Her stringbag fuller than she’d expected it to be, she crossed the street to the bakery. BRUCK’S, it said over the door. On the window was taped a faded, swastika-bedecked sign: German people! Don’t buy from Jews! Sarah smiled mirthlessly. She wasn’t a “German person.” The “Jew” stamped on her identity card proved as much.
As she’d hoped, Isidor stood behind the counter instead of his father. His face lit up when he saw her. “Hello!” There were other people in the bakery; he couldn’t say everything he might have. By the way an older woman’s eyebrow quirked, he’d said plenty with one word.
“Hi,” Sarah answered.
“What do you need today?” Isidor did his best to sound businesslike and matter-of-fact, but his best wasn’t very good.
“Two kilogram loaves,” Sarah answered, also as plainly as she could.
“Coming up.” Isidor took them off the shelf with as much ceremony as if they were fit for a king. They were plain, solid, black war bread; a king would have to get mighty hungry before he cut slices from them.
The other shoppers paid for what they’d bought and parted with ration coupons. After they left, Isidor reached under the counter. He pulled out half a dozen lovely purple plums, displaying them in the palms of his hands. “Where did you find those?” Sarah exclaimed.
“Across the street,” Isidor answered. “Old Bohm at the grocery isn’t such a bad guy. He’ll trade this for that. If we’re careful, we can get away with it.” He gave her the fruit. “Anyway, these are for you.”
“For me?” she squeaked. “No, Isidor. That’s too much!” Half a dozen plums, and she was carrying on as if he’d given her a kilo of gold. It was silly-or would have been if she weren’t what she was where she was.
“Hush,” Isidor said firmly. “I can’t get you the kinds of things I want to. They’d shoot me if I tried. Besides, nobody in Germany can get that kind of stuff nowadays except guys like Goring. So I do what I can. Today, it’s plums. Next week, who knows? Maybe even lamb shanks or something.”
He sounded a hundred percent serious. He was most of the time. Sarah had more whimsy in her. She wagged a finger at him. “Don’t you know the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?” Even as she said it, she realized there were probably Jewish girls in Munster who would sell their body for half a dozen plums. The difference between bad and worse was far bigger than the difference between good and better.
“I know how you got to my heart,” he answered, and her cheeks heated. He’d got to hers the same way, there hidden by the tall grass at the park. He glanced up toward the flat over the bakery. “If my folks weren’t home right now…”
She nodded. Getting together when no one else was around wasn’t easy, which was putting it mildly. Maybe that should have relieved her. If she were what people called a good girl, she supposed it would have. She must not have been, because it didn’t. She wanted him to touch her again the way he had then. She’d touch him, too, even if that got messy. And if he wanted to do even more…
You lost your reputation when you did things like that. It would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. As if a Jew in the Third Reich had any reputation worth losing!
“Maybe Father and Mother will go out one night before too long,” Sarah said. “Curfew’s not as tight as it has been. Neither is blackout. If they do-”
“Let me know!” he broke in.
“I will.” She had to hide a smile. She’d expected him to be eager. She hadn’t exactly expected him to be that eager. Everybody said men were like that when they thought they were going to get what they wanted. A lot of the time, what everybody said was a bunch of Dreck. Not here, evidently. Then she thought of something else, something different. “Can you give me some newspaper to cover up the plums? If people see them in my stringbag, they’ll wonder how I got them.”
“Sure.” He handed her the front page from the day’s paper. “Nice to think it’s doing something useful, anyhow.”
“I know. I’d say it was only good for wrapping fish, but when’s the last time you had fish to wrap?” Sarah said.
“Been a while,” Isidor said sadly.
“I know.” Sarah nodded. “We’ll, I’d better go. Thanks again.” She felt his eyes on her as she left. It didn’t bother her one bit. ere you go, Rudel.” Colonel Steinbrenner signed Hans-Ulrich’s furlough papers with a flourish and handed them to him. “Do you know what you’ll do?”
“Well, sir, I wasn’t thinking of going anywhere very far,” Hans-Ulrich answered. “Five days… That’s not much time, and I don’t want to spend most of it sitting on a train. I thought maybe, oh, Bialystok. It’s a city, and it hasn’t got smashed to the devil like the White Russian towns.”
