Distant Taps The Woodpecker

Part 3 — the last few days in the Carpathians with my sufi, before we part ways, and subsequently I build up the "Silent Owl Squadrone"

I arrived back in Uzhhorod, and met my Circassian sufi at my favourite cafe, near the headless Pushkin square, next to the river. Favourite cafe was putting it mildly. Tea Roo, read the stone sign above the entrance, a letter having long plunged near someone’s right shoulder below. Inside the two sisters, daughter and conversed in both English and Hungarian to me, and Lena the waitress, scooped up yet another piece of apple pie and poured another compote to go with one last espresso, the very best espresso in Ukraine, and therefore Europe. The wallpaper might have been peeling and the decor simple, but the welcome was effusive in a warm and humble way.

‘So what do you think,’ I asked Niyne as we sat in thick coats on stools outside the cafe, while Lena in thin white sweater put two coffees down; ‘will they invade?’

She looked down at her cup, a fern leaf design slowly swirling in her coffee. ‘They will invade,’ she said, ‘as they invaded us in 1763, and we fought them for a hundred years until they wiped my country physically off the world map. Our Tsikekun, the Circassian genocide was Russia’s murder and removal of 97% Circassians from our lands. 1.5 million people were killed. In the late 1800s they were still getting impaled, burnt and raped, and the bellies of pregnant women ripped open. We were called subhuman filth. They have not changed, at all.’

Picking up a packet of sugar, she made to tear it open above her coffee, then seemed to change her mind and smiled a little, inwardlly, putting the sugar packet back down carefully.

‘Within random complexity there are patterns,’ she continued. ‘They form themselves, they transcend time, but are influenced by it. It is not just one flap of a butterfly’s wing causing a moonsoon, it is the day the rose is ignored for the thorns. Chaos is the pendulum of the opposite action, and that new pattern does not care of the difference between lies and truth, or malice, or good intentions. They will do the same to Ukraine that they have done before, in Circassia, in Chechbya, or Georgia, and in Ukraine itself previously, my adopted country. They will do it because they put someone in power who thrives on chaos, and believes in genocide as policy.’

‘We first met in Croatia, during the war in ex-Yugoslvia, so now war might come here,’ I said.

‘What will you do?’ she asked.

I sighed and shrugged.

‘Me too,’ she smiled.

‘I’ll go to the Tatras for a while now, in Slovakia, continue my forestbathing studies, want to come?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘I’m staying in the Partizan Panzion, if you do drop by.’

‘I won’t leave this time.’

‘Don’t make the big decisions now.’

‘You once told me they need to be made early, not late.’

‘Once upon a time it was possible to be rational,’ I replied

‘Once upon a time,’ her voice, gritted, ‘once upon a time is always a precursor to disaster. But I am a sufi, I am Circassian, I can only live by our code, I cannot run, of course I will not. Nape; honour, is the most important part of Circassian faith. In our country we had no prisons, no corporal punishment, just expulsion from society were utilised for crimes. But our most terrible punishment is napeteh, to lose face and so lose respect from our society. Napeteh was caused sometimes by military defeat or imprisonment by a foreign army, so it was a custom for Circassian warriors to commit honour suicide.’

‘I will get my passport stamped and come back,’ I said after a pause in which I searched for something to say.

‘Don’t lose it, otherwise it may be another long wait.’

‘The Tatras are where I went after Croatia, and Bosnia, after I last saw you through the bars of a cage. Was nice, big snowflakes and fluffy snow, green forests that I cross-country skiied through, but I couldn’t forget those bars you were behind.’

‘Sounds like you were in the cage, not me.’

‘Maybe I should be.’

‘I wonder what you’d be in a zoo, a tiger plotting his return, hoping everyday, padding back and forth, or a lion lying there, looking almost doped, long having given up.’

‘Oh, I’d be some exotic chipmunk or wallaby.’

‘You can change the animal but the principal would be the same.’

‘Or a gnu.’

‘Let me have my tiger fantasies.’

‘Caged though, and I wonder which of the two is the most tragic.’

‘I wonder, and anyway, many more cages are coming, many, many more.’

We got up: ‘Come, I’ll walk you to the bus station,’ she said.

We went by the river, passed the little statuette of John Lennon, then Santa Claus and rossed the pedestrian bridge then through Petofi square, named after Hungary’s national poet. From there we walked owards a large Orthodox church with blue dome. ‘Impressive,’ I said, looking at the large pines on the premises, across from the awful ametiville Intourist Hotel, a large crumbling block in testament to Ukraine’s recent Soviet past. Passing a military supply shop, we looked in, but said nothing, and we turned towards the bus and train station.

‘See you sometime,’ said Niyne.

‘Damn, bit too much like a closing scene from a book,’ I said.

She frowned.

