Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  “Theirs,” she answered.

  That warmed Marian’s heart—Fayvl’s, too, by his shy grin—but could leave the wrong impression. “My first husband was killed in combat over Russia last year,” she said quickly.

  “I see,” Foote said. “Good she seems to care for your fiancé, then.”

  “Is very good,” Fayvl said.

  “Um, yes. Shall we get on with things?” Without waiting for an answer, the justice of the peace flipped open his book to a dog-eared page and began the ceremony. Marian and Fayvl both said their I dos. A few seconds later, Harlow Foote declared, “Under the authority vested in me by the state of California, I now pronounce you man and wife.” He nodded to Fayvl. “You may kiss the bride.”

  “I love you, Mrs. Tabakman,” Fayvl said, and he did.

  “I love you, too, Mr. Tabakman.” Marian kissed him back. She’d already started practicing her new signature. She didn’t want to slip and write Staley by mistake.

  “Kiss me, too!” Linda said. Laughing, her mother and new stepfather did.

  —

  Trucks came up the dirt road through the taiga to the gulag. Like all the ones Luisa Hozzel had seen bringing zeks to the camp, they were old, worn-out American models. Like the guards here, they weren’t good enough to be worth anything in war any more. They could still do the job, though, when it came to things like hauling prisoners around.

  The German women lined up in their camp clothes. They remained under guard. The MGB men with machine pistols looked eager for an excuse to open up on them, in fact. A man with a clipboard came down the line. “What your name is?” he asked Luisa in Russian not much better than hers.

  “Hozzel, Luisa. Г963,” she said, family name before personal name, with camp number at the end. That was the way you did it here. They hurt you enough so you learned in a hurry.

  “Hozzel, Luisa.” He ran a stubby finger along the list of names on the clipboard till he found hers. “Г963.” He checked the number she’d given him against the one stenciled on her jacket and trousers. When he saw they matched, he ran a line through her name on the paper, as if to deny she’d ever been here at all. She wished to God she hadn’t.

  There were a couple of delays because the guards were morons or because a zek was wearing clothes with the wrong number on them. The women stood there, waiting. No one complained loud enough to annoy the MGB men. No one dreamt of throwing away the chance to get out of this place.

  At last, after what seemed forever, the outer gate opened. The guards gestured with their weapons, urging the zeks toward the trucks. One of the men stood right next to Luisa. She risked asking him, “Where are we going?”

  He stared at her. “You go home to Germany, you dumb cunt.”

  “Da.” She nodded. “Where are we going now? Where are the trucks taking us?” Not in her worst nightmares in Fulda would she have been able to ask those questions in Russian. For her sins—and they must have been bad and numerous—now she could do it with ease.

  “Oh. The trucks. They take you to Birobidzhan. You get on train there.”

  She’d never heard of Birobidzhan before the MGB men grabbed her in Germany. Now she knew it was the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. The Nazis had murdered their Jews. The Russians sent theirs to Siberia and bragged about it afterwards.

  The guards packed the women into the truck like sardines. Again, no one grumbled. Birobidzhan sounded more wonderful than Paris, London, or New York could have right then. Birobidzhan was where they would board the train west, the train taking them home.

  They’d each got a chunk of black bread, the size of a morning or evening ration, to take with them. Luisa was always hungry. She’d have to figure out what to do with the bounty. Eat it now or save it for later? She didn’t worry about anyone using the latrine. They’d all got used to the morning and evening rushes, to occasional leaks behind a tree out in the woods, and to holding and holding and holding.

  “We’re moving!” someone exclaimed when the truck started along the rough road. She couldn’t have sounded any more thrilled in her lover’s arms. Luisa knew just how she felt.

  Jounce, rattle, bang—Luisa wondered if she’d bite her lip or break a tooth before she made it to Birobidzhan. The truck’s springs and shocks were only a memory. Well, if she did break a tooth here, she could have a good German dentist put a crown on it, not some Russian butcher.

