Blue Rondo (aka Flesh Wounds)

by Lawton, John

  ‘And I,’ said Kolankiewicz, ‘was a twenty-year-old conscript in what remained of the Polish regiments of the Imperial Russian Army. Forced to fight a war to defend a country we hated against a country we hated almost as much. Poland has always been in the middle. So much in the middle that for hundreds of years at a time you find it erased from the atlas and all but erased from history. The war you date as ending in 1918 ended a year earlier for the whole of Poland and Russia. And in its place began another which has never ended. When the Germans put Lenin in that sealed train to the Finland Station, they had sent us a time-bomb. By 1920 I was a prisoner of the Whites. Suspected of being a Red, wanting merely to be a Pole. Stuck on a train of cattle wagons on the new border with Poland and shipped east. You may say I had not run fast enough. Quite so. A lesson hard learnt. Ever since I have not ceased to run. I have lived in the same house in the same backwater avenue in Hampstead Garden Suburb for sixteen years now – and still I run. Every day and every night I run. What do you English know of running?’

  It was a blunt, almost brutal little speech. A rain of bricks and rubble clunking down around them, bouncing the cutlery and shattering the china. In a few swift sentences Kolankiewicz had demolished the edifice of argument, pulled racial rank on them all and upped the ante. There was a pause as he helped himself to more port. This time, Troy was certain, Sasha had winked at Wildeve.

  ‘What you are both focusing on,’ Kolankiewicz went on, ‘are the social and criminal consequences of demobilisation. I cannot fault you on this, Bob. You are, in all probability, right. What I saw in Poland and Russia after the last war were the effects of total war on the civil population. On those who did not or could not fight, and on those who were too young to fight.’

  ‘Total War?’ said Troy.

  ‘The phrase has been in use for a while you will find.’

  ‘It’s your use of it that bothers me. It’s used to describe . . . how shall I put it … a mobilisation of resources . . . you’re talking about it as a culture … as a substitute for culture.’

  ‘If it is all you know of life, if it has shaped the values by which you live, then it is your culture. Substitute or not. I met it face to face. I said I was not swift enough to run in 1917. It would have been convenient to find myself on the German boundaries, to be part of the newly mooted Poland. Mea culpa, I found myself in the hell that was the embryonic Soviet Union. And, as I was saying, I found myself with a one-way ticket to Siberia. It was January. Not the kindest of months. The train ground to a halt in a mountain of snow just this side of the Urals. I never did find out where – Mumsk or Bumsk, it scarcely matters. Among my many travelling companions was another ragamuffin such as I was myself. But he was older than me, older than any of us young men being herded east. I knew him. I’d known him as a sergeant on the eastern front, under the name of Ivan Volkonsky – the name he was doubtless born with, but I also knew his nom de guerre. Since 1917 he had been Leonid Rodnik, a general in Trotsky’s Red Army. He knew me too. His secret became a bond, as it were. The idiots guarding us would have had a prize, if only they had realised just who they had. How they caught him Rodnik never said. But, as the train sat the best part of a month in the deadly cold of a Russian winter, I got to know him rather better. I got to know his life story and he mine – what little there was of it. Indeed, I owe much of my command of Russian to his tutelage.

  ‘Each wagon would be allowed out once a day to piss, to shit and to gather wood. We stripped the forest of kindling while the Whites watched, and fed the pot-bellied stove inside our wagon. And when we ran short Rodnik opened up his shirt and revealed what had kept him warm those weeks, a lining of several million roubles in Tsarist currency. We fed that into the stove too – I was warmed by the heat of burning money. Rodnik started to laugh. Infectious. The whole wagon joined in, hysterical with laughter at the thought of burning that which most of them would have killed for but a few years earlier.

  ‘We starved and we fell ill, and each day the guards would take the most infirm among us and despatch them to the next world with a bullet to the back of the head. It was obvious, even disregarding the fate that awaited us on the other side of the mountain, that if the train did not get through the next tunnel soon we would all die in the same fashion. The rough justice of the judge with the rifle. You may recall the long passages in War and Peace when the French march their prisoners westward shooting the wounded as they go. It was not unlike. One of those moments when you seek no parallel in literature. I have never seen myself as Bezukhov. Indeed, I have never been able to read the book since. No matter.

