The Commissar (23 page)

‘Up my arse, how I do look forward to bein’ a civvy again,’ says Porta, dreamily. ‘A life without danger, where anybody can run around free, with any invitin’ loot he likes in his pockets.’

‘Do not start laughing too soon, my friend,’ she mumbles. ‘You have no idea how complicated the life of a civilian can be. There, they have no regulations written down to follow!’

‘
And
there’s nobody who’s got to give anybody the first salute, is there?’ says Porta. ‘Any shit can just walk past any other shit, just staring blankly at fuck-all. But I do believe it’ll be different for us who’re travelling first class. They’ll lift their lids to us, an’ kiss our arses if we want ’em to. It’s better to have money in your pockets’n a bundle of stick-grenades!’

‘Yes, God knows you are right,’ breathes Vera.

Porta sits waiting, with a bottle of cognac and a pot of coffee while Vera goes to find a telephone to try to get in
touch with her commissar husband. She is mad enough to spit when she comes back.

‘I’ve had enough of it,’ she screams, throwing herself into an armchair. ‘If those shits and my clever husband do not pull themselves together we have had it. We are for the shit-heap!’

‘Yes, I thought we’d have trouble working with a bloody policeman,’ says Porta, worriedly, pouring more cognac into his coffee. ‘I
know
’em! They can do anything, long as somebody’s tellin’ ’em what to do. If there
isn’t
anybody, they flap round in circles like a lot of old maids who’ve had a bucket o’ cow-piss thrown all over ’em. If we don’t find out something that can get your twit of a husband moving, PDQ, we’ll soon find ourselves on the receiving end of a lot more shocks!’

‘That all you’ve got to say, you limp German prick?’ she scolds him, forgetting she is a highly-placed, aristocratic lady. ‘What’ve you got a head for?
Do
something! Give your orders! You
are
a German, aren’t you? Just sit there swilling coffee and cognac!’ She goes on furiously for some time, spitting out the foulest oaths in the language. Words she certainly did not learn in her aristocratic home.

‘Yes, it is a bit shitty ain’t it?’ Porta admits. ‘I must say it’s nice and pleasant having a bundle of cash in your pants, but it does bring a lot of excitin’ situations with it. Tell me, girl, does your feller drink?’

‘No, never,’ she says. ‘But why do you ask?’

Porta sucks on a tooth, and pulls at the lobe of his ear.

‘Does hubby work hard?’

‘Indeed he does. I guarantee you that. He has worked like a horse all his life for the lousy state. It is only seldom he drinks, and then he gets really drunk.’

‘That does ease my mind,’ nods Porta. ‘People who drink too much, y’know, see things through rosy spectacles an’ everythin’ goes easy. I must admit I was scared of the lot of it being just drunken dreams. Let me talk a
bit of my Russian German to your hubby. Where’s your radio? We’ll soon get things on the right track an’ be wealthy people with houses an’ fishin’ rights in Sweden. D’you like salmon, girl?’

It is easy to keep clean when you do not engage in trade or mix with other people
.

Henri de Montherlant

‘
Let me go,’ babbled the old Jew, trying to tear himself away from the brutal grip of the three young men
.

‘
Where’ve you hidden the-stuff?’ shouted the big stormtrooper, hitting the old man in the face
.

The woman screamed and tried to help her husband. She was thrown back into the dark corridor. She screamed again when the SA man’s boot sank into her. She screamed for the last time when a rifle butt smashed into her face. Then they looted the shop
.

When the police arrived they found the old man lying weeping across his wife’s body. They turned him in to the collection point at Old Moabitt, and hanged him for wife murder eight days later. That was the day Dr Goebbels decreed:

Ordnung muss sein!

It was 3 April, 1936
.

*
Geheime Kommandosache
: German for Secret Command Matter

*
Bautzen:
A notorious German prison

The men who have been on leave are beginning to return. They come plodding down the long straight highway. Some have managed to thumb a lift, but most of them have had to walk the fifty kilometres from Svatogorskaja. The leave train didn’t go any further. It is easy to tell which of them are town boys and which come from the country. The farm lads are giving way at the knees from the weight of all the good food their families have loaded them down with when they left. The townies have only their equipment to carry. One thing they all have in common. They are unbelievably sorry for themselves, and under their influence the whole regiment is very soon in the grip of the blackest kind of depression.

