“How come you are not like them?” Istvan asked.
“I had to work harder,” Aaron answered without hesitation. “Marvin does public relations and makes deals and shoots himself in the foot. Howard’s an actor who can’t get parts these days. They don’t get their hands dirty. I’ve been a delivery driver, a streetcar motorman, a mechanic, a cowboy, part of the black gang in the tubs I sailed in during the war.”
“You are a genuine proletarian,” Istvan said. “The Hungarian government would have…said it loved you.”
“But proletarians are supposed to be ignorant, right? My old man taught me to read before I started school, same as he did with all his kids. I never quit, either. So I maybe have a suspicion the stories the Reds tell about pie in the sky by and by are just that—stories.”
“That’s how it looked to me.” Before Istvan said so, he looked over his shoulder. No, no AVO or MGB men lurking just within earshot and waiting to pounce like a cat at a mousehole.
Aaron not only saw that glance, he recognized it for what it was, which most Americans might not have. “You’re okay here, kid,” he said. “They won’t haul you away for anything you say. You have to do something. Even then, you get a lawyer.”
That impressed Istvan less than Aaron might have hoped. You could usually get a lawyer in Hungary, too. But he wouldn’t do you any good once you got him. He was just another way for you to waste your money.
“I am glad you aren’t angry at me.” Istvan meant that in more ways than one. If Aaron were to whisper a bad word about him to Herschel Weissman, how long would he keep his Blue Front job? How much trouble would he have landing another if he lost this one? In Communist Hungary, not having a job was a criminal offense. Was it here, too? Would they use it as an excuse to ship him back to the POW camp in France? Were they turning people loose from that camp yet? If they were, would he have to go back to Matyas Rakosi’s workers’ paradise and explain what he’d been doing in the United States?
Those were a lot of worries to pack into a brief expression of relief. Though he didn’t realize it, he was wasting his time on every single one of them. Aaron would never have reported him for anything short of high treason or sabotage. Aaron would rather have gone to the rack than squeal on a fellow worker. He’d put up with Jim Summers for years rather than reporting him to the boss. Even if no Marxist-Leninist, he was fiercely loyal to his own class.
All he said now was, “Don’t get yourself in an uproar about it. C’mon. We’ve got a TV and an icebox to take to Pasadena.”
What he called an icebox—probably because that was the name he’d used as a kid for the cases that kept food cold—was a refrigerator fancier than any in Budapest. It had its own freezer compartment where you could keep meat fresh for weeks, not just days.
As for television…Istvan had heard of it while he was still in Europe. He’d seen a couple of dead sets in German houses where his unit of the Hungarian People’s Army had camped. But he’d never seen TV in action till he came to the States. More than the abundant food, the cars and the roads and the phones and the radios (some of them in the cars!), television made him think he’d taken a ride on H. G. Wells’ time machine (he’d read the book over and over in Hungarian). If TV wasn’t something out of the future, he didn’t know what would be.
“It seems very strange to me that, if you have the money, you can put it on the counter and buy a television,” he said as he dollied it up the ramp into the Blue Front truck.
“How come? I did. I needed to save for a while so I wouldn’t have to make time payments, but I’m glad I did.” Aaron handled the refrigerator. Those, Istvan had learned, were surprisingly delicate. You had to keep them upright. If you didn’t, you’d kill the motor and be left with a several-hundred-dollar piece of junk.
The refrigerator was bigger and heavier than the TV. Istvan was bigger and heavier than Aaron, and felt guilty when someone more than twice his age handled something that size while he just watched. But Aaron knew the business better than he did. The older man had whipcord muscles, and understood lifting and hauling and securing cargo from long experience.
Even by American standards, Pasadena had money. The woman who accepted delivery was polite to Aaron and Istvan, but in a distant way. A colored housekeeper was sweeping and dusting. Istvan tried not to seem to stare. She was the first Negro he’d ever seen close up.