  They took three or four hours to reach the Siberian town. That was as close as Luisa could put it. The place didn’t look like much. Most of the buildings were log cabins out of the American Wild West. Maria Grunfeld, who’d escaped for a while, said the smaller town of Smidovich looked like that, too.

  More guards waited at the railway depot. “Out!” they shouted, and then, “This way! This way!” This way the women went. They stood by the track for the next hour or two. A man who looked like a zek but had probably served his term came by with a bucket of water and a dipper. Luisa got a sip. The lukewarm water tasted of rust. It went down her throat like champagne even so.

  Up chugged the train. The guards squeezed all the women into three cars. They were crowded, but not nearly so crowded as Luisa had been on the way to Siberia. She couldn’t move much, but she could breathe.

  Everything seemed simple when the train rolled out of Birobidzhan. It would keep going for several days, maybe for a week or longer. Luisa knew she could endure that. The reward at the other end of the tracks made it all worthwhile. Fulda. Home.

  She looked around to see if Trudl Bachman was in this car. If she was, she wasn’t in this compartment. How did she look forward to her homecoming? What would she have to say to Max?

  What will I have to say to Gustav? Luisa wondered. He’d woken up screaming time after time from nightmares about his stretch on the Eastern Front, but he’d never said much to her. His attitude seemed to be that anyone who hadn’t gone through it wouldn’t understand.

  Luisa hadn’t pushed him about it then. Now…Now she’d been through some things he hadn’t. Maybe the gulag wasn’t as bad as combat. Maybe. But it had horrors of its own, horrors that were liable to wake her in the middle of the night for years to come.

  She began to realize things wouldn’t be so easy as she’d hoped when the train stopped on a siding for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. Several trains went by while it waited there. The bread was only a memory.

  Maria said, “I don’t think we’ll be getting back to the Vaterland as soon as we hoped.” The only thing that made her sound different from Dorothy going I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more was that Dorothy sounded excited about the world turning Technicolor once she got to Oz. Maria sounded glum at having to linger in grim, gray Russia.

  Luisa closed her eyes, stretched out in her seat as much as she could—which wasn’t much—and tried to sleep. She’d just gone under and drifted into a blissful dream about roast goose and rhubarb pie slathered with whipped cream when the train jerked forward and back onto the main track again. The lost rest was bad enough. The lost feast seemed ten times worse.

  The sun was coming up when they stopped in Kubychevka-Vostochnaya. Luisa had no trouble reading the name on the badly painted sign at the train station. By now, she took the Cyrillic alphabet almost as much for granted as the one she’d grown up using. She even guessed the name meant something like Eastern Kubychevka; the Russian word for east was vostok.

  Three men in shabby clothes, like the fellow at Birobidzhan probably released zeks still subject to internal exile, brought the German women food. The bread was the same nasty black stuff they’d endured in the gulag. But with it everyone got fifteen centimeters of sausage. The stuff was stale and stretched out with bread crumbs, but it still tasted of pork and pepper and dill and caraway seeds. Luisa had no idea when she’d last eaten anything so delicious. By the ecstatic sighs from the other women—sighs more joyful than some other kind of sausage seemed likely to give them—no one else in the car did, either.

  When t
he women asked for water, the men brought them two full buckets and a dipper with which to drink. They asked to be paid in the only coin women were likely to have on their persons at all times. Then they laughed to show they were kidding. If they hadn’t laughed, they might have got what they asked for. So many female zeks got used to opening their legs to thank men for favors.

  By the time the train pulled out of Kubychevka-Vostochnaya, the car’s toilet started backing up. “Nothing but the best for us, hey?” Luisa said. The stink was bound to get worse, and they still had a long way to go. She told herself she didn’t care, and almost made herself believe it.

  —

  Vasili Yasevich didn’t have too much trouble learning to speak and understand Polish. A lot of the vocabulary was similar to Russian, though the Poles always put the stress on the next-to-last syllable of words with more than one. He spoke with an accent, but he could get them to follow him.