‘Better not speak,’ I laughed, a little too forced, hoarse.

‘If I let you do all the talking you can forget any future book,’ she said: ‘And I think there will be enough to write about soon anyway.’

‘Hope you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘Never have hoped you were wrong, but I do now.’

‘Yes,’ Niyne said, ‘I was right, you are that tiger, prowling there and back behind bars, hoping when there is no hope left.’

* * *

At the long wait on the border with Slovakia I read Book of the Five Rings, written around 1643 by Miyamoto Musashi, a ronin, unattached samurai, who fought duels as physical philosophy. Musashi remained an undefeated warrior, artist, philosopher and teacher, in a life exemplified balance in all things at all times.

“Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things,” he wrote.

I was first in the Tatra mountains in 1993, after failing to get to Niyne, when my Pass to the Nagyatad refugee camp had been suddenly revoked. In those terrible days at the gate I tried everything, and in the end the police took me to the train station with vague instructions to get out of town, and promises of jail time if I did not, on espionage charges, something that had already been tried on me once before.

After a beer, coffee and kifli, a HungarIan croissant, at Budapest’s grandiose Nyugati train station, with its catacomb 90s East European market in the dungeons below, I set off for the refuge of the Tatra mountains. In Slovakia all banks refused to change 5,000 Forint Hungarian bank notes, and so I walked through the mountains to Poland, to get the money changed to Zloty, a full 2 day trek in gymshoes and shorts and a small backpack with nuts, honey, shirts, underwear and sleeping bag over two particularly difficult cols, razor-sharp mountain passes and plunging vistas, cold night in a small cave and meandering forest paths before arriving in Zakopane. The Polish mountain town was a setting for novel if there ever was one, with wooden houses designed for a film full of drama and emotion, in a backddrop of high peaks, and a climbing shop owner who had climbed Mt Everest, and spent the afternoon with me and two glasses of buffalo grass vodka. The vodka bottle and I became repeated companions over a few days while I stared at the mountains, thinking ofNiyne in her cage, wondering where I had suddenly disappeared to, and why. My thoughts became heavier and heavier as each bottle lightened, and in these pre-mobile and internet days, communication seemed to be a fraught affair, not least as I knew her address only as Nyine, public cage, Nagytad refugee camp, Hungary.

At some point I found the right bus back towards my planned quiet retreat in Slovakia, which despite an ex-boxer prime minister who arranged to have the country’s president’s son kidnapped, beaten up, and dumped at the border, was one of my favourite destinations in the 1990s. More particularly, Starý Smokovec, a small, quiet settlement in the Tatra mountains, in a country with an attitude in those early 1990s; within a region that itself had stumbled out of the stupor of communism and having to grow up all over again despite the aches and scars accrued under the absurdity of the previous regime. Next-door Hungary was also developing its attitude, and the prime minister had just announced he was not prime minister of Hungary, but of all Hungarians, even those over the border; tantamount, just about, to a declaration of war in those Yugoslav war days. With its sizable Hungarian minority, and not commonly-known history of being invaded by Hungary (the last time in 1968, as fighting strafed the streets of Prague during the Prague Spring), and while Yugoslavia nearby crumbled, Slovakia tensed, Mercier, the infamous Slovak prime minister, argued for Slovakia joining the newly formed CIS, formed from the ex-USSR, to become the richest state in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), instead of the poorest in the European Union, and banned shops using only the Hungarian language on their signs.

I loved the atmosphere of turmoil in Eastern Europe at the time. Writers are always hunting for tension, conflict and pressure — just ask the Czechoslovak authors who wrote the masterpieces they did under the communist regime, permanently fighting censorship, or worse. But aside from that, I loved coming to Starý Smokovec, in the Slovakian Tatras. In those early years of the decade I’d travelled around eastern Europe repeatedly, but whenever I wanted to add a few more chapters to a burgeoning book, I would head straight for the tiny mountain town in the Tatras for a few weeks, in summer, winter, spring and autumn. I stayed in various different pensions, each one clean, charming, with a table in a room with a view. Considering the pensions started around €5 per night at that time, I was able to spend all my breaks ensconced in a room, coming out for breathtaking walks among trails, or a few Tatran beers. Starý Smokovec was therefore the ideal writer’s retreat, with clean air, not too much to do except walk, and write, a language that I did not understand but was charming to the ear, and prices that meant I was able to concentrate on the book without worrying where my next meal would come from. And so in-between mountain hikes and lubrication I wrote in chalets and pensions and bars, over garlic soup, smoked fish, stuffed potatioes and cheese and bread. Later, when not teaching I took trips to Moldavia in the new Czech Republic, to Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, where I travelled with false documents as the Serbs in Belgrade tried to get rid of Milosovic and his Lady Macbeth, until the Serb police got rid of me. I went to Romania, during those infamous days when miners were paid to come to Bucharest to crack a few demonstrating student heads open, after the fake ‘revolution’ that got Ceaucescu and his own Lady Macbeth out of the way, and I travelled to the Ukraine, with its visas issued not to the day of departure, but hour. Then I returned to Starý Smokovec to write. Those were days of change that for the people of central and eastern Europe meant a past that was opened, dissected, condemned and thrown into the dustbin, and many struggled to start again, and slowly Nagyatad faded to the back of my mind, with all efforts to make contact with camp authorities unanswered, and the ex-Yugoslav war moving on to Kosovo; the refugee camp closed and dismantled.

