"Oh, boys and girls, what was really the point of sacrifising yourselves for us? You shouldn't have. Honestly, we were unworthy of the blood you shed, the doublecrossing pretenders we were. We could always adapt to, and survive under any conqueror. When all is said and done, the Fuehrer hadn't been that bad. Until the damnable terrorists from England popped up with their parachutes, and hark, all gone our inconspicuous still existence right in the middle of the hurly-burly. Such a mess they made of it."
The old man sighed. Carefully he picked up a postcard tied with a black ribbon to the tombstone of a Russian soldier. Vera Kuznetsova, wounded in a Prague street on the 8th of May, 1945 by an SS officer from the Death's Head division. Died in a hospital.
On the happy picture-postcard with flowers, was written in an unsteady handwriting of a very old, almost blind Russian woman:
The old man fixed the card to its place. There were less and less of such cards each year - all of the soldiers' mothers had departed. That year, came this last birthday greeting.
The old man wiped off a drunken tear. "Oh mother, your daughter is out of favour now. Your children, Russia, are now second-class fallen. Their death has been devalued. I am glad this mother will never find that out."
Depending on the current political state of affairs in the country, honours to the fallen were passed from one cemetery to the other. Now the baten of glory, of which the dead Russian solders were deprived after the years of holding the first place, was lastingly handed to their neighbours. Anyway, nothing mattered to the gone-off, who rested in peace altogether for fifty-one years by now.
A small, grievous embassy delegation entered the Russian cemetery, carrying a wreath. The old man saluted, in the foreign military style, and went away in order not to interfere with the sad ceremony.
There was far more animation at the other cemetery. Thrice the military salute rattled, three orchestras were playing, the government delegation laid flamboyant wreaths, the Vice Prime Minister was pronouncing a speech. "We wanted you, not THEM. Bad luck. But today we all would like to imagine what would have happened if fortune had turned her face towards us. Yes, we humbly confess that we have always lived, cowering and cautious, complaining about the invaders and all the time holding on while others were fighting instead of us. We like being pitied, and praised for our obedience. But we will become lions, one day we will show ourselves on the arena of history!" Salute, applauses, threefold cheer.
The old man saluted in the foreign fashion and went home. Approaching his house, he strongly felt something was wrong. His Russian wife, Svetlana, was with a great effort trying to hold their three bullterriers, which were enragedly tearing towards the cellar. "Gosh, it must be prisoners hiding down there again!" stunned the old man. The old house, longing for a repair, stood right next to the cemetery and served as a hideaway for numerous delinquents who escaped from the nearby jail. Three of them broke the jail every week, locking up the watch into the cell instead of themselves. As if to annoy the old man, all of the escapees invariably hid themselves in his cellar. Tired of the police which disturbed him without pause, the old man settled three tremendous bullterrier dogs into the cellar. "Just wait, I'm going to chuck out those jail-birds!" he shouted, but as he was rushing towards the house he slipped on a heap of dog faeces and fell down. It was a venomous old woman from the neighbourhood, Mrs. Naschvalova, who had put the heap there. She did not like the old man's active participation in the large-scale collecting of dog excrements. He was the Vice Chairman of the National Committee for Collecting Canine-Originating Dropping and was in charge of organising a worldwide conference on this issue in the Grand Hotel Hilton. Mrs. Naschvalova also gathered the by-products of digestion of pets, but only in order to lay them out in front of the old man's house. In the celler sat two dreaded women. Oxana Vovchenko, a tourist from Ukraine, had lost trace of her daughter, Ulyana, half a year ago. All that time she beggared at the railway station. She learned from the gypsies that her daughter had been kidnapped and sold to a luxury bordelle. Mrs. Vovchenko had no funds for a quest but she firmly decided not to leave untill she found her. Finally she met Ulyana, who had managed to escape, at the railway station. The girl was pacing to and fro, wondering where to get money for a ticket home. "Ulyana, my daughty! Could it be that's you?" A beggar woman, dressed in dirty rags, embraced Ulyana. "Thanks God I've finally find you. He has percieved my prayers." When mother and daughter had wept out all their passions, they started experiencing pangs of hunger. However, all the cheap snack bars nearby had a notice at the entrance saying, "UKRAINIANS NOT ADMITTED". Insulted, the women walked forth. It was the same everywhere. Finally, Ulyana exploded at the sight of yet another "UKRAJINA STOP!" notice. "Bastards! OK, let's make it this way: you don't say anything and I'll pretend I'm from here." After poor lunch they went back to the railway station, where their spirits fell again, as Ulyana was surrounded by local pimps. The mother's strivings to protect her were useless, and it seemed that the girl was about to be taken awqay again. Catching the instant, the women dashed outside and took the first tram passing by, which brought them to the cemetery. They crossed it and faced the house that stood in some distance. As they hid in the hedge near it, quick-sighted Ulyana read a sign-board that said, "National Committee for Collecting Canine-Originated Dropping Headquarters". Another one next to it ran, "From this house, on the 8th of May 1945, a portrait of Adolph Hitler was secretly thrown out to the rubbish-heap. GLORY TO THE COURAGEOUS!" "What on Earth das that mean!?" stunned