Candles flickered in the wind. Lots of them had burnt right down. Some had been snuffed out by the wind.
A pile of wreathes reached up to his knees. I still remembered him in the wash-tub. The coffin stood propped against the church door. The church rose black above him, the whole building. It looked like it had been lowered down from heaven, as if hanging from the pitch-darkness. Commander Vyžlata was tied to the coffin. The lads hadn’t told me that. Perhaps they didn’t know.
His arms were spread out, tied to the coffin at the elbows. His fingers were all sticking out. So Kozhanov’s guards hadn’t been here. They’d never have left him like that, like some Lord Jesus Christ with his arms outstretched! I’m pretty sure they don’t like that kind of thing, any religious stuff. No way! They’d have taken him down, dead or alive, with the first volley, they wouldn’t care. So they were behind me, somewhere.
I didn’t look into Vyžlata’s face. Didn’t want to. But then it was inside the coffin and it was dark. All I needed was to know he was there, because apart from me there was only one person who knew where Vyžlata had been before: Margash. And only Margash knew who and what were still in the cellar.
I detached myself from the coffin’s shadow, so as to slip into the mightier shadow of the church, and scuttle down the few streets to the pond, then make myself scarce somewhere in the countryside around Siřem, but then I heard them… First, a distant grinding noise and then the rumble that tanks make as they rip up the ground. They were getting closer… Now I was being chased to the Home from Home by the tanks of Kozhanov’s army. Fortunately for me, they hadn’t sent out a scouting party on foot. On the other hand, that meant they were on the attack.
I ran past the dark and silent farm buildings that marked the end of the village, immersing myself in the slow breaking of the day, as if I were carrying it. Next I ran past a tank. Its tracks were done for. It was burnt out, sadly. It smelt of burnt flesh and vomit. I knew it was part of the ‘Happy Song’ column… The Home from Home was surrounded by a solid wall of tanks. The ‘Happy Song’ tanks had formed a circular defensive line the whole length of the hillside, and beyond the tanks with their red stars pockmarked by bullets from all the village Home Guards in the sector that went from Tomašín, Luka, Bataj and so on, there’s this barricade, a long inner defence barricade.
There’s a lot going on between the Home from Home building and the barricade. Behind the barricade — piled high with bundles of paper, school desks, chairs and anything else that could be dragged outside the Home from Home — giraffe heads perched on long necks were waving; and beyond the barricade, which in the grey light of dawn seemed to be getting higher and higher, ‘Happy Song’ soldiers were flitting about, dragging bundles of paper and various other things. I couldn’t recognize their faces at that distance. All I could see beyond the rampart were vague flittering figures in uniform. Crouching low I carried on… and I had to slip past the first tank of the chain of defence that had lined up ready to fire. They must have been able to see me! So I walked on slowly, just walking… At the very moment when I felt a gun barrel in my back, I heard, ‘Eto Ilya — it’s Ilya!’ Timosha looked closely at me from under his tin helmet. He was worn out! A second gunner in a raggedy sailor shirt and camouflage dress was just as tired-looking. They stared at me, but without really trying to work out where I’d been all that time… ‘Great to see you! Off to the captain with you!’ said Timosha, severely. He was staring at my tracksuit top. Perhaps he wondered why I wasn’t wearing the tankman’s jacket that he had pinned me into with his own hands. With a wave of his gun he chivvied me round behind the tank in the direction of the barricade. The other one never opened his mouth. They were saving their breath, and saving on movement. I knew this kind of stiffness. They could scent battle in the air, and wanted to be prepared. I went where they told me.
The first light from the sky had diluted the shadow of the Home from Home into wisps that the gunners shredded as they moved around in it. They were pouring water onto the bundles of paper they’d piled up as defensive mounds — a burning barricade is hard to defend. Also on the barricade they’d put the stove from the kitchen workshop, and piles of wood from the cellar. They’d gone and chopped up the cubicles! There were all sorts of boxes and piles of bricks. They must have gutted the insides of our poor Home from Home… I walked slowly over to the barricade, walking as tall as possible, so as not to be mistaken for some enemy saboteur on a recce and killed by a burst of gunfire. But the helmeted gunner on sentry duty just waved to me. He recognized me… I skipped over the paper bundles in his sector and there I was, standing outside the Home from Home.
In my head I sorted out what I was going to say to Captain Yegorov. It was obvious from the unit’s combat situation and the dead tank that the Bandits hadn’t been fibbing: the new Russians didn’t want this lot.
It crossed my mind that the ‘Happy Song’ tankmen and gunners were digging their own graves, and that inside the barricade, surrounded by the winds around the Home from Home, I was about to enter my own grave. The poles we had used to break cinder strips into crushed ashes, and to catch flying scraps of charred paper with, had been used to reinforce the barricade. I stepped aside for some soldiers, getting a nasty bang on the knee when I tripped over the wash-tub… The company sergeant, whose face I couldn’t make out in the morning mist, gave me an earful. Accompanied by two gunners, he was dragging the tub along, filled with broken bricks, to add to the barricade. The bustle of work was mixed with the cries of small and fully grown animals, and it was obvious that more refugees from the Socialist Circus had arrived. I really wanted to take a good look at the animals, but there was no time, because I wanted to get inside and straight down to the cellar before daybreak, when everything is visible.
I edged at a snail’s pace through the pushing and shoving mass of bodies. The soldiers were getting on with building the barricade, and the animals kept getting under their feet. I edged towards the front door of the Home from Home, stepping over and sometimes tripping on the hosepipes they were using to fill some buckets with stinking water, and then I realized that they were dousing the barricade with water from the cellar… They had even chopped up the Bulgarian seaside sideshow and tossed its painted planks on top of the bundles of paper. The camels were hobnobbing with some other animals, including the seaside donkey — well, that was no surprise! There were some big fat does, too, like I’d never seen running around here. They were gobbing at everything and lashing out with their feet. Some gunners were dragging them along with ropes behind the Home from Home, and I heard a sharp burst of automatic fire, followed by another. I had barely got a decent look at them and they were already being executed. Tough luck. Nobody took any notice, and they didn’t take any notice of me either. How come, when I hadn’t been with them for so long? They didn’t care a damn about me… Then suddenly I heard ‘Ilya!’ and again ‘Ilya!’ and there was no mistaking the voice of Captain Yegorov. I stiffened to attention, then the cloud of dust kicked up by the fat deer in the haze of daybreak dispersed, and right there in front of the door of the Home from Home I saw a knot of people, and my captain was calling me from the middle of it! Soldiers were jammed around the wolf’s cage, which was wide open, and the wolf was just lying there on its side. He was huge, lying there as if at death’s door. I stepped forward, since it was my captain calling, then suddenly I was overwhelmed by an image that escaped from my head.