by Leo Kessler
Now it was mid-afternoon, and at the point, Colonel Stuermer, narrowing his eyes against the glare of the sun, could just make out the blue wisps of lazy smoke emerging from the isbas1. They were arriving at the village of Chursuk. He decided to take no chances. Placing two troops under the command of Major Greul, he ordered him to secure the heights on both sides of the dusty winding country road. Then, assuming command of the rest, and followed at a distance of five hundred metres by Lieutenant Haas and his mules, he began to advance on the village.
The clip-clop of the mules’ hooves started the skinny-ribbed dogs, lolling outside the decrepit huts, off barking: the racket wakening the inhabitants of the huts who had been sleeping. Barefoot, shaven-headed boys, with slant dark eyes, came out, scattering the chickens which shared the huts with them, and gawped open-mouthed at the newcomers. Heavy-bosomed women in rags, their dark faces almost hidden, save for the eyes, by cloths hastily flung across them in the Muslim fashion, followed — and a few men. And Colonel Stuermer noted out of the corner of his eye that most of them were armed. Was he leading Stormtroop Edelweiss right into a trap? The thought flashed through his mind alarmingly. ‘Keep a weather-eye peeled, Meier,’ he snapped at the big NCO who followed at his heels, together with Jap, who because of the Mongol-cast of his features, which he had inherited from his Sherpa father, seemed to be attracting most of the attention.
‘Will do, sir,’ Meier replied promptly, and unslung his machine pistol significantly.
They passed on into a kind of rough square, with the houses built into the side of the rock wall above them and supported by rough-hewn, weather-worn timbers. To Colonel Stuermer’s mind, it would be an ideal place for an ambush.
He raised his hand and the dusty column halted. He would go no further, especially as his progress was barred by a group of men, dirty, unkempt, with bloodshot drunkard’s eyes, who, like the ones he had spotted earlier, were all armed. ‘Everybody on his toes,’ he commanded. ‘But nobody fires unless I give an order to.’
For what seemed an age, the ragged scowling bunch of tribesmen and the tense, anxious mountaineers faced each other in the hot rays of the sun in the dusty square, in complete silence. Suddenly there was the sound of many horses’ hooves. It was followed a moment later by the crackle of small-arms fire. ‘Stand to’ Colonel Stuermer ordered urgently as the crowd parted and about fifty horsemen came tiding full tilt, firing their ancient pieces above their heads as they did so.
‘Hold it!’ Stuermer yelled above the racket just in time, as the horsemen jerked at their reins and brought their sweat-lathered mounts back on their haunches in a slither of pebbles and a cloud of dust, sliding to a halt. The Karatski were putting on a demonstration of strength for his benefit.
For a few moments more, the wildly excited dirty horsemen continued to expend their ammunition while their frenzied, wild-eyed horses spun round in crazy circles. Then, one by one, the ancient curved rifles started to fall silent, until no one was firing.
Stuermer heaved a sigh of relief, and stared up at the dirty bearded faces of the sweat-stained horsemen. They were definitely un-Russian in appearance with their high cheekbones and slant eyes. No one in Intelligence had been able to tell him much about the Karatski, but one didn’t need to be clairvoyant to know that they were from the East, perhaps the last survivors of one of the great oriental scourges which had swept across Russia in the old days.
But the big colonel had little time to speculate about the origin of the horsemen. Suddenly one of them swung himself down from a white stallion heavily decorated in antique silver braids, and dropped neatly in front of Stuermer. ‘Bandit,’ he announced. ‘Ya Starost.’
‘He’s the headman here, sir,’ the corporal translated. ‘His name is — er — Bandit.’
‘Well, I’ll piss up my sleeve,’ Meier whispered to the colonel. ‘He shitting well looks like it too, sir!’
Stuermer agreed. The headman certainly did, with his long yellow face, terrible squint and long, drooping, Mexican bandit moustache, obviously dyed, hanging down on both sides of a sly mouth. Hoping that appearances did not always count, he said to the interpreter, ‘Tell him, Corporal, that we come as friends. Tell him that although we represent the mighty German Army, we will allow him and his men to keep their weapons, providing they use them only against our enemies — the Russians.’
