SS General (40 page)

"Three hours late," he grumbled to us, "it's disgusting what things are coming to in this country--they get onto the wrong line, you know. They send them off willy-nilly anywhere they choose, never mind the people waiting to get on them. It's high time something was done about it." He looked us over critically, taking in the details of our uniforms. "I don't suppose it's like that in Germany," he said. "Why can't you people do something about it, now that you're here? You're supposed to be the efficiency experts, aren't you?"

At this, a whole knot of peasants turned to us and began clamoring.

"It wouldn't be allowed in Germany!"

"No sense of duty, that's what the trouble is."

"I've been waiting here twenty-four hours."

"All I want to do is get to Nikopol. It says in the timetable it was due yesterday morning. But where is it?" A stout man with a chicken tucked under each arm nudged Porta in the ribs and looked trustingly up at him. "Where's it got to, eh?"

"It's been delayed," said Porta. "That's what it is, it's been delayed--it's the war,
tovaritch.
The war delays everything."

"But when's it going to come, that's what I want to know."

"Give it time," said Porta, looking very wise. "Be patient, comrade! You can't hurry these things."

Half an hour later, an engine pulling both freight and passenger cars puffed into the station and groaned to a halt. A jubilant shout went up from the crowd. Chickens, baskets, pigs, children were swept up, dogs ran about barking and wetting themselves and everybody else with excitement. The station was too small to accommodate such a long train and the last two coaches extended beyond the platform. We all tumbled pell-mell onto the railway tracks and surged toward them. The man with the black-and-white pig became stuck in a door. People pulled from in front and pushed from behind, and both man and pig set up a terrified squealing. The guard blew his whistle and shouted. He ran up and down the platform in a frenzy and finally drew his pistol and fired several shots into the air.

"Sabotage!" he screamed.

The crowd ignored him. No one knew where the train was going, it was not to be found in any timetable and there was no indication, either on the train or on the platform, but everyone, nevertheless, was hell-bent on climbing aboard. Porta wriggled through a window and fell into a coach headfirst. I saw Tiny fighting his way through a mass of clucking chickens. A Rumanian sergeant pulled out his saber ready to decapitate Barcelona, but a fat woman elbowed her way between them and knocked the saber to the ground. Military police appeared and began hitting out indiscriminately. A sergeant pulled out his revolver and fired a shot into the crowd. The bullet whistled past the head of the black-and-white pig, which promptly leaped out of its owner's arms and went howling through the train like a hand grenade. Instantly, a chase set off after it.

At last the platform was empty and the train was full. People were sitting in the baggage racks and standing pressed together in the corridors. The black-and-white pig had been recaptured and locked into one of the toilets along with a calf and six self-important geese. Chickens were everywhere, under the seats, on the seats, perched on people's heads and laps. The police were pushed off bodily and the train started up, without bothering to wait for the guard to blow his whistle. He galloped along the platform beside it, red in the face and bellowing, while we hung from the windows and yelled obscenities. Ultimately some kindly peasant flung open the door of the last coach and hauled him up.

"Pity about that," remarked Barcelona, closing the window. "I was quite enjoying it."

"Ever hear of a bloke called Manfred Katzenmeyer?" Porta asked him, pushing a cackling hen off his lap.

"No," said Barcelona. "Should I have?"

"Not necessarily. It just reminded me of him--that fool of a guard getting left behind like that."

"Why? Is that what happened to Manfred Katzenmeyer?"

"Yeah, he's a kind of legend," said Porta. "He started off in the last war as a captain in the artillery, only he got himself in good and proper by mixing up one box of grenades with another with all hell to pay when they tried to fire on the Frogs. So they took him out of that and put him in charge of transport. They figured he couldn't do much harm there."

"They'd have shot him today," I put in.