under the trees
leaves and shadows of leaves
shadows stay

Descending from a new, modern Tatra mountain train thirty years later, in February 2022, I went to the Partizan Panzion, with Hemingwayesque paintings of fighters from long-forgotten wars. One looked like me, sitting in great overcoat, with rifle and goatee beard. I felt like I was in The Shining, and when I walked into the bright February snow forest to soothe unsettled rumination I thought instead of the nostalgia that had come back from the past to the present; of Nyine, wondering if this was one of these clever, simple, unexplainable twists of fate that. But my path was worn and true, and the trail wound up higher and higher through the forest, until my thoughts ironed out, and I was able to look down at the vintage, traditional health centres below me along the side of the Tatra mountains below me, their window catching the evening sun. From there I was able to think clearly, and mulled over a hypothesis I had been working on: that up to the mid 20th century it had been the norm to send people to the mountains, or somewhere where the air was fresh. The Tatra mountains had many sanatoriums dating back to those oh so romantic eras when lung diseases were not cured by modern-day drugs. But when those afflicted by a deadly lung disease like tuberculosis went to the hills, where were they going? They were not going to the peaks, but to the mountain forests. It was not specifically mountain air that was healing, but perhaps more the forests, from the pines and fir trees, which grew on elevations from the sea up to nearly 4,000 metres on a mountainside. The Paimio Tuberculosis sanatorium, in Finland, was an example of this, where until the 1950s patients were wheeled out into the forest itself, which was more or less at sea level. Contrary to expectations, results also seemed to be magnified when the forest air trapped moisture.

The results for cure of tuberculosis in forest setting was exemplified by the cure cottages at Saranac Lake, known as the capital of the forested Adirondack mountains, and frequented by many, including Robert Louis Stevenson, when it was thought he also was suffering from tuberculosis. The cure included complete rest as well as the fresh, clear air, of which forest air was a prime example. And as I looked into the details of this curative process, it seemed to me it was possible that phytoncides, emitted from evergreen trees but not deciduous ones, were of direct benefit. These phytoncides, volatile oils with anti bacterial and anti fungal qualities, and composed of terpenes and phenols that provide compelling fragrances, also boost the immune system. In the fresh forest air patients were breathing in these phytoncides like a-pinene and limonene. Less known is that these phenols and terpenes bind to intensify harmful pollution particles, the bane of our supposedly post-industrial age.

It was not just tuberculosis patients that spent time in sanatoriums, however. Many first world war soldiers, victims of gassing by various poisoned gas, and traumatised generally spent time in convalescent homes nestled in nature, recuperating just by being among trees and taken out of the intense, murderous environment they had been subjected to. The Tatra mountains were ideal, with their luscious coniferous forests and small peaks, wooden chalets dotting the mountainsides and sanatoriums in tiny, quiet settlements among forests on plateaus and in valleys. A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood, Franz Kafka once said. I felt that about the forests of the Tatras I walked through, once a refuge from a curse in civilisation. Kafka, perhaps the best writer of the 20th century, never benefited from a proper cure, and the author from Prague died from Tuberculosis in Vienna, a few years after World War 1.

almost intoxicating
the green shade
over my haiku

Sitting in the Partizan lounge I sipped tea.

‘Darjeeling?’ my neighbour with large black moustache and sergeant major air at the next chair asked, rather grandly.

‘Glass cup though.’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ he replied, in a mix of English accent mixed with a Slovak tilt.

Our conversation was brief, some might say terse, or aphoristic, as conversations among climbers high on mountainsides can be, but emtertaining all the same in that most tense of times, before battle, or invasion, when no-one could be quite sure. I thought again how important forestbathing was in times like these, to bring a needed relaxation to the permanent winding, like on those toy soldiers, a crank stuck in their back, twisted further and further, until they clatter across the floor to stop suddenly against a wall, or fall.