We snarl at one another, punch-ups are started for the slightest of reasons. Tiny had already beaten eight men up so viciously that he has been tied to a tree as if he were some kind of watch-dog. We have no guardhouse to keep him in. The Unteroffizier-cook, a fellow we call ‘Fried Egg’ because he looks like one, gets himself scolded almost to death when two men back from leave throw him into the soup cauldron. All he’d done wrong was to say: ‘Welcome back to the joys of the Eastern Front.’

Porta is slouching grumpily down the broad main road, when he runs into Sonia Pushkova, her round fat face shiny with sweat as usual. She believes herself to be very attractive, although she would be none the worse for a close shave. She crashes into Porta with all the grace of a fully-loaded truck, and throws both her fat arms around his neck.

‘Like to come into my chicken coop an’ have a look at
the new hen?’ she asks him, licking the inside of his ear with her fat, wet tongue.

But Porta is far too low in spirits to be interested.

‘Shit on your new hen,’ he mumbles, and gives her broad rump a hearty smack. I’ll come an’ fuck you some other day, and your hen can sit on her perch and cackle in time to the beat!’

All alone, Gregor comes limping into what was once a fine hotel, before the war, but is now a half shot-up heap of ruins. A primitive sort of bar has been opened in it, but the kind of bar which is only for people with money – and a lot of it.

‘What a shithouse of a place, ‘Gregor says, sitting down alongside Porta on a rickety bar-stool. ‘Beer and champagne,’ he orders, sourly.

‘What the devil are you doin’ here?’ asks Porta, and stares questioningly at his stick. ‘And what’s happened to your leg?’

‘Sprained my ankle at the funeral,’ explains Gregor, swallowing half the contents of his tankard in one go. He stares at the girl behind the bar.

‘You are pretty man!’ she says in Russian.

‘I know that,’ he replies. ‘I don’t believe in the German God any more,’ he turns and says to Porta. ‘When you’ve had it good for a bit, and then come back to this godforsaken country,
then
you really understand for the first time what kind of a bucket of shit the German High Command’s offerin’ its tired heroes! Hell’s
bells
?

The Old Man comes in, followed by Tiny and Barcelona.

‘Now I’ve seen the lot,’ roars Tiny, exploding into a shout of laughter at the sight of Gregor. ‘’Is ’Ighness the Chauffeur-General ’as come back to the poverty-struck!’

‘You been decorated?’ asks Porta, pointing to the colourful KVK
*
on Gregor’s chest.

‘My general awarded it to me on his deathbed,’ answers Gregor, assuming a sufficiently sorrowing expression.

‘Well, well. So
he’s
gone to Valhalla too?’ says Porta, sadly. ‘The Fatherland certainly does require sacrifices from us. I know the family of a colonel that’s sacrificed three sons an’ two daughters on the altar of the Fatherland, and God help me if they don’t still wave paper flags on all the national holidays!’

‘Yes, it’s rough enough,’ sighs Gregor. ‘My general’d stayed alive, my fate’d have been different.’

‘No doubt about that,’ admits Porta. ‘The winners would probably have strung you up alongside your general!’

‘Could be,’ agrees Gregor. ‘But what’s worst? Rolling round in Russian muck with a pound o’ lead in your guts an’ dyin’ slowly, or dropping down a couple o’ yards through a hole with a rope tied round your neck? Oh well! I had some good times with the General Staff. Me an’ my general, an’ our monocle, had some fine manoeuvres together. In the beginning it was like the day after a Harvest Festival!

‘“All we need here to make the similarity perfect,” said my general, polishing away at our monocle, “is the smell of cowdung. That would be
it
! We’ve got to get this crowd in line,” he trumpeted through his eagle-beak of a nose. “Unteroffizier Martin, you will move in to staff quarters,” he barked, semaphorin’ with our monocle. “In twelve minutes we drive to church and remind God that it is His duty to give German arms the victory!”

