He would spit on the floor, because there was nobody to tell him not to, and start: ‘If Czechia is ever destroyed, then the hardworking, diligent sons of the Bohemian Basin will be exterminated. I hope you understand that, my lad. But Czechia’s protected by intrepid warriors. They’ve vanquished everybody from the Tatars to the Krauts. Other enemies have hardly been worth their bothering about. They can swat ’em with their hats. One day you’ll be an intrepid warrior too, laddie. I’ll make sure of that.’
And Mr Cimbura promised that when I was older he’d get me a portrait of Czechia for me to keep as my very own.
Mr Cimbura told us that when he gave away pictures of Czechia to the newly confirmed outside the church, Father Francis reported him, and Mr Cimbura had been horsewhipped by the lord of the manor. But that didn’t matter. When he got back to his cottage after the whipping, the newly confirmed who hadn’t got a picture came knocking at his window in the night. ‘Girls,’ said Mr Cimbura, ‘want to be like Czechia, and boys want to have her, but her not being around, they lie on top of the girls and make babies with ’em, so the seed of the Czechs shall not perish! Czechia dealt with that toff in a roundabout way, it seems. Anyway, he’s long been resting in his tomb. He tried to take off in his plane, but the Communists hanged him, the collaborating Jerry bastard,’ said Mr Cimbura, although he had said something different earlier.
He also told us how Czechia’s intrepid warriors would lay traps in the forest for the Krauts and Tatars. How they would carve images of Czechia into the trees with axes dipped in the putrid matter of black eggs. Some warriors would cut her image into their own skin. She was their protection. And an enemy soldier would go mad in a wood full of images of Czechia cut into the trees, throwing down his weapons and equipment and becoming a wanderer. And he would walk on and on, never stopping, until he died.
Mr Cimbura liked telling that story. It amused him.
When Sister Alberta told stories, I stuck it out through the nasty parts and fell asleep, feeling happy, because Czechia was victorious and everything turned out all right. But Mr Cimbura didn’t like happy endings.
I remember all that. In fact I don’t remember anything else at all.
That’s how we lived before the nuns arrived.
And then someone else came.
I was standing in the corridor. I might have been able to hear Dýha if I craned my head towards the cellar steps, but I wanted to see who these new people were.
3: The nuns. Mayhem. Quiet outside. He did it himself!
I ran up the steps, almost crashing into a soldier. He had a rifle, but no helmet.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he shouted. I shot past him like a rat, ran into the dining room and crouched behind the door. You wouldn’t have spotted a whisker, or even my rat’s tail… Standing in the dining room were sisters Zdislava and Alberta, Eulalia and Emiliana, and Sister Dolores as well. They had little bundles in their hands and wore travelling coats. Soldiers or cops from the Communist uprising were standing around them and one Communist said, ‘Five kilos each, I said!’ The nuns stood there in a huddle, looking like chickens in a book of nursery rhymes or like naughty schoolboys who hadn’t learned something they should have. Then one of the nuns said, ‘Yes, sir.’ And the Communist said, ‘There aren’t any sirs now,’ and laughed. Then the Communists poked the nuns with their rifle butts, and one of them roared, ‘In line!’ and they set off, out through the door of the dining room into the corridor. I was hunched down behind the door. The nuns didn’t see me. Not even Sister Dolores, who was the last out. I never saw her again, ever. Sister Eulalia suddenly ran towards the door of the smaller boys’ dormitory, but the Communists dragged her back into line.
