No More Heroes

by Brian Wright

Malinowski is smiling at me again, attempting to keep my spirits up. Instead he makes my skin crawl.

The others are getting noisier outside, vodka circulating as usual after a brush with the enemy, while we sit with our all-too-sober thoughts in this shadowy cabin. Earlier on I asked Malinowski if it was alright to turn the lamp down because the light was hurting my eyes. Neither of us has spoken since. Even Malinowski has run out of words. My own tongue feels swollen and useless.

Time is dragging. We seem to have been sitting in this room for days, weeks, not hours. The silence is profound. Hard to imagine that only yesterday we were the best of friends, Malinowski chattering away in his gruff peasant voice, me just glad to be in his company. There was always something that marked him out from the rest. The bold look in his eyes, perhaps.

That’s why we’re here together, in this mess. Every time Malinowski gets up to stretch his powerful limbs, it feels as if invisible chains are tugging between us.

The skirmish this morning is already a distant blur to me. The rattle of gunfire as we struggled to get away. Prudowicz’s scream as he fell dying. We didn’t stop to retrieve his body, just desperate to put distance between ourselves and the Germans. Everyone fleeing for their lives.

Except Malinowski.

He’d held his ground, kept on firing long after we forded the stream which lay between us and safety. Attracting attention to our position. The chief had to strike him to get him to stop. Meantime I was cowering behind a giant fir tree, bleating something about my mother. When one of our comrades retrieved me, there was laughter all round because I’d soiled my pants.

The laughter ended when the inquest began.

I’ve never seen the chief look so angry, the veins standing out like cables on his neck. ‘What if everyone behaved like you?’ he screamed. ‘How long do you think we would have lasted?’

He’s right, of course. We’ve stayed alive because of his tactics. Hit and run. Mostly run these days, heavily outnumbered and outgunned by our pursuers, cornered in these forests, chased from one God-forsaken part of eastern Poland to another.

We all know that things will not go well if they ever lay hands on us. At best, they shoot prisoners out of hand. Their worst still makes me shiver, recalling the time we came across the mutilated body of one of our captured comrades. Strung up and left as an example and warning.

After ranting for several more minutes, the chief decided that death was the only penalty, to stop the rot from spreading. I closed my eyes at that moment, anticipating the blast of his heavy pistol.

I should have known better. He’s an old fox, always coming up with the unexpected. He glanced from me to Malinowski with cunning in his reddened eyes. Of course, he knew we were the best of friends. He gestured at me with contempt. ‘You can look after him,’ he snarled, ‘until the moment comes for his execution.’ No-one dared to ask when that would be.

And that’s why we’re in this room, me and Malinowski, in a flickering half-light.

Although our comrades outside are swapping crude jokes, I can tell there’s an edge to their laughter. They’re thinking about what’s going on in this cabin, just glad they’re not either of us. It seems interminable, the wait for the moment when the chief is ready — and drunk enough — to carry out his sentence. It’s torture for them too, this sadistic delay. Our leader’s message loud and clear, everybody will be made to suffer for the sins of one man. Never behave like him.

It feels as if if I have a fever. Seeing me shiver in spite of the evening warmth, Malinowski speaks up at last.‘Don’t worry, Bronislaw,’ he soothes me. ‘Things will turn out alright, you’ll see.’

Not for the first time since this morning I wonder if, deep down, I’ve always hated Malinowski. I recognise now that what I took for his simple peasant ways was actually a severe lack of brains. The man is a moron, believing the chief was ever going to forgive and forget! That at any moment he’d say never mind, come outside and have some vodka!

No, the only thing that holds our band together is fear. The fear of dying. The chief knows that. He also knows the only way he can retain our utmost loyalty is to make an example every so often. This is what happens when you disobey me. We are easily cowed, after all.

Except Malinowski.

He is smiling at me again in his boneheaded way, muttering words of encouragement. Perhaps that’s the thing about being brave, you think the worst is never going to happen. I don’t have that consolation, a born pessimist and born-again coward.

I curse Malinowski in my mind. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be stifling in this cabin, suffering like this. Wary of his huge hands, the hands I’ve seen almost knock a man’s head from his shoulders, I keep my thoughts to myself.

He saved my life in one of his fits of bravery, carrying me through the long grass as I bleated from a leg wound, until we had outpaced the Germans. Thinking about this day of torture, of what will happen at any moment, the dark stain on the earth, I wish for a moment that he’d let me die back then.

Because I can tell by the lowering of the voices outside that the terrible finale is not far away. I expect the chief to call out at any second. I am quite literally shitting my pants. ‘Courage, Bronislaw,’ Malinowski says.

That’s easy for him to say, the lion-hearted imbecile! Malinowski is smiling to himself and I know exactly what he’s thinking. Too many hours spent in his company for it to be otherwise. That craggy open face always easy to read. His expression saying, in a few minutes only one of us will be alive.

Finally, he’s realised! Until now Malinowski has told himself, and me, that the chief was simply playing a cruel game with us.

I can almost see it, the body lying on the dark earth with a bullet in its head. The sweat breaks out again in my armpits.

And yet when Malinowski touches my shoulder tenderly, it really feels as if some of his courage is passing into me. I experience an upsurge of my old feelings towards him. ‘Everything will be OK,’ I mutter through cracked lips, ashamed of my earlier thoughts.

‘We’re still friends, then?’ he asks, rather anxiously. ‘Of course we are,’ I respond. His heavily muscled arms engulf my shaking body.

The sound of boots on the wooden steps outside. The rap of knuckles against the door. The chief’s muffled roar. ‘Come out and meet your fate!’

Malinowski looks at me, and for the first time there is dismay in his eyes. But it is soon replaced by a peasant gaze, impassive, accepting that what will be will be. He takes my hand in his giant paw. ‘Goodbye, old friend,’ he says in a firm voice. I am too overcome to answer.

Our comrades are in a crescent facing us when we go outside. I can tell, even in the gloom, that many of them wish they were anywhere but this forest clearing.

It’s getting late and everyone is obviously the worse for drink and lack of sleep. Only the chief looks determined, his eyes redder than ever in the lamplight. ‘Our work is never done,’ he jokes to the second-in-command. There is uneasy laughter in the ranks.

Looking across to where the two of us are standing to attention, he gestures me forward. When I stumble to a halt with a pathetic attempt at a salute, he says, smirking, ‘As a fitting punishment for your crybaby display back there, I sentence you to latrine duty for the next month.’

Someone shouts out from the back, ‘I have your shovel here!’ Several comrades snigger and snort.

The chief’s voice is still jovial. ‘And now for the final job before we turn in.’ Suddenly no-one is laughing.

As if gauging the mood of the men, the cunning old fox changes his tune. All at once his voice is benign, even patriarchal. ‘I should have seen that you were always too bold, my son’, he says. ‘But we are still alive today not because of impetuous courage but because we know when to be cowards, when to run away.’

His voice still has a paternal ring. ‘Now, my boy, come and meet your fate.’

There is a protesting groan from someone in the ranks. Malinowski was always a popular comrade. As he steps forward, his head held high, I can feel the tears on my cheeks.

The chief’s voice is higher now, sounding angry, as if he’s whipping himself up to do the deed. ‘You could have cost us everything with your confounded bravery.’ He stares at all the faces in the shifting light. ‘This is to show that when I say retreat, I mean retreat.’ The last thing I see before I close my eyes is the heavy pistol being raised.

When I open them again, the body is lying on the dark earth. The chief is addressing us in a voice which holds both regret and resolve. ‘Remember this lesson well.’ As we drift in silence to our rough beds, I catch his aside to the second-in-command.

‘Too brave for his own good.’