After a while we are all standing in a circle round the two ‘Mafia bosses’. More vodka comes out. This time a cheaper brand.
Tiny snatches a bottle from the hand of a little Siberian sergeant, who is preparing to take a swig from it.
‘Herrenvolk first,’ he protests, downing almost half the bottle. He licks his lips appreciatively before handing it back to the sergeant.
‘Pull in your tongue,’ says the Siberian. ‘Sticking out like that, it makes you look as if they’d just strung you up!’
A new bottle of Stolichnaja had been brought out, but only for Porta and the Commissar. The rest of us have to make do with the cheaper Raj.
Before very long even the Old Man is looking on the brighter side, and beginning to kick up his heels in a few dance steps. It is 6 January, the Russian Christmas, to which everyone looks forward the whole year.
The sledge-driver fishes out a balalaika and Porta his piccolo. To their accompaniment the Commissar sings in a deep bass:
‘Snow covers hill and plain.
From longing’s bitter deep
Our souls cry out in pain.’
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 Commi
ssar, 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?’
‘Sent ’em to Kolyma,’ the former Vice man says, making a clumsy attempt at palming the ace of spades under cover of the talk.
‘Better have that one, too,’ says Porta, sweetly, holding out his hand.
‘That’s funny,’ answers ‘Whorecatcher’, looking innocent.
‘Yes very, bleedin’ funny,’ rumbles Tiny, angrily. He draws his Nagan from its place in his boot-top. ‘You just watch somethin’ funny don’t ’appen to you, mate. Like you suddenly growin’ a couple extra ‘oles in you somewhere or other!’
‘I can’t see there’s any risk grabbin’ a bit o’ free cunt now an’ again!’ Tiny laughs noisily and scratches his crutch. ‘If you get picked up for it all you got to say’s the bag’s a bleedin’ liar!’
‘You don’t get away with it that easy, lad,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’ sadly. ‘The Vice Squad knows all those games. Keep off rape! Any caveman of a copper can prove it’s you that’s been inside it easy as winking. Cunts’re like guns. The rifling tells you what’s been through ’em. and even the most corrupt judge’ll take that kind of thing seriously. I can only remember two cases where the sod got away with it. There was this Anna Petrovna who’d accused some limp prick of having raped her. Well, the report revealed that she’d let 946 high-born gents get across her. They used to contact her by telephone. Not too clever of her that, ’cos our telephone bugging service checks all telephones. We had a serious talk with her, and she told all. Rape, that was just a bit of fun she was having. The real reason was he wouldn’t share his black money with her. They both wound up in Kolyma!’
‘But you said he got away with it,’ protests ‘Frostlips’, disappointedly.
‘I said he got away with the rape charge,’ answered ‘Whorecatcher’. ‘He went to the mines for having black money. Three years later
he committed suicide with an ice block.’
‘What was the other case?’ asks Porta, interestedly, raking in the pool. It is the fourth time he has had twenty-one!
‘It was a Chinese bint,’ smiles ‘Whorecatcher’, lifting up the corners of his eyes with his fingers to show us what she’d looked like. ‘She found out one day that her belly was growing at a surprisingly rapid rate. So she stepped off up to the social worker, who was one of them that was born in the bottom of a laid-up barge, an’ believed every word the slit-eyed bint told her about rape and being misused and that. So if the yellow bitch could get a prick tacked on to her coming nipper then she was certain of getting a bag full of roubles from the social lot. We had a bit of a talk with her and read what she’d said to the bull she’d got on the board as being pappy. Luckily for him our sex experts were able to prove that what this Pekin duck was saying was not on. They sent her to Kolyma, together with what she was carrying around in her.’
‘What about the feller?’ asks Porta. ‘He go to Kolyma, too?’
‘No, not for that,’ answers ‘Whorecatcher’, sorrowfully. ‘He went up for a different job, couple of years later. He’d been celebrating the first of May, and got drunk. While drunk he’d talked a lot to a bloke who didn’t agree with him. You know what I mean, I reckon? He was picked up before he’d even got rid of his hangover!’
‘Jesus,’ cries Tiny, impressed. ‘You reckon the German Vice bleeders are as good as your lot?’
‘I dunno,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’, playing a jack, on which Porta promptly drops an ace for another 21,’ but I can guarantee not much gets past ’em, and I know that when there ain’t a war on they visit one another and pass on the news!’
‘What a bleedin’ world we do live in!’ sighs Tiny, letting his cards down, thoughtlessly, so that ‘Frostlips’ gets a look at them.
‘Twenty-one,’ chuckles Porta. He has immediately picked up the signal from ‘Frostlips’, who is his partner.
Tiny is speechless. With a silly look on his face he stares at the ace and two queens lying in front of Porta. He has two jacks, and a king on the side. If it hadn’t been for all that talk about the Moscow Vice Squad he could have bid ‘Twenty-one’ long ago. But he is still so shocked at what he has heard that he does not even get annoyed.