The Home was silent. The boys were probably pretending to be asleep, making good use of the midday calm for a nice nap. The Communists led the nuns down the stairs, and Sister Zdislava gripped the banister and said, ‘What will happen to them?’ and one Communist said, ‘Come on,’ and pulled her away. Then downstairs the door slammed as the nuns and the Communists went out to the front of the Home. ‘Where are they taking them?’ I wondered. Then the door of Sister Leontina’s office flew open and she fell through it. She didn’t have her dark cape on, that came flying through the air afterwards, tossed from the office by a Communist. Sister Leontina fell to the ground. She was wearing a funny white shirt, and if I hadn’t been able to see her head, I might have thought one of the taller longshirts had fallen down… For the first time I saw Sister Leontina’s hair. It was grey and lay flat against her head. She got up slowly and kept touching her hair with one hand. Two Communists came out of the office. They didn’t have rifles, just pistols, and the one who had thrown the cape had his gun in his hand. He said, ‘You should have had kids yourself, bitch!’ Now Sister Leontina was standing, wrapping her travelling cape around her body. She lifted her head back to stare at the Communists, just like Dýha when he spoke to her, and she said, ‘God can see you…’ ‘Sure, you old prayer-bag,’ said the one with a pistol in his hand. ‘Get moving!’ said the other, and he pushed Sister Leontina so hard that she almost fell, then shunted her along the corridor. Then Sister Leontina walked on by herself, the Communists behind her. I didn’t even wait to hear the door bang. I jumped to the window like a rat. Outside the sun was shining. The five nuns were standing in the snow in their travelling capes, the Communists standing around them. Then Sister Leontina came out of the Home from Home, and the gaggle of nuns surged around her. A lorry drove up and the nuns, one by one — sisters Eulalia, Zdislava, Dolores, Alberta, Emiliana and Leontina — climbed onto it. The Communists were laughing, prodding them. I bet they felt Sister Dolores’s tits. That’s why they were laughing so much. The lorry drove away slowly, and the Communists lined up in twos, like us boys on the way to church. Behind me I heard a noise in the corridor, voices. Longshirts were creeping out of the dormitory, one after the other, their mouths open. From above I heard the tramping of feet… the boys in the other dormitory running to the window. They were all around me at once, and they crushed and shoved at the window, pushing me aside, but I still saw the nuns waving to us. I glimpsed them. Six nuns raising their arms, waving to us, then the lorry picked up speed and they were driven off up the hill.
Someone asked, ‘Where are they taking them?’
Somebody replied, ‘Dunno.’
And one longshirt started blubbering. It was cold by the window and maybe someone had trodden on his foot.
I went to see Monkeyface, to tell him what had happened.
Then mayhem broke out all over the Home.
Monkeyface was trying to scramble out of bed. He was surprised that the midday calm was so full of noise and shouting. His net was over his bed. I didn’t let him out. I went to see what was going on. Monkeyface gawped at me through the net. I came back and gave him some bread. The whole bit that was left. He wanted more.
‘I could go and join the Legion as well, you know,’ I told him. ‘The lads want me to go. So watch yourself!’
And I went and found the others.
Mayhem had broken out on both floors and in the dining room. I’d hardly left the dormitory and in the middle of all the hullaballoo — with all the lads whooping and shouting and laughing and running up and down the stairs — I heard bang! bang! coming from downstairs. And when I got there, I saw that the shortpants had grabbed a big bench and were hammering away at the kitchen door — bang! bang! — and the door flew open and they broke in, laughing and shouting. Pushing in behind them went the little longshirts, clambering over the bench, and I jumped over it too, and landed in the kitchen and got a shock to see it was snowing… The shortpants were hurling bags of flour at each other, and their faces were all white, and they’d also opened all the cupboards, big and small, that weren’t under lock and key. First we ate the fudge. Anyone who could get hold of it crammed it in his mouth and chewed away. No-one cared about ruining their teeth. There wasn’t all that much fudge, so in the hurly-burly we stuffed ourselves with gherkins too. There were huge jars of them and one fell out of a cupboard and smashed. So, laughing and shouting, we hunted the gherkins all over the floor. They slipped out of our hands. And if anyone had felt like it he could have stuffed his mouth with butter. There was a great pile of it in little cubes. Then Karel announced, ‘And who wants some bread?’ and with a huge kitchen knife he hacked at the loaves and handed out bread to anyone who put up his hand. In a cupboard we found jars and jars of jam and plum curd, and everybody’s face was sticky with the goodies, and we swapped bread and gherkins and jam among ourselves. Then Karel called out, ‘Pick up the glass, dammit!’ because some of the little ones had dropped their jam jars, which smashed on the floor, and the sticky sweet glass lay among the glass from the gherkin jars, and the little ones were wading up to their ankles in flour and laughing, playing tag and smearing butter over each other’s faces. Then finally someone kicked or smashed open the door to the pantry, but inside were only boring things: scrubbing brushes, buckets and floor-cloths and boxes full of coal-tar soap… And the noise! The lads kicked the bars of soap all over the kitchen and the corridor, aiming them into the corners… There was a huge washer drum in the kitchen for doing the dirty linen, and one little boy climbed inside and the others set it turning, laughing as they stood round the drum. They all wanted a spin inside. They got hold of the tub we used to bathe in too. Someone climbed into it and the others dragged it around. Then some of the older boys found some salamis. They cut them into little cubes and anyone who wanted some got some. The longshirts left the drum and the tub and begged for salami… Then no-one could eat any more, so we started throwing it at each other.