I thought of the Redwoods in California that we had visited years back, we being Pepine, Luis, Tod and I, just days before entering Mexico, where my book had more or less really started, detailing first our journey through Central America. But it was that day spent among the Redwood trees that I remembered most often. Those immense trees, beyond describable in their sheer and stable size, stretching far, nearly 100 metres upwards, in understated red tones, among greenery so bright one wondered if chlorophyll was not just an accidental colour, that if somehow nature wanted to please through unadulterated beauty and power of healing. Rehabilitation through interaction with forests has long included psychological benefit. Deep in this redwood forest on a path between the glorious tall conifers, any negative issues on my mind existed no more. My emotion, already one of anticipation when we had arrived, was matched by a physical sense of wellbeing as the light but delightfully heady aroma of the redwood landscape seemed to cultivate a transcendent experience — of attunement to that outside the self, and moments that I have ultimately perceived as important to me when they came back in mind.

When I arrived in the Partizan’s dining room in the evening after a walk there was a great yelping by the hotel owner’s resident golden setter, through the glass door to a patio outside. We ran out and threw a manner of items at the enraged bear. I gave it a whack with my wooden staff, then another one, as the bear bit into the dog’s hind leggings. Whatever had annoyed the bear, it was not giving up easily, and it continued to attack the dog again and again, before we finally scared it off.

‘If there ever was a sign,’ said my fellow guest in his strong accent, sitting in the dining room with me afterwards.

The next morning the Russians invaded.

* * *

Piles of clothes lay dumped in the rain, and tents from various charities, toiletries, food packets, plastic bottles, bedding, all laypiled, also, on the Slovak border, ignored, for the most by the stream of new refugees, a crowd that poured slowly, interminably away from the war, with suitcases on wheels, push chairs, wheelchairs, blankets in arms and paper bags, in one uniform movement out of Ukraine, like a great jar of molasses knocked off a shelf after an explosion, seeping silently across the floor. The bus crawled forward to this scene of muffled desolation, dumbed even; quiet, seemingly dignified, but in fact a lethargy of extreme tiredness, of extreme shock, in what was the heart of Europe at the beginning of 2022. On the bus I was the only foreigner, and had indeed been refused entry to a previous bus. War attracts the good, the bad, and the ugly. I was not sure which of the categories I best fit, but was helped by the Russians very quickly snapping up the bad and ugly.

Still on the bus, I nodded to an armed border guard, and received a text from Niyne: I joined the territorial defence, the TDF, she had typed.

Where are you, I typed back.

Kharkiv now.

And how is it? I tapped, watching her type.

Nobody is putting me in a cage this time.

Pretty sure they won’t.

Things intense.

Yeah.

We are blind at night.

You need some night scopes.

Yes, we do, can you get some anywhere?

Don’t know.

Pls try, we are losing guys.

Yeah, is bad.

But we are stalling them pushing them back.

Keep tight, I tapped out.

There a pause, and when I checked the phone quickly again, on silent as it was, I saw a new message:

Now, she had typed, a sufi verse...

I watched the typing symbol, and in a few seconds it came through.

My broken heart is wounded everwhere
With countless cuts from which red drops appear
Yet when sad lovers meet and sigh their sighs
Not without praise shall each other’s name be claimed
Not without tears
For it is not the years on which those that stumble will fall
But of the dwelling on them
In those pale companions
Whose joy has been forgot and hope has disappeared
Only remembered by the tap of the woodpecker 
On an old telegraph pole

Back in Uzhhorod again, I strolled by the river towards the café I’d sat at with Nyine, with an address for the just-formed International Legion in my pocket. There was a shout, and I saw young woman running after me with phone in hand, that I had forgotten at Lviv Croissants where I had dipped in for a coffee.

‘How do you get such charming woman to run after you!’ chuckled a figure with silver beard, close-cropped hair, grey fatigues, standing nearby, arms on handle bars of his bicycle. Thus was my introduction to Andrej, his glasses in hand, Jewish, indeed a rabbi of sorts, polyglot, speaking in Hungarian, English, Ukrainian, Slovak and Russian. And it is in Hungarian we first conversed for a while after the first greeting, then finally in English again.

‘I am on my way to Szolnok, in Hungary for a few days, the world capital of suicide, from here, the country where most are murdered and least commit suicide,’ he said.

‘I am heading to Lviv, to join the International Legion,’ I replied. ‘I was just nearby in the Carpathians this last month, looking at forests.’

‘Nah, stay with us here then, the Jewish community. Hang around a bit, and come join the Zakarpattia Brigade, the 101st, we could use a bit of foreign blood.’

‘Not sure what I could bring,’ I said.

‘We’d find out, wouldn’t we? I’ll be back in a couple of days, train’s free for us,’ Andrey replied, ‘you were studying forests, sounds useful to me, and you say you were in the coastguard, and territorials medical corps.’

‘Yeah, was.’

‘You could even start our own battalion of foreigners with the 101st. We get many lost souls coming through already, from outside Ukraine, some very lost, others just a bit over the hill, a few without military experience. Pick as many as you can, we need the forests with Belarus full of observers, sounds like this could be a match to me.’