Oxana when her daughter interpreted to her the golden inscription on the marble tablet. "Your grandmother fought Hitler in a totally different way. She was in a partisan detachment. She was captured and tortured for weeks. The Gestapo men cut her leggs off before the execution. And here - some portrait in a rubbish heap?" "Hush, police driving along!" Ulyana became anxious and pulled her mother into the house. The door to the cellar was not locked, and the escapees timely hid themselves. There they were discovered by the old man. "Get out, you thieves!" he shouted, but in this very instant fifty-one jail-breakers swooped into the cellar, knocking the old man off his feet. Then they threw themselves upon the stock of Pedigree Pal tins, and started consuming their contents greedily. "HŽNDE HOCH!", Oxana suddenly yelled out, inspired by the wartime recollections. The prisoners, still chewing, obediently put their hands up. Then came Svetlana with the bullterriers. "Out! Line up!" she commanded. The dogs confirmed the seriousness of her intentions by awesome barking. Fifty-one jail-breakers lined up in the kitchen-garden. The old man rose to his feet, shook off the faeces and, as usually, started reproaching the escapes. "Where is your civic consciousness? Think of the way you make our brave police look like, every week!" The round-faced convicts were sweeping their sly eyes, and snickering. Hugry bullterriers, randy with the flavour of Pedihree Pal, broke lose and hurled at the rank of prisoners, who fled, screaming, and climbed up the trees. Having locked up the dogs in the celler, and women in the house, the old man went to arrange some business of his Committee. Svetlana, Oxana and Ulyana were drinking coffee and watching television. It showed a reporting dedicated to the 51th anniversary of the end of the Great War. Rat-like old Mrs. Naschvalova presented bunches of fading lilac picked on the war cemetery, to three American naval infantrymen. "I would like to thank these brave boys for the liberation of our beloved capital fifty-one years ago!" she squeaked in rapture. "But they are much too young to have done it," a journalist objected. Suddenly something clicked in the old woman's brain, and she, by a habit of many years, shouted, "DA ZDRAVSTVUYET SOVIETSKAYA ARMIYA!!!" The TV camera staggered, and Mrs. Naschvalova disappeared from the frame. Svetlana shook her shoulders and switched to another channel. There ran a porno movie ROOM 51, about the wicked Great War. A youth radio station held a military phone quiz for small children. DJ Zlatoust put a quesstion, "What is your peer's life in the Chechen city of Grozny?". "BOMBASTIC!!!" answered a child on the line. "Great, my golden boy!" Zlatoust lauphed merrily. "Next question: how do your Chechen peers sleep?" - "LIKE DEAD!!!" - "Great chap! You've got the first prize: a free subscription on the teenie magazine Encore. We'll come back after a song by the Not-All-There Brothers." Svetlana phewed and turned off the radio. "I propose we should honour the memory of our soldiers fallen in all wars over, and that of killed Chechen children and women." She brought a bottle of vodka and some herring with pickles. After the drink the women sang sad war songs. The old man returned with a box of small plastic spades for cleaning off dog excrements, and some put-on advertising boards on which there was a diagram of the object to be gathered, and a slogan, RESPECT YOUR STREET / LEAVE NO DOG SHIT. "You'll be going along the streets wearing these, and collect the faeces you come across - this will increase public consciousness." "Good heavens, should I have escaped to end up like this," sighed Ulyana. It was getting dark. Half-denudated, all covered in spits and dogs dung, old Mrs. Naschvalova was creeping down the street mumbling, "What wrong did I say? Just confused the armies, so what? I am an old woman, I have not fully reorganised my mind yet. Why have my fellow citizens shamed me? Didnt many of them, like me, voluntarily manifacture weapons for Hitler to fight our future liberators, up to the very V-Day?" Something clicked in her brain, and she stopped in front of the old mans house, waved her feeble fist in the air, and exclaimed, "Damn you let, Russian bitches, Ill get you all!" The three bullterriers broke into furious barking, as if they took the insult personally. The old woman jumped up. A wonderful plan of taking vengeance on the rusophile old man and his female detachment flashed into her mind. The 9th of May came. The inhabitants of the half-ruined house, came down with Russian vodka, were sleeping like dead Chechens and did not hear the night ado of the dogs in the cellar. In the morning, the old man looked from the window and was downrightly astonished. There was no heap of dog excrements in front of the house, which Mrs. Naschvalova would normally pile up in the dark of the night. Svetlana, Oxana and Ulyana put on the advertising-boards, armed themselves with spades and went down to the cellar for the bullterriers. The latter were lying on the floor, dull, faint, and ultimately reluctant to going out. Ulyana stumbled over some small box. "My God, strichnine! Somebody tried to poison the doggies!" "I know who" Svetlana said, as one of the bullterriers crawled to her and licked her leg. In its mouth it had a bloody piece of grey fabric, which an old woman's tiny pattern woven in. Having bought bouquets of tulips and carnations and smashed the detested ad-boards to pieces, the women set off to the Russian war cemetery. It was empty there. At the tombstone, an old woman tied with a black ribbon a postcard from Russia that had just arrived. Svetlana read, in a low voice: "Dear brother Mitya, congratulations on the Victory Day! This year, our mother died; on her deathbed, she was happy she would finally see you again. We also will never forget you, nor our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Rest in peace! - Your loving sister, Maria."