Cold War in a Country Garden

by Lindsay Gutteridge

  They slept till the morning breeze rattled the door.

  “Let’s go, fellers.” Bill Olsen mimicked Dilke’s simulated Americanese.

  They sluiced cold water on to their faces, then walked beneath the door. It swung above them, crashing violently and intermittently against its catch.

  It was dark and cold but they were glad to be out of the workshop. A flush of light marked the skyline. They sat at the top of a cement slope which led to a footpath and watched the light creep up from the horizon. The swaying grasses, at first silhouetted against the sky, gradually turned green. A lark trilled as if half asleep. The bird’s song and the smell of grass and damp earth were sweet after the journey through the dirt and stink of the shed. Henry lay back while his companions searched the photograph for a track to the main camp building.

  The army had taken over a farm. Its roughly plastered, whitewashed walls were turning from grey to pink in the changing light. A long, rambling, single-storey building, it was partly obscured by the rampant vegetation of a derelict kitchen garden.

  Dilke and Olsen stood up.

  “You O.K., Henry? I’d like to push on.”

  “He’s a growing lad; needs his sleep!” laughed Bill Olsen, and lightly kicked the sole of Henry’s outstretched foot.

  They walked down towards the footpath and Henry opened his eyes, sat up smartly, and with sudden energy pursued them.

  A forest of grass bodering the path concealed a gutter—just a shallow depression running parallel with the pathway leading to the house. They had seen it on the photograph and when they came to where the grass was sparse they turned off the grit-strewn track and walked through the forest of brittle stalks to the gutter, which was filled with fine sand.

  At seven, two giant figures passed. Their heavy footfalls on the gravel and the swish of their stiff overalls signalled their approach; their dark shapes loomed for a moment through the screen of grass and then diminished rapidly towards the shed.

  The flat, sandy bed of the gutter stretched before them. In places the grasses leaned from each side and meshed together overhead. Bill Olsen was reminded of the Zambesi—in the morning sun the white sand gleamed like water.

  At eight they walked into a tunnel of overhanging foliage. They heard a dry, rustling sound overhead, a clutch of newly hatched grasshoppers hung inverted from stalks of grass.

  Henry shot at a hopper but only injured it. It crashed down, falling from blade to blade, dislodging one of its fellows in passing. The dislodged insect fell on its back a little distance from the men, frantically kicked itself upright and went off in short hops. They watched it go out of the shadow of the over-hung foliage and up the dry bed of the gutter till it disappeared round a bend.

  The injured hopper hung by one leg from the lowest grass stalk. It hung for a minute, aimlessly moving its other legs and its antennae, then it fell at their feet. Blackeyed and pale-bodied, it was somehow pathetic in its helplessness. They despatched, dismembered and grilled it, the flesh within the as yet unhardened casing was white and succulent; Bill Olsen produced three cans of beer to accompany the meal.

  By nine o’clock they had moved on.

  The wide, sandy road over which they had travelled at last faded out; they scrambled through undergrowth and came out on to a cement path beside the building. A brush-width of paint had been run along the base of the whitewashed wall, its brilliance was hard on their eyes, but its broad, smooth surface made a good path and in a short time they came to the end of the wall and turned the corner.

  The building was in the shape of an L: the long leg of the building was on their left; facing them, and at right-angles to the main building was an extension. A rough stone table stood outside, shaded by a vine which grew over an openwork awning. A man sat at the table on a tubular chair.

  The sun blazed on the forecourt which lay between them and the distant figure.

  As they set off across the coarse grey surface, sunlight flashed from the broken flints and split pebbles embedded in the concrete surface. Within an hour they reached the shelter of a bank of nettles and from its shade they watched the man. He sat with his forearms resting on the table top, with his peaked military cap on the table at his elbow. He was of medium height, very broad, his neck was short, his head round, his hair close cropped.

  “Bratislav Volsk. Born 1913. Eldest child of a family of ten. Son of peasant farmer. Served in Soviet Army during the Second World War. Present rank: Marshal of the Rumanian Army; Tank Training Section…”

  Dilke remembered the potted biography on the back of Volsk’s photograph—he also remembered the picture of the hard mouth and the round peasant cheeks squeezing up the small black eyes—this was unmistakably Volsk.