I nodded, in a bouquet of surprise, and honour.

‘We can send you people that have been turned down from other places, maybe a little older, maybe women who have planned to join specialised units of Ukrainian men who don’t speak English. There is already one here, called Raven.’

In that way the Silent Owl Squadrone, part of the Zakarpattia 101st Territorial Defence, was born, and in that strange twilight zone, like waiting for your first customer when you have just opened a bar, or the first deer in your sights, first storm at sea, first illicit affair from the smoky back alleys of a war torn city, I waited for Raven at my quickly favourite cafe, in an upstairs room in which I held court. Raven, from the Appalachians, with Vietnamese heritage, her ancestors and herself from the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Ashville, North Carolina.

‘I heard about you guys from the internet,’ she lied; ‘in the Blue Ridge mountains we are called Uplanders. That was it. Had to come to the Carpathian mountains and serve.’

On the internet? ‘We are not on the internet,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here a week.’

‘You’d be surprised, check the dark net,’ she said, dumping her backpack, black, and looked around, hunted, hunting. In Raven, I was quick to learn, lurked a figure shrouded. Raven, the typecast enigmatic mercenary, with a reputation as dark as the shadows she carried, and cast about her. Clad in black, only, and adorned with a few sharp knives and piercing gaze, she’d been in some covert unit, which she frequently mentioned without giving details, sprinkling in a few swear words when asked. She was out early every morning, practicing some obscure martial art, alone, and even in company seemed to drift into her own world. Yet beneath a cold exterior came a carbon mirror copy; a complex soul, haunted, but also harvesting compliments in a need to be loved, or at least liked. And Raven herself battled with the truth of her own identity, trusting few, but needing them give her the warmth she so desperately desired. So she walked somewhere between darkness and light, her destiny entwined with those who crossed her. But ultimately she stood alone, a solitary figure in her secretive landscape, with the one quality we were looking for; she could look after herself.

Texas turned up next. Invited himself to our table in a cafe by the river one evening, as Raven and I sat drinking beer, conversation minimal, as it always was with Raven, where she spoke of her love of front lines, where brotherhood could be found, and appreciation, at last.

‘I want to be in front too, Texas said, ‘at the front, in the most dangerous of places.’ He shrugged: ‘troubled childhood,’ he offered, in explanation, lighting a Malboro cigarette, exhaling quickly; ‘been building small cabins for refugees,’ he said, ‘with my church group. I’d be up for all of it with you guys.’

Smoker he might have been, but I often saw Texas jogging at sunrise over the folowing days, wearing four, five layers to sweat out the wine from the night before, which he drunk to lower the cholesterol of his ten eggs a day; all he ate, for protein. Texas was different in a way that defined the word.

Fir, from Norway was sitting at the cafè when I arrived the following morning, a vet, like from that TV programme years ago on some British channel, quiet, cheeky, and a twin, she said, so to one day expect her to double.

‘We all have our dark side,’ Raven said to that, causing me to bite my lip and not say the obvious: except you, Raven except you.

And then there was Wireman. Straight from the Bronx. Literally, where he’d been kicked out from.

‘Thought once I got my green card I would be ok,’ he said, ‘ but I was shipped back here.’

‘A criminal,’ Raven said to the computer screen she was typing into.

Mexicano followed, who was in fact Italian, well Sicilian, with handlebar moustache, a qualified drone pilot who preferred to watch the International Legion from afar a while first, and then Squirrel, a Polish woman, doctor of something or other, living in Ireland, short hair and sharp eyes, who in our interview had expressed such virulent hatred for what she termed feminism it seemed her overriding motivation, and had finished her interview with: ‘I will need a glass of wine, it’s lunchtime.’

‘Hired,’ I’d replied.

Tennis, also a doctor, was Taiwanese, permanent gin, lock of dyed blond hair at her forehead, and all that was professional, travelling around the world by bike, in Ukraine in a last minute diversion, to help out, a little surprised to find herself with us.

‘Around the world?’ I repeated.

‘Yeah.’

‘What would you do after that?’’

‘Sail from New Zealand to Taiwan.’

‘You sail?’

‘Never. Want to come along?’ charming Tennis asked.

There was Volli, from Estonia. What could I say about Volli, except that I knew him well, from Estonia. Volli, who looked more like Woody Allen than Woody Allen did.

‘And I know war, from my job,’ he pleaded, sensing my hesitation.

Volli worked as the projectionist at the local cinema. He had a point: his cinema had been showing a lot of war films lately. While in Haapsalu I’d ran a small café for a little while, when the owner had gone back to Latvia to give birth, and Volli had been a regular. Getting him back to the cinema to to turns on the lights and set the next showing had always been something of an uphill task, and the cinema gained something of a cult following, when Volli yet again stumbled onto the stage to apologise for some hiccup. The management was not part of that cult, and his warning letters were stacked in the corner of the projection room.