‘Circumcise your watches!’ Meier breathed, in awe at the colonel’s boldness when the little force of mountaineers was clearly outnumbered by the wild riders. ‘You certainly know how to lay it on, sir.’
Stuermer ignored the NCO’s comment. His eyes were fixed on the headman’s face for his reaction. Although he didn’t understand the words, the yellow man’s reaction was obvious enough. At the mention of the word ‘russki’, he hawked thickly, spat in the dust and drew one dirty forefinger slowly along his throat as if he were slitting it. The headman was definitely no friend of the Russians.
The corporal took a long time interpreting the headman’s speech, in which he explained he and his people had always been the enemies of the Russians, presumably as far back as the days of the legendary Rurik. But in the end he finished his diatribe, which was replete with much hawking and spitting, and clapped his hands.
As if by magic, a barefoot, shaven-headed boy appeared, bearing a silver tray, obviously looted somewhere or other on one of the tribe’s rampages down into the plains. On it was a crisp loaf of white bread, salt and two glasses of vodka.
Stuermer knew the tradition. In the old days when Germany had first invaded Russia, the advancing troops had been welcomed thus by headmen at the entrance of every village. But when the population had begun to realize that the Greater German Wehrmacht had not come as liberators from the Communists, but as new conquerors, the custom had ceased. He took the loaf, tore a strip off it, and swallowed it. Then, placing a pinch of salt in the ‘V’ of taut skin formed by stretching his thumb and forefinger round one of the glasses of vodka, he licked the salt, raised the glass in toast to the headman, who had taken the other glass, and downed the firewater in one fast gulp.
The ice was broken. The wild-looking tribesmen applauded by slapping the butts of their weapons against their horses’ sweating flanks and the celebration could begin.
Woman after woman entered, bearing tray upon tray of food: mutton, raw and pounded to a kind of stinking paste, boiled, or roasted and pungent with garlic. Great mounds of the crisp white bread of the area. Huge casks of honey. Bowls of water, drawn directly from the River Kuban and grey with the tiny pebbles that it contained. Steaming gourds of warm mare’s milk — and alcohol, for although the Karatski were supposedly Muslim, and from the window of the barn in which the Stormtroop had been billeted they could see the wooden mosque, they seemed to have no objection to alcohol. On the contrary, the road outside was already littered with ‘vodka corpses’ and the tribesmen constantly kept falling out of the saddles of their mounts, overcome by too much vodka.
But if their men were wild and unhibited, the women were modest, silent and invariably veiled with a piece of cloth covering their faces between the mouth and the eyes. Yet there was no concealing their interest in Jap. Their black eyes flashed with interest, every time they passed the place where he squatted on the floor, and he received the largest portions of food and drink. Once or twice the women overcame their shyness sufficiently to touch his yellow face, as if they were reassuring themselves that his colour was real. In particular, Jap received the attention of the Starost’s daughter, a tall, wonderfully built young woman, of whom Meier said: ‘I’d give her a piece of my salami any day — for free, too!’ She could hardly keep her eyes and hands off the little corporal, who munched away at his food on the floor in greasy-lipped contentment. In the end she leaned across and whispered something in the interpreter’s ear, and incidentally gave an appreciative Jap a generous look at her melon-sized breasts, before fleeing in embarrassed confusion, giggling as she ran out.
‘What did she say?
’ Jap asked, his mouth full of roast mutton, the grease dribbling down his unshaven chin.
‘She said, she liked you most. She said you were one of them.’
‘Yer,’ Ox-Jo snarled, showing his envy. ‘I always knew he was one of them.’
‘Yellow is mellow,’ Jap said, unmoved, and accepted another leg of steaming roast mutton from one of the admiring females. ‘Yellow is very definitely mellow up here.’
‘What do you make of them, sir?’ Lieutenant Haas asked Colonel Stuermer, as the latter and Greul sipped the warm mare’s milk reflectively.