"Very likely," agreed Porta. "Well, they did, in the end. When Adolf come along and they started screaming for manpower, any nut that volunteered was welcome--including Katzenmeyer. Well, that was asking for trouble, that was --he'd already proved he was an imbecile. Anyway, they give him this train to look after. He didn't know the first thing about trains, but they figured as he didn't actually have to drive the thing, it didn't really matter. All the stations he stopped at, they used to hate his guts. Always bawling everyone out and finding fault. Piddling, if you know what I mean. When I first come across him, he looked like a field of daisies. He'd togged himself up with this special uniform, covered all over in bits of yellow braid--they used to call him the Shithouse King in those days. He had this rule, see, about opening your bowels at set hours. Twice a day, once after breakfast and once before kip. Officers and men, he treated 'em all the same--used to send 'em off, regular as clockwork, and then stand there timing 'em. Three minutes thirty seconds and God help anyone that had the runs . . ."

"What's that got to do with the train?" interrupted Barcelona, smothering a yawn.

"What train?"

"The one you were supposed to be telling us about."

"All right, all right, I'm coming to it," said Porta, irritable as ever when someone tried to rush him. "Give me time. One day, the stupid jerk got left behind. It was his own fault. They'd stopped at some crummy little station the other side of the Donets, some one-horse place where nothing ever happened. Well, there was an old dodderer of about ninety-eight used to stand there leaning on his broom and watching the trains go by. Someone had given him this broom back in 1922 and told him to hold onto it--just to give him something useful to do. In a country like Russia, you can't have people just standing about doing nothing. So ever since 1922, this old fella had leaned on his broom not bothering anybody. He'd seen 'em all come and go--he'd seen Wrangel's cavalry and Trotsky's marines, he'd seen the Cossacks when they had their little revolution, he'd seen the Germans back in 1914--he'd got to the stage where he didn't give two damns for no one in authority. He knew they were all the same underneath, just wearing different uniforms. He'd heard 'em all shouting and bawling in his time. Long live the Tsar! Long live Lenin! Long live the Kaiser! Long live Russia! Long live Germany! Up with the Revolution! Down with the Revolution! Up with . .."

"So the train went off without him." Barcelona was getting impatient again.

Porta glared at him. "Not him! Katzenmeyerl"

"Sure, who else?" Barcelona drawled.

"Katzenmeyer got out of the train to boss people around like usual, and he saw this old geezer leaning on his broom. So of course he bawls him out and asks him what the hell he's doing just standing there. So the old geezer tells him about this commissar back in 1922 giving him the broom and telling him to keep hold of it. So then Katzenmeyer gets mad and starts shooting his mouth off and asking him about his bowels, and while he's doing this, his train suddenly ups and offs without him. So he goes tearing up the line behind it, waving his arms about and hollering like a nut, trips over the points and knocks himself out. And meanwhile," said Porta with relish, "the poor bastard's train goes roaring off along the track without a guard and nobody knows where the hell it's meant to be going, so every station it gets to, they just shove it off onto whatever line happens to be free and send it on its way. It went all around Europe!" Porta's eyes gleamed. "It passed through Kiev no less than fifteen times. Berlin saw it three times. It even got as far as Paris, and the Frogs didn't know what to do with it so they sent it on to Amsterdam and Brussels. After that it got lost and wasn't seen again for nearly two months. It turned up at last at Munich, full steam ahead from Rome. Even then the fools didn't recognize it in time. They got panicky and changed the points and sent it off to Frankfurt. The railroad officials were going berserk. They simply never knew where it was going to turn up next. People standing on little country platforms used to be frightened out of their lives by this huge great train suddenly surging up out of nowhere. The driver couldn't pull up, you see. They figure he'd have gone all the way to Peking if the lights had stayed on green. It was lucky for him someone turned 'em on red and stopped him just in time, otherwise he might still be whistling around Europe in the middle of the war."

Porta leaned back in his seat, looking very well pleased with himself. There was a short silence. Gregor, the Legionnaire and the Old Man were all asleep. Heide had found a magazine and was reading it. The Old Man suddenly snored.

"And what happened to this Katzenmeyer fellow?" asked Barcelona.

"They shot 'im," said Porta.

"Well, well." Barcelona turned and looked out of the grimy window.

Tiny suddenly leaned forward. "What about the people in the train?" he said aggressively. "I don't see how they could have still been alive after all that time. What did they eat? And what about the train? How did they run it? Where'd they get the . . ."