‘You’re in, Volli, cause you’re a technician,’ I said, ‘and piss artist, and I cannot believe you came all the way down on the basis that you heard I was here.’

Callsign Spirit, a Brazilian woman was someone who contacted me online, on Twitter, when it was still called Twitter, and her interview was done in the messages.

I was meant to do this, she typed to me.

I know, I wrote back.

After the war I will take you to the jungles of Brazil, she wrote. I have Indian blood, it is my home.

Deal, hope it can be over soon, I typed, but when Spirit arrived in Ukraine, it was to keep going to the front, in the east, and it was with shock and surprise I met her there later, looking like the fervent salsa dancer she was, fit, fun, smooth, and a tease.

At the first gathering of the group behind the Uzhhorod army base I stood facing the thirty or so volunteers, and growing daily.

‘In the time-honoured way, I’m going to tell you that if you think you cannot hack what we’ll be doing, it is best you leave today.’ I looked around. In a scene that looked like it was taken straight from Hollywood no-one stepped out.

‘No idea what we’ll be doin,’ Texas mumbled.

Good point.

Labietis, a brewmaster and hunter from Latvia arrived with small bag over his shoulder, tall and quiet, followed by Anorak from Britain, with crew cut, Hot Dog, from the French Pyrenees, a waitor, he said, and rugby player, dark, and brooding, two humble Colombians, another Brazilian, and a Peruvian, shott, stocky, callsign Inca, all four with the International Legion until the recent multiple missile strike on the training centre in Yavoriv, nearby, electing to ‘change battalions a while.’ Following them, literally into the café was Jean Mi.

‘Hi,’ he said, I am Jean Michelle. Give me a gun and tell me where to shoot. I am in Ukraine to sell Jaguar cars, in Odesa, maybe Kyiv.’

‘I see.’

‘Get me a visa and I’ll do what you want, then on leave I can go get cars from Europe and bring them in.’

Raven looked up from her computer. ‘Jean Michelle what?’ she said.

‘Paux,’ he answered.

‘Ok,’ she said, ‘jail in Switzerland.’

‘Highly recommendable,’ Jean Mi said.

‘And this newspaper title, from the Monaco Tribune, Who Is This Mysterious Jean Michelle Paux?’

Nice place to visit,’ Jean Mi said.

Raven was staring at the computer screen. ‘So you were the companion of Princess Stephanie of Monaco?’

‘Ah, companion, is a big word,’ Jean Mi shrugged, in heavily-accented French.

‘Lover, then,’ Raven said, ‘shorter.’

‘Callsign Monaco, then,’ I said.

‘Want to buy a Jaguar?’ Monaco said.

After Jean Mi, Blowfish arrived, via Andrej, with a strong recommendation.

‘I was in the police,’ she said, ‘in Okinawa.’

She’d come by plane to Dubai, then Frankfurt, then Warsaw, and from bus to Uzhhorod, where she initially planned to catch a train to Kharkiv. I was humbled.

And then there was Bunny.

‘Bunny?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, phlegmatically, pink bag in lap, pink sweats on, and pink overcoat which she opened to reveal a vysyvanka, embroidered Ukrainian shirt, a chilli pepper hanging between her breasts and medallion, eyes brown, hair a mass of curls and fingernail polish black. She fingered the medallion.

‘Gypsy talisman,’ she giggled. ‘I am half gypsy and half Jewish.’

‘What is your speciality?’ I asked her.

‘I’ve been a prostitute for ten years.’

Silence.

‘I can stay awake at night. And be active.’

‘Good point. Positive.’

‘I am here because I had to get away.’

‘Ah, the bad news. Why?’

‘I had a customer who I never charged.’

‘Yep, heart of gold,’ quipped Raven.

‘He was still a teenager.’

‘Oh those complications,’ Raven quipped again.

‘And a friend of my son.’

‘Yeah, would be,’ Raven sighed.

‘Some people were not to happy,’ Bunny continued.

‘No?’ Raven snorted.

‘He was legal in Hungary. Look it up, on the internet.’

Raven snorted, dismissively. It was clear there was a cast of characters forming for a book, and I felt like sitting down and writing one. I had been here before, and thought briefly of friends from the French Foreign Legion, collected in my first book, the book itself intruding again in the unfolding of events here in Ukraine.

With what looked like most of the volunteers arrived, we called the group together: ‘We’re in the forest area near the border with Belarus. The area is in the Rivne Oblast, and its part of Polesia, a very large area of forest wetland. More about that in a minute. You are eyes and ears. To see if Russians are infiltrating, if they have groups of saboteurs there and anything else that is happening.’

‘Eyes and ears and hands,’ Raven said behind me, arms crossed.

