The Commissar (17 page)

I go down so heavily my face smashes into the lock of the LMG. I wipe my hand over it. I am bleeding freely, but have no time to think about that. I sight in on the muzzle-flame from the Russian SMG, press the butt of my gun into my shoulder and grip so tightly with my left hand that I almost get cramp in it. I send three short bursts at the Russian SMG. Then I’m up like lightning, run to the left
and fall into new cover. I am hardly into it before a grenade goes off where I was only a moment ago.

A shell from a tank-gun passes close above my head and cuts Fahnenjunker Kolb in two with the efficiency of a circular saw. The blast from the exploding shell throws me far off to one side and tears the LMG out of my hands. I sob with terror and press my face into the ground. When the rushing in my ears stops, I put my hands out to feel for the LMG. Instead, my fingers find themselves touching a naked leg. I feel at it and cannot believe my eyes when I open them to look. A naked leg, torn off at the groin and blown out of both boots and trousers. I start to scream, and beat my fists on the ground, hysterically.

‘Get
on
! Get
on
!’ the Old Man chases me, bringing his mpi-butt down on the small of my back.

‘No!’ I protest, ‘I
can’t
go on!’

Heide grabs me brutally by the collar.

‘Get up, you yellow swine,’ he snarls, viciously. ‘Where’s your LMG? Don’t tell me you’ve lost your weapon?’ He throws me from him. as if I were a sack of rotten potatoes.

I fall, sobbing, on one knee, completely finished.

He points the muzzle of his machine-pistol at me, and cracks me hard across the face with the back of his hand. My helmet goes back on to my neck. Then, suddenly, it is all over. I am a normal, well-disciplined soldier again. The MG is back in my hands with the strap regimentally across my shoulder. My legs are going like runaway pistons.

I literally fly past Porta, who is in cover behind a woodpile, readying the stovepipe.

‘Hey there!’ he shouts cheerily after me. ‘Hang on. Don’t want you getting to Moscow before us an’ grabbin’ all the good cunt!’

A T-34 is hit just in front of me. A blinding sheet of flame goes up, and the tank breaks up with a metallic sound, like a giant fist crashing down on a tin roof. The explosion illuminates a whole row of wrecked houses. From off to the left come the hard cracking explosions of German stick-grenades.
It must be Heide’s squad who’ve got within throwing distance.

Porta’s bazooka howls, and the passage of air from the speeding rocket almost tears my helmet from my head.

A T-34 goes up in a volcano of flame. Porta’s rocket must have scored a direct hit on its ammunition locker.

I am deaf for several minutes from the violence of the explosion.

‘Come
on
! Forward!’ roars the Old Man, his bowed legs cranking away.

I rush forward, shooting as I run at the dark figures over by the wrecked houses. Between bursts I hear the short, stammering bark of the Old Man’s mpi. A couple of yards in front of me I see a shadow which resembles a mole-hill, but is really a Russian helmet with its funny steel cockscomb. I shoot so low that the tracer scorches along just above the ground, cutting the Russian’s head in two.

‘Forward!’ the Old Man chases us on. ‘Forward!’ He pumps his arm up and down in the air, signalling to us.

I take cover behind a concrete balustrade, and lob a couple of hand-grenades over the rosebeds, in which leafless bushes stand closely ranked. I push forward between the flower beds.

‘Back!’ I scream, desperately, rolling head-over-heels down the slope.

I have run into three Russian SMG gunners, and they are sending a hail of bullets along the length of the hill.

‘No, damn that,’ roars the Old Man. ‘Forward! We’ve no choice! Up with you! Grenades!’ I look around me, timid and frightened, and I feel like running, dumping that cursed machine-gun anywhere, and running; running till I reach home again.

‘Come
on
! shouts Porta, waving to me. ‘Let’s kick Ivan’s arsehole up round his cars, so he won’t get to thinkin’ he’s winning the war!’

I jump to my feet and press on up the sleep slope. A couple of hand-grenades, and the Russian machine-gun nest goes
up in a fount of flame. My feet seem suddenly light, as if they had grown wings.