‘I took over the quarters of a Leutnant who’d been reduced. They stunk of perfume worse than a whore’s scent factory. This Leutnant’d been a brown-holer, so they’d made him a slave in Germersheim. On the way I met my old mate the Adjutant, the rotten swine. When he saw me he stopped dead as if somebody’d hit him between the eyes with a club.

‘“You,” he groaned. “God in Heaven,
you
! And I hoped and prayed you’d been shot to bits and spread all over the Russian steppe.” He glared at me like an admiral out on the
high seas just before he gives the order to open fire with a full broadside. Then he stuck his face up close to mine and opened his mouth so I could see his tonsils. “You know what, Unteroffizier Martin,” he squealed, like a tom-cat that’s got its balls trodden on. “You are the nastiest, and most repelling individual I have ever met. You’re a barracks
rat
! That’s exactly what you are! A meaningless shout on a wet barrack-square! But you’re not going to fool me! I’ve seen through you! Your conduct can be compared to that of a money-grubbing Jew, but I imagine I’ve told you that before.”

‘“Yes sir, Herr Rittmeister sir!” I smiled, crashing my hobnailed heels together twice. “I realized a long time ago, sir, that the Herr Rittmeister did not regard me with the same warm affection as he would a son!”

‘You should’ve seen that lousy bicycle dragoon, ‘Gregor goes on. ‘He made a face for all the world like a travellin’ salesman dealin’ in moth-eaten rabbit skins. On the way to the mess my general got annoyed because some blokes didn’t salute us, even though the divisional flag was waving merrily on the front mudguard. The Staff Padre got a rocket straight off. ’cos his dog-collar wasn’t as clean as my general wanted. This made the dope of a sky-pilot nervous, of course, and he got mixed up in his bible text and told us Jesus was at the Battle o’ Carthage, and handed out Hannibal the Iron Cross.

‘“You need a rest, my good parson,” barked my general right in the middle of the prayer, and banged him with eight days confined to quarters, before he’d got to the “Amen”. But it wasn’t till we got to the war game in the afternoon my general really went up the wall. He’d got a message from Füihrer HQ, you see, that told him that it wasn’t us who’d be gettin’
53 Panzer Corps
, but some shit of a South German who’d got his party book in order. My general an’ our monocle took that very near. We’d been looking forward, you see, to smashin’ up an armoured corps and shedding a bit of good German blood on the battlefield.

‘It was a deep secret, but we were really jealous of a
Russian colleague they called “the Butcher of Khiev”, because of his remarkable efficiency at finishing off the troops he was put in command of. My general wanted to be talked of as “the Butcher of the Ukraine”. Things like that look great in the history books!

‘“There are dark times on the way,” predicted my general. “No war game today!”

‘Well, the message from Führer HQ went into the waste-paper-basket, we polished our monocle, and took a stiff drink. We were in such a bad mood we even forgot to mark the bottle so we could check if anybody had taken a swig on the sly.

‘When I helped him on with his uniform, at exactly 23.00, he looked funny. It was as if his eagle nose had begun to droop a bit. He didn’t check his bedtime with the three watches he carried around with him. He’d been hit pretty hard by them havin’ given our armoured corps to some fat-gutted party dope from the Bavarian beer-halls.

‘“Soon the ravens will come to fetch us,” he said, through his nose, and sent me a steely glance through our monocle.

‘“Yes, Herr General, sir!” I replied, banging my steel-shod heels together. “It really looks dark! The civilians have stolen our uniform and us gentlemen for God and the Kaiser’ve got to stand in the corner with our monocle in our hand! Yes sir, Herr General, sir, these are wicked times. We can expect nothing good from the civilians. They are the spawn of the devil. They will spit in our beer!”

‘We were silent for a while, thinking things over.

‘“Play a little for me, Unteroffizier Martin,” he ordered, lounging down in the large general’s chair he had had made from the skin of his late horse, Baldrian, which was so German it even topped the mares in Wagnerian rhythms.

‘I sat down at the mechanical organ and sang:

Even I, a strong man,
Have felt the fiery
Heat of love . . .