  He sat under the vines, his hands flat on the table, a thin cigar like a factory chimney smoking between two fingers. He was immobile, gazing at the plains which shone in the mid-morning sun. From the doorway at his back came the muted sounds of an office: typing, telephones ringing, file drawers being slammed. He sat without movement for fifteen minutes. An orderly came out with a pile of papers and stood beside the table; only Volsk’s eyes moved; they swivelled sideways at the man, then his right hand reached out and took the papers. The man saluted and re-entered the building. Volsk placed the papers before him, scratched a match along the table top and relit his cigar; he picked up a pen and began signing.

  His movements had been deliberate and slow but now he signed the letters fast, turning the sheets like a sorting machine. He pushed them“aside, anchored them against the slight breeze with his cap and returned to his meditation. The orderly came to retrieve the papers and deliver a message. Volsk looked down at his watch, nodded, extracted a pack of Cuban cigars from his breast pocket and lit one; smoked it, glanced again at his watch and walked stiffly indoors.

  “That’s our man,” said Dilke. “He may come out after lunch; let’s get a bit nearer.”

  They walked under the table and began to climb the trunk of the vine. But before they reached the table top Volsk had returned, he was seated again when they climbed on to it. A strand of the vine lay across one end of the table and they sat beneath its leaves to recover their breath and eat some of their rations. The table top was a slab of marble; squashed and dried-out cigar ends lay under the leaves and the yellow burn marks of abandoned cigars marred the blue-veined top. A smell of body odour and garlic drifted down the wind.

  Volsk had a busy afternoon: he dictated some letters; went indoors to take telephone calls; gave orders to his men. A squad of tanks clattered off the road and parked in the compound which Volsk overlooked; the tank corps commandant came to Volsk for instructions, his goggles pushed up on his dust-streaked forehead. A dispatch rider roared up to the side of the building, delivered a message and waited at attention; Volsk sent him off without a reply.

  In the later afternoon he was visited by two officers, and his manner, which had been taciturn and abrupt, changed. He switched on a smile, pushed back his chair and stood to shake their hands vigorously. He called for more chairs. Volsk was by turns silently attentive and voluble, slapping the marble top with the flat of his hand to emphasize his points. His batman brought out lemon tea and finally he walked them back to their staff car and said goodbye. Though their arbour of vines gave some shelter from the sun it was a hot day and Volsk sweated heavily. Since they had first seen him, bare-headed and with the top button of his jacket undone, his standard of dress had deteriorated. He now sat with cigars sticking out of one pocket, a khaki handkerchief out of another and his jacket completely unbuttoned. The orderly came to him after the officers had gone, Volsk dismissed him and soon the office noises ceased; his batman left a tray with coffee and a bottle of vodka; Volsk removed his crumpled jacket and threw it on the table; he drew towards him a metal box which had been left by his visitors, unlocked it and took out a manilla folder of papers. He was into overtime: poured a generous vodka, lit up a new cigar and started work. He skimmed rapidly through the papers, t
hen with pen in hand began again and read more slowly, adding notes in the margins.

  Henry had used his camera during the day to photograph the camp surroundings… Volsk… his visitors…

  Dilke decided to take some pictures himself. He climbed higher up the vine so that he could look down on the table. It took him an hour to reach a point which was sufficiently high and clear of foliage to give him a good view. Through the viewfinder Dilke saw the whole of the table and the man seated at it. He sat with his tunic shirt undone, a grey fuzz of hair showing on his chest; his short neck thrust from the open shirt; the ring on his left hand glittered as he turned the pages.

  Dilke changed to a telescopic lens; it gave him a close-up of the papers, the hands, the box. The box was old and worn, the steel shining through the chipped blue paint; two combination padlocks lay on the table beside it; a sheet of notes was pasted inside the lid; the box contained more folders.

  Dilke photographed each paper as Volsk turned it up; the light was failing but he went on exposing a second film even after his meter had stopped registering the light: the backroom boys might squeeze an image out…

  Volsk locked away the papers and Dilke rejoined Henry and Olsen and they sat under the leaves amongst the stale tobacco shreds and waited.