  ‘As dead wood grew scarcer the guards escorted us further and further from the train. Every so often someone would make a break for it and get a bullet in the back. We were lucky. I escaped without a scratch. Rodnik took a bullet in the arm. But we ran. In half an hour they gave up the search. Why waste a bullet? Winter would kill us anyway.

  ‘On the third day we stumbled into a dream … no … a fairy tale … a setting from the Gebrüder Grimm. It was dark – an hour or so after dusk. We came upon a clearing in the forest. Tiny huts built of branches, a campfire burning, a stew of some forest creature bubbling, an array of utensils beaten out of tin, a hard circle of earth, clean and worn as though someone had lived there a while – but of that someone there was not a sign. So . . . we raised the pot and we ate. We had neither of us shown any ability to live off the land. We had starved for those three days, and for weeks before that we had lived on rations of nothing but oats and kasha. It was a matter of minutes before I saw them. They had been watching us all along. Then they came out of the trees, those hideous, blackened bodies . . . and not one of them four feet tall. A dozen children living wild in the forest. Rodnik put down his tin plate and stood to speak to them. The first child stuck a spear in his chest, another aimed at me and missed. A third crawled along the ground and sank its teeth into Rodnik’s leg. We ran again. Or I ran and Rodnik hobbled, dragging the demented child along by its teeth. I leapt a ditch. Rodnik could not. The weight of the child held him down. He screamed at me, “Run,” and I ran. I looked back and saw children swarming over him like flies upon a carcass. I spent a night in the forest. I circled. Determined to rescue Rodnik, if I could. Not knowing the folly of such a thought. The next day I entered the same clearing. The children were gone, the campfire burnt still. But there was no sign of Rodnik. I approached the pot, prepared once more to rob Lilliput to keep Brobdingnag alive. I picked up the beaten tin ladle, stuck it into the stew and raised a mouthful to my lips, all the time looking around for the children. And from the corner of my eye I saw a pile of long bones, and another pile of the clothes Rodnik had been wearing. And I knew what was in the pot. I knew what it was I held to my lips. I had almost eaten the delicacy known as long pig. Those children had killed, skinned and jointed Rodnik, put him in the pot and eaten him. I ran. It seems to me now that I ran all the way to England. All the way to Hampstead Garden Suburb. When I die you can shovel a spadeful of North London into my coffin, much as Chopin’s friends shovelled a bit of Poland in with him. Whatever … I ran, and they did not catch me.

  ‘Who knows where those children had come from? How far they in their turn had run to escape the war? Who knows how long they had lived like that, without parents, without teachers? Who knows how long they went on like that? The little cannibals of the Russian forest. Orphans of the total war. Stripped of all morality. Stripped of anything you or I might recognise as civilised values. That is total war. And I will warn you now that there is a whole generation growing up in England stripped of conventional morality. Cannibals? Perhaps that is unlikely . . . but a generation that survives by taking what it wants?’

  Not so long ago it seemed – had it been last February or March in the depths of winter? – Troy had faced a bunch of urban urchins in Stepney in London’s East End. He recalled the mixture of innocence and greed that had flickered across eight small faces as he bribed them all to help him search a Blitz bo
mbsite for the remains of a corpse. His old mentor Sgt Bonham had been outraged. Not simply the bribing of kids, that alone was bad enough, but the knowledge of what they might find. Troy had had no doubts. He was not corrupting youth. Youth had been corrupted long before he got there. Those boys had had the best part of five years of war. They were ten years old or thereabouts and their memories of life before the war must have been scant. They’d known little else but rationing and deprivation – wanting was their world. But, try as he might, Troy could not see the comparison Kolankiewicz was making between the savagery he depicted and the children he had met. It was still an innocence of a sort. Take away the simple fact of death – a body to whose fate the kids. had been indifferent not, it would seem, out of callousness or war’s familiarity but out of a paucity of imagination – take away that body and it wasn’t Kolankiewicz’s primitive nightmare in a Russian forest it was … it was . . . The Coral Island … it was adventures with Jack and Ralph. Wasn’t it?

