Mr Cimbura fell off his chair and I felled Páta from behind with a textbook move, and because he fought back I locked him in the best room. You could hear him making matchwood of the best room. But he couldn’t get out.
Then I wiped Mr Cimbura’s face, and it was like washing the shit off someone’s old arse, but I washed the mess of blood and phlegm off his face and went down to the cellar.
There was no whiff of girls in it, just a smell of cellar and cold. If Hanka had been dancing there, I think I’d have recognized her smell.
It was cold down there. In the cellar wall there was a hole, a tunnel. Because I felt a gust of cold from the tunnel that cut right through to my bones, I realized that it led off to somewhere under the cemetery.
Mr Cimbura had just one shelf in his cellar. No decent stash! There were a few eggs, so I cracked one top and bottom and sucked it out… ugh, it was vile! My mouth was full of bitter, black muck. There were no good eggs, just these disgusting black things… I reckon he did it deliberately! My eyes flooded with rage as I spat out the eggy goo, then I smashed the rest of the eggs against the wall — ugh, the stench! They were all off… disgusting. There were some pickled ones in jars and I ate as many as I could, then I trampled on the rest and peed in some of the other jars.
I waited for Commander Baudyš.
A howling draught was blowing out of the hole. I went to the kitchen.
I thought I might have to treat Mr Cimbura some more, but I didn’t. Mr Cimbura was sitting by the stove, sipping tea from a mug and his face was all wrinkly with age, but clean. And not a scratch on it, not a single one.
‘Hmm, a nasty piece of work you’ve turned into!’ he said the moment I entered the kitchen. I stopped where I was. The twigs crackled in the blazing stove.
‘You handled that little brute nicely, though. That counts for something. You’ve grown. I never liked you much, no, but I never beat you.’
‘And I didn’t beat you neither,’ I said.
‘I should think not!’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘You’ve been snooping in the cellar, haven’t you, my lad? I try to do my bit for the lassies, see. The country’s going to the dogs right now. And the people’s regime started out so well! The comrades wrung a few bourgeois necks and bent a few gallows, it’s true. That counts for something. But now the comrades are getting all cosy with those Moskies. They don’t love their country, bloody comrades. But Czechia will cleave them to her fine young bosom and crush ’em! Have you heard about the Moskies, sonny?’
‘No, Mr Cimbura.’
‘Our stout heroes have been giving the Jerries what for since the beginning o’ time. So they’ll deal with the Moskies all right too! Whoever heard of ’em before? They comes from Moscow. Russian Tatars, they are, but with their ugly mugs painted white to fool us, so they look like us. Siddown, lad! You used to get me bloody annoyed with all your sleeping. You can’t do so much of that now, eh? I don’t suppose you want to anyway. You’ve grown up. Have you notched up your first bird yet?’
I sat down, but I was really scared in case Mr Cimbura started asking about Monkeyface. I was relieved to hear Commander Baudyš’s voice and Páta’s hollering, because as soon as the Commander entered the hallway Páta started hammering away at the door of the best room, and when Commander Baudyš opened it, he jumped him, though it was pointless attacking Baudýš.
Although the lads kept a tight rein on Páta, he caused considerable confusion and no interrogation of Mr Cimbura or of me by Commander Baudyš took place.
We dragged Páta along and windows opened and mad dogs tugged vainly at their chains. Then our squad passed through the village towards the Home from Home, where we all spread out, because Šklíba had done another bunk — but this time he got away. I never saw him again.
Commander Vyžlata had us line up and Margash was still with him. The Commander was drinking some booze. He had a bottle in his hand and he said that something unfortunate had occurred, that one of us had left after having declined an offer of friendship. Commander Vyžlata shed a tear and bowed his head briefly, then wiped the tear away with a finger and flicked it to the ground. We said nothing… Then, gesturing with both arms, he summoned us into the dining room and we obeyed, because we were anxious, and there, painted on the picture of Private Fedotkin, was a Czech boy in a tracksuit with a green knapsack over his shoulder, and he was handing Private Fedotkin a gun belt. And we stood there in silence. We knew by now that they had killed the brave Private Fedotkin. And I looked towards Margash and Margash looked at me, and I got a shock, because Margash had a face as long as a fiddle, like that time in the cellar, and he was furious, but not in the way some of our lot sometimes were when we lost it a bit, us being psychopaths and all. When any of us got the red mist we looked different from Margash. And now I got angry as well, being full of hatred for Commander Vyžlata, because why should Šklíba have to wander alone through the snow and the forest just on account of the nuns? Why wasn’t he here with us, like usual? Why was all this going on? Because of Commander Vyžlata! And it crossed my mind that if Margash said, ‘Now!’ I’d do what he’d already seen in his dream anyway. ‘But how?’ I wondered. ‘How should I kill the Commander?’
Commander Vyžlata tipped back his bottle of booze and took a swig and flopped down on the floor. With him squatting down like that I could get at his neck. But the Commander suddenly stood the bottle on the floor and quickly stuck one hand in his pocket, making some of the longshirts squeal. Commander Vyžlata’s eyes flashed as if he meant to spear us with them, but he stayed sat on the ground and I could have reached him, and the other lads would have helped me, I think… I glanced at Margash and nodded a ‘Yes?’ at him, but Margash shook his head, meaning ‘No!’ and that was good, because Commander Baudyš entered the dining room and said, ‘Dismissed! Prepare for training!’
So we went outside the Home from Home and lined up in our shorts and T-shirts ready to train for whatever it was we had to do.
We used to train under supervision, under the commands of our commanders, but Commander Vyžlata wasn’t training us this time. He was walking up and down our lines and talking about how he’d coped with other scum before this… like the guttersnipes of the Vorkuta camp… and he wasn’t going to be put out by a handful of little jerks from Bohemia, so we should all bloody well watch it! That’s what Commander Vyžlata said, keeping one hand in his pocket. Then he bellowed, ‘Do you know what befell the son of the regiment, what they made him do?… They made an executioner of him, my lads!’ The Commander smashed the bottle to the ground and the smallest longshirts squealed. Then Commander Vyžlata told us what it had been like in the freezing cold hell of Vorkuta… after the court martial! And how they had forced him, Vyžlata, to take up the murder weapon and finish off Private Fedotkin… thereby turning his — Vyžlata’s — humanity inside out… but what else could he do? ‘And what would you have done in the penal colony of icebound Vorkuta? Well?’ All that was left of the son of the regiment’s hand-sewn uniform were worthless tatters… The son of the regiment had finished off Fedotkin, the man who had been like a father to him. Yep. That’s how it went at the snowbound camp in faraway Vorkuta. They saw things differently there.