Setting up the TV meant hauling it into the front room where Mrs. Blankenship wanted it, hooking up the wires that led to the antenna on the roof, and plugging it in. Aaron took care of the refrigerator. He made sure it had survived the trip from the warehouse and talked with the lady of the house about the temperature control. Istvan followed maybe one word in four.
Mrs. Blankenship didn’t seem to follow much more. “Lucille!” she called sharply. “Come in here and get the low-down on how this thing works.”
“Comin’, ma’am,” Lucille said. Aaron went through it again. He sounded the same talking to Lucille as he had to Mrs. Blankenship. Istvan thought better of him for that.
Mrs. Blankenship signed the paperwork acknowledging receipt in good working order and gave Aaron a check. He stuck it in his breast pocket. “Thank you very much, ma’am,” he said.
Istvan tried out some English once they were driving away: “She is—how you say?—not too smart.”
“More likely, she just doesn’t want to listen to the hired help,” Aaron said. “It isn’t hard. Lucille picked it up easy as you please. She’d get in trouble if she didn’t. Not Mrs. Blankenship, though. She thinks angels come out when she takes a crap.”
“Maybe American needs revolution after all,” Istvan said.
Aaron gave him a peculiar look. “Yeah,” he said after a pause. “Maybe it does.”
—
A couple of Ihor Shevchenko’s men used their entrenching tools to deepen a hole at the bottom of a 155mm shell crater. After a while, one of them looked up and said, “Think that’s deep enough, Comrade Sergeant?”
Ihor studied the grave. “Give it another half a meter, Misha,” he said. “We don’t want the dogs digging up poor Volodya, right?”
What a sergeant said was right by definition, at least if you were a private. Misha and the other Red Army man dug some more. Volodya’s body, wrapped in bloody burlap sacking, lay by the edge of the crater. He was dead because he’d been greedy and stupid. He’d grabbed a bottle of vodka without noticing the wire attached to it. That had to be one of the oldest booby traps in the world. The charge had blown Volodya, the booby, to bits.
Those bits, or most of them, went into the grave. The soldiers shoveled dirt over their late comrade. “Put some paving stones and bricks on top of all that,” Ihor said. “Gotta keep the scavengers away.” They both sighed heavily, but did as they were told.
And that was the only monument Volodya would ever get. It might have been just as well; a proper headstone would have read Died of stupidity. Back in the USSR, they’d built all sorts of fancy memorials to soldiers who gave their lives in the Great Patriotic War. And how many of those memorials still stood? How many had gone up in atomic hellfire?
Come to that, how many memorials would go up to all the people who’d died in this war? Not very many, not unless Ihor missed his guess. The survivors would be too busy trying to put the country back together again to care about everyone the A-bombs had rubbed out.
A machine gun chattered to life. Ihor’s head went up as if he were a hunting dog taking a scent. “Fucking bandits,” he muttered—that was a German MG-42, as unmistakable as any weapon ever made. The Poles had salted it away in 1944 or 1945, then hauled it out when they thought it would do them some good.
“I hope they run low on ammo for the damn thing,” Misha said.
“Hope all you want, but don’t bet on it,” Ihor said. No one nowadays made the 7.92mm cartridges that had been the German standard till Hitler blew his brains out. But it had also been the Polish standard, so the bandits probably had all they need
ed.
Ihor knew what he needed. He needed to go home, even if home was only a collective farm a little too far outside of Kiev to have been smashed by an American A-bomb in the early days of the war. He needed Anya, too. When you marched off to war, you couldn’t afford to let yourself think. If you did start thinking, you’d realize how completely insane you’d gone.
He did the things you did when you were trying not to think. He made a production of rolling a cigarette with makhorka and a scrap of newspaper. He gauged the distance and direction of the machine gun. It wasn’t close enough to be dangerous, even if it was close enough to make his hackles rise.
But thought wouldn’t go away. Even as he sucked in smoke, he wondered what his chances of getting back to the Ukraine were if he deserted. Regretfully, he decided the odds were slim and none. An officer might have pulled it off. Even in the classless society the USSR extolled, people were reluctant to question officers without some pressing reason. Sergeants? No. Sergeants were conscripts who hadn’t got shot right away. Anybody could bark Show your papers! at a sergeant. If you didn’t have papers…Well, in that case your destination would suddenly change.
