Republic Of Whores

by Josef Skvorecky

  “That chickenshit little Jew!” Střevlíček’s voice echoed through the quiet tank. “Thinks he can tell us how to do things when he doesn’t know ratshit about tanks.”

  “And these are the motherfuckers we support when we work,” said Žloudek philosophically.

  “Let him go to hell,” said the tank commander.

  “He’s permanently pissed off ’cause somebody’s having it off with his old lady,” explained Bamza.

  “You’re kidding. Who?”

  “A sergeant from the 106th,” said Střevlíček. “A few days back, Kohn drove her out into the street naked.”

  “Jesus!” said Bamza. “But she’s real cute.”

  “Yeah, but she’s a whore.”

  “What woman isn’t?” said Bamza philosophically.

  “Well, Kohn’s wife is, for sure,” said Corporal Střevlíček. “You can tell just by looking at her.”

  They all watched the officer as he headed towards the jeep.

  “Boys, on New Year’s Eve she was all over me. Got me stiff as a fencepost,” said Střevlíček wistfully.

  * * *

  The conclusion of the exercise — the conquest of another hill called Kužel Peak — was deplorable, and the major’s heart soared. From the brow of the hill, where he had positioned his jeep, he had a splendid view of the sunlit north-east slope of Old Roundtop. From the foot of Kužel Peak to the horizon, the landscape was swarming with armour. The first tanks, in mild disarray, were grinding up the slope. They should have been advancing in a line, but they weren’t. The lead tank was only about fifty metres from the Pygmy Devil — so close that he could see the sun reflecting off the glass in the gunner’s sights in the turret, and the ruddy face of the driver, who had left his hatch open to get a better view. (This was improper in a battle situation, and strictly against orders. The major happily made a mental note to remember it.) Just below the summit stood a tank that had shed a track. Near it was a small armoured car hung up on an unexpected lump in the terrain, like a turtle belly down on a slat with its feet flailing in the air. This was Captain Matka’s command vehicle. He stood beside it, belabouring the unhappy driver, who was trying, with the inadequate strength of his own muscles, to free it. The captain had forgotten about the tanks of his own squadron; they were swarming over the sunlit green grass, growing smaller as they receded. At least three of them were squatting motionless in the landscape, tiny figures in leather helmets scurrying busily around them, while flares arced above the field and squibs of imitation shrapnel burst everywhere. The enemy (carrying signs) fired enthusiastically and the tanks returned their fire. This part of the exercise was coming off perfectly.

  Then the Pygmy Devil’s attention was drawn to a tank rapidly swanning down a hillside to the foot of Kužel Peak, firing great cannon-bursts of backfire from its exhaust pipe. Behind the turret stood an officer, and as the tank drew nearer, accelerating and decelerating jerkily, the officer could barely hang on. The tank reached the embankment above the road that led around the foot of the hill. The major raised his binoculars to look. The driver had his hatch open, of course. Now he would decelerate and — but instead the driver gunned his vehicle and the tank slid quickly forward and dropped onto the road with a metallic clang. The officer on the turret disappeared. When the tank had advanced a few metres, he reappeared in the major’s binoculars. He was now on the ground, trying to regain his footing, but he fell back, and from the way he moved his mouth the major concluded that he was yelling.

  By this time the first tanks were beginning to rally on the major’s jeep, and the officers were jumping down and running towards him. Other tanks arrived, and in ten minutes the whole formation had assembled. The last to pull up were three wheezing self-propelled guns, their crews gathered casually behind the armour-plating like tourists in an open sightseeing car. Captain Matka loped up on foot, drenched in sweat. Behind him stood a group of markers with flare pistols in their belts, engaged in loud conversation. A group of medics brought up the helpless Bobby Kohn on a stretcher of camouflage canvas. He was groaning and at intervals he aimed vile curses at someone whose name they couldn’t catch. They set him down on the ground and a medic leaned over and took him by the leg. Kohn let out a roar of excruciating pain. After several more painful probes and pokes, the medic declared that the lieutenant had broken a leg. The news spread rapidly. “Serves the sonofabitch right!” said Střevlíček. “Pity he didn’t jam his tailbone up his ass while he was at it.”

