Court Martial (36 page)

'If that bureaucrat can stand on his feet tomorrow morning,' says SS-Scharfiihrer Schramm, 'I'll look after you shits personally!'

Wolfgang looks at him and smiles sardonically.

'We'll look after him all right,' he promises, blackly.

An SS man shoves Hirtsiefer roughly, so that he knocks two prisoners over towards the bunks. They get to their feet and strike out at him.

'It was you, you lousy Social Democrat, who gave our hungry wives two cups in recognition of them having brought their twelfth child into the world'

Growls are heard from the men surrounding Hirtsiefer. Even the SS men's smiles have disappeared.

'Comrades, you forget they also received two hundred marks,' he says, weakly.

'You shit! You deducted it from the dole money,' screams a mousy little prisoner from the far side of the table.

'And you kicked us in the arse, when we wanted an increase in the money for the kids,' roars SS-Sturmmann Kratz crashing his rifle butt on the ground.

'Your rotten two hundred marks was our lot,' rages a prisoner, 'and we could then die of hunger far as you were concerned. But now you're where you belong and you can feel how it is to starve!'

'Kick his balls up into his throat,' an SS man suggests, smacking 'Mouse' on the shoulder.

They took him at nightfall. They beat him and kicked him. They dragged him through the latrines. Night after night they repeated the process. When his wife came to fetch him, in a large Mercedes, he had to be carried out.

The SS guards and the prisoners were furious. They'd got hold of a bureaucrat, and now he was being let loose.

A few days later the Gestapo came and took three SS men and eleven prisoners. They were shot for having mistreated the prisoner Hirtsiefer.

51
Abwehr = Counter-espionage.

+
V-men = (Vertrauensleute) = spies.

52
GEKADOS = (Geheime Kommandosache) = Secret Command Case.

53
Rabotschijs dvidatji porokh (Russian) = Workmen moving ammunition.

+
Krass tjuk (Russian) = Are you stealing?

++
Papirossa, starschij serschant (Russian) = Cigarette, staff-sergeant?

SS
Spajisibo (Russian) = Thank you.

**
Dashe, Mladschij lejtenant (Russian) = Very good, sir.

THE RED ANGEL

'If the lousy
Germanskis
come to Kosnowska we'll knock their heads in,' yells Mischa, making his Cossack sabre whistle in the air. 'If I hadn't got run over by that rotten train and lost my foot I'd have shot thousands of the fascist swine by now!'

'Germans are no better'n reindeer shit,' shouts Nikolaij, contemptuously, throwing a half-rotten potato against the wall. He is still too young to be called up, but he has already worked two years in the mines. His left leg is stiff. It happened last year when a charge went off too soon. Carelessness, said the NKVD examining committee. His father was killed in the same explosion. They carried his remains out on a tarpaulin. When the NKVD inspectors left they took an engineer and two dynamiters with them. They never came back.

'I'll eat a dog if those Germans don't get here, soon,' says Shenja, the hostess of 'The Red Angel'. She bends down and her huge breasts almost touch the floor. She takes a double-barrelled shotgun from under the counter and aims it at Yorgi, the party's political worker. 'I'll shoot their tails off, soon as I get a sight of them!' she shouts, ready for a fight.

'Your drawers'd drop off from the bang,' grins Nikolaij, knocking back a vodka.

'They would, would they? shouts Shenja, furiously. She puts two shells in the shotgun, cocks it and fires.

The sound is terrific. Those closest to her are almost deafened by it.

'Mad devils,' shouts Yorgi, who has fallen to the floor from pure fright. 'That crazy bitch could've killed the lot of us!'

'Anybody else think my drawers'd drop off ?' howls Shenja, loading the gun again so as to be ready if the Germans do come.

