The Commissar (34 page)

We forget our mission here, and no longer feel the icy cold; no longer see the moon with its frosty, barren light; no longer hear the trees cracking, with reports like rifle shots.

A bony corporal, in the olive-green uniform of the frontier troops, starts up an ancient Slavic song to the melancholy strumming of the balalaika:

‘Bless Thee, O Lord!
Look down with grace upon us . . .’

It is more than the Commissar can stand. He cries out. A wet drunken snort, like the barking of a dog with a heavy cold. His face reddens, and tears run down his cheeks. His wet, carroty hair hangs down over his watery eyes.

‘
Ssss Rozh deniem Khristvym
,’ he gulps, deeply moved. He grasps Porta in his arms, and he too begins to weep, in his drunkenness. ‘I get so terribly sad at Christmas-time,’ he sniffles, with such a sorrowful expression on his tear-wet face, that the rest of us are close to crying with him.

‘A feller can’t
stand
it,’ sniffs Tiny, wiping his eyes with a filthy mitten.

‘Look down with grace upon us, Eternal Master,’ intones the corporal of frontier troops, taking a swig at the vodka bottle. ‘Look down with grace upon us,’ he repeats, handing the bottle to Tiny.

‘We’re goin’ to need it, too,’ sighs Porta, blowing his nose noisily. ‘This is no ordinary criminal caper we’re going on.’

‘Bet it’s the first time in history anybody’s ever used tanks and guns to bust open a bank, ‘Gregor laughs loudly.

Tiny goes down on his haunches and tries to dance
prisjodka
with the frontier corporal, with the result that he
comes close to breaking his back. On the advice of the corporal we tie him to two motor-sledges and pull in opposite directions. His vertebrae go back into place with a sound like a splintering plank.

‘Bet that bloody well hurt,’ says Gregor, wincing.

With a piercing howl the Commissar jumps high in the air, cracks his heels together a yard above the ground and begins to whirl round in breakneck circles:

‘I am always drunk
and fear no man or beast!’

he sings in a ringing voice.

The frontier corporal is hopping round with a full glass gripped between his teeth and his hands clasped behind his neck. The Commissar falls over with the vodka bottle still clutched in his hand. He looks at it in amazement.

‘So
there
you are!’ he hiccoughs. ‘Thought I’d seen you around.’ He staggers back on to his feet with great difficulty. Through a vodka haze his eye falls on Tiny, and he hands him the
Stolichnaya
.

‘Take care of that till I get back. Drink any of it and you’ll wind up in Kolyma!
Panjemajo
?’

‘Trust me,’ grins Tiny, looking thirstily at the bottle.

‘A man’s more stupid than the Pope, if he trusts anyone,’ slavers the Commissar, staggering dangerously. ‘You know Tomsk,’ he asks a snowdrift, trying to embrace it. ‘You can hear yourself walk there. When you’re on your way back from the brothel “The Merry Bed” your footsteps
echo
! They’ve laid the roads with wood in Tomsk! Only thing they’ve got plenty of in Tomsk. If you’ve been in Tomsk,
tovaritsch
,’ he tells the snowdrift,’ the rest of the world you won’t bother with. You won’t be able to manage it, see! Tomsk is the arsewhole of the universe!’

Finally Porta manages to get him back on his feet. They kiss one another on both cheeks in the old Russian fashion. Arm in arm, and singing at the top of their voices, they
stagger towards the remains of the soot-blackened
kolchos’s
main building. They fall several times on the way.

They are almost there when the Commissar remembers the
Stolichnaja
. He turns back, swearing viciously, and after colliding with several trees on the way he reaches Tiny. He puts out a demanding hand towards him.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Tiny falsely, handing him the empty bottle.

‘The devil!’ roars the Commissar, staggering threateningly. ‘I’ll be damned! And I thought it was only Russian corporals who stole from their officers! What am I to do with you?’ He hiccoughs and emits a long, long belch. ‘I’ll send you to Kolyma!’

‘Gimme a bottle of vodka then, first?’ asks Tiny, belching in his turn.

‘You know all the tricks, do you?’ says the Commissar, blinking his watery eyes.

