The Commissar
‘Mama mia! What a punch!’ cries Porta, who is sitting on a pile of gold ingots enjoying the fight.
We are all taken up by the battle. We shout and encourage them, and give good advice.
His face pouring with blood, Heide tries an attack, which, by all the tenets of boxing, is suicidal. One hard blow after another crashes into Tiny’s twisted face. It resembles a bowl of minced meat, blood oozing from it. Tiny takes it all with the indifference of a rock, not even guarding against the merciless punches. You can no longer see from where the blood is coming. It is pouring from the whole of his face.
‘Kick him in the balls,’ shouts Porta kindly, banging his fist into his other hand to show how.
‘Butt him! That rotten swastika rat,’ roars Igor, furiously boxing holes in the air.
‘Tear his head off!’ screams the Commissar. ‘Kill the stinking Nazi pig!’
There is no doubt where the Russian/German audience has its sympathy.
Tiny steps backwards towards the cellar door. Kostia. the little slant-eyed Siberian with the big Cossack fur hat, opens the door. The whole prison seems to shake as Tiny falls backwards down the stairs and through the trapdoor which leads to the heating system. All we can see of him are his size 14 boots caught on the edge of the trapdoor. The rest of him is dangling over the hissing hot-water pipes which have been smashed by the explosions.
Heide gives out a victorious yell, and throws himself murderously at Tiny, who is desperately attempting to release himself from the trapdoor. Kostia and Porta help him by pulling off his boots. He somersaults up onto his feet.
For a moment the two bloodthirsty berserkers stand watching one another. Heide, the boxer, is continually on the move, and using his left. It is no secret that he has a left hand everyone is afraid of. He has learnt to use it in the same way as the Britishers. Every punch is hard and deadly accurate. He is a feared regimental boxer, and has won countless matches. Anyone but Tiny would long since have been dead. Heide is grimly determined to kill him. Years of hatred are culminating in the battle between these two.
Tiny gives a scream like a bull elk at mating time, and flails away, but without any of his punches landing. He has no thought of defending himself. A hail of hard blows makes him stagger for a moment. He spits out a couple more broken teeth. His mouth looks like a crushed tomato.
Heide gets home two karate kicks on Tiny’s body. The spectators howl in disgusted protest. When Tiny manages to do the same, they cheer and clap excitedly, and all seem to feel that everything is as it should be.
Shortly after, Tiny goes down on one knee. Heide immediately kicks him in the face, with a cracking sound like eggs breaking.
Tiny is now literally mad with rage. Roaring furiously he gets back up on his feet and lands a right on the side of Heide’s head which sends him spinning round like a top. He gets a few more punches home, but this time on Heide’s ribs. With blood running down over his face and both eyes closed he goes in like a mad bull to crush the Nazi’s face.
But Heide ducks like lightning and feints a left towards Tiny’s bloody face. Lithely he springs to one side and avoids a murderous kick at his crotch which would have crushed not only his testicles but his entire pelvis if it had landed.
Heide grins satanically, and begins to hammer away at Tiny’s smashed face with his ramrod of a left.
‘We’ve got to stop this,’ says the Old Man, worriedly. ‘Hell, that Hamburg crook’s no more than a gutter fighter. He hasn’t the faintest idea of how to box. The Nazi pig’ll murder him. It’s like a cat playing with a mouse!’
‘The big dope don’t even know how to defend himself,’ says Gregor, shaking his head in commiseration.
‘Stop ’em!’ repeats the Old Man. ‘It’s cold-blooded murder!’
‘Have to shoot Heide to do that,’ says Porta, accepting one of the Legionnaire’s Caporals.
Heide’s fists are going like drumsticks, and every time they land on Tiny’s face it sounds like a butcher slapping a parcel of minced meat.
Tiny keeps hitting out, but without his punches landing.
Heide is dancing round merely flicking his left into his face, certain he has won.
Tiny gives out a ringing scream, and rushes forward like a mad bull in the arena.
