‘Don’t be stupid,’ Chata said with a smirk.
And now old Još was standing next to him, and I could sense I couldn’t go with him either. Još said, ‘You wanna be with us because no-one makes war with the Gypsies, right?’
‘Yeah.’
And old Još said, ‘But they can kill us anyway, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So there you have it!’ said old Još.
‘Like I said, we failed. To free our brothers,’ Chata said, pretty impatiently.
I’d completely had it by then. Još was old and the skin on his face was all crinkly like the crocodiles in The Catholic Book of Knowledge. I had a feeling he wouldn’t laugh at me, so I asked him, ‘And can I be all on my own for all time?’
‘’Course you can’t,’ said old Još.
‘So, what am I supposed to do then?’
‘Look, we’ve gotta get going,’ said Chata. ‘The brothers are waiting!’
Then they were gone. They weren’t there any more. All I could hear was Chata laughing: ‘Saying he wants to go with us… ha, ha, ha!’
I sat outside the school again and tried to put the stopper back in the canteen. I managed, then I started to fall over backwards, but because I’d got a bed of rags on my back, made up of stuff picked up at the cottages, I landed softly and was asleep in no time.
And that’s how I was found in the morning, asleep, curled up like a dog, my thirsty tongue hanging out, by Peter, who was in charge of a machine gun-armed Soviet jeep. He was also inspector of reservoirs.
He kicked me in the leg and I yelped, and from his uniform and really weird Russian I gathered he was from the army corps of the Hungarian People’s Republic. He wanted to know how to get to the Little Supremo.
I soon realized that Peter was crazy. In turn, he took me for some stupid peasant kid. He was quite happy to sit me in his jeep and give me something to eat and drink, and we chatted together. I picked up his semi-automatic from the back seat, and all he did was laugh and tell me to be careful, because it was loaded. I showed an interest in the two machine guns mounted on the back, so he explained how they worked, and he also boasted about the ones mounted in front. Next I wanted to examine his Nagant revolver and dagger, so he lent me them both and I laughed, because I assumed that was how a stupid peasant, especially one who’s still just a kid, would laugh, and then I really was very happy, because this guy wasn’t teaching me or training me or interrogating me, and if it came to that, well, he’d already offered me a way to take him out with a variety of weapons.
Peter questioned me as to what I was doing within the reservoir project catchment area. I told him I’d come out of the forest.
He nodded and said it was because of people like me that the Soviet command had appointed him inspector. He’d been driving around collecting leftover people, because here in the forest region even rural life had come to an end. But now he was looking for the Little Supremo. Otherwise there was nobody here any more. They’d all been evacuated.
I told him I’d noticed all the villages were abandoned and generally odd.
‘Yes,’ Peter nodded, ‘this region is to witness the realisation of the ancient dream of the Czechoslovak masses. There will be a sea here. It will be the Czech Sea, as a gift from ordinary Soviet people to the ordinary people of Czechoslovakia.
‘I see,’ I said.
‘There will be this second Central European Balaton, which is why the main engineering works are being carried out by experienced Hungarian comrades — inlanders,’ said Peter, and I didn’t have a clue what he was on about, so I asked him where all the people had gone.
‘Most of the population has already been evacuated,’ Peter said. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded pretty stupid.
‘All around here will be flooded,’ Peter went on, and he waved an arm, and that wave across the area around Siřem was probably meant to take in the deserted villages left over after the fighting.
Then Peter talked about women. He didn’t mean the poor women that toiled in the fields, but described some gorgeous women on horses. He said he believed the riders were part of the Little Supremo’s contingent. He talked about women jumping right over his armoured jeep on their horses — black, grey and piebald. He didn’t manage to talk to any of the women and they rode off. He wanted to inform the Little Supremo about the reservoir project. He believed the Little Supremo and his contingent were detained in some inaccessible regions. He would be grateful, assuming I was a local, if I’d conduct him to the Little Supremo.
I hadn’t a clue what he was on about, but I wanted to make him happy, since he’d found me, so I nodded.
‘Be a good lad, Ilya,’ he said, ‘find the Little Supremo.’
Now Peter and me were sat next to the statue of the Czech patron saint, who was armed, in a village where some of the men had probably been killed and the women run away into the forest, and the remaining folk evacuated, whatever that meant, and Peter struck me as the craziest soldier I’d ever met. The thing about him was, he was happy. He was obsessed with finding the Little Supremo, who I knew nothing about. Peter said I seemed like a godsend, just when he needed one. ‘Together, we’ll creep our way through each and every army to the inaccessible regions,’ he said, ‘and we’ll find the Little Supremo.’
I nodded. Then everything went so fast that I didn’t have time to regret the brevity of our alliance.
I told Peter that I’d noticed the odd hoofprint from time to time in Chapman Forest, and once I’d heard female laughter. Peter was overjoyed.
We mooned around there, chatting. I translated into Russian the inscription LET US NOT PERISH, NOR THOSE WHO COME AFTER US on this statue of an older style of fighting man, and I told him that before long the only thing left of the Czech land would be its name, a fate that has befallen many other foreigners as well, as history shows. Peter started laughing and assured me I was totally wrong, then he span me such a yarn that if the nuns were around he’d have had to gargle a whole bucketful of tar.
He told me about the Little Supremo. His army corps’ scouts had learned about the Little Supremo from their women prisoners.
Apparently, it was all about some new tactic in the fight against sovietization. ‘It’s the only way for smaller nations to prevent themselves from being totally submerged in the Eastern Empire,’ said Peter.
When stories about the Little Supremo spread among the divisions, the number of deserters rose. After the Czech insurgency had crushed Peter’s division, he decided to find the Little Supremo and offer him his services.
Peter had first learned of the Little Supremo from a female prisoner. She even came, apparently, from a place I’d mentioned — a Siřem girl!
‘What did she look like?’ I gasped.
‘Pretty, young and wearing a tracksuit,’ Peter said, but he didn’t know her name. After the Siřem girl had filled the other prisoners’ heads with silly ideas, talking about the Little Supremo, they escaped. All the women who had refused to be evacuated wandered off into the forest.
‘What had she told them?’ I asked.
‘They call it the Prophecy of the Little People,’ said Peter.
And off he went, though because he told me about the prophecy in Hungarian Russian, it’s possible I didn’t quite grasp it all. But what he said was roughly this. The heroic Czech men having fallen in battle against troops from the five armies despatched by the Eastern Empire, their womenfolk were left forlorn and weeping. They walked on and on through dusty fields on a terrible journey, attacked and violated by enemy soldiers. There was no-one to stand up for them. Then suddenly the women found their hero: a tiny man, who, all by himself, was pulling along a captured enemy tank on a rope. They were amazed at his strength and virility. He took pity on the women and went with them into the forest. Since that day, the bellies of the widows of those heroic warriors, as well as the bellies of young maidens, have been growing and rounding out, and many of them will soon bear little warriors. So little that it will be easy for them to slip between the checkpoints of the five armies and continue wreaking havoc on the enemy until his total annihilation. They would dwell in caves and forest hideaways, and they would be impossible to track down.