  * * *

  They lined up the tanks and brought all the cannon to the same elevation. “We shall critique the exercise later, Comrade Captain,” said the Pygmy Devil coldly, “when we return to camp. For the moment, I merely want to point out a few shortcomings to the crews. Have them fall in.”

  Captain Matka was furious — especially at fate, which had seduced him with visions of unlimited power while blinding him to the fact that this power was unlimited only in a downward direction. Upward, the power structure was like the feudal system he’d learned of in his political schooling. He stood at attention in front of the row of tanks and roared like an alcoholic bull:

  “Battalion crews in order of troops — fall in!” Instead of a frenzy of bodies falling rapidly into order, as called for by the regulations, there was a slow, confused stirring of smudged and dirty figures. After two minutes of pushing and shoving, a ragged and incomplete column of men, four deep, had formed beneath the row of raised cannon.

  “You look like you’re lining up for a bloody funeral,” Matka declared, so he couldn’t be reprimanded later for tolerating slackness.

  “And no talking during falling-in,” First Lieutenant Růžička added. Matka executed an about-turn, raised his hand to his cap, and set off across the uneven terrain that separated him from the Pygmy Devil. His fat legs moved smartly back and forth in an attempt to represent a proper marching step, but he spoiled the effect by stumbling on a lump of dirt, making visible all the comic possibilities of this strange clown show. Matka approached the major, halted, clicked his heels together, and announced that the Seventh Tank Battalion had fallen in as ordered.

  He was instructed to stand at ease, and did so with the chilling awareness that he would face a post-mortem when they got back to base. He fell in behind the major, whose eyes were flashing with sarcastic delight. The Pygmy Devil maintained a long, rhetorical silence, and then began to address the troops.

  “Comrades!”

  “This should be more fun than a kick in the crotch,” whispered Bamza, who was standing behind Danny.

  “The purpose of today’s exercise,” the major continued, “was to test our capacity to mount an armoured assault on a hastily constructed defence system put in place by the enemy. It was an utter farce! A parody! It was chaos piled on confusion!”

  “He has a nice, clear way of putting it,” said Sergeant Vytáhlý, a science graduate, under his breath.

  “And he even uses big words properly,” remarked Sergeant Krajta, who was standing to Danny’s left. “Where would we be without our highly qualified officer corps?”

  “What you may be tempted to call an attack by this battalion on a hastily constructed enemy defence system, comrades,” the major went on, “looked more like a rabbit hunt. You were going every which way, you ended up in every possible hole. One daredevil started his turn on a slope so steep I was expecting him to roll right over at any moment. Comrades — you have put the lives of your comrades-in-arms in danger, and you have shown that, in all your time in the army, you have learned nothing at all. Where was the line? Where was the regulation fifty metres between vehicles? Obviously two years of training is not enough. We will have to think seriously, comrades, about extending the training period to three years. And another thing: there are comrades among you who have already been with us for two and a half years. One would have thought longer training would mean better training. But this exercise has shown that even these comrades are only capable of Svejking about. They do not ta
ke the battle plan seriously. They do not take drill seriously. They do not take digging-in seriously. But remember what the great Soviet commander Kutuzov once said: ‘More sweat —’ ”

  “ ‘— on the training field, less blood on the battlefield,’ ” a quiet chorale of sarcastic voices echoed.

  Now the Pygmy Devil got angry. “Yes, comrades,” he shot back. “When war comes, many of you are going to regret it. Many of you, comrades — except for that tiny handful of conscientious soldiers among you.” The Pygmy Devil pointed a finger towards heaven. “I wouldn’t normally say this because of a few slackers. But these slackers are a danger not only to themselves, but to all their comrades. They are a danger to your wives and your mothers. They have abused the confidence that the working people have placed in our army. But never fear, comrades, we know how to deal with them. They needn’t think we don’t know who they are. They needn’t think our working people will let them undermine what they have built with their own hands. No, comrades —”

  His voice echoed over the leather-helmeted heads of those slackers, ninety-two percent of whom — according to the card index of class origin put together by First Lieutenant Růžička and often vaunted in reports sent to high command — were from working-class or peasant backgrounds. He was all but drowned out by a rising breeze that began to flap the soldiers’ overall legs, making a sound like the snapping of many flags in the wind. They learned nothing new about the errors and imperfections they had perfected from exercise to exercise, but they did hear these darker threats, in which the working class became a strange, paranoid, bloodthirsty beast with its sharp eyes pinned on the army, and the army became seething with sedition and treachery spawned by that very same working class. The Pygmy Devil described the proclivities of this beast as though he were speaking for a neutral third party.