  Volsk drank steadily till it was quite dark under the arbour, the intermittent glow of his cigar lighting his profile.

  They heard a squeak and a thump as he recorked the vodka, saw the flying red parabola of his cigar butt go up through the vine leaves and out into the wasteland. His chair scraped on the rough concrete and he walked from under the arbour and urinated into the black tangle of nettles, gazing at the moon which rose over the northern plains. He went indoors; they heard the door slam, a key turn and a light appeared in a window of the extension building behind them. The light illuminated the table; the half-empty bottle of spirits remained; the jacket and the steel box had gone. The window creaked open and was put on its catch. Dilke looked at his watch, it was eleven o’clock, the light went out: Volsk had gone to bed.

  3

  They had two alternatives: to climb up the vine to the window of the bedroom or climb down and make the long trek into the main building and round to the bedroom. They had no ropes and they realized that they might waste hours climbing to the window and then find that they could not get down to the floor. There were six or seven hours before dawn and Dilke decided that this should be enough time to go the long way round and get into position.

  In three hours they were inside the bedroom.

  A strip of moonlight lay on the white wall. To their eyes, made sensitive by hours of travelling in the night, the bedroom and its contents were clear. It was a large whitewashed room with a bare, plank floor. It contained only three items of furniture: a camp bed; a monumental wardrobe with flamboyant peasant decorations on it; and a huge safe, silvery gray in the moonlight, its metal handle in the form of a clenched fist holding a bar; the door was decorated with cast-iron curlicues, surmounted by an eagle, manufactured—Dilke smiled—in Baltimore.

  Volsk’s clothes lay in a heap on the floor. They could see the hump of his bare shoulder above the single blanket under which he slept. He was as motionless in his sleep as he had been awake. His deep, slow breathing filled the room. The bed towered above them, its tubular legs fitted into sockets beneath the canvas base and they could see no way up and no way through to the surface of the bed. They walked beneath it for an hour searching unsuccessfully for a route. There were only two hours left before daylight.

  They felt defeated.

  Suddenly there was a long, heavy sigh from the sleeping man, then a creak, and he turned in his sleep. The canvas sagged and stretched and billowed overhead; the bed groaned; a tumbling avalanche of blanket fell to the floor. They ran round to the side of the bed. The blanket sloped up in deep folds like the foothills of a mountain range.

  Dilke looked at his companions. Henry’s head was thrown back, his eyes fixed on the receding curves of Volsk’s body. His face had a hard look which had been absent when he joined Dilke three months before; there were marks of strain around his mouth and eyes, his brows were set in a frown. Olsen whistled tunelessly between his teeth as he secured the radio transmitter at his hip and tightened the crossbow harness on his back.

  “If you’re ready we’ll start. I’ll go first. Follow at intervals of a hundred millimetres. Place the transmitters wide apart and well down to the roots of the hair or we’ll lose them at his first haircut. I’ll put mine near the ear. Put yours on the crown of the head, Henry. And put yours somewhere between, Bill…” Dilke suppressed an impulse to shake hands… it would be too melodramatic.

  “If we get separated we’ll meet at the entrance of this room; if not there, then back at the box.”

  Bill Olsen zipped his last zip and made fast his last buckle; he grinned and reached out a hard hand; Dilke shook it and then shook Henry’s. He turned and walked into the shadows of the nearest valley which led upwards. When he had ascended to the edge of the plateau he looked back, the climbers below were invisible in the shadows.

  The blanket was stiff and rough-textured, decorated with stripes and squares of colour which in the moonlight appeared as a patchwork of greys and blacks. It was like farmland; but beneath him Dilke could hear deep visceral rumbles and soft explosions; a rank smell rose through the coarse weave. He tracked up to the summit of the hill and stood on the edge of the blanket. Two figures toiled up the slope behind him.

  Before him Volsk’s flesh gleamed in the soft moonlight which was reflected from the wall. Dilke removed his boots and socks and stepped down on the skin; it had a firm, moist feeling, like the body of a whale.

