The air hissed again and I heard vroweeee! There was a flash of fire above me and a column of white smoke rose up in the darkness at the very spot where the people from the house had been standing. I took a step towards the bridge and went towards the monsters with my arms raised, outstretched. I went towards the shellfire, with my back to the people trying to catch me, and from the bridge it did it again: vroweeee! The air hissed and one of the tanks drove through the burning house. With a roar and a clank the tank stopped right in front of me, and rising up on top of it was the figure of a man in uniform, and he also raised his arms towards me, and I skipped up and over the tracks like a weasel and now I was on the tank with my dad. We tramp towards each other across the tank’s armour plating, and we laugh for joy in the dark and the smoke and the thudding of shells. We rejoice and embrace! Otherwise I’d have fallen off!
Dad hugged me to him. I sank my face in his belly and I was amazed to have found my father exactly where Commander Vyžlata had told us. Shells whizzed past us. You could still hear shouting, but Dad held me tight, and I got this flash of an idea that even if this man wasn’t my dad, it was definitely better to be standing on a tank than to be a corpse lying shot to ribbons under it. I guess that’s obvious.
II. TANK TROOPS
13: And things started to happen! Sacks and violence. The sweetness of the world. Dago
And that’s how I came to know Captain Yegorov that night.
And things started to happen.
All I can remember from the succession of days that followed is the roasting, blazing daytime. It was very hot. We flew along, and the days and nights were coloured by the flashes that our column’s weapons spat whenever the need arose.
Our isolated tank column criss-crossed the rebellious Czech countryside. The insurgents had torn down the signposts marking towns and villages, making it totally impossible for us to find our bearings in the open.
That much I gathered from what an orderly, Kantariya, said. As soon as me and Captain Yegorov, whose embrace had rescued me, jumped down off the armour plating of the lead tank, Gunner Kantariya and I unloaded the command tent for Captain Yegorov from the two pickups that made up our supply train.
I spent part of that night and the following morning answering the questions asked by the little band of tank crewmen and sub-machine-gunners. It was a friendly, informal interrogation. The experienced fighting men of the Soviet armoured corps were pleased to have met me. In the land of the Czechs they had grown accustomed to being sworn at, stoned and shot at by snipers. Whereas me, marching towards the tanks with my arms held high, I had seemed more like some boy fallen from the skies. They were pleased that I had greeted them in their own language. During the interrogation, not one of these smoking, smiling, fighting men had asked me about my parents. Later I understood that many of them saw the army as their family. I blessed all those at the Home from Home who had come from the Soviet Union and spoke their language, even though the nuns had tried to ban it. For it was only thanks to what they had taught me that I was of any use to my rescuers.
I spent that first night with Captain Yegorov in his tent, and when he ordered me to remove his boots I quickly understood that the trick was to kneel, grab one boot and hold it tight, while the exhausted captain levered gently against my shoulder with his other boot, gave a little kick with one leg and a jerk with the other and so liberated his leg from the boot’s firm embrace. Only then did Captain Yegorov collapse onto his folding camp bed, while I wrapped myself in one of the many rugs that made up the soft, multicoloured floor of the command tent and fell asleep as well.
It happened in the morning, while we were drawing rations.
After answering all of the questions, I was assigned to the hull front of the lead tank in the column.
Gunner Kantariya brought me the bottom half of a tank crewman’s uniform, while Gunner Timosha brought me the top half of a tank crewman’s uniform, and we turned them up and pinned them.
As I was getting changed, the bundle of documents fell out from under my tracksuit top.
Gunner Kantariya tore one up and niftily rolled himself a cigarette, but when Captain Yegorov saw this he grabbed him by the ear and gave him a cuff.
Then Captain Yegorov pored long and hard over the maps I had drawn on the documents. During my explanation, he kept nodding in agreement.
I’d had saboteur training and now it came into its own. And if the Soviet soldiers still had any doubts that I’d been sent from heaven, now they were dispelled.
I described the world as mapped on the documents that had fallen from under my tracksuit top and Captain Yegorov listened closely. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Molodets!’
At the time I knew nothing about the special assignment of the ‘Happy Song’ tank column. I had no idea why we were cruising around the countryside and scouring it. I didn’t know what or who we were looking for.
Nor did I know that the defiant Czechs had torn down and destroyed all of the notices and signposts and town and village signs absolutely everywhere, nor that Captain Yegorov’s tank column, cut off for some strange reason from the main body of the Warsaw Pact troops, was wandering about the country lost.
That first morning of my life in the turned-up uniform of a Soviet soldier was spent watching Captain Yegorov and his taciturn band of tank crewmen and gunners study my maps long and hard. Then Captain Yegorov jabbed a finger into one of them at the point where the village of Tomašín was, and our column moved off.
And things started to happen!
*
I saw the world from the front hull plating of the tank, and I heard the world in the roar of its engine, and in the crackling and whistling of the radio, and the crackling of the transmitter inside the tank, and in the raised voices spluttering protests at the Soviet occupiers, crazed voices coming from the loudspeakers that had been erected in every village around Chapman Forest, just like in Siřem, and I also saw the world on the televisions inside captured but not yet demolished houses and cottages, but television held no more surprises for me. I didn’t give a damn about it anyway, because there was never a naked girl on it. The television screens were just filled with newsreels from various battles, and you couldn’t even tell which side was reporting, because the Russians often overdubbed Czech transmissions and vice versa, and sometimes the Czechs spoke Russian and the Russians Czech so as to confuse and frighten each other, and nobody knew what was really going on.
All the bonfires of the century converged on us, while the iron hammers of the age whizzed through the air above and pounded the landscape like an anvil. Hunkered down in my snug made from rags on the front hull of the lead tank, I realized that as interpreter to the ‘Happy Song’ tank column I had tumbled headlong into the greatest event of the twentieth century: the Czecho-Russian War.
It was summer and the land of the Czechs shuddered and shook under our tanks, and the horizon was filled with the smoke of fires. The armies of five nations of the Warsaw Pact, led by the Guards regiments of the Soviet Army, had attacked Czechoslovakia and an uprising had broken out.
Guiding the tank column around the Siřem area was dead easy. My maps perfectly depicted the landmarks around Chapman Forest.
Me and Captain Yegorov cruised the countryside aboard the lead tank, smashing pockets of resistance. We pored over my maps point by point, and my world became vast. I saw the world from the front hull plating of the tank, high above the heat-softened asphalt, over which the air quivered in blasts from our engines.