Tracer bullets snarl and hiss past me. It seems incredible they can all miss. Running madly I reach the opposite stone balustrade, am over it, and rolling down the slope on the far side. Round about me I hear the sharp crack of tank-guns, and the hollow droning of the stovepipes.

Another T-34 explodes in a sea of red, glowing flame.

The rest of the section comes rolling down the slope after me.

Russian MGs hammer wildly. Three or four shadows flit past.

I thread a new belt into the LMG, and smack it shut far too noisily.

‘Give me some covering fire,’ the Old Man demands, hoarsely. ‘I’m going over that balustrade there, and as soon as I’m gone you come after me! And get the lead out!’

‘Very good, ‘I mumble, pressing the butt of the LMG into my shoulder and sending off five or six short bursts. The Old Man struggles up on top of the stonework, rolls over it and disappears. I jump up, and rush, bent over at the waist, across the open stretch, sweeping the LMG from side to side.

A green flare goes up, hangs in the heavens, and slowly dies away.

‘Done it again,’ pants Porta, pulling up alongside me.

A number of Russians come slowly toward us with arms above their heads. They stare at us fearfully as we search their pockets with nimble fingers. They have nothing on them worth bothering with. A few evil-smelling
Machorkas
, one or two greasy, much-thumbed letters.

‘They’re poor as us,’ sighs Porta, patting a shaggy
Kalmuk
on the shoulder. He is an elderly man with a large moustache, drooping sadly down over his mouth.

The last of the T-34s goes clattering off through the park. In the distance sounds of fighting can still be heard, but they ebb slowly away, and the silent blanket of night falls again over the scarred town.

The next day passes with one parade after the other. We are continually sent back to do it all over again. Which we don’t of course do. Instead we sit and play cards. In the end the people who lay on parades get tired of all the work it costs them. The hidden foreign weapons come back out again. A
Kalashnikov is
really better than a
Schmeisser
. For one thing it has a magazine holding a hundred rounds, and the
Schmeisser
holds no more than thirty-eight.

After a while everything is back to normal. Porta and Tiny tramp around again in their private headgear - tall hat and bowler. Albert is packed into his ginger-coloured fur. Heide is almost normal, and is no longer indignant over Albert’s racial cocktail. He does not speak to him more than absolutely necessary, however.

‘He looks like a shit-fly that’s burned its arse on a storm lantern.’ says Porta, as Albert sits down alongside Heide and starts showing him some photographs. Heide conceals his disgust, but cannot help studying them closely.

Leave is handed out generously, but only to married men with children, so that the Old Man and Barcelona are the first to go. We follow them all the way down to the leave train, and stand, waving, long after the train is out of sight, and even the sound of it has died away.

We go back to our billets feeling like small children who have been left at home on their own. Without the Old Man we feel lost.

Then something else happens, which almost knocks our pins out from under us.

Gregor is leaving us, and for ever. We think it is a lie. Even when he is packing his gear, and sharing out the things he no longer has any use for, we can’t believe it. He shows us it in black and white. Army Staff has asked for him. He is again to be driver and bodyguard for his famous general. We go with him to the train, too. He is wearing a completely new uniform. They dare not send him off to report to a general in his worn-out front line kit.

‘You
do
look nice.’ cries Porta, admiringly. ‘They could
put you straight on to a recruiting poster to bullshit idiots into the Army at a mark a day!’

We take leave of him on a platform filled with holes. Gregor leans far out of the window shaking our outstretched hands. As a general’s driver and bodyguard he has been allocated a seat in a real passenger compartment. He treats the MPs who examine his papers accordingly. Condescendingly, he looks the spit-and-polished MP up and down, and tells him to say Unteroffizier when he speaks to him, and stand to attention.

‘Anybody can bloody well see you’re General Staff now, ‘Porta nods, approvingly. ‘Give ’em some stick, the shits, but don’t forget you’re still one of us! If you happen to run across anything good, don’t forget Joseph Porta, Obergefreiter by the grace of God, is in the market for everything!’

The train departs and we slouch back to our regular routine. Soon, however, we are beginning to feel the need of excitement again.