  Who knows, thought the tank commander, maybe he is.

  The sun hid itself in the clouds and the four ranks of men in oil-stained coveralls and leather helmets stood silently in front of the dark tanks. Above them the wind gave wild chase to grey autumn clouds, and carried away the angry voice of the tiny officer auguring a relentless series of sinister acts that this unprepossessing monster — the people — might yet perpetrate.

  When he gave up, defeated by an eddy of wind that swept an enormous column of dust from the roads and pushed it over the hill into civilian territory, Corporal Andělín Střevlíček said out loud: “He’s so full of shit, it’s running down his chin.”

  2

  THE FUČÍK BADGE TESTS

  One of Tank Commander Smiřický’s few pleasures in life was polishing his boots. He would sit on his box near his bunk and, with lightning strokes of his brush, polish the black leather to a mirrorlike sheen. Among all the things lying about the dormitory floor of Number One Squadron of the Seventh Tank Battalion — shirts with circles of sweat under the arms, coveralls reeking of oil, greasy paper from parcels of pastries sent from home, dirty towels spattered with blood drawn by the cheap razor blades sold in the camp store — his boots were something beautiful, something aesthetic he could cling to in a world otherwise dominated by military orders and the grey prospects they offered. Compared to the other things permitted during the mass cultural activity period (a stroll through the evening boredom of base camp, writing the thousandth letter to Lizetka, or sleeping through a Soviet movie in the base cinema), boot-polishing came closest to what a master of yoga does when he stills his mind by contemplating his own navel.

  Danny’s attitude was not typical of the Seventh Tank Battalion. Most of the men in the first squadron, now lounging about on their trunks and their beds, thought of boot-polishing as something for greenhorns. Their boots lay strewn under their beds and in the aisles, caked with mud and dust from the manoeuvres of that morning.

  The squadron had spent the afternoon cleaning and repairing the tanks. Now they were resting in a room crammed, like a submarine, with twenty-five sets of bunk beds with sagging, straw-filled mattresses, trying to kill time. The driver, Střevlíček, was over by the doorway, arguing with Sergeant Očko about the superiority of the German-built BMW motorcycle over the Czechoslovakian Jawa. Over in the Third Tank Battalion, four privates had been court-martialled for praising enemy technology and thus undermining combat readiness. But the last informer in the ranks of the Seventh Battalion, or at least the last one known to its members — a certain Otakar Hrouda — had long ago been rendered harmless by constant badgering, and in the end had jumped out of a secondstorey window. Dr. Sadař, a physician in basic training, had said Hrouda was suffering from serious mental imbalance, and he had been sent away to a military hospital in Prague. A few beds over, Private Bamza was reading a greasy, well-thumbed paperback, and on Sergeant Žloudek’s bunk, soldiers were showing each other snapshots of girls, some in states of partial undress. Several of the men were asleep on their bunks. The only one in the whole battalion doing anything that could be remotely construed as mass cultural activity was Private Mengele, who was strumming on a three-stringed mandolin, surrounded by a silent group of musically inclined soldiers. His sentimental voice carried through the room as he sang:

  Last night, I had a fit of masturbation —

  I did it twice, it’s very nice.…

  The political officer of the squadron, Sergeant Mácha, was sitting on a trunk with his back to the musical circle, biting his tongue and composing a letter to his wife, Majka. It was a quarter after seven, and the plan for mass cultural activity that evening (the sergeant had drawn it up himself and was personally responsible for its execution) said: 1900 — 2100: Singing circle rehearsal, chess tourn., FB circle prepare for FB test.