The attack makes Heide step to one side professionally, and accept a couple of light blows. He bobs and feints, cool as a cucumber, takes a step forward and lands a straight left which stops Tiny as if he had run into a wall. His animal roar turns to a strangled gulp, as the air is knocked out of his lungs. He stops, in confusion, and wipes the blood from his eyes, trying to find Heide, who is dancing lightly around him on his toes. Every time Tiny throws his club of a fist at him he is out of reach. Cut to bloody doll-rags, Tiny shakes his head in an attempt to clear it. His left ear hangs down on his neck, half torn away.
‘Yellow Nazi swine!’ he growls furiously, and kicks out backwards like a horse.
Heide sees his chance. Two murderous blows and a kick and Tiny is staggering across the concrete floor like a dying man, with blood streaming from his nose and mouth.
Heide struts over towards the wall, brushing his hands together contemptuously, as if he had been handling something filthy.
‘Butcher’s offal!’ he snarls, and goes to a water-tap to swill the blood from his face.
Tiny, who is lying on the floor struggling desperately to regain his breath, lifts his bloody head, and peers around. He looks like a grizzly bear awakened too early from hibernation, and he is just as vicious as one.
The babble of conversation amongst the spectators dies away. The sudden silence warns Heide, who has begun to comb his hair. He whirls and barely manages to duck under Tiny’s giant fist as it comes hurtling at him in a hook which would have taken off his head if it had landed.
Heide goes to work with a whole series of professional body blows.
Tiny’s lungs whistle for air, but Heide is in close, hammering at his middle. It feels as if his stomach is being smashed in, and his lungs dilate emptily in his chest.
Murder and hatred glitter in Heide’s eyes. None of us doubt that he is not going to stop now until Tiny is dead.
‘Adolfs little Moses,’ gasps Tiny, with a horrible grin, swinging his arms in circles. He hits Heide on the chin with a punch which lifts him from the floor and throws him against a row of shelves. Machine-pistols clatter down over him. Tiny thunders forward and runs straight into the barrel of an mpi in Heide’s outstretched arms. He is moving so fast it is a wonder the barrel of the weapon does not go straight through his body. He gives out a shrill scream and goes down on his knees with both hands pressed to his stomach.
With a crazy grin Heide swings the machine-pistol at him, but Tiny manages to duck away from it and the butt only grazes his head. He rolls across the floor and gets back up on his feet. On his way he too has got hold of a machine-pistol, and now the two men go at one another with the butts. Heide is the faster at this, too. Tiny remains the slow-thinking gutter fighter with no idea whatever of finesse. What takes Heide a fraction of a second to work out, takes Tiny an hour. Every time Tiny thinks he has Heide set up and swings at him, the mpi butt hits something else. Igor goes down without a sound, blood streaming over his red-painted face.
Heide has got round behind Tiny, who is standing staring blankly at the unconscious Igor whom he thinks of as a friend.
‘Sorry!’ he mumbles, sniffing sorrowfully. Behind him Heide takes careful aim, and brings the butt of the mpi down on the back of his neck. He goes down on his face like a felled tree, his arms spread out like a man crucified.
The Old Man bends over him, worriedly, feeling for his pulse.
‘Get a doctor!’ he orders, harshly.
‘Doctor?’ the Commissar screams with laughter. ‘Where the hell d’you think you are? You’re in Vladimir isolation prison, man! They only use doctors here to certify death, and if there was one he’d be crazy from gas for the next 48 hours! Now it’s off! And it can??
?t be too soon!’ He turns to Igor and coughs an order in some strange Russian dialect.
When we are a few miles from the prison, a blinding flash of light illumines the sky, and we hear the long, thundering roll of an explosion.
‘Those villains blew up the prison anyway!’ snarls the Old Man furiously.
‘What the devil! At war aren’t we?’ remarks Porta, cheerily. ‘And it’s not only legal, it’s also our duty to knock off the lads from the other FPO. It’s only the communications centre Igor’s blown up! If the commandant went with it, nobody’s going to cry for him, either!’
The Old Man growls and looks angry.
A little later the differential goes on one of the trucks. We blame one another for it, and World War III nearly breaks out on the spot.
In the end Porta downs tools and refuses to do any more to repair the damage.