  Reading the language, though…The Poles didn’t use Cyrillic, the alphabet he knew best. And they had a variety of lines and hooks and accents to modify the sounds of the Roman letters they did write. Also, because the Roman alphabet had fewer characters than the Cyrillic, they used odd combinations of letters. Russian needed only a single letter, Щ, for the sneezing sound of shch. Polish had that sound, too, but wrote it szcz.

  “This is made to drive people crazy,” Vasili said.

  Major Casimir scowled at him. “I don’t know what you’re grousing about. Every sound has a letter or set of letters that matches it. This isn’t English, by the Virgin. English spelling is all one big lie.”

  Since Vasili spoke and read no English, he couldn’t say much to that. He did say, “Russian uses one letter where you use four sometimes.”

  “You Russians as schismatics, though,” Casimir said with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “You’ve been schismatics for nine hundred years. No wonder you use a stupid schismatic alphabet. We use the same one the holy Pope does, God bless him.”

  “If ours is better than yours, what difference does being schismatic make?” Vasili said. “Besides, our church says we’re the ones with the orthodox doctrines and you Catholics are the miserable schismatics.”

  “Schismatics always think they’re orthodox. That’s part of what’s wrong with them,” Casimir declared loftily.

  Before Vasili argued more theology with the bandit chieftain, he recalled that Casimir could still order him shot with a wave of the hand. Changing the subject seemed the better part of valor. “What do you suppose the Red Army will try against us next?” he asked.

  The Pole leered. “You were in it. You tell me.”

  “Way it looks to me is, if they don’t knock something out of the way the first time they try, they keep banging away till they do,” Vasili answered. “They don’t fight cute.”

  He got a smile and a chuckle from the major. “Cute, huh? No Pole would use that word with fighting. But you’re probably right. They’re stupid and they’re stubborn and they have soldiers falling out of their asshole. They like to keep butting till they smash something down. What shape are your fieldworks in?”

  “They could be better,” Vasili said. “Your men don’t like shoring them up after they get knocked around.”

  “And this surprises you because…?” Casimir said. “Patriots don’t pick up a rifle and risk their lives to play with shovels and dirt and sandbags. They do it so they can kill the invaders who want to take their country away from them.”

  “I understand that.” Now Vasili was the one who let his patience show. “But do they want the invaders killing them because they’d sooner knock pears out of trees with their dicks than work?” The Russian mat for screw around sounded silly in Polish, even if the languages were close cousins.

  “Because they’d sooner what?” Casimir laughed out loud this time, which told Vasili just how silly the mat sounded in Polish. The major went on, “Never mind. Don’t explain it. I get you, I think. I’ll tell them to get off their lazy asses.”

  And maybe that would do some good, and maybe it wouldn’t. The bandits didn’t follow orders for no better reason than that they were orders. If the Poles thought your orders were stupid, or that following them took too much work, they’d just ignore you. They didn’t have the Red Army’s solid chain of command backed up, at need, by the secret police.

  Major Casimir scratched his chin in thought. His face stayed smooth all the time; he had a bone-handled straight razor he stropped against a square of leather he carried in his pocket. “You know, I’m going to move a few guys with PPDs up in front of our line tonight and tell them to dig in so the Russians don’t spot them. That’ll make the bastards shit when they start taking flanking fire.”

  “Tak.” Vasili remembered to say yes in Polish. “The Red Army doesn’t like surprises. I saw that.”

  “The Germans saw it, too. But knowing something is true doesn’t always mean you can do anything about it,” Casimir said. “We’ll just hope we’ll be able to.”

  Vasili didn’t think the bandits put in much work on the field fortifications he’d designed. He didn’t push them. He was still more a useful POW than a fellow fighter. The proud Poles disliked obeying orders from somebody like him. The way things looked to him, if they hadn’t had Russians to squabble with, they would have fought among themselves.

  Of course, the Red Army had its own problems. Few of the soldiers it sent to Poland wanted to be there. They didn’t fight the way they had against Hitler’s men or the Americans. Their officers might order them to keep coming no matter what, but they didn’t care to get killed for what looked to them to be no good purpose.