“Give him a bottle,’ he turns to the frontier corporal. ‘Now we’re having a party it might as well be a good one. It’s only Christmas once a year.’ He looks prayerfully up at the clouds and mumbles: ‘Look down in grace upon us, Lord!’

‘That Tiny, he’s a wicked chap,’ Porta confides to the Commissar, as they stagger arm in arm towards the main building. ‘He was hardly born before the Children’s Aid took him. Nobody can
stand
him, down at the David. He goes round with Jews too!’

‘Does he really?’ asks the Commissar, stopping to salute a tree, which he seems to think is a rabbi. ‘It’s not all Jews who’re suitable company for weak people,’ he says, giving out a thunderous belch.

‘You’re right, there,’ says Porta, putting the wrong end of his cigarette in his mouth.

‘Look down in grace upon us, Lord,’ pants the Commissar, throwing a snowball at an imaginary enemy. ‘This cursed war will lead to nothing good! Before we know where we are properly, all our ideals will have been
destroyed, and our banners trampled into the mud!’

‘I just want to tell you one thing,’ shouts Porta, letting himself down on to an up-ended bucket. ‘They’re whores an’ pimps the lot of ’em, no matter how high up you go. They fuck one another’s wives to get an advantage out of it and do it backwards and forwards too.’ He stares at the Commissar, with streaming eyes. ‘It’s bloody immoral! You can’t do that an’
stay
moral! You ever fucked anybody else’s wives?’

‘You are my friend,’ screams the Commissar, in drunken happiness. He throws his arms round Porta, so hard that he falls backwards off his bucket. ‘And you have fucked my wife,’ he laughs, cunningly. ‘How is she, by the way?’

‘Last I saw of her she was playin’ monkeys up a tree with some counter-jumper from supplies, but he had the clap and the MPs picked him up.’

‘Red Front!’ shouts the Commissar in a ringing voice, clenching his fist. ‘When you’re driving in a waggon you cannot get off,’ he breathes, mysteriously.

‘The trick’s in the deal,’ explains Porta, with drunken honesty. ‘Everything’s based on buying and selling, and what you’ve
got
to have is your head screwed on straight. The dearest thing you’ve got to sell is yourself!’

‘Who the devil’d buy me?’ asks the Commissar, doubtfully.

‘A lot more people than you’d dream of would,’ answers Porta.

‘As ugly as
I
am?’ smiles the Commissar, mirthlessly.

‘If you can’t get what you want you have to take what you can get, as the ostrich said when he tried to have a fuck at a duck.’

‘Look down in grace upon us, Lord,’ sighs the Commissar, throwing his arms wide despairingly.

‘Nobody move!’ roars Gregor in a high, screaming voice. ‘This is a hold-up!’

‘He’s practising for when we get to the gold, ‘Porta tells the Commissar.

Drunk as we are we can see there is a storm coming up. One of the feared mountain storms which, in a moment, change everything to a raging hell of snow, with winds strong enough to send a twenty-ton truck flying over the edge and down the mountainside like a piece of loose paper.

We crawl into the igloos and roll up close together to protect ourselves against the terrible cold. Sausages and legs of mutton are passed from hand to hand, and after some brief, mumbling talk we fall into a heavy sleep. Only the machine-pistols lying around us indicate that there is a war on.

Tiny grunts in his sleep and smiles like the cat who has eaten the goldfish.

The Commissar sleeps with his cap turned round on his head. Now and then he makes strange noises and sobs in his sleep.

With a scream he suddenly sits up and clasps his head with both hands. It feel like one huge inflamed boil. He groans aloud, as he tries to turn his body and realizes that his backbone creaks like a door hanging on rusty hinges. He cannot discover where he hurts most. He is in pain from the tips of his toes to the roots of his hair. He finds out his head is the worst. It feels like a basin of gruel made with old, sour milk. ‘Look down in grace upon us. Lord,’ he sobs, and falls, groaning, back down amongst the rest of us.

‘
Gauno
*
,’ snarls tank-driver Ermolov, turning angrily away from the unhappy Commissar, who mumbles again, weakly: ‘Look down in grace upon us. Lord!’

‘Guano,’ repeats the driver, viciously.

