‘You’re not the only one who wants to go home.’ Burke had finished his soup and now crushed the double-skinned can and shied it into the sink.
‘Who said anything about going home? I want the cruds out here with me, so I can show ‘em just what it’s like.’ Dooley sent his can after Burke’s. Aimed less accurately it bounced from the drainer and on to the floor, to be flattened under the big man’s boot. ‘It’s the fucking neutrals I really hate, especially the fucking Frogs, I’d smear every last one of them.’ He demonstrated his. meaning by grinding the can hard into the boards.
Over in a corner, Clarence had built a nest of rags and paper and burrowed into it with his sleeping bag, but the noise Dooley was making was preventing him from sleeping. ‘Alright, so you don’t like them, does your continuing tirade mean I’m not to get any rest? Now be a good idiot and be quiet for a while will you, six hours will do nicely, but I’ll settle for two.’ He pulled a smelly, dog hair-smothered, threadbare rug over his head. It didn’t help, Dooley was like a record that had become stuck in a groove, going on and on. After a further five minutes Clarence could stand no more.
‘That does it. I have to tolerate this ghastly war, you loathsome oafs, this stinking ruin, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to put up with your simplistic all-embracing bigotry. Since when have you Americans been so fast off the mark in joining a war? Seems to me I remember a slight delay – of, what was it, three years? – before you came into the first World War. It took a reminder from the Japanese to get you into the second. You’re only in this one because half your troops were stoked up on drugs when the balloon went pop, and the Ruskies clouted seven thousand of your men on the first day.’
It was not going to be that easy to get Dooley away from his pet subject, even using provocation of that magnitude. So determined was he not to be sidetracked, he virtually ignored the sniper’s interruption except to glower in his direction and threateningly ball a huge fist. ‘They’re all the fucking same you know, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Finns, the Frogs; they’re all a fuck sight more neutral towards the Commies than they are to us. It’s only a couple of months since the Swiss shot down that Casevac transport. First thing I did when I heard about that was to go to a club I knew they used, to crack a few heads. When I got there I had to join a queue. Take the Swedes, smug bastards: free health care, free love and free coming and going for half the Red spies in Europe. And all the time they keep bleating about their neutrality while their factories keep supplying the fucking Ruskies with everything from telegraph poles to fur caps.’
‘They have the highest suicide rate in the whole of Europe you know.’
‘Let me know when it reaches a hundred per cent, I’ll give a cheer.’ Dooley turned to see who had come in, it was Boris. He took in the man’s battered face and torn clothing, roughly held together by an assortment of improvised fasteners. ‘I’m glad to see those bricks made a real mess of you. I couldn’t be happier if it had happened to Burke. Nothing broken is there? No? What a pity!’
‘You do not have to like me, I do not expect you to, but you should try to remember that we are fighting on the same side. Would you have spoken in the same way to Solzhenitsyn, or any of the other dissidents from the pre-war days?’
‘There’s the world of fucking difference between a dissident and a deserter. Those guys thought that way from the start, and said so. They didn’t wait till they’d served a year in the Red Army, and had just been moved to the front before coming round to that way of thinking. I know your sort. Cruddy arse-licking party member while everything is going well in the motherland, then a whining shit-scared coward when your piddling little post at some factory suddenly comes off the exemption list.’
Shoving the Russian roughly aside, Dooley stamped out of the room. In passing, he kicked two of the bottom rails from the stairs and booted their splintered remains ahead of him.
‘You were lucky there, Boris.’ Burke listened to the American’s noisy progress to the control room. ‘Friend Dooley gets really worked up when he’s waiting to go into action, it ties him in knots. The only way he can let off steam is to lash out. If he’d swiped at you, you’d have snapped as easy as those rails.’
Boris sat on the corner of the wobbly pine table dominating the centre of the room. It creaked beneath him, but took his weight. Like the few other pieces of furniture remaining in the house it was too heavy and cumbersome for the owners to take with them in their rush to leave the place, and of too little value to be of interest to the looters who’d dared visit the island after the Swedish government had declared it a prohibited area on the outbreak of war, at the time of the first battles in the waters of the Kattegat.
‘I should tell you, I was not a combat soldier with the Red Army. I was, I am a technician. That is all.’ Boris took cigarette papers and a pinch of dark, almost black, tobacco from a stained leather pouch. He rolled the long ‘ shreds into the valley of white paper he made between thumb and forefinger, licked its edge and lit the finished cigarette with a lighter fashioned from a Russian 12.7mm heavy machine gun cartridge case. He toyed with it.
‘And neither was I an intellectual, with the protection of the interest of the world’s press. I am an ordinary Russian, not a party member. It took a long time for me to see, longer still even to summon up the courage to tell myself that what the Communists were doing to my country was terribly wrong. This lighter, it was produced, unofficially, at one of our second-line vehicle repair workshops, in East Germany. The men made and sold them so they would have the money to buy extra food. Their rations had been cut when their productivity fell. That happened because a senior officer, a member of the party of course, had diverted shipments of tools and spares to the black market. Without them they could not do their job.’ Boris flicked the lighter on and off. It emitted a strong smell of petrol.
‘The day after I bought this, the man who sold it to me was arrested, as were all the machinists and the junior officer in charge of the workshop. I think the machinists were sent to the northern Chinese border. The officer and the salesman were shot. There was no trial, not as you would know one. They were charged, gave their names, and were taken out. That in Russia is a trial.’
‘For turning out a few crappy lighters?’ Hyde took the lighter and examined it. ‘Some of these parts have been cut by hand, you can see the marks of the saw. How many could they have made, ten, twenty?’
‘The charge would have been sabotage of the Russian war effort. Anything which in the eyes of an official or an officer, if he is a party member, can be construed as misuse of materials, is punishable by death. There is no appeal, in most cases there would not be the time unless there was some delay in mustering a firing squad, and usually there is one waiting. If they really wanted to get rid of you, then even wiping your nose on the sleeve of your uniform could provide the excuse. Usually they do not need one, but they have bureaucratic minds, and like to put a label to all that they do.’ Accepting the lighter back, Boris returned it to his pocket. ‘Your big friend was almost right. I had a secure position, actually it was at a small research centre. The pay was quite good and I rode with the tide, did nothing that would make ripples, attract attention to myself. I ignored what went on around me, even when an inoffensive colleague was arrested by the KGB. So long as I was untouched by it all, I closed my eyes, tolerated the shortages, pretended I did mot see the privilege of the party members. But there is a time when these things can no longer be ignored.’