'Germans are the cowardliest people on the face of the earth,' says Fjedor, banging the flat of his hand on the table and making bottles and glasses dance. 'Yellow-bellies! Scared of losin' the little bit of life they've got in 'em. When I was at the machine school at Murmansk, one of the swine came to look at our machines. Run away from his own country. Only just managed to save his skin when Hitler took over. A real bastard
he
was. So bigheaded he couldn't make do with
one
secretary, but had to drag
two
of 'em round with him. Anybody could see what
they
were! Couple of high-priced whores from Moscow. Prick an' balls was all they'd been educated in. That rotten German had his nose so far into everything an honest
rabotschij
54
could never feel safe. Well, for our own sakes we decided we'd best get rid of him. So, late one night we pick him up coming rollin' out of the brothel
Mollnija
+
and stuff him in a cement sack. Believe it or not he got free before we got down to the old part of the docks. Down the street he runs, shouting his head off for help. But who's goin' to help anybody, particularly a German, in Murmansk in the middle of the night? We caught up with him, anyway, and give him one in the guts with a club, and then we all kicked his head about a bit and he quietened down. But they're hard to keep calm, those German sods. We dragged him down to the Czar's slipway.
You
know, there where they've got the barges laid up. Lord, the way he kicked and struggled when we held his head under the water. Just wouldn't go off quiet and self-possessed like a man. Every time we thought he must be dead, and pulled him out of the water, off he goes again, howling and spouting water and beggin' for his rotten life. A couple of us started kicking him in the balls. We kicked him so hard they must've ended up in his throat. He offered us all his money, every single kopeck, if we'd let him stay alive, and swore he'd put in a good word for us in Moscow. Just shows you what liars the Germans are. Who'd put in a good word for anybody who'd been doing his best to kill him?'

'"I know you, Alexandro Alexejewitsch," he shouted to our foreman, between gulps of water.

'See, even at the gateway to death a German notices everything, so that he can tell the Evil one down in hell who it was who sent him there. Now every Soviet citizen knows that one thing's what he tells God and the Evil one, and another thing's what he tells the NKVD. Well, his recognising Alex meant he'd left us no choice. Now we'd
got
to do him in. But these Germans are tough. We jumped up an' down on him till every bone in his body must've been broken. Under the water he went on sendin' up bubbles and spitting like a forest cat in springtime, but death took him in the end even though he'd fought a good fight.'

'They're a pestilence, those devils,' shouts Pjotr, gripping the bolt of his Home Guard rifle. 'If they come here, we'll soon finish
them
off. Bang, this'll go, and there'll be one German less left in the world.

'I want a couple of 'em alive,' shouts Cholinda, the milkman's wife. 'I'd hang 'em from the beams, I would, and castrate 'em. Then we could sit an' enjoy their screamin', just like the Tartars used to do when they surprised a feller between their wives' legs.'

We caught a couple of Finnish fascists in December '39,' says Sofija, happily. 'We hung 'em up by the feet and beat 'em between the legs until we dropped with exhaustion. It was a couple of officers with green stripes down their trousers and swastikas in their wicked eyes. When we was finished with 'em their grey trousers'd turned red. Before they died they were sorry a hundred times over that they ever attacked the Soviet Union an' put out the eyes of small children!'

'That's what I like to hear,' roars her husband, Vassia, fanatically. 'When I was serving in the Levtenow punishment camp we had that many ways of killing off the enemies of the people we sentries got mixed up ourselves. But when it came to the fascists, we just used to flay 'em like we skin reindeer. Our OC, a hellhound from Chita, collected gloves. His house was just like a museum. One day he discovered that he was short of one particular kind. He whistled up the whole camp, went round the ranks and selected a man and a woman of each nationality. The chosen ones were taken to the kitchen and made to put their arms into boiling water. Then our Mongolian OC skinned their hands and arms neat as you please, and had some gloves for his museum that nobody else had. Some shit must have talked in Moscow, though. What a row there was! I was lucky, I'd been on other duties that day and hadn't been in the kitchen. On a hell of a cold morning up turns a little commissar, who'd forgot how to smile before he was born, even. He was so little he could've walked upright under the belly of
a
horse! The heel-less Cossack riding-boots he wore had legs no bigger'n thimbles but still came up to his knees. If his ears hadn't stuck out like bat-wings his tall pointed fur cap would have rested on his shoulders. It was so tall he could use it for a stool. It took him twenty minutes to sentence the glove collectors to death. Decapitation by sabre on the parade ground before sundown. He chose the executioner personally. A
kalorshnik
55
from Leningrad, a giant of a fellow, who could have hidden the Commissar from Tomsk in his open mouth. He was in for life for having murdered four women, chopped their bodies to pieces with a woodsman's axe, and thrown the remains in the Luma.

