‘So I want to introduce this boy to you.’ Commander Vyžlata pointed to the new lad. ‘His name’s Margash!’ he said, smiling at us. So we laughed as well, and Bajza shouted ‘Goulash!’ and fell from his desk, laughing and kicking his legs in the air.
Commander Vyžlata raised his arms to command silence, but it didn’t come. Pebbles and pencil stumps and whatever else anyone could find in their pockets started flying through the air. We created mayhem, banging our fists on the desks and stamping our feet, and the Commander stood there with his arms flung wide, listening to the noise. And Commander Vyžlata reached into his pocket and pulled out a big black pistoclass="underline" bang!… and what a bang it was! And the bullet buried itself in the dining-room ceiling above our heads, and when a strip of plaster peeled away and fell somewhere among us, then there was total silence. Commander Vyžlata put away his pistol and said, ‘Go to bed.’
We had stopped laughing. We were totally worn out. We tramped up to the second floor, to the shortpants’ dormitory.
We flopped onto the empty bunks wherever we could, and the ones left over crept in with someone else, it didn’t matter. Our heads were all drooping, but some of us were talking anyway.
‘What did he mean, saying we’re scumbags?’ wondered Mikušinec.
‘Nobody wants us,’ someone said.
‘Airguns could be fun,’ Mikušinec whispered. ‘It’s like being in the Legion!’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘let’s do a runner. Let’s go and join the Legion. How about it?’
‘Idiot,’ Dýha whispered. ‘You can’t do a runner in winter. He was right about that.’
‘You can, even in winter,’ someone said.
‘But not in Siřem,’ said Dýha. ‘Listen, let’s wait for them airguns. That could be just what we need. The altar boys don’t stand a chance, and if Vyžlata starts buggering us about we can cut and run and shoot our way to the Legion.’
‘And what did he mean about the sisters?’ asked Mikušinec.
‘You’ve just gotta act like they were never here, or he’ll do his nut,’ someone said.
‘But they were here!’
‘Forget it.’
‘Okay.’
‘Sod him,’ said Páta, and someone started sniggering into his pillow and said, ‘Ha, ha! A gippo cowboy! Ha, ha!’ and from somewhere in the dormitory came, ‘Yeah, that’s a good one, a gippo cowboy… I just had this vision of a gippo cowboy and I had to laugh.’ And Páta said, ‘You’re all stupid.’
Then I whispered to Karel, whose bunk was across the aisle. ‘Karel! I’d still rather go and join the Legion.’
‘It’s winter, Ilya. Go to sleep.’
6: All about Fedotkin. Hanka. Cleaning out. The new lad
In the morning we lit the stove and washed in basins, as we always did in winter, and someone said, ‘Do you reckon they’ve brought those airguns yet?’ and Páta roared, ‘Yippee!’ Then we heard Commander Vyžlata: ‘Weapons training will come later, lads.’ He led us out to the front of the Home from Home and got us limbering up in the crisp, cold air… He was wearing just a vest and shorts and set the pace, and after the tiniest longshirts had collapsed in the snow, he appointed me and Páta and the new boy Margash to exercise with the littlest ones and look after them, and when any of them flopped into the snow, we picked them up… The youngsters enjoyed falling in the snow when it was down to me or Páta or Margash to catch them, so I reckon that us three got the most exercise that morning. Then Margash and I suddenly made a grab for one longshirt who had fallen down and our foreheads crashed. We picked ourselves up and I watched him in slow motion, and it was like looking in a mirror, and I said, ‘Watch out!’ and he said ‘Okay!’ So he did speak Czech!
Work began only after we’d limbered up. We began clearing the Home from Home of its mountains of paper. Fortunately, we started at the top of the house, because if we’d begun with the cellar, Commander Vyžlata would have discovered the grave in the cellar floor. I knew that.
Teams of us took turns at carrying out the old paper and burning it at a spot we had cleared of snow, outside the front door. We took turns so all the lads had their fair share of time in the fresh air.
We liked having a bonfire. We turned the burning heaps of paper with poles.
We spent each day clearing bundles of paper out of the Home from Home, passing them in a long chain, and we also picked up the various documents that had landed here and there, blown about in the draught. Inside the Home from Home there was a draught all the time now; the wind whistled along all the corridors and through all the upper floors, making the doors bang. We also knocked the holy pictures off the walls and added them to the fire. The Commander didn’t want them in the corridors.
On the very first day, Commander Vyžlata informed us that we older ones didn’t have to sleep at midday, which we welcomed with a roar. The nuns used to make us. We went to the dining room and watched Margash sketching, then painting, a picture of Private Fedotkin on a white patch of wall where a holy picture had been.
The days of our new life dedicated to work — and later to studying as well — passed one by one, and the portrait of Private Fedotkin was very quickly coloured in on the wall, and Commander Vyžlata used tiny brushes to add his own touches to it.
We no longer talked among ourselves at night. Commander Vyžlata would lull us to sleep, so we didn’t waste our energy in the evenings, and got up in the morning well rested and eager for work and study.
Commander Vyžlata lulled us to sleep in the same way he had persuaded the waifs in the huts of Vorkuta to sleep at minus forty degrees. He told us about the son of the regiment.
He would walk up and down the dormitory and tell us the story of Private Fedotkin and an abandoned street kid, and I kept my eyes closed, holding on to the day’s images under my eyelids: burning paper and floating shreds of scorched parchment dragged back to earth with poles; assembly in the dining room before lessons and at mealtimes; teams of boys moving from floor to floor; and our dusty hands passing bundles of documents from one to another all the way to the bonfire.
Sometimes I thought about Monkeyface. I didn’t want to. It took the story told by Commander Vyžlata to overlay Monkeyface’s image in my mind. So I probably waited more expectantly than any of the others for the Commander to come.
The voice of the storyteller was interrupted by the breathing and snoring of the ones who fell asleep first.
The Commander told us about the son of the regiment, who had not only been abandoned, but was also beaten and driven out and jeered at by villagers, and by people in the towns. His parents — whores and foreigners — couldn’t give a shit about him. The boy trudged his way through the world until one day, having escaped from a fire, he saw a tank drive into the fire and on top of the tank stood Private Fedotkin of Stalin’s Flying Brigade. Private Fedotkin reached out for the boy and they forged a friendship, and together they crushed lots of Jerries to a pulp with their tank and generally made mincemeat of heaps of wicked people, and the boy became the son of the regiment and Private Fedotkin made him a boy-sized uniform. Every evening the story was the same, and the lonely boy at the start of the story endured endless wrongs, beatings, slights and jeering among stupid people. But then his life was transformed by Private Fedotkin.
They travelled the world together in triumph.
And how did it end? I really wanted to know what became of the son of the regiment, but I always fell asleep.
Commander Vyžlata told the story of Private Fedotkin in Czech and Russian, so we could talk about it among ourselves, and if anyone didn’t know some word, somebody else would tell him. It was easy. We came from all over the place.