Free Agent of Death by John Drake

then reappear from behind the ears of a woman officer who was present – an operational, flying, fighter pilot I would add – and not half bad looking either. She laughed a lot and made me extremely welcome later on, which was also typically Russian, at least on the Eastern Front where you might be dead tomorrow and you lived for the day. So I didn’t sleep much and now I was tired as well as sick. Served me right.
    ‘Comrade!’ said Ulitzky, yelling over the engine noise, and reaching out to slap the pilot’s shoulder for attention. ‘Come round! Circle over the cathedral dome. Show him! Give Moscow boy a good look.’
    I should point out that while that is reasonably close to what Ulitzky said, it is not precisely accurate. That’s because it, and most other spoken Russian that I heard during my time in the USSR – especially when men were talking, and always when soldiers were talking – was full what the Russians call Mat , which might freely be translated as effin’ and blindin’. This I certainly didn’t learn from my parents but from the other boys in the Russian school which I attended when my father taught at Moscow University.
    But effin’ and blindin’ doesn’t do justice to Mat for the art form which it is in Russian, assisted by the grammar of the language which changes the meaning of words with prefixes and suffixes. The nearest I can do in English to give a flavour of Mat is to repeat the apocryphal tale of the RAF mechanic who turned the flats off a nut and blamed the spanner by saying, and I paraphrase for decency: ‘Eff! The effer’s effed the effing thing!’ giving the dreaded eff-word first as a curse, then as a noun, then a past participle, and a finally a gerund, which is about as far as you can go in English. But Russian is different. You can do all sorts things to change a word, letting rip with a machine gun stream of swearing that transmogrifies the rude word again and again, until even a poet would shake his head in admiration. But you can’t put that into English because the grammatical cleverness is untranslatable and what would emerge would just look vulgar. So I haven’t tried. But believe me, it was there all the time even if I don’t write it down.
    Meanwhile: ‘Come round,’ said Ulitzky, ‘Circle over the cathedral dome. Show him! Give Moscow boy a good look.’
    I looked. The downward visibility was excellent. The Peshka’s fuselage sat high on the wings, and the cockpit stuck out in front and had a glazed floor. So the visibility was excellent but the view was appalling. I already knew what to expect because the Russians had shown me photographs, but actually seeing the streets full of corpses was truly grim. There were so many that it was hard to believe. On the other hand, it wasn’t an atom bomb that had been used. Not than nor any other high-explosive weapon, because everything was untouched, apart from being dead.
    Ulitzky shouted in my ear.
    ‘They must have thought the raid was over. It was only one plane, remember. So they came out into the open, and they died.’ He looked down; he shook his head. Then he suddenly sobbed, and angrily wiped away the tears. ‘All dead without a mark on the body! Men, women, children, babies. Even the cats and dogs! Even the birds.’ He sighed, then, ‘Look! Look!’ he cried, as we flew over a walled yard. It was full of horse-drawn wagons, but all the horses lay dead beside their drivers.
    ‘Was it gas?’ I said. ‘There’s no damage from bombing or shelling. The city’s untouched.’
    Ulitzky shook his head. ‘No. We thought of that. We asked the chemical warfare people. They said you can’t get enough gas in one aircraft to kill so many people, no matter how bad the gas.’ Ulitzky looked down; he shook his head. ‘But whatever it is, nobody can go near it. We’re safe up here, but anyone who goes there – down there,’ he said, shrugging, ‘they drop dead. Just fall down dead.’ He looked at me. ‘We