Sitting on the table in the dining room was Žinka, dead opposite the portrait of Private Fedotkin and the Czech boy. He had an open bottle of booze. In one hand was a screwdriver and there was a big radio on the table in front of him. There was masses of technical equipment around. He must have brought it all in while the killing was happening. His crutches were propped against the table.
He gawped at us. He pressed down on the table and kind of got up, stretching. Suddenly he looked terribly pale! We could see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He was gulping. His eyeballs were popping. He stretched out a hand. His paw was aiming right at us. He was staring.
Margash tittered. I also laughed.
‘Rascals!’ said Žinka. ‘There are two of you, aren’t there?’
‘Yes, Commander,’ said Margash.
‘Phew, that’s a relief!’ squawked the legless Commander Žinka, placing one paw on his heart. ‘I was afraid I was seeing double.’ He leaned over the table, grabbed the bottle of booze and flung it at the wall where it shattered. He would never have got away with making a mess like that with Commander Vyžlata in charge.
‘Right!’ said Žinka. ‘My mind’s made up: I’m not going to touch another drop ever again. Not until our final victory over the Soviets! That was quite a fright you gave me, lads! Thought I’d got a touch of the DTs.’
We said nothing. I waited until Margash nodded, then I approached Commander Žinka. I kept one hand on the knife at my back. I was glad it was me who had the bright idea of where to keep a kitchen knife.
‘I’ve had the DTs before, see.’ Commander Žinka’s head was nodding. ‘Imagine, some vodka found its way into our block one day. No, you can’t imagine it. I got so drunk I was seeing double. Double the number of huts in the penal colony, double the number of prisoners and double the number of butchers. Believe me, lads, it was almost more than a chap could bear.’
Commander Žinka fell silent for a moment, then started splashing his paw in a pool of alcohol on the table. We, too, were silent. Then Commander Žinka nodded towards the instruments on the table.
‘The Radio Free Siřem transmitter… What do you think of that, then? And what about the good working people in the village? Marvellous, eh? Well, my boys! I’ll be expecting you to be like the boy soldiers of the Hussites and fight to the last man!’ This last bit Commander Žinka bellowed.
‘Yes sir, Commander, sir,’ we bellowed in turn, standing to attention on the spot. And Commander Žinka said he must arrange a meeting of all the commanders, and asked if we had seen Commander Vyžlata anywhere.
We fidgeted… In Fundamentals of Close Combat it says nothing about the combat situation where two boys are supposed to liquidate a legless giant squatting on a table-top, but Margash hissed and I made a move… Margash was almost beside the Commander. I was looking Commander Žinka right in the eye, my right hand on the knife inside my trousers behind me, and as Margash moved again I shouted, ‘Up there!’ to make Žinka look upwards, and as he raised his head I rammed the blade right into his neck. Saboteurs use this sort of trick all of the time, as we’ve been taught.
But Commander Žinka shouted, ‘Aha, so he’s up there, upstairs! Thank you, lads.’ Then he reached for his crutches, slipped off the table, clipped his stumps into the leather straps on the crutches and sets off, as if nothing had happened. He left the dining room, banging away at the floor with his crutches, while me and Margash, we just stared after him… I was terrified he would find the body… and he did!
We heard a bang and a flop, and Žinka was lying there on the landing! His crutches as well! But all he did was shout, ‘Who the hell left this wash-tub here, for crying out loud?’ Then he grabbed his crutches and scrabbled his way up the stairs, groping step by step, rolling over the steps and slipping back down, cursing and swearing, and then he was over the top step and rolling around on the landing. He chucked his crutches angrily ahead of him and didn’t even care whether he hurt himself on the floor — he was probably used to it. Me and Margash, we leapt up the stairs after him and when he entered the sisters’ bedroom with a roar, Margash tossed one crutch in after him and we slammed the door shut and turned the key that was in the lock.
We leaned against the door to get our breath back, and I said, ‘I’m glad we didn’t kill him! He’s not that bad,’ and Margash said, ‘You’re right!’