  Volsk slept on his right side. Dilke walked up the curve of his chest; the huge thorax rose and fell rhythmically and as he moved higher the deep subterranean thud of the heart became louder. Dilke climbed on the ridge of the pectorals and passed a thicket of hair surrounding Volsk’s left nipple—like a cairn on a mountainside in a tangle of rusting wire; he walked along the curve of the deltoid muscle, over the prominent clavicle and into the hollow above the bone. Here, at the base of the neck, the skin was darkened by the sun. The beating of the heart was muted by distance but along the broad column of the neck the carotid artery pulsed to its rhythm. He kept a little to one side of the artery and walked up the thick strap of sterno-mastoid muscle. Dilke stood on the curve of the neck; above and to his left stood the convoluted ear, like something by Henry Moore; on his right were the shallow craters of old carbuncle scars; before him were the first sparse hairs of the head.

  The cropped hair rose to waist height, it grew unevenly, its bare grey patches littered with dandruff.

  Dawn was approaching: a little colour crept into the black and-white moonlit world. Traces of yellow were discernible in the jackets of the climbers below him; and behind them the chequered slopes of the blanket were turning to shades of green and brown-—but the effect of fields and copses was superficial: this huge, rumbling, throbbing, pulsing hulk was alive.

  From the head came a harsh grumbling sound; beyond the Henry Moore Dilke could see the side of Volsk’s face covered with a dark stubble of unshaven beard. The jaw muscles were heaving and bunching beneath the skin; the sleeper was grinding his teeth. The noise lit a spark of fear in Dilke’s mind; it fed on childhood memories of ogres. The air stank with the fumes of vodka and garlic and wet cigar butts: it was like approaching the den of some foul-mouthed beast; a minotaur or a Cyclops… for the first time, Dilke felt unmanned.

  Olsen was now only thirty paces away, trudging up towards him with his crossbow unslung. Dilke unclipped his own bow and walked into the hair. The skin had a series of parallel scratchmarks on it, he walked across the swollen ridges and around the curve of the ear—looking for a good site for the radio.

  The hairs varied in thickness and in shades of grey. He chose one as thick as a sapling and, putting down his bow, he scraped away greasy fragments which clung to the
base of the hair and choked the crater from which it grew.

  He unpacked the transmitter. It was a little bigger than his fist and was clipped to a metal loop to which a tensioning lever was attached, the lever which would contract the strap and pull it tight into the rough, scaly trunk of the hair. He lowered the loop over the hair until the transmitter lay on the skin of the shallow crater then reached for the lever to tighten the fitting.

  From the side of his eye he saw a movement on the slope above. Bill Olsen was halfway up the curve of the head, walking with his eyes down, Henry was beyond him on the horizon. Then Dilke saw the lice. They were grouped on the head like browsing cattle. Dilke could clearly see the sucker of the nearest one thrust into the scalp, the light from over the horizon shone through their transparent bodies—he could see the blood pulsing into the stomachs of the creatures.

  Olsen, searching for a site for his transmitter, suddenly came upon a louse, it plucked out its sucker and scurried away, alarming the rest of the small herd. They rushed off leaving tracks in the hair. The scalp moved beneath Dilke’s feet; the hair around him stirred—though the air was quite still. Volsk’s body shifted uneasily and the muscles of his vast arm moved.

  Then a huge, dark shape appeared over the curve of the head.

  Volsk’s hand.

  There was a flash of yellow from his signet-ring, then the hooked fingers sped towards them over the bristling surface of the scalp.

  Dilke froze.

  Henry flung up both arms, his palms towards the juggernaut, then he disappeared beneath it without a sound. In one smooth reflex action, Olsen dropped on one knee and fired two bolts. They vanished into the whorls on the ball of the nearest finger. A noise like a thousand bulls bellowing hit Dilke and the hand vanished.

  The head beneath him jerked convulsively, pressing hard against his feet. He took off into the air; saw Olsen suspended before him like a man on a trampoline; he felt himself somersaulting in the same way, then fell in a spinning curve towards the slopes of the blanket. A kaleidoscope of reds, yellows, browns and greens flashed before his eyes. He hit the slope of the blanket twice and shot over the edge of the bed. The blanket fell from the bed to the floor in a long curve and Dilke whirled down it like a falling ski-jumper. He rolled off the blanket, skidded across the plank floor and fell into the gap between two floorboards. He finished his fall in a cloud of dust, striking his head against the side of the trench.