Wojtek and the Commissar
Illustration in Ambit magazine by Michael Foreman
When Wojtek Granitzki was in his late teens, the revolution happened. People in the village agreed that it was the business of Russians and that, as ever, they could keep it. All the same, it reached their corner of Galitzia under a dust cloud in the shape of lean men on horses, who carried bayonet-topped rifles, and waved pistols, sabres and scimitars. Tied to their saddles were the heads of the swords’ one-time owners; White Russian loyalist heads sported blond hair and whiskers, had thin, aristocratic noses, the Tatar heads sprouted dark hair and beards, under broad, peasant noses. Nobody needed to look at the faces of the revolutionary guards to know that all were subject to the will of the revolution. They just had to look at thosee battered faces that bounced off the haunches of horses.
The revolutionaries were led by a commissar, a slight man with a sweeping, silver gaze and a shining pate, a forked beard and a brow permanently furrowed. His men took all the food and cooked it over fires in the street. They set a desk and chair outside a storehouse. Some sprawled and dozed around it. Others sat attentively. It looked uncommonly like a church service, except in the details. One of these was that the village’s wooden church was burning at the other end of the street. Another was the body of Father Yuri, which hung, eyeless and tongueless, from the crane under the storehouse’s roof.
The commissar sat at the table and began to call the men of the village to him one by one. He sometimes began by saying, ‘Do you know what has happened to your Tsar?’ Their answers might prompt other questions. What did the man before him think of the revolution? The man might say it was a good thing. He might look down and spit, and say it was an evil thing. He might be asked to justify his statement, and then his answer would guide the commissar. The man might be sent to one side, sat on a corner of the square and watched lazily by the guards, might be sent home. He might be sent into the storehouse.
A minute after the storehouse door closed, a sharp explosion would be heard, never diminishing in its ability to startle. Then the next man would be called. Wojtek was sent for. He told his aunt he’d be back just as soon as he could, then pecked her hastily on both cheeks, managing neither to look at her face nor see the helpless gesture she was making. He shrank the village street with his gangly boy’s walk, saw the storehouse loom at him.
‘You’re a Jew?’ the commissar checked.
‘No sir,’Wojtek answered, and then was asked his name. He gave it.
‘Hmm.’ The answer seemed to satisfy the man in some way. ‘A Polak, then,’ he commented, neutrally. Then he demanded, ‘A Royalist?’
‘Certainly not, sir.’
‘Do you want to help the people in their revolution?’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Oh? Tell me how.’ The commissar took his watch out.
Wojtek eyed its racing second hand. He was a dreamer and a planner, a melder of metals, a tinkerer and a fooler with cogs and wheels and bellows and solder and steam and oil, a magician in the guidance of temperature and friction, a builder of engines and structures, an autodidact with the optimism of all inventors. His enthusiasm might at one time have led him to grab the commissar’s lapel and promise the man that he shared with him a vision of gargantuan factories rising out of what were once barren fields, flooding the world with metal. He condensed it all to, ‘I am an engineer, sir.’
The commissar snapped his watch shut. He held a hand up, and slowly its fingers folded in and his thumb emerged. It was pointed behind him, to the storehouse. No longer looking at Wojtek, he wrote something laboriously onto a list before him. Wojtek stood and looked from the commissar’s bald crown to the storehouse door, struck dumb.
‘Engineers aren’t required at the moment,’ the commissar explained, almost kindly. ‘This has been designated an agrarian area.’
‘Please, sir, I assure you that I can do something . . . agrarian.’ Wojtek’s voice attained an agglutinative squeak, which elicited a vibration of amusement from the commissar’s men.
‘But you’re an engineer.’
‘Yes sir, yes, true, but . . .’ Wojtek felt as if he were trying to swallow a slab of poppyseed cake. ‘But why can’t I move to where engineers are needed, sir?’
‘Paperwork.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘Too much paperwork.’ The commissar picked up his pen, gave it a shake. ‘And I’ve just run out of ink.’ He blocked Wojtek’s intended offer to find some ink with a hand, and an odd look of gratitude. ‘And of course, there is the problem of the trains.’
‘Trains, sir?’
‘There are none. You know why?’ He had to laugh at Wojtek’s shake of the head.
‘No engineers. Listen.’ The commissar beckoned Wojtek to bend down to him.
‘Don’t think about it. And don’t think there’s anything on the other side. There’s nothing. No Heaven, and no Hell. And that should stop you worrying about whether you’ll be rejected from one or welcome in the other. There is absolutely nothing. I have it on good authority.’
‘Whose, sir?’ Wojtek was astonished, firstly at the man’s statement.
‘There is no authority but the people’s.’ For the first time, the commissar looked stern. He pointed up to Father Yuri. A startlingly friendly smile broke across his face.
He asked good-naturedly, ‘What did that shyster tell you?’
