‘You will have dinner with my wife and I in the year 1975. When we are big-bellied men sitting on our money-mountains. Somehow we will meet.’
Archie, dubious of foreign food, smiled weakly.
‘We will know each other throughout our lives!’
Archie laid Samad down, got himself a mattress and manoeuvred himself into a position for sleep.
‘Goodnight, friend,’ said Samad, pure contentment in his voice.
In the morning, the circus came to town. Woken by shouts and whooping laughter, Samad struggled into uniform and wrapped one hand around his gun. He stepped into the sun-drenched courtyard to find Russian soldiers in their dun-coloured uniforms leapfrogging over each other, shooting tin cans off each other’s heads and throwing knives at potatoes stuck on sticks, each potato sporting a short black twig moustache. With all the exhaustion of revelation, Samad collapsed on to the front steps, sighed, and sat with his hands on his knees, his face turned up towards the heat. A moment later Archie tripped out, trousers half-mast, waving his gun, looking for the enemy, and shot a frightened bullet in the air. The circus continued, without noticing. Samad pulled Archie wearily by the trouser leg and gestured for him to sit down.
‘What’s going on?’ demanded Archie, watery-eyed.
‘Nothing. Nothing absolutely is going on. In fact, it’s gone off.’
‘But these might be the men who-’
‘Look at the potatoes, Jones.’
Archie looked wildly about him. ‘What have potatoes got to do with it?’
‘They’re Hitler potatoes, my friend. They are vegetable dictators. Ex-dictators.’ He pulled one off its stick. ‘See the little moustaches? It’s over, Jones. Someone has finished it for us.’
Archie took the potato in his hand.
‘Like a bus, Jones. We have missed the bloody war.’
Archie shouted over to a lanky Russian in mid-spear of a Hitler potato. ‘Speak English? How long has it been over?’
‘The fighting?’ he laughed incredulously. ‘Two weeks, comrade! You will have to go to Japan if you want any more!’
‘Like a bus,’ repeated Samad, shaking his head. A great fury was rising in him, bile blocking his throat. This war was to have been his opportunity. He was expected to come home covered in glory, and then to return to Delhi triumphant. When would he ever have another chance? There were going to be no more wars like this one, everybody knew that. The soldier who had spoken to Archie wandered over. He was dressed in the summer uniform of the Russians: the thin material, high-necked collar and oversized, floppy cap; he wore a belt around a substantial waist, the buckle of which caught the sun and shot a beam into Archie’s eye. When the glare passed, Archie focused on a big, open face, a squint in the left eye, and a head of sandy hair that struck off in several directions. He was altogether a rather jolly apparition on a bright morning, and when he spoke it was in a fluent, American-accented English that lapped at your ears like surf.
‘The war has been over for two weeks and you were not aware?’
‘Our radio… it wasn’t…’ Archie’s sentence gave up on itself.
The soldier grinned widely and shook each man’s hand vigorously. ‘Welcome to peace-time, gentlemen! And we thought the Russians were an ill-informed nation!’ He laughed his big laugh again. Directing his question to Samad, he asked, ‘Now, where are the rest of you?’
‘There is no rest of us, comrade. The rest of the men in our tank are dead, and there is no sign of our battalion.’
‘You’re not here for any purpose?’
‘Er… no,’ said Archie, suddenly abashed.
‘Purpose, comrade,’ said Samad, feeling quite sick to his stomach. ‘The war is over and so we find ourselves here quite without purpose.’ He smiled grimly and shook the Russian’s hand with his good hand. ‘I’m going in. Sun,’ he said, squinting. ‘Hurts my little peepers. It was nice to have met you.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said the Russian, following Samad with his eyes until he had disappeared into the recesses of the church. Then he turned his attention to Archie.
‘Strange guy.’
‘Hmm,’ said Archie. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked, taking a hand-rolled cigarette the Russian offered him. It turned out the Russian and the seven men with him were on their way to Poland, to liberate the work-camps one heard about sometimes in hushed tones. They had stopped here, west of Tokat, to catch themselves a Nazi.
‘But there’s no one here, mate,’ said Archie affably. ‘No one but me and the Indian and some old folk and children from the village. Everyone else is dead or fled.’
‘Dead or fled… dead or fled,’ said the Russian, highly amused, turning a matchstick over and over between his finger and thumb. ‘Good phrase this… funny phrase. No, well, you see, I would have thought the same, but we have reliable information – from your own secret service, in fact – that there is a senior officer, at this very moment, hiding in that house. There.’ He pointed to the house on the horizon.
‘The Doctor? Some little lads told us about him. I mean, he must be shitting himself with fear if you lot are after him,’ said Archie, by way of a compliment, ‘but I’m sure they said he’s just some sick bloke; they called him Dr Sick. Oi: he ain’t English, is he? Traitor or something?’
‘Hmm? Oh no. No, no, no, no. Dr Marc-Pierre Perret. A young Frenchman. A prodigy. Very brilliant. He has worked in a scientific capacity for the Nazis since before the war. On the sterilization programme, and later the euthanasia policy. Internal German matters. He was one of the very loyal.’
‘Blimey,’ said Archie, wishing he knew what it all meant. ‘Wotchyagunnadoo?’
‘Catch him and take him to Poland, where he will be dealt with by the authorities.’
‘Authorities,’ said Archie, still impressed but not really paying attention. ‘Blimey.’
Archie’s attention span was always short, and he had become distracted by the big, amiable Russian’s strange habit of looking in two directions at once.
‘As the information we received was from your secret service and as you are the highest-ranking officer here Captain… Captain…’
A glass eye. It was a glass eye with a muscle behind it that would not behave.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know your name or rank,’ said the Russian, looking at Archie with one eye and at some ivy creeping round the church door with the other.
‘Who? Me? Jones,’ said Archie, following the eye’s revolving path: tree, potato, Archie, potato.
‘Well, Captain Jones, it would be an honour if you would lead the expedition up the hill.’
‘Captain – what? Blimey, no, you’ve got it arse-ways-up,’ said Archie, escaping the magnetic force of the eye, and refocusing on himself, dressed in Dickinson-Smith’s shiny buttoned uniform.
‘I’m not a bloody-’
‘The Lieutenant and I would be pleased to take charge,’ broke in a voice behind him. ‘We’ve been out of the action for quite a while. It is about time we got back in the thick of it, as they say.’
Samad had stepped out on to the front steps silently as a shadow, in another of Dickinson-Smith’s uniforms and with a cigarette hanging casually off his lower lip like a sophisticated sentence. He was always a good-looking boy, and dressed in the shiny buttons of authority this was only accentuated; in the sharp daylight, framed by the church door, he cut quite an awesome figure.
‘What my friend meant,’ said Samad in his most charming Anglo-Indian lilt, ‘is that he is not the bloody captain. I am the bloody captain. Captain Samad Iqbal.’
‘Comrade Nikolai – Nick – Pesotsky.’
Samad and the Russian laughed together heartily, shook hands again. Samad lit a cigarette.
‘He is my lieutenant. Archibald Jones. I must apologize if I behaved strangely earlier; the food’s been disagreeing with me. Now: we’ll set off tonight, after dark shall we? Lieutenant?’ said Samad, looking at Archie with a private encoded intensity.
‘Yes,’ blurted Archie.
‘By the way, comrade,’ said Samad, striking a match off the wall and lighting up, ‘I hope you do not mind if I ask – is that a glass eye? It is most realistic.’
‘Yes! I purchased it in St Petersburg. I was separated from my own in Berlin. It’s a quite incredible likeness, don’t you think?’