“Comrade Sergeant…?” Misha said hesitantly.
“What?” Ihor tried not to sound too gruff.
“What are we doing here?”
Had Ihor been a different kind of sergeant, the soldier would have found himself in the MGB’s claws in short order. Had he been another different kind of sergeant, he would have answered that that was a question for a priest, not for an underofficer. But he knew what Misha meant. In the Great Patriotic War, the whole country had been fighting for its survival. Here…
“We’re trying to stay alive. If we have to kill some Poles to do it, that’s all right,” Ihor said. “Sooner or later, we’ll knock ’em around enough to make ’em quit. Then we’ll go home and pick up our lives again.”
As if to underscore that, Red Air Force bombers unloaded on the Polish positions a few kilometers away. The planes with the red stars could do as they pleased. As far as Ihor knew, the bandits didn’t have anything that flew.
Their MG-42 snarled again, doing its best against the bombers. They flew low; Ihor didn’t think they flew that low. But he understood why the gunners wasted a belt or two of cartridges. You liked to hope you were doing something to hurt the guy who was hurting you, even when part of you knew better.
Soviet artillery opened up, raining more tonnes of high explosive down on the bandits’ heads. With all that descending on them, someone who knew little of war would have guessed the Poles had no chance to live. Ihor knew better. He’d been shelled and bombed too often by the Nazis, who knew exactly what they were doing, and by the Americans, who had less expertise but more ordnance to throw around.
When you got down to it, human beings were damned hard to kill. They dug in. They could take surprising wounds and come back to the fight. Ihor had only to look down at the scars on his own leg to know the truth of that. Only A-bombs reliably did for everyone in a given area.
Pretty soon, some bored Soviet brigadier general would order the division forward to clean out what he imagined to be the handful of Polish survivors. He would be positive the planes and big guns had smashed them all to sausage meat.
And the bombardment would ease off, and the Poles would come out of their dugouts and onto their trenches’ firing steps. They’d come up from their cellars and into their sandbagged firing positions on the ground floor of apartment blocks and pharmacies and tailors’ shops. And they would chew up the oncoming Red Army men, and everyone ranked higher than captain would be astonished. Never mind that the Fritzes had done it a hundred times in the last go-round. Never mind that the ordinary veterans had often done it, too. The officers would be astonished even so.
Captain Pavlov sent a runner to Ihor with the message he expected: “Get your section ready. We move up in fifteen minutes. Our signal is a red flare and then a green one.”
“A red flare and then a green one.” Ihor nodded. “I serve the Soviet Union!”
He had no watch. The flares did go up after what felt like a quarter of an hour. Like many of his men, Ihor used the time to gulp his vodka ration. A hundred grams went a long way toward smothering the fear that scraped along his nerves.
“Urra!” he yelled. “Urra! Urra!” The rest of the Red Army soldiers were shouting their heads off with him. When you sounded like a savage, you had an easier time believing you were one.
Muzzle flashes ahead. Bullets cracking past. Ihor hunched lower. He fired a burst from his Kalashnikov. If the bandits had to duck, they wouldn’t shoot straight. He could hope not, anyhow.
A moving shape ahead—a careless Pole. Ihor fired with serious intent this time. The man crumpled. He would have shot me ran through Ihor’s mind.
The Poles left behind a rear guard and skedaddled. They would make a serious fight of it some other day, when their chances looked better. The rear guard was well hidden and stubborn. The ones who didn’t get away had to be finished off with grenades and entrenching tools.
Ihor slumped against the side of a metal trash bin. He noticed his ear hurt. When he touched it, his hand came away bloody. “Fuck me,” he said to no one in particular. “I got wounded and I didn’t even know it.”
Strength dribbled out of him. So did the artificial rage from the vodka. He was all at once just a man who’d swallowed another heaping spoonful of hell. He wanted to retch it up, but he couldn’t. Like all the ones he’d swallowed before, it was part of him now.