Wojtek took a look up at Father Yuri. He certainly remembered the priest telling them that God would rescue the Tsar, would save them all, and that the Bolsheviks were in fact headed straight to Hell. It didn’t look like it from where Wojtek was standing.
‘He lied to you.’ The commissar made a fatherly shake of the head. ‘He told me he had the eyes of God. He told me he spoke God’s language. Well.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Hmm? Look at him now.’ The commissar had his thumb up again, and refused now to catch Wojtek’s eye, so there was nothing for it but to walk. Wojtek dragged his feet, but he was walking just the same.
The second thing that had astonished him was his late realisation of the commissar’s storehouse logic: any man who addressed him as sir was sent into the storehouse. What a schmuck.
Inside, under a head-high mist of cordite and dust, Wojtek saw the bodies of men sprawled on the floor amid smashed boxes and crates and boards behind which hoarded grain had been piled. The men had broken, bloodied heads, collars stained darkly, shirts, trousers likewise. They had long ceased to be his friends, but he had grown up with some of them and, more importantly, it had always seemed to him, grown apart from them too.
A touch on his arm startled him. One of the commissar’s men stood there. He held a revolver out to Wojtek, and pointed. ‘Over there,’ he clarified. ‘Centre of the room.’
Wojtek stared. The man was short and wiry, had a feral look to him. His teeth were strangely white and even. Wojtek couldn’t place his accent. He wondered if he was from the east, or the north, or the south. He had already seen White Russians and Tatars, or their heads, at least. The revolution truly was bringing the peoples of Mother Russia together.
‘One round in the chamber,’ the man said, and added helpfully, ‘It’s at the right place.’
Wojtek heard the words, but they didn’t seep in till he felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. It was only metal, he knew, a series of pipes and chambers, a spring, friction, and then percussion.
Wojtek wondered only much later why it hadn’t occurred to any of the men on the floor to do what he did next, which was to take two quick strides, raise the gun to the guard’s temple, and pull the trigger. The bang faded to a ringing note. It scared him. A puff of smoke stung his nose. Fighting the urge to sneeze, Wojtek saw that he had missed the man’s temple. That was the adjustment made by his glasses, he supposed, and the trembling of his hand. He had shot the man in the eye, instead. An alarming fountain of blood, more than Wojtek had ever seen outside a farm, was spurting, over Wojtek’s shoulder and onto the floor. Wojtek watched the arc dumbly, and stepped out of his daze and smartly to one side as it diminished, made a streak on the floor then ran down the man’s face and front.
More alarming was that the guard was still standing upright. Wojtek looked closely and fearfully from the remaining eye to the outstretched hand.
Fastidiously avoiding the hand, he rummaged in a side pocket of the man’s coat, and found rounds for the revolver. His hands were shaking too much to be able to load them into the thing. He put the gun into his own pocket, followed it with a handful of rounds. In the man’s other pockets were a wodge of slightly damp banknotes, a few coins, some keys, and a schmatter, a rag of a handkerchief.
Wojtek had been in the storehouse one time, maybe. It belonged to Solomon Shinevsky, an old Jew merchant who had bought and sold fairly to Jew and gentile alike. Old Solomon, polite always to the point of nuisance, had called everybody sir. Wojtek saw him among the remnants of boxes of dry goods stacked up by the far door, presumably for confiscation by the people for their revolution.
He turned back and reached for the guard’s cap. He put it on his head. He heard the commissar’s voice faintly outside, and then that of a courteous villager, and his work took on a new urgency. He helped the guard out of his coat. Even then the man did not fall over, and Wojtek was mighty puzzled, until he saw that the impact of the bullet had forced the man’s head onto a metal spike sticking out of the wooden upright behind him. It was displaying him like a beetle in a museum case.
He shook himself into the coat, and began stuffing his finds back in, the banknotes, the pennies, the keys, the schmatter.
He stepped between the bodies on the floor, and went for the far door of Solomon Shinevsky’s storehouse. The yard, as he remembered, gave onto the road. It was empty of men. It was full of more broken crates and torn sacks. A wind was whipping up dead leaves, corn husks, loose shavings and kapok, and for a moment Wojtek thought it was snowing.
Solomon Shinevsky’s bicycle leaned against the fence.Wojtek pulled it upright, mounted it, hooked up with a tailwind and sailed off into the afternoon, determining right there and then never to call another man sir.
Wojtek and the Commissar, published in Ambit in 2011, and illustrated by Michael Foreman
This story is part of a larger work centring on the character of Wojtek, and tracing his journey from his village in Galicia during the Russian Revolution, through war-torn Europe on various stolen bicycles, to the Paris of the 1920s and eventually to Pennsylvania.
It was published in Ambit magazine in 2011.
The story was illustrated by the eminent Michael Foreman, which is a real honour. He has a long association with Ambit, and is an artist in his own right, very much in demand.
It was published in Ambit magazine in 2011.
The story was illustrated by the eminent Michael Foreman, which is a real honour. He has a long association with Ambit, and is an artist in his own right, very much in demand.