  He looked round for his Jack. But Wildeve had slipped out silently. So had Sasha. Ah well, he thought, there were worse things in the world than your best friend fucking your sister. Weren’t there?

  6

  The next morning the Big Man made a makeshift shooting range in the orchard out of straw bales and cardboard. He painted up a rough series of concentric circles. A target so big perhaps he thought even Troy could not miss it. But Troy did.

  Churchill tried him out first on the police-issue Webley. Troy knew – he’d been told – he couldn’t hit the side of a barn door. Not with a weapon as clumsy and imprecise as this he couldn’t. He stuck out his arm, fired off three rounds and missed the target every time. He paused and could have sworn he heard the Big Man sucking air through his teeth.

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Churchill. ‘The only opinion that counts is mine. It’s about body and posture, Frederick. Don’t hold the gun as though you’re offering it up for sacrifice. Pull back your arm and tuck yourself in a bit tighter.’

  ‘But then I can’t use the sight.’

  ‘Sights on a handgun are a waste of time. The best you can do is aim your whole body in the right direction. So, swing round, full on to the target, pull back

  Troy fired a fourth round that nicked the edge of the Big Man’s target. He hoped he was smiling, not smirking, but getting it right, or marginally right, for the first time was enormously satisfying.

  ‘Fire the next,’ Churchill said, ‘and if you hit it again make the adjustment to hit closer with the one after.’

  ‘Adjustment? What adjustment?’

  Churchill swayed gently, rolls of fat surely quivering beneath his winter tweeds, feet planted firmly in the crisp snow. He looked like a woolly Buddha performing some ritual exercise. ‘Flow,’ he was saying. ‘I can’t think of any other way to put it. The whole body flows with it. You don’t steer . . . you just flow. It’s like riding a bike.’

  This at least made sense to Troy. That was the great thing about a childhood spent on a bike. You thought, it did. Symbiosis between boy and machine. All he had to do was to think of the gun, any gun, as a Rover bike with a Hercules three-speed.

  The fifth clipped the edge again. He thought, ‘in a bit’, and placed the final shot in the second inner ring. And all, he thought, without seeming to have to do anything. His bike had gone round corners without him having to steer it.

  ‘Not bad, not bad at all,’ Churchill said.

  ‘Always knew you could do it,’ the Big Man lied.

  ‘Reload. Fire off another six, and then we’ll try an automatic.’

  Two misses four inners.

  Troy would always have a ‘thing’ about the American army-issue Colt .45 automatic. It was the gun that had put him in hospital. He said nothing to Churchill, picked it up and loaded.

  Something must have been obvious, perhaps the hesitation, perhaps the sense that Troy had weighed up the gun in his hand as an outward manifestation that he was also weighing up the idea.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ said Churchill.

  Troy clapped a hand to his side. Roughly where the bullet had caught him.

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘I really ought to get over it,’ Troy said.

  ‘Indeed. It’s hardly more than a superstition if you think about it.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘One Colt is much the same as another.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Except, of course, that this isn’t a Colt.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Well, it’s the Colt patent, all right, but Colt didn’t make it.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Well, wartime demand got so heavy they . . . they . . . franchised the manufacture. I’m sure that’s the word, “franchise”. If you look at the grip you’ll find the name of the manufacturer.’

  Troy took his thumb off the grip and opened his palm. ‘Good Lord . . . Singer. Don’t they make . . .’

  ‘Sewing-machines? Indeed they do. Now, sing along with me: the sewing-machine, the sewing-machine . . . it’s a girl’s best friend!’

  And he burst into song. A clear, accomplished baritone. Troy did not sing, but at every repetition of ‘sewing-machine’ he squeezed off a round.

  The Big Man had begun his retreat from the matter once it was obvious that Troy was not going to make a complete fool of himself, and had felt, after less than an hour out in the cold, the pressing need of his elevenses: a Thermos flask of hot tea, a ham sandwich and that morning’s pitifully thin copy of the Daily Mail. Once Churchill began to sing, his interest perked up again and his bass joined Churchill’s baritone – a fat man’s chorus: ‘the sewing-machine, the sewing-machine.’