‘A bit about me,’ I said, ‘just so you know. There are two people I look up to. One was a speaker at Hyde Park Corner, in London, I watched when I lived on the streets in London a while. He said nothing. A crowd gathered and we watched him. After a while someone asked him what he was going to talk about. He told them he was not going to talk about anything. Then why are you standing on a box, they enquired. Because I want to. Stop asking me stupid questions, and fuck off,’ he told them.’ I looked around. ‘Any questions? Make them serious please,’ I added.

‘Is that your motivation speech?’ Bunny asked.

‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ I said. ‘kidding, relax, but we need to keep it tight. We may have been around the block a bit, grown long in the tooth, but we are not on a picnic, and need to look out for each other.’

‘That’s better,’ said Bunny. ‘Who is the second person?’

‘A school sports teacher, who used to throw a basketball at people he thought weren’t listening properly.’

‘That is a bit tough.’

I walked up to her, as she stood, resolutely in pink, facing me: ‘Don’t need a running commentary, Bunny, thanks.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘yes, sir.’

Meeting most eyes, I continued: ‘The name of this unit is Silent Owl. Much of the time you’ll be on waterways in canoes, so you’re almost an inland naval group, in Polesia, north of here. We’ll be getting you trained as FPV pilots as soon as possible, to get drones in the air where you might think there’s infiltration. We’ll need them: the closest comparision I can make to Polesia is the Amazon. You are going to be in a large forest area, days on a stretch. You may spot people who don’t want to be seen, and definitely not by you. When you do a recon into the bush stay off the paths, stay on the grass. Imagine a way, find a way through the trees. Sensing a path one cannot yet see goes a long way towards developing senses that are potentially within you, and help your sense of direction.’

‘What do you mean, no maps or anything?’ Bunny said.

‘Listen, magnetoreception, the sense by which animals are able to guide themselves using magnetic fields, is also perhaps where a good sense of direction comes from,’ I said. ‘Tune into the forest. When you push a branch aside instinctively measure how far it will bounce back when you let go, which stone or set of stones we step on might be stable and which might not. Remember, I’m telling you this because we’re going to be stuck in forests, observing and reporting, sometimes alone. You cannot get lost. We won’t find you in all probability, and the Russians might. Use your senses, your instinct. They’ll develop.’

‘Yo, bro,’ said Wireman.

‘I’ve studied your dossiers guys. Most of you were honest with me, and opened up, and most of you have been using different senses in your previous vocations. If you had not, you probably would not be here,’ I lied, slightly: ‘you guys are special, but we need to brush up on things. When you sleep remember where the sun rises. You will need to find dry spots under trees, build a small windbreak. You won’t be setting up camp for a long time. You are the seekers, the hunters, not the hunted. But your primary mode of transport will be canoes. You’ll see why.’

‘Intuition is experience,’ said Raven, scanning with stone eyes, ‘comes from experience.’

‘I more or less agree with you. There might be more to it,’ I said, ‘look at electroception for example, sharks use the sense of electroception to detect prey. Bees can detect electric fields, and both the presence and the pattens of static charges on flowers. While flying, bees harness positive electric charges. When a bee visits a flower, the charge deposited on the flower leaks over time into the ground. Bees detect these electric fields, and use this information to determine if a flower has been recently visited by another bee. Look. Sense. Check. If someone is behind you and you feel it, could that be your sense of electroception, a little more than intuition? Feel, more than just see, if an area you are in has been used. Flowers themselves may quiver and increase scent when bees are in the vicinity. This quiver produces minute soundwaves, which are ably focussed by a given flower’s shape. When a bee does a specific dance called waggle dance, or essentially a figure eight, other bees use the electric field emanating from the dancing bee for distance communication. Remember, pick up any changes. Detect. Assume, always, Ruscists are going to use the forests to infiltrate into Ukraine.’

I kept my briefings oblique. It seemed to work better than the run of the mill discipline, and we were going to spend a long time in the forests and marshlands up at the border with Belarus: ‘In some ways trees have better eyesight than we do, I amounced, to surprise, ‘there are plants that have at least 11 different types of photoreceptors. We have 4. Measured in that way, these plants have a visison that is more complex than ours is. Develop yours. Keep on edge. Keep your eyes on what is around you.’

‘We got night vision?’

‘No, you got you until one day, hopefully we get.’

I continued, on a roll: ‘Polesia is one of the last remaining forest wetlands in Europe. You’ve got bison there, wolves, of course, lynx, and a variety of good food, with fish, also, plus plants. But there are things in the forest that can see, smell and hear you better than you can, Trees communicate with scents they produce, scents to trigger warnings to other trees and insects, or scents to attract, such as the blossoms and flowers. The forest keeps aromas close. In the winter war, in Finland, Finnish soldiers fried sausages in the forests and picked off the starving Russians that came through the bush looking for where the smell came from. Use all your senses. If they come through from Belarus, look for cigarette butts, broken branches, footprints. Listen. Cigarette smoke, soap and toothpaste are easy to smell. We’ll often be in teams of two, give yourselves roles. If one is piloting a drone the other is aware of the surroundings.’