VASILI YASEVICH STARED from the outskirts of Warsaw toward the half-built pile of Stalin Gothic that dominated the skyline—that practically was the skyline. “Bozhemoi!” he said. “It’s hideous. It’s only half done, but it’s already hideous. What’s it going to be, anyhow?”
“Why, it’ll be the Palace of Culture and Science, of course.” Casimir raised a cynical eyebrow. “A gift to celebrate the lasting friendship between the Soviet and Polish peoples.”
“Let me guess—a gift inflicted on the Polish people by the Soviet Union.”
“Right the first time.” Casimir hoisted that eyebrow again. “And do you know what they say? They say the view from the top of the Palace of Culture and Science will be the best in Warsaw after the building gets done. Do you know why they say that?”
“Hmm.” Vasili considered, but not for long. The answer was as obvious as…“Because it’ll be the only place in town you can’t see the goddamn Palace of Culture and Science from.”
“Right the first time,” Casimir repeated, but this time on a disappointed note. He studied Vasili. “People who are too smart for their own good don’t always have happy endings.”
“Is that what happened to Warsaw?” Vasili asked, as innocently as he could.
Casimir gave him a dirty look. Except for the hideous palace that was going up and a handful of other new buildings, Warsaw was rubble and shanties built from rubble. Hitler’s men had blown up and bulldozed the city after the Polish Home Army’s uprising failed in 1944.
With a sigh, Casimir said, “In a way, we were too smart for our own good. When we rose up against the Nazis, we expected the Red Army would help us liberate our own capital. But it sat on the far side of the Vistula while Hitler solved Stalin’s Polish problem for him.”
That sounded reasonable. But Vasili, who kept his ear to the ground, had heard some other stories, too. Still sounding innocent, he said, “You mean, the same way the Polish Home Army let Hitler solve Poland’s Jewish problem for it by sitting on its hands when the Warsaw Ghetto rebelled the year before?”
Casimir started to answer, then stopped. At last, he said, “You want to be careful to whom you say that. Otherwise, you’re liable to open your big mouth a little too wide, fall right in, and never be seen again.”
“Which means it’s true, but it embarrasses you,” Vasili said.
“I should have given you a noodle as soon as they captured you. My life would have been simpler,” Cas
imir said. Noodle was what both the SS and the MGB called a bullet in the back of the neck. Vasili didn’t know who’d borrowed it from whom, or from which secret police force Casimir had taken it. That didn’t seem the kind of question one asked.
He found what he hoped to be a safer query: “How many really committed, pro-Soviet Communists in the Polish government these days?”
“Fewer than the motherfucking Russians wish there were.” Casimir gnawed on the inside of his lower lip. “More than we freedom fighters wish there were. Some of those people, they’re almost Catholics, the way they believe.”
“Even after the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty?” Vasili asked.
“You’re no ordinary Russian, that’s plain,” Casimir said. “Any ordinary Russian would tell you Stalin bought two years to get ready for Hitler with his treaty. Of course, your ordinary Russian wouldn’t tell you he stuck those two years up his ass. And your ordinary Russian wouldn’t say a word about what the treaty did to Poland. He wouldn’t care, either.”
“Do the Polish Reds care?”
“They…look the other way. Some of the police in Warsaw will look the other way at us. Some will, but not all, so keep your eyes open, you hear? This city isn’t all free yet, even if it’s on the way there. If we get separated, find your way to a druggist’s shop named Witold’s after the guy who runs it.”
“I’ll do that,” Vasili said. “Maybe we can talk business.”
“Hope you don’t have to. Come on,” Casimir said.
Warsaw was livelier than its battered appearance suggested. People scavenged through the ruins. Old women selling things they’d found sat next to farmers’ wives selling produce and cheese and sausages. The policemen going this way and that looked nervous and hangdog, as if they weren’t sure whose orders to follow. Japanese soldiers in Harbin had looked the same way on the few days after the Russians invaded Manchukuo but before they reached the city.
Armistice Page 31
