‘The locals didn’t want him as their commander anyway, see? They don’t want anyone as their commander, see?’ Dýha said. I nodded.
From the rest of our discussions I gathered that the lads were most concerned about the truce between the Nato forces and the troops of the five armies, now safeguarded by an army of new Russians of the Eastern Empire, a truce I only heard about on television in Ctiradův Důl, which was captured by the Soviets, then immediately lost again.
I was really pleased the lads were so full of their own adventures and so unconcerned about the details of my sojourn with the tank column.
‘We were in Germany with the Yanks, like,’ said Karel. I had swallowed his chewing gum ages ago, so he gave me another piece.
‘And now the Nato lot’s here and cosying up to the Russkies,’ said Dýha.
‘But our commander’s never gonna give in to ’em,’ Martin spouted.
‘Nato’s got men at all checkpoints along with the Russians, enough to make a decent chap afraid to poke his nose out of the forest,’ said Karel.
‘They’re lookin’ for weapons,’ said Dýha. ‘That’s why they’re turning over every chicken in the coop, and picking up every dog hair and stuff like that. They’re scouring every village, man!’
‘It’s biological weapons they’re lookin’ for,’ someone said.
‘We’d have managed a war with the five armies by ourselves, us Czechs, with the Slovaks along as well,’ said Dýha, ‘but now the Russians have got all Nato on their side… well, who knows!’
I wanted to put my own oar in, and I couldn’t carry on saying nothing, so I told the lads that some people in the tank column believed in a new brotherhood of machines and people and animals — and I was also wondering, since the war was over, whether we might not take care of the animals in the Socialist Circus Project. It was something we all knew about from working in the village…
‘The brotherhood of people and animals? That was Eden,’ said Martin. ‘Nothing new! But with machines, man, that’ll be Armageddon, believe me!’
‘What’s that?’ I asked him, because I’d heard it before.
‘The nuns taught us about it, man,’ said Martin. ‘You were always buried away somewhere with Monkeyface.’
I didn’t want to hear about that, so I quickly started on something else… I told the lads about the wolf and the dinosaur egg, and they found it funny. They laughed, and I’d also found it funny when Dago told me about it on the tank.
So I told them all about the circus zone that was supposed to come into being under Captain Yegorov’s command at this very spot, around Siřem. But the uprising had put paid to it!
The lads told me a group of Ukrainians had recently passed through with a dancing bear and that they’d let them pass. That could have been the circus.
Then the lads talked about running into a band of women one day in a forest clearing… They’d surprised the women in the forest, and a weird lot they were, because the women, wearing colourful clothes, leapt onto horses and charged off. I gathered that these women on horses had slipped past all five armies and the insurgents. The old people holed up in underground bunkers in the forest claimed they were wood nymphs and that it meant the end of the world, because whoever heard of nymphs on horseback wandering about among gangs of armed men?
That’s what the lads told me, and I said nothing, though only I knew who those lady riders in motley circus attire were.
We simply chattered away.
‘Say, though, Ilya, what did the wolf look like?’
My news about the egg and the wolf had provoked interest.
‘I wonder if Nato and the new Russians are tightening the noose round Siřem because of the dinosaur egg.’
‘Imagine,’ said Karel, ‘what a dinosaur attack could do to an American base! Reduce it to smithereens, I tell you.’
‘But suppose it’s not a dinosaur inside the egg, but something else. A secret weapon. Could be a live secret weapon,’ I told the lads, and for a moment they were silent.
‘Gosh!’ someone gasped.
‘It’s something so terrible they thought it best to make a truce!’ Martin panted.
For a moment we sat there saying nothing, then Karel ordered, ‘To the crag! On your feet!’ The lads stood up immediately, stuffed their spoons down their boots and the empty tins in their knapsacks, and cleared everything up, making it so tidy it looked as if no-one had ever even been there. Then Karel dived into the undergrowth of Chapman Forest, followed by the others. Only Dýha stayed seated.
‘Look, the Šklíba thing,’ he said. ‘The altar boys that go and join their families in their shelters say that someone has seen a lone boy in the forest. What do you reckon?’
‘Dunno.’ I shrugged.
‘And they say he was praying!’ said Dýha. ‘It could have been him.’
‘Could,’ I said and we both shrugged.
‘Karel’s an orderly, see,’ Dýha added. ‘I should be the one with the higher rank!’
‘Obviously!’
And I told Dýha that we needed to warn Commander Baudyš, because Captain Yegorov’s tank column meant to attack Siřem.
‘Hmm, well, that Yegorov of yours is in for a hard time. The whole area’s being taken over by Kozhanov’s 1st Tank Brigade of Guards, ain’t that something?’
‘Aha!’ I said, though I hadn’t a clue what he was on about.
‘You’re very lucky to be with us, Ilya,’ Dýha said. We stood up and set off through the forest. I kept a close eye on the bushes and branches ahead of us, which were stirred ever so slightly by the lads who’d gone on ahead.
‘Your pals in the tank column are headed straight for Siberia, you know, since they let their formations get knocked out by peasants,’ said Dýha, and he laughed.
‘What?’
‘Yeah. The only ones in charge around here are gonna be Kozhanov’s tank guards, and the Eastern Empire’s new command’s gonna sweep any other Russkies off to the gulag.’
For a while we just walked on.
‘By the way, Ilya, that crap about dinosaurs and a secret weapon, that’s just longshirts’ horror stories. The Russians and Nato have reached an agreement. We’re done with war before they do for us. The altar boys are gonna stay in the forest. They’ve got families here. But we ain’t got no-one. I’m joining the Foreign Legion. You coming with me?’
I said nothing and kept walking.
‘You left that paper in the wayside shrine, man,’ Dýha was breathing down my neck. ‘You did just the right thing! Baudyš was pleased. You’re a great saboteur, man! But then if you weren’t, we’d have done for you first, there on your tank, you realize that!’
‘I’ll report everything to the commander!’ I said. I didn’t want to say any more to Dýha. He was just like the soldiers on the tanks who liked their jobs in the column. He even smelt like them.
‘You can’t report anything to Baudyš.’ Dýha laughed in the darkness ahead, where he had overtaken me. ‘And what about the giraffe head?’ he asked. ‘Did it give you a fright?’
‘Yeah!’ I said.
‘I bet it did.’ Dýha was walking so fast I could hardly keep up, and he was carrying three Kalashnikovs, a full knapsack and ammunition. He knew the way, of course.