‘I’m a bloody tank-driver,’ he shouts furiously. ‘Accordin’ to regulations I’m not allowed to repair anything! The mechanical engineers are supposed to look after all that! Dial three zeroes and get ADAD*.’
‘I’m a tank-driver, too,’ bawls Kostia, his narrow black eyes glinting. ‘I do no repairs either!’
‘Let’s go in and shoot some dice,’ suggests Porta, crawling down into the Panther.
‘Why not?’ grins Kostia, following him.
‘No you bloody don’t. I won’t stand for it,’ shouts the Old Man. ‘I said I’d have nothing to do with your gold robbery, but I’m still the goddammed Section Leader of 2 bloody Section! Out of there, Porta, and get on that differential! That’s an order!’
The only answer the Old Man gets is the smack of the hatch, closing down and being dogged on the inside.
‘Frostlips’ and Gregor crawl under the broken-down truck with a lot of cursing and swearing, but give up after a while, shaking their heads.
‘Can’t do a thing with it,’ says ‘Frostlips’, ‘it’s a total write-off! The Yanks knew what they were doing when they made us a present of those rotten Studebakers! Capitalist shit!’ he rages, kicking at the big tyres.
‘What the hell’s that?’ asks the Commissar, and listens tensely.
‘Crow,’ cries out ‘Whorecatcher’ nervously, staring up at the dark sky.
As if in reply an old scout biplane appears from the clouds and circles low over us. Then it disappears again into the cloud curtain.
‘If it’s us they’re looking for, they know where we are now,’ remarks the Old Man, uneasily.
‘It’s not us,’ says the Commissar thoughtfully. ‘I had some German equipment and weapons scattered about in the prison, and the Kübel with the smashed radiator I left outside. So they’re not looking for Russians. They’re looking for a German Brandenburg Commando*!’
The broken-down truck is taken on tow behind one of the T-34s.
‘We’ll get another truck all right,’ promises the Commissar, confidently. ‘But until we do we’ll just have to tow that Yankee shit.’
Six days after our departure from the Vladimir prison we halt in a deserted, forgotten village to make necessary repairs to two of the vehicles. Their radiators are boiling so much that it is a wonder they have not split open long ago.
When the repairs are completed we sit down to play cards with the village mayor and the local OGPU chief, a man who got into political hot water twenty years earlier. We play in silence for a while, until ‘Frostlips’ accuses the mayor of cheating. When ‘Frostlips’ keeps on with his charges the mayor gets angry and threatens to cut off his ears if he does not stop talking such nonsense.
‘May God grant you the pains and tortures of a slow death, you immoral dog,’ snarls ‘Frostlips’ at the mayor.
The mayor goes pale, but still continues to cheat. Suddenly the light goes out, and while the mayor is gone to see what has happened, ‘Frostlips’ sweeps the money up from the table and hurries out into the kitchen.
When the fuse has been changed and the sleepy light again shines down over the table, the mayor discovers that his winnings have disappeared. He gives out a loud yell and looks under the table in the vain hope that the money has fallen on the floor. Of course, it has not.
‘And you’re the one who’s supposed to see to it there’s law and order here,’ he screams accusingly at the OGPU chief, as he realizes slowly that he has been robbed. ‘May the Evil One grant you thousands of cramps, pestilences and cankers, and so order it that these bounties not only fall upon you. but also upon your children and your children’s children even unto the twelfth generation, if you do not find my money!’
‘When we’re finished with this lousy war,’ scowls Barcelona, ‘I don’t want ever to see snow again! Damnation, how I hate snow! No matter where you look everywhere’s white! The only chance you’ve got of seein’ a bit of colour is to go out and look at your arse in a mirror!’
‘What did you do before you became a soldier?’ Kostia asks Porta.
‘Oh, a lot of things,’ answers Porta. ‘Beat up the mothers’ darlings from out in Dahlem, and fucked their girls; mugged a yokel now and then that’d come to Berlin to find out what it was like to ride on a tram. Had a job for a bit delivering for the greengrocer on Bornholmer Strasse, and then went up in the world and went round with coke on a delivery bike. Used to measure up the coke in a wooden keg. That was 5 litres and cost 95 pfennigs. Every household’d buy one of them, and it was just enough to keep the place warm through the evenin’.’
