Island Operation (Part I)

The next day, between eleven and twelve, after previously checking the mail, where there were only two meek payments of commission from some poorer publisher, but no summons to the EXTRA term, I made my way to the neighborhood of the university. 

With me I took three differently calibrated screwdrivers, two large folded drawing boards of sufficiently thick, gray packing paper, a few meters of string, scissors, as well as a white medium-sized frette towel, one of those which I always brought with me. Everything was meticulously folded up, precisely placed in the large lower inside pocket of my English officer’s Burberry coat, such that from the outside, it could not be seen at all what accessories I had hidden there. 

On the way I also picked up at the liquor store a half a liter bottle of vodka—but not that forty percent red label for thirty one ten, but the more expensive forty five percent blue label. I counted on making a good impression. The cities in the West have this going for them: when through a larger one a river ran, then it was full of various channels, artificial offshoots, water reservoirs, locks, bridges, sluices, barriers and ditches. Not at all like in the East, where the cities did for themselves and the rivers did too. But this town was Western even though it belonged momentarily to the East. 

I walked the length of a relatively substantial, deep cemented channel, separated from the street by some ten meters of width, overgrown with wild terrain. From the surface of the deep running water, the concrete walls could be some three or four meters and were perpendicular to the water. 

The channel itself was not wider than five to seven meters. In a certain place the river forked around an island, in a shape close to a drop, but a drop swimming as if against the current. The drop—the island—could be about a hundred thirty by forty five meters. In the widest part of the island, meaning at the front of the current, stood a two storied stucco nineteenth century mansion. The walls had numerous signs of cannon fire and bullet holes, as, after all, all the walls in this long besieged city had. 

Despite this, the mansion was still in pretty good shape, with a driveway for cars and from the years, of course, for carriages, and there were visible signs of a large, circular flower-bed directly ahead of the entrance, on which at this time freely trotted four long-maned, probably Soviet, horses: three chestnuts and a bay. Somewhere lower than half-way down the island there was one small bridge, across which, back and forth, strolled a Soviet guard with a machine gun of the type PEPESZA. For many years the sight of such a soldat would fill me with considerable fear. 

Now I felt sure of myself, strong, and, thanks to Plebanczyk, well trained and well schooled. I knew perfectly well that in a matter of seconds I could drop this guard, together with his pepesza, and with a heavy back injury send him to hell. But of course, only for the glory of his fatherland would he fall into the idyllic-romantic stretch of deep channel under the bridge.

Whatever the propaganda tried to instill in me on the matter of the Soviet Union and the Soviet people, I always knew the truth—who, for example was responsible for Katyń—and for me they were simply mentally degenerated, uncivilized, antipathetic, dangerous brutes. Of course, sometimes you’d hit someone like the cultured Dmitri Shostakovich, the cultured Sergei Eisenstein, or like the very cultured Semyon Budyonny, but these were just rare exceptions, which actually served to prove the rule. Because my entire family, meaning everyone who at that time was an adult or close to adulthood, took active part in the Bolshevik war, from early childhood they fed me blood-curling tales of the horrific things Red Army soldiers were capable of doing during that war. 

As a child, for almost the entire first two years of the war I lived under Soviet occupation, because at the moment of the war’s outbreak my mother and I were unfortunately vacationing in the eastern region of the country. Miraculously, we held on to our lives and now we, and many who found themselves in a similar situation, knew exactly what kind of crowd this really was. Before the war, and really through most of its history, my nation did not find itself among the community of the most civilized European nations. 

For example, in the year 1863, during the time of the January insurrection, when the nobility, led by Romauld Traugutt and Artur Grottgerr, tried to fight the Russians in the forest roads and terrain, and in the manors the ladies and the unmarried women, discretely singing Moniuszko, were nonstop busy in the mass production of antiseptic rags for the growing number of injured January insurgents, in this year, in the year 1863, in a country like England there was already serious thought of football leagues. 

Anyway you looked at it, even despite certain things that could be much better, between my country and the invaders from the East, the gap in civilization was gigantic because, simply put, absolutely no civilization was present there, and the constant repetition in the form of surrealistic-abstract jokes of the merry adventures of the kacap with the meat grinder, cologne, phonograph, watch, or water closet, were the honest truth.

Near the bridge, where at some seventy five meters the island ended at an acute triangle and the two off-shoots of the river reconnected, two barracks stood: at the edge the shorter one, and near it the bridge, and at the other bank the other one was at least three times longer. Looking downstream, both barracks ended at the same point, at the end of the island, their adjacent corners meeting at a thirty degree angle. 

Not only did the barracks abut at their ends, additionally they were connected by a sort of developed covered pass-way. Finding themselves at the channel the walls of the barracks formed one plumb line with cement edges perpendicular to the water and three meters in height. The triangular area between the palace and the barracks was taken up by a scrap yard of cars, all of which had signs of being shot at. 

The trucks were American, while the automobiles were primarily German luxury models from the pre-war period. The barracks were not visible from the windows of the palace, because the two places were separated by several rows of ornate and quite tall coniferous trees, forming in not too large an area a sort of authentic thicket.

I was once told by a guy I knew, Mr. B., that from the time of the aggression towards Russia until the first weeks of the siege, on this island there had been an exclusive bordello for the generals and higher officers of the Wehrmacht and the SS, as well as other prominent Hitlerites.