'All of us, both prisoners and permanent staff, were paraded to see it, so we'd all get an idea of what'd happen to any of us who might get the idea of collecting gloves for ourselves. It was a nasty execution. The woman-murderer from Leningrad was as nervous as a virgin with her backside pushed up against a red-hot stove. Every time he looked at the little Commissar from Tomsk, he shook like an aspen. He started by cutting an arm off the first one. The poor fellow bellowed like a bull, but not for long. In two shakes his head was rolling on the parade ground. The next one he did, he took half the man's chest off along with the head. That's how it went with all ten of 'em. That murderer from Leningrad was strong as a bear. When he swung the sabre it fair
whistled
through the air.

'The OC from Chita was the last of 'em to be done. Three strokes and he was gone. Then the Commissar from Tomsk pulled his Nagan and put a bullet straight between the eyes of the quadruple murderer from Leningrad. He swayed like a tree in a storm and down he went amongst the ten he'd cut the heads off. That's what we'll do when the Germans come. We'll pull their hides off an' hang 'em to dry outside Party Headquarters. No commissar'd bother just now
what we
did to Germans.'

His stream of words is interrupted by the opening of the door. A thick cloud of snow blows into the drinking-shop.

'Shut the bloody door,' everybody shouts at once, as the icy breath of the Arctic sweeps through the room.

A young woman, holding a three-year-old boy by the hand, leans back against the door. With a tired movement she pushes back her hood and wipes the snow from her face. She blows on her cold hands and stamps her feet on the floor to get some warmth back into them. Then she looks searchingly around the packed room, where the air is thick with machorka smoke.

'Looking for me, woman?' asks a skinny fellow with a white face full of pimples. His forehead is as low as that of a mental defective. His eyes gleam with animal ferocity.

'Come home now, Gregorij,' she begs him, in a low, quivering voice.

'Not a chance,' snarls Gregorij, emptying his beer glass with a long slobbering sound. 'Get off my back, woman! I can't stand the sight of you
or
that little whore's son of yours!' He takes a long swig of spirits and gives out a rumbling belch.

'You promised me this morning you would not get drunk today,' she says, complainingly, pushing a lock of dark hair back from her forehead.

'Would you believe that? Now this bitch of a woman says I'm drunk!' He hiccoughs, and grins foolishly. 'If that ain't an insult, I don't know what is! You're forgettin' perhaps, who's commissar in this town! Just you wait, you bitch! It's easy for me to fix you an' that whore's brat!' He refills his mug and drinks again. The beer runs down over his chin and chest as he drinks. Truhhh!' he puffs, blowing the beer out over his face. Don't come here tellin' us what to do, you Kiev mare! There's plenty of room in Kolyma for Trotskyists like you! I know what you're
thinkin
', you wicked counter-revolutionary bitch, you!' he slobbers drunkenly, and wobbles uncertainly towards her with his full tankard in his hand. With a cackle of laughter he empties the beer over her head and slaps her face. 'Fuck with the pretty officers all right can't you, you wicked devil! Don't think there's any of us here believes you were married to that shit of a captain! Fell in battle 'gainst the Finnish fascists, you say! Jew lies! The shit shot himself 'cause he was scared of goin' to the front! I know what's what, I do! Ain't I the
polittruk
56
?'

'You're dead drunk,' she says, quietly, wiping the beer from her face with her sleeve. 'Won't you ever grow up? Tomorrow you'll be sorry!'

He looks at her with
a
foolish, drunken look on his face, pushes her to the floor dragging her by the ankle, like a sled, across the floor to the grinning crowd at the bar. 'Here,' he shouts, ripping her clothing apart, 'help yourselves, anybody! I Commissar Gregorij Antenyew, give you my permission! Whore's are state property!' With a harsh laugh he forces her legs apart.