‘Bloody hell!’ cries Kostia, in amazement, ‘I always heard you Germans were high finance people and that rich, you put notes in between your sausage and your bread!’
‘Don’t believe all you hear,’ Porta advises him, condescendingly. ‘In Old Moabitt we were that poor we used to steal the bottoms out of the beer-glasses when we went past a boozer!’
‘We were poor, too,’ says Igor. ‘I washed houses, and made just about enough so’s things could go round. One little vodka of a Sunday at the most, and even though it’s forbidden to be poor in the Soviet Union we were still poor anyway. But then I got a bit more rich too, and I would’ve been really rich if you rotten Germans had stayed where you belong. My young brother an’ me hit on a really great idea. We started holding up the deliverers from the meat market, and selling the proceeds on the black.’
‘Did you rustle cows then?’ asks Tiny, with interest. ‘That ain’t no good! I know all about that ’cos me an’ the fur Jew’s kid David pinched one of them things once. All we got out of it was all three of us landed up with old Nass in the David Station. Since then they don’t bring cows inside. They took the bleedin’ thing up to Nass’s office on the first floor, and then couldn’t get it down again. They ’ad to ’oist it down, and when it wouldn’t go out of the window they’ad to knock a ’ole in the wall for the walking milk-shop. They made it too little, and before they’d finished the cow got that scared of’avin’ been picked up by the coppers that it shit all over Nass an’ all ’is detectives!’
‘No, we did not take live cattle,’ explains Igor, with a cunning grin. ‘We waited for the ones who came to fetch meat on bicycles. When they went in to warm themselves with a quick early morning vodka, they’d leave their bikes outside. Then we would take the lot, bikes, meat and all. They tried to come after us sometimes, but they never caught us!’
‘Did your kid brother join the OGPU too?’ asks Porta, interestedly.
‘No, he was eaten by lions!’
‘Eaten by lions?’ asks Porta, in astonishment. ‘How, then? I’ve never met anybody who’s been eaten by lions!’
‘Well, it was like this,’ sighs Igor, sadly. ‘We never used to pay to get into the Zoo, we went in over the wall. Sometimes, of course, we made a mistake and landed in with the sea-lions or the polar bears. We always got away with it though. The polar bears were that surprised when we came chasing over the wall that they never thought of eating us until we were out of there again. After a bit we knew all the animals pretty well. And they knew us, too. It was only the keepers who d
idn’t like us.
‘Well there was one day when we hadn’t had anything proper to eat for several days, and were standing there watching the big cats getting outside their dinners,
‘My kid brother was standing down in front of the lions’ cage watching the keepers putting great big lumps of meat in to them. When the keeper was out for a minute, my brother nipped into the cage and grabbed a big chunk of meat from right under the nose of a motheaten old lion. It gave out a terrible roar when the meat disappeared, and struck out at him. He got such a blow that he went flying up in the other end of the cage and landed on another lion that was having its lunch siesta. All hell broke loose. Round and round they went in the cage! The whole crowd of ’em after my brother. What a din! When the keepers finally turned up there wasn’t much left of him. Those mangy lions had eaten him all up!’
Kostia tells us that he has always been a headhunter, and has caught many prisoners who had escaped from Kolyma.
‘The Jakaeirs always told us when anybody had gone over the wall. They got ten roubles for the information. Bounty was a hundred roubles for every body we handed in. We were merciful. We never tortured a prisoner. We would shoot him sleeping, so that he would not experience the fear of death. Winter was the best time. We could collect the bodies and store them until we had a sledge-load. In summer we had to get them handed in before they rotted and could not be identified. We got no pay for bodies unless they were identified at Central Camp, and there was another risk in handing in rotten bodies that nobody wanted. I know several who have been hanged for an unsolved murder. In that way the police got them off their lists and had less trouble with their percentage of open-ended cases.’
‘Hell’s bells!’ cries Gregor, spitting, as if to get rid of a nasty taste. ‘What kind of company’s this we’ve got into?’
‘But it was parasites on the body of the community we captured, ‘Kostia defends himself.