“Have a good time,” the squadron commander said. “You’ve got a girl back there, don’t you?”
And here Hans-Ulrich thought he’d been so casual! He coughed a couple of times. “Uh, not exactly, sir.”
Colonel Steinbrenner seemed to riffle through a mental card file. “Oh, that’s right,” he said when he came to the card he wanted. “You’re the one who was chasing that little Jew or half-Jew or whatever she is at the tavern. Go on, then. Have fun. I hope you catch her.”
“Thank you, sir.” Hans-Ulrich got out of there as fast as he could. He hoped he caught Sofia, too. Marrying a Jew, or even a half-Jew, would shoot down your career faster than flak from the Ivans. Laying one, though… If there were any regulations against that, he hadn’t heard about them. And he would have, because he kept his ear to the ground.
The nearest railhead was in a town northeast of Minsk. Hans-Ulrich took the squadron’s Kubelwagen to get there; one of the groundcrew men rode along so he could drive it back. As Hans-Ulrich hopped out, the noncom said, “Enjoy yourself, Lieutenant. Fuck that bitch till she begs for mercy.”
“Um,” Rudel said, and was spared the need for anything more because the groundcrew man put the Kubelwagen in gear and drove away. Did everyone in the whole wide world know he was interested in Sofia? Everybody in the squadron did, anyhow.
A Feldgendarmerie sergeant with a shiny gorget checked his papers and his ID before letting him board the train. “Go ahead, sir,” the fellow said when he was satisfied. “You’re you, all right.”
“I hope so,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I’m not likely to be anybody else, am I?”
“You’d be surprised,” the military policeman answered. “Matter of fact, you’d be fucking amazed. Some of the guys who try to go west on bad papers or no papers at all… Makes you wonder whose side they’re on, by God.”
With such encouragement ringing in his ears, Hans-Ulrich climbed onto the train. It was already crowded, but he wedged his way into a compartment. He promptly fell asleep. Several hours later, shouts of “Bialystok! All out for Bialystok!” roused him and sent him staggering down onto the platform at the train station.
Yawning, he tried to figure out where Sofia’s place of employment lay. East of the station-he thought. He started that way. If he couldn’t find it, he’d ask somebody. Most Jews and some Poles here understood German.
Quite a few men in Feldgrau prowled the streets-fewer in his Luftwaffe gray-blue. Bialystok wasn’t Paris or even Warsaw, but it wasn’t the front, either. It had enough bars and brothels and cinemas to keep the Germans amused while they unwound after weeks nose-to-nose with Ivan.
He found the place without too much trouble. Since the signs in Bialystok were in two languages he couldn’t read-one with an alphabet as meaningless to him as Hindustani-he took that for a good omen. The next interesting question was whether Sofia would be working when he walked into the tavern. Had he come all this way just to sit around and drink mineral water or coffee?
But there she was, small and dark and slim and maddening. “Oh. It’s you,” she said, as if he hadn’t been away blowing up Russian panzers for weeks. “Well, come on over here and sit down.”
She led him to a little table off in a corner. “What? I don’t deserve a better seat t
han this?” he said, more or less joking.
Sofia, plainly, wasn’t joking at all. She shook her head. “Why should you? You don’t spend enough cash to make it worthwhile to put you anywhere else. Coffee! Fizzy water!” She rolled her eyes at what they did to profit margins. The expression and the logic behind it certainly made him think of her as a Jew. They didn’t make her any less attractive, though, even if they should have.
Doing his best to sound reasonable, he answered, “I don’t get drunk and tear the place up and break things, either.”
“We can collect on that-sometimes, anyhow. I suppose you’ll want coffee now.” Without waiting to find out whether she supposed accurately or not, she bustled away. Hans-Ulrich admired her trim ankles. He’d never particularly cared about ankles before-things got more interesting as you moved north-but he made an exception here. Hers were turned on a superior lathe.
She came back with the coffee, set it down on the table, and stood there waiting. He gave her money. That made her turn to go again. Before she could disappear, he spoke quickly: “What time do you get off today?”