‘Well, I don’t think friend Bandit is exactly Andre Hofer,’2 Colonel Stuermer answered. ‘I mean they are out-and-out robbers. They do no work. That, they leave to their womenfolk. Their occupation is hunting and robbing. But because of that, they seem to have come into conflict with the powers-that-be ever since the days of the Czar. And I think for that reason they have been traditionally anti-Russian and now anti-Soviet. He took another sip of his airan. ‘As far as I could make out from the Starost, the Red Army launched a punitive expedition against his people — there are a couple of hundred thousand of them altogether — just before the war. They managed to beat the Reds off, but they suffered severe casualties. That expedition seemingly has made them more anti-Russian than ever. At all events, that Bandit chap appears to want us here.’ He waved a hand at the red-faced, gorged mountaineers.
‘Appears!’ Greul emphasized the word with a sneer. ‘To my way of thinking they are just as sub-human as the rest of the Red rabble. I don’t think you can trust a single one of them.’
‘You might be right, my dear Major,’ Colonel Stuermer said.
‘But for the time being we must not show them that we distrust them. What is it that that American said? “Walk softly and carry a big stick”? This whole expedition puzzles me. First that business in the mountain last night. Who is the woman? And remember that Soviet Alpine Corps cap you found in the plane. What of that? And now these people. They look like villains, yet they welcome us as if we are long-lost cousins.’ He finished the last of his drink, and yawned. ‘We will play the role of the happy, welcomed visitor, but we will be on our guard as long as we are here in Chursuk. We will carry a big stick.’
‘Wooden eye, be on thy guard,’ Haas said, pulling down the side of his right eye in the German gesture of caution. ‘Is that it, sir?’
‘Exactly, Haas,’ Colonel Stuermer said, rising to his feet. Everywhere the drunken soldiers attempted to rise, but he waved them to remain seated. ‘Carry on, soldiers,’ he commanded and looking down at Greul’s face, set in its usual look of contempt for such drunken indulgence, he said, before leaving for his bed, ‘Ensure that Sergeant-major Meier runs a security patrol this night, Greul. I want no more unpleasant surprises to disturb my nocturnal slumbers.’
Greul looked at Haas’s grinning face. ‘Does something amuse you, Haas?’ he snapped.
‘Not really, sir.’
‘Not really,’ Greul echoed harshly. ‘A German officer and a National Socialist is never vague. It is either one thing or the other for him. Well?’
Haas flushed. ‘I was just thinking, sir,’ he stuttered, ‘that the C.O. does everything with a…a certain sort of style. I mean, be never takes things beer-seriously.’
‘Meaning I do?’
‘No, I didn’t say that, sir.’
‘Well, now I’m going to be beer-serious, as you put it in that common soldiers’ slang you prefer to use. Lieutenant Haas, you will take charge of this night’s security arrangements.’ He rose stiffly to his feet, eager to be away from the scene of drunken carousing.
Haas sprang to attention. ‘Sir!’
Greul gave him one last look. ‘Remember, Haas, you are in charge. Now I bid you good-night.’ And with that, he strode out in his usual imperious manner, leaving Haas staring after him, suddenly very afraid.
Note
1. Primitive cottages.
2. Austrian Tyrolean national hero, who fought against Napoleon in his native mountains.
FOUR
‘Kr..unt!’
Jap staggered up to his feet drunkenly. All around him, his comrades lay snoring where they had fallen, in a heavy drunken sleep. He shook his head. The bone-littered room came into focus, looming at him out of the drunken fog. He shook his head again and wished he hadn’t. His head started to throb rhythmically, like an overworked outboard motor. Slowly, very slowly, he creaked his head round, as if it worked by heavy weights.
The ‘vodka corpses’ lay sprawled everywhere, hands still clutching their glasses, draped like broken puppets across up-turned trestle tables, slumped, like over-grown grey embryos, in corners. There was even one trooper lying lengthwise across the pot-bellied iron stove at the back of the room, the steam rising slowly from his vodka-soaked uniform, giving off the unpleasant stink of smouldering serge. ‘Suppose the stupid shit must be cold,’ Jap told himself, drunkenly.
Then the picture of those two melon-sized breasts flashed in front of his eyes, and he remembered why he had woken up. The Starost’s daughter! He gave a low growl. ‘Kr..unt,’ he cried hoarsely. ‘Must have…kr..unt this night!’
One yellow paw stretched out in front of him, unaware that he was clad only in his boots and tunic, he staggered towards the door like a blind man feeling his way, crunching across the bones which littered the floor, stumbling over the unprotesting bodies of his comrades, his mind full of those magnificent breasts, which seemed to fill the whole world, like two huge yellow zeppelins.