‘Do we choose?’ asked Bunny.

‘Choose what? Who we are with?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘sir.’

‘Somebody has to, Bunny, might as well be each of you.’

The men and women in front of me looked around, in their assortment of colours, stripes and checks; still tourists, with the odd, assorted uniform; ‘Green please, camo best.’ I looked at Raven. ‘Black if you must,’ I said. ‘At the Drunken market, just a name, you’ll find all weather camouflage. Sorry we don’t have any, yet. I paused. ‘Shorts, leggings, or swimsuit, should be black, if you want to wear that in the kayak or canoe. Hopefully oil skins, fishermen’s overalls in winter.’

‘What if we spot something, do we call in air support?’ Texas said.

‘Ah, humour. Excellent,’ I beamed: ‘You do not have the back up of artillery units, or anybody. There are TDF units manning trenches, but you are usually a good few miles in front of them. We are fortunate to have local geography on their side. The long narrow roads that lead down from the border that are surrounded by the thick forests cover deep, swampy ground. That swampy ground is your friend, but it won’t seem like it. All the same, stick to dry land where you can when out of the canoes. I don’t know much about drones, but you’ll need some space when using them.’

‘Hundreds of thousands of migratory birds pass through those forests,’ announced Anorak suddenly, ‘including at least 150,000–200,000 European Wigeons, 200,000–400,000 Ruffs and 25,000 Black-Tailed Godwit, recorded in spring. Nowhere else in central and eastern Europe are there such large concentrations of Ruff and Black-Tailed Godwit as in the flooded forest area of the Pripyat river going through Polesia.’

‘You are not on a fucking nature tour, mate,’ I replied. ‘Green tape for recognition, rolls are hanging around. No yellow please.’

‘No pink then?’ Bunny asked.

‘No pink, Bunny.’

‘Your kilt is plain,’ Bunny said, of the green wool kilt I was wearing. ‘Yeh, made in Pakistan,’ I said.

‘Nice,’ she continued.

‘Easier to put on than trousers, keeps legs dry.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Anything else dry?’ she chortled.

I was going to tell them about the trees, how they are able to tell the time relatively successfully without any clocks or watches by studying the duration of light with their photoreceptors, and well as the temperature of the local environment, that when autumn arrived the fruit and other trees produced a key protein that reacted to lack of sunlight by ensuring that the tree did not blossom, and accordingly activated tree blossoms when light increased and the temperature began to rise, but there was oblique and there was oblique.

‘How are they?’ Andrej said, placing his bicycle against the rust-coloured railing on the walking bridge across the Uzh river, next to a stoic woman still selling flowers at dusk, and another selling woollen socks. Further down a beggar, with a stump, sat slumped to the same railings, and a guitarist plucked blues numbers with a small speaker.

‘Odd,’ I said, standing facing the river, small bag of cherries in hand.

‘It’s an odd war,’ he said, ‘get rid of any not up to it. Let’s have them out in the forest a while. We’ll send them to Polesia to man the forests as soon as possible, and let’s get them canoeing, on the Tisza. Did you tell them the risks?

‘Which are?’

‘They’re not going to be all armed at first. Our priority is to get drones, so they can monitor a large area. They really need to get into the forest and not be seen. Silent Owl is to observe enemy troop movements, not engage.’ They take a risk with their phones, but hopefully it will be ok.’

‘Yeah, hopefully.’

‘We’ll use the Milchat messaging service,’ Andrej said, of the Ukrainian military messenger that rivalled the best.

In The Subtle Lure of Defeat, I’d used an obscure general as a contact man for some dream sequences. Andrej was not a dream figure but very real, and his comment about a lack of weapons, at least in the beginning, seemed likewise a real concern for me. But Ukraine were having other concerns. Somehow, the Ukrainians had been the Russian Spetnatz teams back from Hostomel airport, and back from Kiyv, despite idle commentators cocooned in western Europe predicting defeat, in fact instant defeat.

Good name, Silent Owl, I see,’ Andrej added, elbows on the railing facing the river, as figures trudged home behind him, in the deepening dusk.

‘Is, yeah.’

‘Is because they’re a loud bunch, they need quietening down, remind them of their name, so really, in the forest get them at the earliest hunting each other in pairs, with some hand signals primed.’

‘If I can mould them into a team, where they want to care for and protect each other, they’ll do well,’ I said.

Andrej looked at me, eyebrows raised. ‘Ok,’ he said.