‘Don’t be too hard on me,’ whines the Commissar, drunkenly maudlin. Then he throws a wicked look at Ermolov. ‘Arsehole,’ he growls, offended at a miserable Staff-sergeant permitting himself to say ‘shit’ to a Commissar of the Army, the highest ranking authority at Corps
HQ. Where the devil’s it all going to end if this filthy war goes on much longer? Never heard anything like it. A lousy NCO throwing a word like ‘shit’ at
him
. A Commissar of the Army! He falls back down and snores his way straight into an alcoholic nightmare.

‘I’m goin’ to Maxim’s
Where all the girls are dreams . . .’

sings Porta happily in his sleep.

It is more than Albert can stand. He springs up excitedly and begins to shake Porta roughly.

‘What the hell are you up to, you black shithouse?’ rages Porta, punching at him. His beautiful dream has been broken into and he is angry.

‘You were singing!’ snarls Albert furiously, diving under the canvas again and burrowing down between Gregor and me.

‘Singin’?’ gapes Porta. ‘I was bloody well sleepin’! The Bible’s softened your brain, you black apeman!’

‘Shut it!’ roars the Old Man from his corner. ‘Go to sleep! That’s an
order
!’

Quiet falls again on the igloo, and we all dream of what it is going to be like to be rich. None of us have ever tried that before.

It is still dark when we get up, and all around us is a blinding hell of snow. Ice crystals drive at us like bullets, tearing our skin so that the blood comes.

Tiny starts a violent argument with Staff-corporal Oscar Rowitsch, called ‘Frostlips’, because he always looks as if he is freezing to death.

‘You ’eap of Caucasian camelshit,’ screams Tiny angrily, and begins to swing his arms, threateningly.

‘Frostlips’ ducks like lightning, and just manages to avoid Tiny’s devastating punch.

‘Stand still, so’s I can get at you,’ roars Tiny, rushing forward like a bulldozer.

‘Frostlips’ lands an iron-shod infantry boot on the tenderest part of Tiny’s instep.

He lets out a roar which a lion would have envied him and grabs at his injured foot. A serious tactical error. He barely sees the heavy Russian infantry boot coming at him until it thuds into his face. With a scream of pain he falls on his back, blood spurting from nose and mouth. Now he is really angry. Like lightning he rolls himself into a ball, kicks his feet into the air and straightens out like a released spring. With the force of a steamhammer. his forehead crashes into ‘Frostlips’s’ broad Mongolian face. Then he spins round and kicks out backwards like a crazy horse.

For a moment he seems to hang in the air. Both his size 14 boots hammer into ‘Frostlips’s’ chest, knocking all the breath out of his lungs. The next kick sends him back several yards and he slides towards the edge of the cliff. We see him already on his way over into thin air, but his dangerous slide is stopped unexpectedly. Warrant Officer Stepanov comes round a corner of the ruins, with his arms full of fried sausage and mutton, and gets in the way.

Stepanov lets out a roar as his feet are swept from under him, and sausage and mutton fly up into the air.

He is on his feet first with his
Kalashnikov
gripped by the muzzle and on his way to split ‘Frostlips’s’ skull with the butt. The Commissar’s quick intervention saves the man’s life.

‘Stop those crazy games,’ he growls. ‘Wait to play ’em until you’ve all become Swedish Social Democrats!’

But Stepanov, whom they used to call ‘Whorecatcher’ when he was serving on the Moscow Vice Squad, is so angry they have to tie him to a tree until he simmers down.

It is well into the afternoon before we get away. There are problems with several of the vehicles, since their drivers have been in no condition to turn their engines over during the night. We have to tow the half-track behind the T-34.

We are totally exhausted when we stop, well into the night, for a couple of hours of rest. We have laboured
through oceans of snow. A couple of times we have come close to losing the trucks. Ice broke under their wheels on the way across rivers not yet frozen through.

The Old Man has to threaten us with his machine-pistol to get us to build an igloo. But it gets built at last, and we huddle together, freezingly cold, inside it. Now we come suddenly a wake again. Porta gets the cards out. He shuffles and deals with practised fingers.

‘Tell me,’ he asks ‘Whorecatcher’, ‘what did you Moscow fellers do with rapists when you got hold of ’em?’