“Past your bedtime,” Sofia said. Glancing at the steaming cup she’d brought, she added, “Past your bedtime no matter how much coffee you drink.”
“But I came all the way back here to see you,” Hans-Ulrich said. “There’s sure nothing else in Bialystok that would have brought me back.”
“Why is this supposed to be my problem?” Sure as the devil, Sofia specialized in being impossible.
“Because-” Hans-Ulrich hesitated. Because I love you would make her laugh in his face. Because I want to go to bed with you was more honest, but too likely to get him slapped. Hoping the hesitation wasn’t too noticeable, he tried again: “Because you’re the most interesting girl I’ve met since I don’t know when.”
A black eyebrow leaped toward her hairline. “You talk prettier than most of them, but you mean the same thing.” Somebody with an empty beer stein banged it on the table and shouted for her. “I’ve got to go,” she said, and she did.
Hans-Ulrich sipped the coffee. It was better than what a field kitchen made but, he thought, not so good as it had been the last time he was here. The war was rough on everybody, at the front or not.
He watched Sofia. He bought more coffee, and more coffee, and more coffee still. If she kept working till after his bedtime now, she’d be doing a twenty-four-hour shift and then some. He got rid of the used coffee in a crowded, odorous pissoir made more cramped still by the infantry sergeant passed out next to the urinal.
A panzer crew and some foot soldiers started punching one another. Hans-Ulrich helped break up the brawl and throw them out. Then he went back to his table.
After a while, Sofia came over with a fresh cup of coffee. She had his rhythm down, all right. Pausing, she said, “Why should I want anything to do with you? You’re a German. That makes you trouble with a capital T.”
He shook his head. “Nah. Germans in Poland are only trouble with a small t. That’s what your government decided. Russians are trouble with a capital T.”
“I don’t care what the government decided. The government is stupid,” Sofia answered, which could have sent her to a camp had she been overheard in Germany. “Germans are always trouble.”
“This isn’t about Germans and Poles or Germans and Jews or Germans and Portuguese, if you happen to be Portuguese,” Hans-Ulrich said. “It’s about you and me, that’s all.”
“Easier for the one who drops the bombs to talk like that than for the poor so-and-so they land on.”
How did she know he dropped bombs? He supposed she could find out. Or she might have been using a figure of speech. Before he could find any sort of comeback, a shouted call for a refill sent her scurrying away. He sipped his coffee. His eyes were wide, wide open. Not quite benzedrine, but not so far away.
The tavern stayed crowded no matter how late it got. Sofia accidentally on purpose spilled a mug of beer on a German who tried reaching up under her skirt. The guy’s friends laughed at him, so he couldn’t get mad. He was drunk and hopeful, not really determined. Lucky for him, too, because Hans-Ulrich would have murdered him if he’d tried to take it out on the barmaid.
And then Sofia came to his table without a cup of coffee in her hand. “All right, Herr Hotshot. I’m off work,” she said, her sharp chin lifted in defiance. “Now what?”
Hans-Ulrich sprang to his feet. He was so surprised and happy, he wondered why he didn’t bounce off the ceiling. He offered her his arm. The way she took it was more challenge than anything else. He didn’t care. All he cared about was that she took it. “Let’s both find out,” he said.
“Night bombing.” Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko spoke the words as if they tasted bad. “This is what we are reduced to until we can reequip with Pe-2s or some other new bombers. We serve the Soviet Union, of course.” Plainly, he wished the squadron could serve the country some other way.
Sergei Yaroslavsky understood his superior’s pride. He had trouble sharing it, though. Enough was enough. Enough, in fact, was too much. Against the Luftwaffe ’s fighters, the SB-2 had had its day. It was as simple as that. Too many of the faces listening to Ponamarenko were fresh and new. Too many veterans who’d served as long as Sergei were dead, shot down by fighter planes they couldn’t escape.
Yes, night bombing was second-line duty. But it was something the SB-2 could still manage. Finding enemy aircraft at night was largely a matter of luck. Bombing by night was also a matter of luck, with navigation and aim so uncertain. But what about it? The explosives were bound to come down on somebody’s head, and the somebody would more likely than not be a Nazi.
