and then, and a rattling sound came from his ruined mouth. His stomach had been slashed open
.

A swarm of flies crawled busily about on the protruding entrails
.

Water!’ he mumbled again. ‘Thirsty!
’

The whole of the long valley was a jumble of empty cartridge cases. Down by the bank of the stream stood a burnt-out T-34. A little further off lay the shot-away turret of a German P-IV. The lush, green grass had been flattened by the tread of countless heavy boots; tank tracks had slashed open the soft earth
.

A swarm of flies buzzed up, suddenly. Some of them lighted on
his face, crawling between his parted lips, and up into his nose. He tried to raise his hand, and then to shake his head, but the orders from the brain resulted in no more than a slight tremor of his body
.

‘
Water!’ he thought. He kept on thinking about water until the moment he died
.

Two weeks later his mother, a war widow of World War I, received the obligatory postcard:

In the name of the Führer, Adolf Hitler, we regret to inform you that your son:

Lieutenant Georg Friedrich,
Platoon Commander of Infantry
,

has fallen fighting bravely and in line of duty for Führer, Volk and Fatherland
.

The Führer thanks you. Heil Hitler!

*
degtrareva
: Russian machine-gun

*
Grofaz
: Greatest Leader of All Time (nickname for Hitler)

†
NSFO: Nazi political officer

*
Tovaritsch
: Russian for comrade

*
PAK
: German abbreviation for anti-tank gun

^*
Cojones
- Spanish for balls (testicles)

*
Kraft durch Freude:
Strength Through Joy (Nazi holiday organization)

*
A cup of black coffee with a dash of schnapps (or vodka).

The town which has been chosen for us to recuperate in looks neat and clean. The war has moved through it quickly, leaving only a few wrecked houses to mark its passage. The gasworks had been blown up, of course. Gasworks are always blown up during a retreat. But we don’t care. Who wants gas, anyway? Not us!

The Hotel
Ssvaeoda
*
hums with activity. The owner, Tanya, stands behind the bar, dressed in an ancient mauve party dress, and flanked by three attractive, short-skirted waitresses, ready to welcome the German liberators. She has an interesting, and very ripe, vocabulary which she has picked up from the Mongol troops who were stationed here before we arrived.

Porta and Tiny start immediately to teach her the equivalent expressions in German. Two days later she is welcoming everyone who enters the bar with a pleasant:

‘Lick my arse?’

Tiny has his hand up under the mauve party dress. He is trying to persuade her to tell him where the commissars hid their vodka and caviare when they left.

‘Fuck?’ he tempts her, lasciviously, in a whisper which makes the rafters ring, and the stuffed bear by the fireplace blink its blood-red eyes.

With the proud gait of a Czarina, Vera Konstantinovna comes through the door. She keeps her expensive fox fur on indoors, despite the heat of the room. She is said to be a woman of rank, married to a high-up commissar, who has
gone off with the Red Army. The others address her, jeeringly, as ‘Your Grace’, but cannot hide the fact that they are really not a little afraid of her.

‘Shag, then?’ suggests Porta, making the international sign for copulation with his thumb. ‘A trip on the old pork dagger?
Panjemajo
?’

On their way upstairs Porta already has both hands searching about under Vera’s skirt.

‘I will just wash
ma petite soeur
,’ she murmurs, pouting her lips for a kiss. ‘My husband installed a bidet here, before he had to leave. You know what bidet is?’

‘A trough to wash out ol’ Porky Pig’s kennel in,’ laughs Porta. ‘They’re all over the place in France, but they fuck more there too.’

While she is in the bathroom Porta takes off his clothes. He throws his heavy Russian pistol clattering on to the dressing-table, but, as usual with him, retains his yellow topper and his boots.

From down in the bar Barcelona’s heavy bass voice can be heard:

Wir, im fernen Vaterland geboren,
nahmen nichts als Hass im Herzen mit,
Doch wir haben die Heimat nicht verloren,
unsere Heimat ist heute vor Madrid . . .
*

She has nothing on but her shoes and stockings when she returns to the room. Her reddish-golden hair swings loosely around her shoulders.

‘What a peach,’ shouts Porta, admiringly, smacking his tongue. ‘Come with me to Berlin. You could make a fortune
in the
Zigeunerkeller
. They pay 200 for a single, and 500 for a round trip there!’

She comes slowly toward him, her lips parted in a sensual smile.

‘Oh Jesus, Jesus,’ he mumbles in a hoarse voice, his small eyes rolling round in his head. ‘You’re enough to make a dead man get it up again!’

‘You are a sweet man,’ she whispers, seductively. ‘But why you wear the boots?’

‘Helps in a quick getaway,’ he grins. ‘Think now if your husband, who has gone on his travels, was to put his commissar’s head in here with a
Kalashnikov
in his hands. I’d be quicker over the cobblestones with me boots on!’

She kisses him. Small, feather-light kisses, which tickle his face. She falls back on to the bed taking him down with her.

‘Like my old stick o’rock, do you?’ he asks, after a while. ‘It’s all the way from Berlin, an’ can do most anything!’

‘You are nice, man,’ she whispers, enticingly, and runs her fingers over the bristly hairs at the back of his neck.

When Porta comes back down to the bar, several hours later, he is met with cries of admiration.