My world in the village was vast. It had barns where we stored the tiles when Mr Moravčík stripped the roof off the cowshed, and granaries where we piled sacks, and yards that we cleared of dung and chicken droppings, and coal holes that we fetched coal from in scuttles, and sheds where we took bundles of wood that scratched our hands.
In my world there were cellars and stables and sheds full of animals, and there were pigs that would eat anything and nanny goats and billy goats that leapt up onto their shed roof after bits of green in the spring, and a huge bull and cows that kept curling their lips, and some of the animals were nasty, clanking their chains in the dark of their houses, because we didn’t smell of the village, but of the Home from Home.
For our benefit Commander Baudyš set up jobs by the stream and in the workshop.
At the stream we worked with stones. The twisted ironwork in the rubbish dump, over which the black water flowed, looked like the skeletons of ghostly animals from the dawn of time, as pictured in The Catholic Book of Knowledge. I didn’t tell the lads that.
There was a footbridge over the stream and under the bridge the water was deep. We picked rocks out of the stream, passed them to one another and built them into levees and defensive ramparts. That was one shift. The second shift was the reverse: we formed a chain and passed the rocks to one another back into the water. The rocks of the defensive rampart dried in the sun and wind. Until they dried out completely we did physical exercises.
Sometimes Commander Baudyš left us alone by the stream. He would go into the village ‘to do some requisitioning’, as he put it.
One day, just as he’d left us, along comes Još.
I was passing rocks and suddenly, from behind me, I hear Chata saying something in gippo to Još, an old gippo who had a cottage on the other side of the village, where more gippos lived. Chata and Bajza, and sometimes Silva too, would go there whenever they could… Now we all gathered round Još, who was carrying a sack… It was bulging and moving and Još hit it with his stick. I thought it might be a rat, but it was a weasel. Još told us this was what he did. They’d send for him from the village whenever weasels or martens were killing hens and chickens, and then, with their snouts soaked in blood, they’d eat all the eggs too. Još would lay traps for the weasels and sometimes even caught one… only sometimes! Usually not even the village dogs can catch a weasel! A weasel’s fast! It fights like mad to stay alive! Often Još would be given a chicken, even if it was torn ragged and practically dead, and he could always get himself eggs — and that’s not all! When he said that, we all laughed. Then Još shoved the sack with the weasel in it in the deep water under the bridge and held the sack down with his stick by the rocks, and the weasel was completely under water and thrashing about like mad. The sack bulged out in every direction and Još held his stick ever so tight in both hands. The weasel fought long and silently and furiously, then died. Još took it out of the sack. Its paws were sticking out sideways.
Chata and Bajza went to see Još at home and we had to work extra to make up for them, because Commander Baudyš knew how much time we needed to put the rocks from the defensive rampart back into the stream, and if we frittered away the time when we were alone, then we’d really find out what having a tough time meant! And we didn’t want that.
During the damp and rainy days of the thaw Commander Baudyš found a new subject to add to our education: woodwork and metalwork.
In the early days of our training, Commander Baudyš slept upstairs in the nuns’ dormitory, close to Commander Vyžlata and Margash’s command post. Later, though, Commander Baudyš arranged things to suit himself, as he put it. He moved into the kitchen.
He had a bench and saws brought in from a van — tiny hacksaws and fret-saws, and a big saw for cutting beams — and he knocked up some shelves and filled them with little boxes of screws, large and small, wire netting and nails. And the fact of him showing us these things, that was part of our training. And because the ground around the piles of ashes left over from the burnt documents was soft now, some of us dug ash pits, while others, under Commander Baudyš’s guidance, made wire-netting fronts for rabbit hutches or built shelves for jars of gherkins, tomatoes, sweet corn… whatever they wanted in the village! And Commander Baudyš also repaired locks and alarm clocks and pump motors, and could even mend snapped and rusted threshers.
After we’d done a repair job and returned it, Commander Baudyš received food from the villagers, and we all got to eat it, although any bottles of booze were for him and Commander Vyžlata.
We filled the breaks between jobs with lessons. What sometimes happened was that Commander Baudyš would call me and I’d take the bundle of papers out from under my tracksuit top and the boys gathered round and we revised the names of the hamlets and the positions of streams and triangulation points and committed them to memory. Commander Baudyš commended me. He was of the view that I should have a special leather case for my papers to wear at the waist, but that never happened.
It was soon certain that the lads would still be committing the world drawn on my maps to memory when the thaw came. Especially during the time of the thaw I worked busily at my maps. Sometimes I drew the world from reports by this boy or that. I found an old pillowcase. Then I carried my maps in it under my tracksuit top. At night I kept them under my head.
We worked and we learned things from the booklets and from Commander Baudyš’s explanations. In addition to jobs to be done in the village we also worked on installations. That was one branch of workshop practice.
Outdoors it kept raining, and we couldn’t practise crawling all day and every day in the soft mud with airguns and gas masks, though we’d have to in a real combat situation! So we would sit around the stove and watch Commander Baudyš’s hands cleaning a watch mechanism or dismantling a gearbox or applying a soapstone coating to a piston with a fine cloth. In the kitchen-workshop Commander Baudyš never shouted; sometimes he even laughed. We never created mayhem. You couldn’t with Commander Baudyš, but some of us did talk to him. And one evening, Páta coolly asked, ‘Commander, why’s the boy painted next to Fedotkin a Czech?’
And Commander Baudyš looked at Páta, who was both slitty-eyed and a darkie, and he said, ‘Because we happen to be in Czecho. Don’t you worry about it. But in the starvation huts of Vorkuta… that, my lads, was international, there you had every type of mug, like here.’
But Páta stamped his foot and said, ‘Even so!’
And Dýha whooped, ‘Ha, ha! The gippo cowboy!’
‘Yob!’ said Páta, and Dýha was about to lash out when Páta tossed a cloud of sawdust in his face. Without looking up from the huge bowsaw he was oiling, Commander Baudyš said, ‘Orderly, discipline the men!’ and Karel struck Páta in the midriff and stuck his chin out at Dýha, and the lads sat down.
When it rained we worked. We also learned things from Fundamentals of Close Combat, acting out the positions in the book’s drawings. We were soon at the last lesson. We trained by the book both outside and in the kitchen-workshop, where it was warm because of the stove.
I did some thinking about whether I’d rather go with Margash to join the Legion, or to his country.
In Margash’s country there would be no village houses in the sleet; no Chapman Forest full of animals just waiting to rip a boy limb from limb. It was a bright place, with grass everywhere. As I worked away at my the task I had been set I thought up ways to fool about in the grass: me, Margash and Margash’s brothers. I enjoyed those workshop lessons held in the kitchen when it was raining.