  Meanwhile Sergeant Mácha wrote: … I’m clipping the last fifty centimetres of my tape measure. I’ll be home before you know it, with you and Marenka, and all I’ll have left of the army will be beautiful memories. Then he crossed out the word “beautiful”. His memories could not bear writing about in detail, because they included the raven-haired daughter of the manager of the Jan Žižka Inn, located in the nearby village of Okrouhlice.

  A cry of “Gin!” came from somewhere in the rear of the room, followed by a dry slap. This was a tournament, all right, but it was hardly chess. The voice of Private Mengele rose above it all in a lyrical expression of protest:

  First, you do the long stroke; up and down, up and down,

  Next you try the short stroke; tickle the crown, tickle the crown.…

  Sitting on the last bunk in the corner, Sergeant Krajta was working on the third chapter of a book to be called Czechoslovak Army Folklore. He had conceived the work in terms of orthodox Jungian psychology, and it was not intended for publication.

  * * *

  At eight-fifteen, the door of the dormitory opened and in walked Sergeant Feurbach. He was wearing a pistol on his hip and a red armband around his sleeve, indicating that he was on duty. He bent forward so that he could see under the top bunk, and nodded to Tank Commander Smiřický. “Hey, man, Růžička wants to see you.”

  “What the hell’s he want?”

  “No idea. He just said get there on the double.”

  “Tell him not to shit himself,” said the tank commander, setting his brush down and pulling his boots on. He tugged the cuffs of his trousers carefully over the tops of his boots, took his jacket from the bedpost and put it on, did up his belt, set his cap on his head, and took a last look at his boots. They were gleaming. Satisfied, he walked out of the room, followed by Private Mengele’s operatic plaint, with the whole singing circle singing along:

  Bang it, whang it, smash it on the floor,

  Squeeze it, tease it, stick it in the door.…

  The profound loneliness implied by those lines moved him as it always did. For two years he’d been unable to forget the terrible, ebony-black despair that had filled him one November day, ages ago, when he’d sat staring at the cubicle wall where a cynical soul had carved the words 730 to go, and he had listened to another chorus of soldiers
singing the same song with deep feeling.

  A true soul of the people — unlike a purely intellectual spirit — doesn’t give in to sentimentality, because such a soul holds the world and its torments at bay with a vengeance.

  When the tank commander had closed the door behind him, the voices of the singing circle remained almost as loud, for they were raised in a rousing finale:

  But for personal perfection I prefer the human hand!

  * * *

  The tank commander walked out of the barracks, and the night air, heavy with the smell of ripening chestnuts, enveloped him. He walked past the illuminated windows of the staff office to the door that led to battalion headquarters. A sentry was sitting beside it with his nose in the only extant copy of a trashy nineteenth-century novel called A Bloody Encounter, or, The Smugglers of Dark Glen. It had somehow survived from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the army base had been built. So absorbed was the sentry that he didn’t notice the tank commander, nor did his assistant, who was standing behind the wicket in the bright foyer and leaning on the counter, engrossed in reading a sheaf of dogeared papers that couldn’t possibly have come from the military press; however, the sheaf was cleverly concealed inside an open copy of Rules and Regulations Governing the Comportment of Guards and Duty Officers.

  Danny walked through the office of the technical chief, where several soldiers under the command of the foulmouthed First Lieutenant Kámen were deep in a conversation about extra-military matters, and went into the typing room. Private First Class Dr. Mlejnek was there, angrily pounding a typewriter. He seemed out of sorts. A quarter of an hour ago, he had been summoned there on orders from Captain Matka, and now, instead of reading the manuscript of Sergeant Krajta’s book on the folklore of the Czechoslovak soldier, he had to assemble a work of fiction called The Commander’s Report on the Field Exercise in Which a Tank Battalion Mounts an Attack on a Hastily Constructed Enemy Defence System, although as staff typist he hadn’t taken part in the event. He looked as disgusted as Sergeant Kanec, who was sitting at the next table drawing the phases of the battalion’s attack on a map for Captain Matka’s personal use the day after next, during staff exercises. An experienced glance told the tank commander that these two over-qualified soldiers had enough work to last them at least four hours past lights-out.