*
After a moment the door opened and I stood to attention to give my report, but Commander Vyžlata ignored me and everyone else… The order came for us to go to bed immediately. The Commander disappeared behind Margash and into the command post. The work teams were dejected and frozen stiff, but they hauled themselves off upstairs to the second floor without any fuss or noise. Only Mikušinec and Karel came back to help me chase the longshirts to their dormitory and the youngsters were playing silly beggars.
I went on upstairs and said to Karel, ‘What was that about?’
Karel rolled his eyes and said, ‘Phew!’
And Mikušinec whispered to me, ‘Šklíba’s in the shit. They was arsing about with Christ in the cellar.’
In the dormitory they were all talking quietly, and Šklíba was sitting on his bed in the corner, and next to him Martin. They were wearing black tunics, but no-one made fun of them. The moon was so bright we could see each other and we spoke quietly, because we had a sense that Commander Vyžlata wasn’t going to be sending us off to sleep with a story today. I soon discovered that the Commander had blown his top because of the pious choirboys, and had burnt their stolen cellar Cross as a twentieth-century abomination, and made the two little choirboys trample on the Cross, and, to add insult to injury, the others had all laughed. But Šklíba insisted he hadn’t stamped on it, even though Commander Vyžlata had ordered him to, and then the Commander had pulled out his pistol. But Šklíba refused to stamp on it anyway, to everyone’s surprise. Now in the half-dark trickling in from the moonlight they were all debating the issue. What had actually happened?
‘What was it like, Šklíba?’ the boys asked. ‘Were you scared?’
‘I’d have been shitting bricks,’ said Bajza.
‘Don’t be daft, you’d have stamped on it,’ Chata said.
‘And you wouldn’t, you reckon?’ Bajza replied, and they started fighting and Chata was suffocating Bajza with a pillow, but only pretending. Šklíba said nothing, though we all kept asking him, and Martin said, ‘Shut up, the lot of you. He can’t hear you anyway.’
‘Aha,’ said someone else, ‘so he fired the gun right next to his ear, then the other ear?’ And they went on and on, deciding that Commander Vyžlata had crucifixes and nuns on the brain. He was a nutcase, really. And all that stuff about the twentieth century. We didn’t give a shit what century it was.
Then someone said, ‘Did you stamp on it, Martin?’ and Martin said, ‘Yeah.’
The lads carried on chatting, but not me. I was thinking about what Margash wanted me to do. I couldn’t let him run away. We’d get Monkeyface, then together we’d escape to Margash’s wonderful country. I tried to imagine Margash. If I had a dream about him, we might talk in it again. I dropped off to sleep, then woke, because someone was standing by Dýha’s bed.
I tried to blink my eyes open… It was Karel, Mikušinec, Chata and Dýha. I went over to them, barefoot. I could hear the breathing of the ones who were asleep, and someone in the corner was sort of squeaking, and the wind outside was going whoo-whoo, so the Bandits didn’t hear me until I was right up close. Dýha put a finger to his lips and pointed downwards, so I dropped to the floor. The boards under Dýha’s bed had been ripped out… They’d been putting little packets down there! Packets made out of old documents. I spotted the sharp blade of a kitchen knife, and there were more of the same. Mikušinec was just wrapping some candles.
Dýha pushed his lips towards my ear and whispered, ‘That thing with the airguns, that’s all crap. We don’t give a shit about him and we’re off to join the Legion. You coming?’
I felt like shouting out loud. I was suddenly so happy! But I just said, ‘Yep,’ very quietly.
Karel nodded. ‘No-one messes with the Bandits!’
I reached in my pocket and handed Dýha my box of matches. He nodded and said, ‘Fantastic!’ and Mikušinec said, ‘Good,’ and wrapped them in paper. They put the packets down the hole and replaced the floorboards.
I crept off to bed. I was so proud to know the Bandits’ secret. They had to tell me because I’d seen them. I was glad to be a Bandit.
I decided to tell Margash that he ought to join the Legion as well. We’d take Monkeyface with us and find some pretty spot on the way to bury him. I was really chuffed that Margash had said he had dreamed about me. I was so happy to have made an appearance in somebody’s dream. I couldn’t get back to sleep for ages, but I dropped off eventually.
Next morning we woke up like on any other day in our new life, but it was a completely different day, not just because of the evening bonfire and the fuss around Šklíba, but also because a car arrived bringing Commander Baudyš, so we didn’t work at clearing out the Home from Home.
At morning roll-call Commander Vyžlata briefly introduced us to Commander Baudyš.
He told us that Commander Baudyš had been appointed to us by the Centre. He also said that we were to obey Commander Baudyš implicitly. Fair enough. But who was actually giving the orders? Sometimes it looked as if Commander Baudyš gave orders to Commander Vyžlata, and sometimes the other way around. Not that it mattered.
We formed a chain and started unloading mess tins and billycans and tracksuits and boots and boxes of airguns and smaller boxes of airgun cartridges and gas masks and green knapsacks and other stuff we’d no idea existed, and nobody talked about the Legion any more.
We were over the moon at all these wonderful things and several times whooped with delight. Commander Vyžlata smiled at our glee and put everything under lock and key. Then they handed out booklets that smelt of clean, new paper, but the lads just sneered — they couldn’t stand it when the nuns used to try and teach them… My guess was that they’d soon have the booklets in tatters or lose them or not think twice about burning them, but I was thrilled by my first glimpse of Fundamentals of Close Combat and I looked forward to A Manual for Saboteurs. I also took a copy of The Motorized Rifleman’s Handbook and hid it under my pillow.
I no longer wanted to go back to Shadowland, and Hanka had stopped coming to the Home. And so whenever I was snuggled up in bed, worn out from the day’s work, and before Commander Vyžlata’s footsteps came down the corridor, I would immerse myself in The Catholic Book of Knowledge or the new booklets. The other lads had had their chance to study, but not me. I’d had to clean the shit from Monkeyface’s little arse and wipe the tears and spit and snot from his face! So the Bandits let me study now.
We knew we would see the things that had been locked up again some time. We would hold them and sniff at them, because lots of the things smelt different from anything we’d ever smelt before. These things were new, nobody had ever had them before us and they were for us.
Commander Baudyš had a whistle hanging from his neck. He wore a full tracksuit and he and Commander Vyžlata would call each other ‘old warhorse’. Then Commander Vyžlata, in shorts and a T-shirt, showed Commander Baudyš all the limbering-up exercises, and Commander Baudyš said, ‘This is going to be a super-dooper unit.’ I was in one row and Margash was in the row behind me, and we were just doing a knees-bend and I whispered to him, ‘The guy with the whistle, what about him?’ and Margash hissed back, ‘He wasn’t in the dream.’ Commander Baudyš was a huge man and must have been much, much stronger than Commander Vyžlata, so I was glad I didn’t have to kill him in Margash’s dream.