He flung open the door and blinked. It was pitch-black outside. He blinked again and, undaunted, stepped out into the night, realizing, as the cold mountain air struck his hot face, that he was more drunk than he thought. Still, he staggered on through the narrow silent streets, already playing with those great breasts, balancing them in his hands, as if he were judging the weight and sweetness of sugar melons, juggling them up and down like a circus clown, sticking them in each ear and crying ‘I’ve gone deaf — I can’t hear a thing!’
The row of cliff-like houses in the little village square came into view, outlined a starker black against the jagged silhouette of the mountains beyond. He stood there, puzzled, swaying back and forth, a cold wind breezing about his naked rump, trying to puzzle out which was the Starost’s house. His eye fell on the yellow candle flickering in one of the little windows. For a moment he could not believe it; then he gasped, ‘She knew I was coming…. She lit a candle for me!’
He blundered forward eagerly, his mind already stripping the Starost’s daughter, with the exotic beauty lying in her bed, completely naked, her legs slightly parted, her lips red and wet with passionate anticipation. ‘Never fear, my beloved,’ he called to no-one in particular, ‘Your Jap is coming.’ He laughed uproariously, ‘But not yet. You get the joke?’ The words froze on his lips. He had bumped into a solid rock wall. For a moment or two he searched it, mumbling to himself, ‘Who’s taken the shitty house away…. Come on, put that place back again, eh?’
Then it dawned on him, after minutes of fumbling along the rock wall, that the houses were built above the stone. ‘Of course,’ he reassured himself drunkenly. ‘She wouldn’t try to cheat me. She loves me.’
He stood, considering the problem. She was waiting for him up there, her naked nubile body tormented with passion. But how was he to reach her? Suddenly he remembered. The tribesmen reached their houses by a rope ladder that they could draw up in time of trouble. Groggily he searched around until he found the knotted rope, which hung just above his head. He reached up and grabbed it, but found that the strength seemed to have gone from his arms. For what seemed a long time he just hung there, the wind whistling around his naked rear, puffing, sweating and swearing like an angry yellow-faced monkey.
‘I’m coming up, if it shittingly well kills me,’ he cursed, the sweat dropping into his eyes like vinegar, his shoulders feeling as if they were going to be dragged out of their sockets at any moment.
He summoned up the last of his strength, heaved, and pulled himself onto the ledge above, to lie there gasping and sobbing, while one of the fat pigeons which the Karatski kept, stared at him, cooing softly, wondering whether this little yellow man who had turned up from nowhere in the middle of the night was dangerous.
‘Make dust, you feathered fart!’ Jap snarled, and flapped one hand weakly at the bird.
It flew away, squawking.
Jap staggered to his feet, and nearly fell over the side, catching himself just in time. He looked to his right. There was the yellow light, all right. His first instinct was to rush straight in and snuggle right up to her. Then he remembered what the colonel had said about the unpleasant treatment the tribesmen sometimes handed out. He shuddered. It would be like jumping too low over a too-high fence. He couldn’t chance that. Tip-toeing forward with the exaggerated caution of the drunk, he approached the flickering light.
As he crept closer, he became aware of the low murmur of several voices. ‘Not that!’ he exclaimed, stopping in his tracks, as if he had just stood on a sharp nail. ‘She hasn’t betrayed me? No!’
For what seemed a long time, he couldn’t bring himself to move any further; he knew he couldn’t bear the knowledge that she was in the sack with another man. He ran his mind over the possibilities, anger now beginning to fire his blood. Not that big Bavarian bastard Meier! He’d be the only one in Edelweiss who would dare pull off a dirty trick of that kind. ‘By the great goolies of the Adolf Hitler!’ he swore, ‘I’ll pound that shit into wallpaper if it’s him!’ He rushed forward, and peered into the dirty, fly-blown little window.
To his immense relief, there was no sign of either the Starost’s daughter or Meier. Instead a group of tribesmen were squatting on their haunches around a low wooden table, drinking from an enamel pail of vodka, which was passed from man to man, listening intently to the sly-faced Starost, who was obviously explaining something to them by means of a rough sketch drawn in the dust at his feet.