We stayed for a while and listened to Commander Žinka roaring as he hammered away at the door. Then we grabbed the wash-tub and trundled it down the stairs so fast that Vyžlata fell out outside the kitchen-workshop and we had to stuff him back in, and he was all cold and slimy and disgusting, and it was a good thing that we did it.
In the passage to the cellar Margash told me to hold on to the tub, so I put all of my weight behind it, and I was alone again with Vyžlata. But Margash came straight back from the kitchen-workshop and tossed a huge saw and an axe into the tub, which was pretty heavy by then, bearing down on me as I struggled step by step.
We got the tub down into the cellar water, and then it was heavier than ever. Margash could only find two candles, so every few metres we had to go back and get them. We were dragging the tub along, bent over, and in the bobbing shadows on the wall we looked like hunched animals. Finally we reach the grille where the grave was. We removed the grille and pushed aside the mound of papers, and we were right next to the cover and Margash said, ‘You go now!’
‘What?’
‘Go now!’
‘But I wanna stay here with you!’
‘You can’t.’
‘Bollocks… how come?’
‘It wasn’t in the dream.’
Margash braced himself against the tub and tipped it over, and the corpse in the sheet tumbled out, and its head slipped free and hit a stone on the broken floor, and the saw, which had also fallen out, also clanged against the stone.
The axe was in Margash’s hand.
‘You’re not gonna cut me, are you?’ I asked him, though I didn’t really care.
Margash said, ‘No! ’Course not.’
‘What are you gonna do after I go?’
‘Never you mind,’ he said. ‘Go now.’
I made my way through the cellar, telling myself that if he had cut me, it wouldn’t matter. I went through the cellar and I couldn’t see any shadows, because Margash had kept the candles so that he could see.
12: In the firing line
The Bandits weren’t outside. I didn’t care. My head was full of images of how we’d killed Vyžlata. Everything had happened so quickly that the images only started popping up now. If I stopped, the image in my head froze as well. I walked fast, so as to get through all the images as quickly as possible, so they’d stop coming.
Then suddenly I heard, ‘Is that you, boy?’ Mr Kropáček was holding a rifle and he said, ‘Siaz! Now you say the password!’ He’d said ‘Siaz’, so I said, ‘Czechia!’ and Mr Kropáček nodded and said, ‘Follow me, boy!’ and I followed him to wherever it was I was supposed to be going.
In the sitting room sat Mrs Kropáček and also the Moravčíks, and Mr and Mrs Holý and somebody else. They had the television on. Mrs Kropáček said they’d be only too happy to hear any orders I’d brought from the HQ of the Siřem Autonomous Zone, but for now I should shut up and wait by the wall, because they were watching the news.
Talking pictures went by on the television. I’d never seen this piece of technical equipment before.
‘We have heard and seen that Soviet units have entered the Republic and that the Czechoslovak Army has been offering heroic, sustained and effective resistance…’ Mrs Kropáček was crying, and Mrs Holý blessed herself with the sign of the Cross and yelped, ‘Our poor boys!’ But Mr Holý roared, ‘Ha, ha!’ and thumped the table with his fist, and Mr Moravčík and Mr Kropáček kept thumping the table with their fists and laughing and shouting, ‘Just you come and get it, you Russkies, you bastards! Ha, ha! The Russkies have arrived!’ And Mr Kropáček showed Mr Moravčík his rifle, and Mr Moravčík said, ‘Huh, all you kept hidden from the Commies was your poaching piece, while I — see!’ and he held up a huge pistol. And then we all went out into the yard in the dark. The stars were out and Mr Moravčík and Mr Kropáček fired into the air, and in other parts of Siřem people had come out, the Russkies having arrived in Czechoslovakia, and they were blasting away at the sky. And suddenly all hell broke out in Siřem, and dogs howled and in the distance we could see lights all around and fires blazing all the way to the horizon.