  And, with Stalin dead, it was as if a huge, strong hand had come off the Soviet throttle. Soldiers didn’t fear Molotov the way they’d feared his Georgian predecessor. That also left them less eager about fighting.

  Which didn’t mean they wouldn’t. They started their latest assault on Major Casimir’s position with an artillery bombardment that might have readied them for the final move against Berlin. Vasili huddled in a hole, praying nothing would come down on him and that blast wouldn’t rip up his lungs from the inside out.

  Katyushas rained down along with the 105s and 155s. Vasili hated being on the receiving end of the Stalin organs. Were his erstwhile comrades calling them Molotov organs now? He didn’t believe it. He did hate the way the rockets screamed in before they burst.

  No sooner had all that let up than the Red Army infantry came forward. Vasili had heard those drunken “Urra!”s before, from the middle of a swarm of foot soldiers. As a matter of fact, he’d let out some of them himself. Now, as with the Katyushas, they were coming at him.

  Given the chance, he would have run away. He wasn’t given the chance. He popped up from his hole, fired once or twice, and ducked down again. Just in time, too, since a tracer drew a line of fire through the place where his head had been a second or two earlier.

  Casimir’s men fought hard. They didn’t run. The Russian had to clear them from the forward foxholes with machine pistols and entrenching tools. If you knew how, you could do some horrible things with an entrenching tool. Some of the Red Army veterans knew how.

  Then the Poles with machine pistols Casimir had sent out ahead of time opened up on the Russians from the flank and rear. Even Vasili, in his scanty experience as a Red Army soldier, had seen how well the Soviet Union’s soldiers did when they executed a fixed plan. They would carry it out come hell or high water, caring no more about casualties than about worn boots. Such indifference to damage was daunting and admirable at the same time.

  But when it went wrong, when the officers and men suddenly had to think for themselves, most of them weren’t up to it. They’d grown up in a system where blind obedience to superiors was the only thing that counted. When it didn’t count any more, when blind obedience would obviously get you killed…They had no idea what to do. Some froze. Others panicked and ran away.

  So it happened here. The Russians had been
driving all before them. But, when they took fire from behind and from the side, they realized things weren’t as they’d been told. To them, unexpected meant disastrous. They ran like rabbits. Some of them threw away their weapons to run faster. They’d been on the point of winning. They weren’t any more. Vasili laughed and laughed, not least in relief.

  —

  Konstantin Morozov swigged vodka from his canteen to celebrate when the troop train rolled out of Poland and into the USSR. It even entered the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, of which Kaliningrad Oblast was a small, noncontiguous part. Kaliningrad—named for a Finnish henchman of Stalin’s—still didn’t seem to wear its new handle well.

  Up until 1945, it had been East Prussian Königsberg, a great German bastion against Russia. As the Great Patriotic War swirled towards an end, Königsberg stood siege and held out longer than it had any business doing. Wounded soldiers, nervous Nazis, and terrified civilians had taken ship out of there by the tens of thousands.

  The city still lay shattered. The Soviet Union had expelled all the Fritzes who hadn’t shipped out and whom the fighting hadn’t killed. Loyal Russians skulked through the ruins. One day, maybe, Kaliningrad would turn into a real Soviet city. It hadn’t begun to yet.

  “We stay here, maybe, Comrade Sergeant?” Nodar Gachechiladze asked.

  “I’ve heard ideas I liked less—I’ll tell you that,” Morozov answered. The stocky Georgian didn’t speak much Russian, so Konstantin often thought he was on the dull side.

  But the question held bite. As long as they stayed in the Kaliningrad Oblast, they were among Russians who (mostly) didn’t hate the Soviet Union and everything it stood for. The next border, though, would take them into the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Lithuanians had thought Hitler made a better overlord than Stalin. They’d slaughtered their Jews, who knew damn well Hitler didn’t and favored Stalin accordingly. Then the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht out again, and the Lithuanians got it in the neck one more time.