Kerosene lanterns and men with electric torches marked the edges of the runway. “Should be fun finding this place again in the dark, shouldn’t it?” Lieutenant Federov remarked.
Sergei had been thinking the same thing. To keep from dwelling on it, he told his bomb-aimer, “Well, if they lit it up like peacetime, the Germans would find it before we got back.”
From Moscow all the way to Germany’s western border, no one showed a light at night. You didn’t want to give the other side a free shot at you, any more than you wanted to hand the other team a penalty kick in a football match. But the lights were on again in England and France. They didn’t worry about German bombers any more. They didn’t need to: the capitalists had made common cause with the Fascists to destroy the building workers’ and peasants’ paradise here.
It won’t happen, Sergei told himself. We won’t let it happen. The Red Army kept yielding ground, but falling back before the enemy worried him much less than it would have worried, say, a Frenchman. In France, you could fall back only so far till you ran out of real estate.
That wasn’t a problem in Russia. Trading space for time had been a Russian specialty ever since invaders started coming out of the west-pretty much forever, in other words. Napoleon made it to Moscow, but much joy he had from his homecoming. Sergei didn’t think the Germans would get that far, even with help from the other degenerate Western powers. And if they should, he didn’t think they wanted to fight through a Russian winter.
Once they were airborne, an order came over the radio: “Switch off navigation lights!” Sergei flipped the switch. The command came sooner than he’d expected. He hoped the SB-2s wouldn’t collide with each other in the darkness. He saw no bursts of flame or midair explosions, so he supposed they didn’t. He would have waited longer than Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko had all the same.
The bombers droned west. A fat gibbous moon spilled milky light over the Rodina far below. There was the front. It couldn’t be anything else. Those sullen fires down on the ground, the plumes of smoke climbing into the air… “Any target we hit from now on, it belongs to the Nazis,” Federov said.
“Any military target,” Sergei agreed absently. He was studying the compass. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the copilot and bomb-aimer blink. If Federov was NKVD, as he’d wondered, should he
have said that? Too late to worry about it now. And how many Byelorussians had the German hordes overrun? Millions, surely, and some Great Russians and Ukrainians as well.
Russians called Germans Nemtsi -the tongue-tied ones. To ancient Russian ears, the German language was sense-free, senseless babble. In German, Slav and slave both came from the same word. Even in the days when they were forming their speech, the Germans had thought their eastern neighbors fit only for doing what they told them to do.
All that went back more than a thousand years-how much more, Sergei didn’t know. He did know not much had changed since.
The navigation lights were out, but he found he could still spot the flames in the exhaust from the other SB-2s’ engines. No doubt they could see his plane the same way. That was good-he supposed. If he saw other ghostly shapes, other exhaust fires, coming out of the west… He shook his head, refusing to borrow trouble.
Compass and airspeed indicator were his only navigation tools. Calling that crude gave it too much credit. “We’re about where we ought to be,” he said at last, hoping he was right. “Let’s give them our present and head back to the airstrip.”
“Sounds good to me,” Federov said.
Sergei shouted into the speaking tube: “Bombs away, Ivan!”
“Right!” the Chimp answered. The bombs fell free. The SB-2 got livelier. “Bombs fucking away!” Kuchkov reported.
“Then I’m getting out of here.” Sergei hadn’t seen any German night fighters, and he didn’t want to, either. He hauled the bomber around in the sky and headed back toward the airstrip. Even more than he had on taking off, he hoped he’d be able to find it.
A moment later, he started hoping he’d get back to Russia to find it. German flak woke up all at once. The Nazis had no searchlights, the way they would while defending their own cities. They were firing by ear and by guess, gauging height and position from the sound of the bombers’ engines.
Fire flashed on the ground as the antiaircraft guns went off. Red and yellow streaks were tracer rounds rising through the air. And the bursts reminded Sergei of the booms when skyrockets turned nights into magic. Here he was, in the middle of one of the fanciest fireworks shows he’d ever imagined.
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