We didn’t go off to join the Legion. We were thrilled by the airguns and talked about when we’d be getting the tracksuits and knapsacks and billycans, and Mikušinec said, ‘With a billycan you can camp out in the woods.’ Then Páta laughed, saying, ‘You don’t need anything to camp out in the woods!’ and Dýha roared, ‘With your prick you can camp out in the woods!’ and they all laughed and laughed, and Chata said, ‘Knife, salt, matches…’ and then Bajza and Chata together started chanting, ‘Knife, salt, matches…’ Then Silva chimed in and some of the other little fuzzy-wuzzies, and they began pretending to attack Chata and Bajza, and they were all shouting, ‘Knife, salt, matches! Knife, salt, matches!’ and I found myself mouthing the words as well. Then Karel said, ‘Spring’s coming and you’re all thinking of getting away…’ We were standing in the snow, but there wasn’t a frost and Karel said, ‘“Knife, salt, matches” — that’s a gippo password… First time I escaped, I didn’t have a knife or salt or matches… and I stayed hidden in the cemetery, but if ever anyone came there in the night, man! — I was scared… Then me and Páta ran into each other. That’s how we met. He used to nick flowers from the graves to swap with the old ladies for an apple, and later we recognized the flowers — the old ladies would take ’em back. We got caught and they sent us to Siřem!’ And I asked Karel, ‘Can a boy have a wolf for a father?’ When I saw the way he stared at me, I knew at once it wasn’t possible in the twentieth century. Then there was a whistle blast, and commander Baudyš called, ‘Line up! Equipment issue!’
One day, soon after our training started, I was taking the ashes out and Margash came down the corridor towards me, and he pretended to bump into me and whispered, ‘Get it done soon!’
I gripped the ash pan and emptied out the ashes. They fluttered around my head in the morning air and landed in my hair. My fingertips tingled as I gripped the metal handle of the ash pan. I was glad Margash still wanted us to go with him to his country. But I had no idea how to go about making his dream come true.
The training days had begun and those of us who made up the combat unit came out of the Home from Home into the big wide world. We trained outdoors.
We ran across a field, hopping sometimes, because there was still snow here and there, but I kept being bumped into by flying beetles, then a bumble bee and a butterfly, and at first I tried to dodge them, then I broke away from the running line.
Commander Baudyš severely reprimanded me in front of the assembled unit, and the lads laughed at me.
After that I would run straight on, whatever came flying at me.
In the past, me and Monkeyface had been trapped indoors. Now we made up Fedotkin squads for offence, defence and sabotage. Under Commander Baudyš’s guidance we learned how to protect ourselves from the most terrible weapon of the twentieth century: the atom bomb. We would lie flat, pointing away from the epicentre of the explosion, and cover our heads with newspaper. Except we didn’t have any newspapers, so the documents from the upper floors served just as well.
During hand-to-hand combat I usually got beaten up, but I was absolutely the best at crawling, and Commander Baudyš took note of this.
I could creep up on an enemy patrol without a single twig cracking. I would think about the rat I turned into on the day they took the nuns away. I seized the enemy around the neck with my left hand and jerked his head back, while plunging my cold steel into his kidneys, then with an up-and-down flip I released my weapon from his body in such a way that the weight of the enemy falling could not damage my cold steel blade.
That’s how it was described in the Manual for Saboteurs.
One time, I slipped past Dýha, who was on patrol, crept round Páta and Mikušinec and landed a fatal blow on Chata, who was standing around aimlessly, and I won.
That day, Dýha sang mockingly, ‘No-one ever hears a sound when Prince Ratty comes around.’ But the name didn’t stick. Dýha and the others from his patrol were punished for being so useless. They had to clear a stretch of wood of every last fallen twig.
I was no longer the long-suffering little donkey the nuns used to call me. I really was more of a creeping, crawling rat. But the nuns didn’t know that. And I didn’t know anything about the nuns. None of us knew anything about them.
We all launched ourselves into the big outdoor world, which grew even bigger with our movements. I liked being in that world. I became a saboteur.
One part of the training of the Fedotkin squads was to spot and map all the bridges, big and small, in and around Siřem, as well as all the wayside shrines and triangulation points, and that’s what we did, trotting this way and that the length of Chapman Forest. I mapped the area in pencil on documents gathered from the Home from Home. From signs and signposts we read off the names of the hamlets and farmsteads that lay all over the forest and I entered them in my maps made from those documents: Siřem, Ctiradův Důl and Tomašín, Bataj, Skryje… I never got a single thing wrong and Commander Baudyš commended me.
I carried my bundle of maps under my tracksuit top, and I kept rehearsing the various names the outside world had and thinking about them… Dýha told us that the town called Louny was huge — even bigger than Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, which was the country we were in — and that there were thousands of streets and thousands of paths and thousands of cars in Louny, and that there were huge numbers of people everywhere. He’d passed through Louny when the cops brought him to Siřem.
I would pore over the maps I’d drawn on the old documents and sometimes I closed my eyes and I could see Louny with its jumble of cottages and ponds and footbridges and shrines. I saw thousands of Mr Cimburas carefully lifting their feet, and thousands of Mrs Kropeks scrubbing floors, and thousands of Commander Baudyšes saying ‘old warhorse!’ and I saw myself, too, running all over the town, a thousand Ilyas, and we ran up and down the backstreets and dodged the traffic and the dogs and read hundreds of different names on signs and signposts, then suddenly it was just me and Margash there, and that was the best. We strolled through the streets and took from the cottages any food or stuff that we felt like, and then I could see nothing. I was asleep.
During our training we did a lot of marching, crawling or rushing along the fringes of Chapman Forest and forging deep into it.
One time we spotted some smoke and reported it to Commander Baudyš. We had found the spot on Fell Crag where the altar boys were camped out, but Commander Baudyš wouldn’t let us attack, so we obeyed. What else could we do?
Poor lads, the altar boys, all ragged. They had to slog away in the field. They would have goggled at our weapons! An atom bomb would have killed them all! They didn’t know anything! Ha, ha! we laughed. I carefully marked on my maps the spot where we’d seen the smoke.
Margash didn’t gallivant around the fields of Siřem with us. He was Commander Vyžlata’s main assistant in raising and training the longshirts. The little choirboys were among the longshirts. They didn’t wear their black surplices, of course. Martin and Šklíba stayed inside the home to be the Commander’s aides. They both had to wear surplices. Commander Vyžlata meant to let them take their dirty surplices off when they came to their senses and recognized the truth about the nuns. They refused.
We were still cleaning the home out and burning bundles of paper. Part of our training was working in the village to ‘win the trust of the wary population’, as Commander Baudyš put it during the theory part of our training in the dining room, and that meant we would go out to do jobs.