  Two misses, four inners. Troy changed magazines and reversed the proportions. The gun behaved differently. It felt to Troy as though it could run away with him, get so easily beyond his control. The escaped bicycle. But he could not deny it was a more accurate gun and easier to handle once that initial runaway feeling had been mastered. With his third magazine he got all six on the target. Low-scoring shots in Bisley terms, but in Churchill terms they were ‘at least going in the right direction’. They worked at it until lunchtime, alternating between the Webley and the Colt – and the inevitable fatties’ chorus -ending with twelve shots apiece from the Smith & Wesson and the Schmeisser.

  The Smith & Wesson took him by surprise. Long and slender, unusually heavy, with a surprisingly small bore – but it blew the target to smithereens and kicked back at him like an angry pig. In complete contradiction to his usual body-hugging technique, Churchill had him hold it at arm’s length. With each shot his arm bucked as though it had been jerked upward by an invisible spring.

  ‘What on earth is this? It feels like a hand-held cannon.’

  ‘Pretty much what it is,’ said Churchill. ‘The manufacturers describe it as a big man’s gun. But that’s advertising for you. It’s what they call a Magnum. They’ve been around for a few years now. J. Edgar Hoover supposedly had the first, and I believe General Patton carries one with a pearl handle. But that’s Patton for you. Essentially – a .357 bullet backed up by a whopping great cartridge. If you look at the chamber you’ll see it’s out of all proportion to the barrel. That accounts for most of the extra weight. A small bullet propelled at high speed by a big charge. You could shoot through a brick wall with it.’

  Troy stared down at the monstrosity in his hand. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘would anyone want to?’

  ‘Call it stopping power. Hit someone with a round from a Magnum, they won’t get up again.’

  Troy put the gun gently back on the wooden case. He rather thought it had just displaced the Colt in his disaffections.

  At lunch Kolankiewicz ate behind a copy of the News Chronicle. The Big Man still pondered his Daily Mail.

  ‘Is he any better?’ Troy heard Kolankiewicz ask.

  ‘That barn door’s getting a bit closer,’ the Big Man replied.

  After lunch Churchill said, ‘I’ve asked him to rig up a clay shoot on one of
your meadows. Have you ever used a shotgun before?’

  ‘My dad let me – no, made me have a go with that one you made for him. Can’t say I thought much about it at the age of thirteen. I certainly didn’t go back for a second crack at it.’

  ‘It’s just the thing for teaching you to sight aim.’

  It may well be true, thought Troy, after twenty or more cartridges had burst uselessly against the clouds, but by the time you’ve sighted up a clay pigeon it’s somewhere else in the sky.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bob,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to handguns. I’m clearly hopeless at this.’

  Before Churchill could answer a dishearteningly cheery voice could be heard saying, ‘Half a mo’, you chaps. I want a go.’

  Troy turned to see his sister Sasha crunching down the path in her wellies, wrapped up against the cold in her habitual black Russian-doll outfit, furry earflaps flapping, toting, breech broken across her arm, their father’s 1928 handmade Churchill shotgun. Something Troy had thought twice about using in front of its creator.

  ‘Not chaps only, is it?’ she said in pure defiance, meaning that if it was they could just get stuffed. She had come out to play and would play regardless of what they thought. ‘I’ll show you how it’s done, li’l bro. Rightie-ho, Fatty, let ‘em rip.’

  “Ere,’ said the Big Man. ‘Oos she calling fat? I never been called fat before. Robust maybe, but fat? Never!’

  Troy looked at Churchill. Churchill looked at the Big Man, the Big Man looked at Troy. Troy silently weighed up the precision of Sasha’s epithet, decided she was right, and nodded to him. This was not the moment to explain the sisters to him. Clay after clay exploded into shards as Sasha, quite literally, showed him how it was done. Churchill, recognising a natural when he saw one, silently deferred.

  ‘You don’t follow, brer. You let it come to you. See?’

  Another clay soared above them. The gun seemed to dangle at the end of Sasha’s arms about waist height. Then, without any sign of haste, she raised the gun to her cheek, looked down the barrel and blew the clay to smithereens. You don’t follow, you let it come to you. You don’t steer, you simply flow. Was it, he thought, all going to be quite so arcane? The initiation into a Zen mystery?