We do not see much of Porta. Hauptfeldwebel Hoffmann is continually sending out office runners – hounds we call them – looking for him, but it is not often they find him. When they do find him it is because he wants them to.

He is spending most of his time with Vera, the deserted wife of the commissar. She is beginning to feel herself very truly liberated by the German Army, in the shape of Porta.

It is Sunday afternoon, and everything is peaceful and quiet. Snow falls softly and silently. There are no noises from the front line, which is by now far away and almost forgotten. Out on the parade ground Tiny is playing with a large, ugly dog, which resembles him not a little.

Hauptfeldwebel Hoffmann has his trackers out after Porta, as usual. He wants to put him on 24-hour guard duty. But Porta is lying, stark naked, on his back in a large, red four-poster bed. with angels blowing celestial horns on each bedpost. He resembles more than anything a long, thin, forked radish as he lies there on the pink bed-clothes, warming his long, bony toes between Vera’s thighs. They
are both dozing and seem to purr with satisfaction like a couple of well-fed cats.

Porta is dreaming that he is lying on the shore of an azure lagoon, wearing a white tuxedo, and surrounded by a group of willing ladies wearing no clothes at all.

‘
Zolloto
,’ mumbles Vera, rolling over in her sleep.

Porta chuckles with laughter, and moves the tips of his fingers as if he were counting money.

‘
Zolloto
,’ smiles Vera, happily.

Porta sits up in bed, wide awake, and suspicious as an old. experienced alley-cat.

‘What do you do?’ she whispers, sleepily, ruffling his red hair.

‘You said
Zolloto
!’ says Porta, bending over her. ‘
Zolloto
!’

‘I say
Zolloto
?’ she asks, seemingly carelessly. She swings her long legs over the edge of the bed, and pushes her feet into a pair of high-heeled white fluffy mules. With a lazy movement she takes a Russian cigarette, with a long tubular mouthpiece, from the drawer of her bedside table. ‘I can
trust
you? You villain!’ she says after a long silence, blowing smoke into his face as she speaks. ‘I mean –
really
trust you? Can you keep silent, if the world falls down on your head, and they stroke you and they promise you the moon and all the planets, if you play canary for them?’

‘What the hell d’you think I am?’ grins Porta, holding up three fingers. ‘In my short but exciting life, I have brought literally scores of plain-clothes coppers to the brink of the screaming meemies. I’ve been chucked out of the glasshouse for disturbin’ disciplinary routine. One General, two Obersts, six Leutnants and a whole
army
of Feldwebels and that kind of
shit
have been driven out of their minds by me. A couple of ’em put a hole through their heads after they’d chatted with me for a bit. an’ an
untermensch
like you wants to know if
you
can trust
me
? Ask instead if
I
can trust
you
? Even though you’ve got race, you’re still an
untermensch
talkin’ to one of the
herrenvolk
!’

She takes two long, thoughtful pulls at her cigarette, and
pinches the long cardboard mouthpiece between her fingers. ‘Watch out,
herrenvolk
man. You could choke on that stupid grin,’ she says, sourly.

Porta is across the floor in two jumps, and fills two tumblers with cognac.

They raise their glasses and toast one another silently. She lights a fresh cigarette, and exhales smoke slowly.

‘It does not make you nervous to get into something both Russians and Germans will not like?’ she asks him. ‘What I talk about is so unlawful, a crook lawyerman from the Mafia even, would shake with fright just to think about what could happen to him if he got caught!’

‘
Me? Nervous
?’ Porta laughs, heartily. ‘Losin’ my good German life’s all that worries
me
. Where breaking the law’s concerned I don’t give a shit for that. I work for me,
and
I know how to fix people who blabber too much. I remember one feller. Talked as much as a flock o’ canaries in mating-time. We took him for a sail one day when we had a hot engine to drown. We put a rope round his neck, but that was only so’s he wouldn’t fall overboard and get lost at sea. But when we got out there where we were goin’ to lose this engine, we somehow forgot our mate’s safety line was tied on to it, and the canary went down to the bottom along with the motor. The last we saw of him was a pair of shoes, round-heeled they were, waving goodbye to us.’