And at that very moment the darkness seemed to part before my very eyes. A sack made the slightest of movements, and in the first glimmer of dawn I saw the strange face of the midget Dago.
14: We’re on the run! Animals. Meadows. The first kurgan
He had slashed the canvas of the tent and stepped inside, then pressed himself against one of the sacks and in the half-light of daybreak merged with it.
I didn’t know if he was a Czech sent to murder Captain Yegorov and steal his spoils of war or whether he was some bogeyman from Chapman Forest. My face was by his boots, but they weren’t boots, more like bootees, and I could see that if this were a man he must be very small, and at first I thought it might be one of the Bandits, but I was wrong.
I attacked at once, determined to destroy the creature and forgetting that I was attached to the precious sacks.
We thrashed about in a screaming ball, and if he had wanted to stab me, he could have done so. I had anticipated that possibility, because in the tank corps I’d had some bad moments even on days that were otherwise glorious, and then I had hoped to be killed — those were my bad moments, which came from too much thinking.
But then I couldn’t think. The little guy fought furiously and with skill, and while I was busy screaming, he defended himself without a sound. He had me flat on the ground, when suddenly I felt an excruciating pain in my side. A kick knocked me away from the creature, and I was staring up at the muzzle of Captain Yegorov’s pistol, as well as the muzzles of the Kalashnikovs of gunners Timosha and Kantariya, while all around us were the other sub-machine-gunners, holding pistols and Kalashnikovs, and also knives and entrenching tools, and they looked so furious they would have killed us both if Captain Yegorov hadn’t chased them out of the tent.
The gunners dragged me away by the rope that was tied to my ankles, cut me loose from the sacks and carried on guarding me outside, under the muzzles of their raised weapons.
Captain Yegorov stayed inside the tent with several NCOs, and the interrogation of the creature of the night began. I guessed as much from his howls. Finally I heard his voice and it was the voice of a man, and it was obvious that he was being interrogated. At one point the blows he received made the walls of the tent belly out, and you could see the outline of the creature’s tiny body. He was smaller than the smallest longshirt at the Home from Home. Outside we all froze, because the stranger’s howling inside the tent ended in the sort of plaintive whine that usually accompanies interrogations, then suddenly changed into a child’s snivelling, and then something that cannot be described as anything other than the mewling of a baby. All was clear.
Willy Dagobert, known as Dago, was an East German comrade of ours. He was the only one who’d managed to fight his way out of enemy territory. The only man in the East German contingent who’d managed to make his way through Chapman Forest on foot, avoiding Czech patrols, and find our tank column.
So he wasn’t really put out by his initial interrogation. The beating he received was more than compensated for by his joy at finding us, and discovering that he hadn’t infiltrated a camp of Czech bandits by mistake, as he’d feared initially.
It wasn’t long before he’d cemented his friendship with Captain Yegorov and all the tank column’s NCOs and other ranks with the aid of several vodkas, and although he was bleeding a little from a few flesh wounds, he made light of them and gave an impromptu performance on the front of one of the tanks.
This was received with much enjoyment among the troops of the tank column. On Captain Yegorov’s orders I also watched.
At first Dago just hopped up and down, but to the amazement and great pleasure of us all, once he got into his stride, he cut some capers on the tank, turning somersaults in the air, and it looked as if, under his tiny, sure feet, the tank was made of rubber and wasn’t at all the murderous monster that crushed some men to pulp while providing a modicum of security for others.
Leaping high above the tank Dago turned somersaults, accompanied by all kinds of sounds coming from his tiny throat — deep, drawling groans and squeaky shrieks, and now and then even little tunes — and this medley of sounds seemed to converge on us from all sides until some of the gunners began looking about them in terror. Then with his little legs Dago did a pitter-patter run-up and started leaping from tank to tank, and in this way he cartwheeled and pirouetted his way around all the tanks in the column, and the soldiers’ delight grew and grew, and then Dago executed the highlight of his turn: in the middle of a mighty leap in the air he made himself small, getting smaller and smaller, looking no bigger than a football. Rolled up like that, he landed in Captain Yegorov’s arms, and now he mooed and whined and bleated like a baby, which was side-splittingly funny, because the baby in Captain Yegorov’s arms had a moustache and the wrinkled face of a dwarf.
Roaring with laughter, the captain briefly dandled him in his arms, then kind of sniffed at his nappy and pretended to be fainting and gasping for breath, and we had never seen the captain so jolly and making jokes, so we clapped and cheered. Then he handed baby Dago to the NCO next to him, who also rocked him in his arms and to general laughter and amusement began pacing about like some village mother before passing Dago on. When Dago had had enough of this rocking and dandling, he suddenly leapt down, straightened his shoulders and stood there before us to acknowledge our applause and cheers, and Captain Yegorov was clapping, his eyes brimming with tears, and kept repeating, ‘What an artist! What an artist!’ and we all said it too.
Then Captain Yegorov bent down to the dwarf and shook his hand. We applauded, breathless with joy, and of course, Dago couldn’t make himself any bigger.
That day we didn’t determine our position using my maps. Dago the dwarf waved them aside and pointed to the spot on the horizon where the asphalt of the road seemed to merge into the trees of Chapman Forest.
Dago set our course and the column moved off to liberate the East German Hygea Circus, which was under siege by Czech bandits. He hoped that his East German comrades would be able to keep the rebellious villagers at bay until our tank column arrived.
That day, spirits were high. From Gunner Kantariya’s silly jokes and Gunner Timosha’s more earnest musings I gathered that my Soviet comrades loved the circus.
I still didn’t know exactly what our ‘Happy Song’ tank column’s mission really was, but from all the banter that rattled between the tanks to the rhythm of our progress it was clear to me that meeting a circus came as no surprise to Yegorov’s sub-machine-gunners. On the contrary, it was supposed to have happened long before, somewhere in the Tomašín-Siřem sector.
But because of the uprising of the Czechoslovak masses and also the hostile operations of the Czechoslovak Army, the plans of the circus and our tank troops had been thwarted.
So it was no surprise that, as we travelled, feverish preparations were underway for a grand meeting. In a tank on the move there is no opportunity to wash one’s clothes, so many privates aired the more neglected parts of their uniforms and underwear, at least perfunctorily, in the favourable summer breeze. Also on the move, they would rip fresh branches from the trees of Chapman Forest to make replacement camouflage.
Dago, safely ensconced between me and the gunners on the lead tank, never stopped chattering in his hard-sounding Russian, urging us to hurry. We especially thrilled to the things he told us about the girls of the East German Hygea Circus, who rode bareback and sang and flew on the trapeze. I also burnt with desire to see some of the mysterious, exotic animals I only knew from nature lessons and pictures, and Gunner Timosha didn’t need asking twice to get out his set of animal picture cards. My delight knew no bounds when Dago dismissed the picture of an elephant with a scornful, ‘Ours is bigger!’ He said the same thing about the prairie dog picture, and the bear and the polar bear… The Hygea Circus seemed to be stocked with every conceivable animal in the world, and I couldn’t wait.