Fortunately, midway through the sentence, there was a frantic squeal of terror and the black-and-white pig came charging through the compartment chased by the six geese. Tiny was so entranced by the sight that he forgot all about his awkward questions.

We reached a station called Vinnitsa and had to change. We waited all night on the platform and not until the following afternoon did the next train arrive. It was called an express but it stopped every half an hour at the most obscure stations on the line, and we had to travel in open cars. We were not even able to get any food during the interminable waits, because the authorities had neglected to put the proper stamps on our cards.

At Novoyovsk we parted company with the express and were hitched onto a smaller and somewhat dubious locomotive which pulled us very slowly along a narrow branch line. The branch line ended suddenly at a place called Slin. It appeared that it had been laid at the start of the war and then abandoned, and no one now knew where it had been intended to go.

From Slin we had to walk across some marshes to the main line, where we waited several hours before succeeding in scrambling aboard a munitions train. We had an uncomfortable journey sitting on boxes of grenades, and three times the train came to a halt and we had to hide under the wagons while enemy aircraft attacked us.

At Krivoi Rog two sappers came aboard carrying a fire extinguisher. They sat on the grenades with us and we learned that one of them had been posted missing, believed dead, over a year ago, while the other had escaped from a transport train six months earlier. Their pockets were crammed with forged passes and travel documents, and it appeared that they spent their time moving freely about Europe under the noses of the field police.

"What's the fire extinguisher for?" I asked politely.

"Can come in mighty handy," I was told, "traveling on a munitions train."

Four days later we arrived at our antechamber to paradise. Stiff and sore, and cynically prepared to be disillusioned, we climbed off the train and waved goodbye to our two friends.

"Hey, where are the whores?" Tiny wanted to know, as we stared across the platform and saw nothing more appetizing than a policeman dozing in the sun with his MPI across his knees.

"Never mind the whores!" The Old Man threw down his gear, stretched his arms high above his head, and took in a deep breath of air. "I smell spring! The lilac must be in bloom!"

It was true. It hung everywhere in great purple bunches, and its fragrant scent was almost unbearably sweet after the sweat and the filth of the trenches.

The policeman woke up and broke the spell which had momentarily descended on us. He jerked his MPI toward us and roughly demanded our papers. They were all in order, but he had to take out a fat file of photographs and go through them in detail, carefully checking them against us in the hope of making an arrest. It was with sullen reluctance that he finally allowed us to leave the station.

We walked out into the town. Rows of pretty little white houses with tiny gardens. The hot noon sun riding high in the sky. We kept close to each other, elbow to elbow, and our boots rang out indecently loud in the quiet street.

"Why's it like this?" hissed Tiny.

"Like what?" said the Old Man.

"So quiet--nobody about--I don't like it. Something's wrong."

"Nonsense!"

The Old Man smiled and walked on, but the rest of us agreed with Tiny; such unaccustomed silence was unnerving.

"Look!" The Old Man was standing at the top of the slope, pointing ahead. Wondering, we ran up to join him.

"What is it? What's the matter?"

Porta fingered his revolver. The Legionnaire had a hand on his knife. Tiny kept glancing nervously over his shoulder.

"Just take a look!" roared the Old Man.

We looked. There, spread out below us, dazzling in the sunshine, was the sea. A great blue lake of water fringed with palm trees. Farther along the coast were cypresses and scented bushes and glowing crimson flowers the size of soup plates.

Staring hypnotically, we moved toward it.

"Is it real?" Tiny kept asking; and he seemed to be serious. "Is it really real?"

Keeping to the left, as do all soldiers in unknown territory, we walked slowly down the steps to the beach. At the foot of the steps we met a guard, who pointed out the army convalescent home. The light breeze was full of the salt scent of the sea, and the waves made a gentle hissing sound as they dribbled up the beach and rolled back again.

Porta suddenly nudged Tiny in the ribs.

"Get an eyeful of that," he muttered, nodding his head toward a couple of girls stepping across the sand on their way to the sea.