“Night school,” Istvan answered. “Sorry, but I’ve got to hustle. Don’t want to be late.”
“Go. Go,” Aaron said. “An awful lot of Yehudim have taken that road before you. Oh, you bet they have.”
Into the car Istvan slid. The front-seat upholstery split a little more under the weight of his tukhus. That was one more thing he’d worry about some other time. He worked the choke and turned the key. When the motor caught, smoke belched from the tailpipe. The Hudson guzzled oil the way a man crawling through the desert would guzzle water at an unexpected oasis.
Still laying down his own smoke screen, Istvan piloted the car east, toward Pasadena Junior College. It combined the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. Since he was a legal resident of California, taking classes there didn’t cost him anything. The Communists had introduced free public education for everybody to Hungary after the Second World War—one of the good things they’d done. Somehow, Istvan wasn’t surprised to find out it had been around in capitalist America for years.
He was taking basic English and an English-literature course. Once he had a better grasp of the language, he figured he’d go on to other things. The car got him to the college much faster than the disappointing local bus system would have. He bought something to eat at the little cafeteria that sold the same kinds of goodies as UCLA’s Gypsy Wagon.
His stomach still full and rumbling, he hurried to the classroom where a patient man taught basic English. Some of the students were brown-skinned and black-haired, and spoke Spanish among themselves. Some were ordinary Americans who’d bailed out of high school for one reason or another and were coming back for a second crack at education. And then there was Istvan.
Mr. van Zandt waited till the clock on the wall said it was seven o’clock. Then he said, “Let’s get started, shall we?” It was far less formal than a Hungarian classroom would have been. The instructor went on, “Turn in your homework assignments, please, and I’ll give back the ones you did on Monday.”
This latest assignment was three paragraphs about work or family. The one van Zandt returned was a similar composition about hobbies or games. Istvan noticed not everyone turned in a paper, and not everybody got one back. That baffled him. Why enroll in a class if you didn’t want to do the work?
The sheet that came back to him was measled with red marks. He’d written about his time on the POWs’ football side. His command of the verb to be was still shaky. He’d called people it twice; Hungarian had no genders at all. Mr. van Zandt showed him several places where his word order was wrong. Istvan saw what his trouble there was, too. English and German might be cousins, but they weren’t identical twins.
At the bottom of the paper, under the B- grade, van Zandt had written This is not bad at all. You write English better than you speak it. What you are trying to say is always clear, even if you don’t say it the way someone who grew up speaking English would. Keep working and you will learn that, too.
That made Istvan feel good. As far as he was concerned, making yourself understood in a foreign language was more important than getting all your grammar perfect. He knew his German, while better than his English, wasn’t anything to write home about. Yet he’d used it with Poles and Czechs (whose Deutsch was also apt to have holes) and with Germans, and he’d managed to get his meaning across.
They went through the night’s lesson on possessives and on the differences between its and it’s and whose and who’s. “Some of you will make mistakes on these,” Mr. van Zandt said. “You’ll try not to, but you will. Try hard, because these are the kinds of mistakes that will hurt you if you’re looking to get a job or something. Someone will go, If this person does that, he can’t know much. But I’ll tell you something. Some people with college degrees don’t know when to use it’s the contraction and its the possessive.”
Istvan could see that. Most of the time, English used the apostrophe to show possession. Its was an exception. Exceptions to rules led people into mistakes.
“For your assignment for next time, I want you to do the exercises on possessives at the end of Chapter Four, and to give me three paragraphs—three well-organized paragraphs—about where you hope to be twenty years from now,” van Zandt said as the hour wound down. “I’ll see you then. Good night.”
Out they went. Some people headed for their cars or the bus stop. Istvan had another class at eight. He walked to that room. Twenty years from now…That would be 1972. It seemed a million years off, not twenty, when you thought of it that way. Whatever he’d be doing, he’d be doing it here, not in Hungary. That was as much as he could see at first glance.
He hoped he wouldn’t still be delivering stoves and washing machines for Blue Front. He was glad to have the job, but he didn’t want it for a career. He couldn’t see any future in it. Aaron Finch seemed contented enough, and he was no dope, but Aaron had his wife and little boy to support. He also had a gift for using his hands that Istvan lacked.
Here was the classroom. Istvan sat at the desk he used most of the time. A few seconds after he walked in, a young woman who was also in his basic English class came in. She sat down just to his right. Recognizing him, she smiled and said, “Hi. How you doing?”
“Hallo,” Istvan said. “I am fine. How are you?” You said I am fine even if you weren’t, unless you were talking to a close friend or something. It was a response to a greeting, not an answer to a real question.
“I’m fine.” She hesitated, then said, “You have an interesting accent. Where are you from?”
“Hungary,” he answered. Interesting probably meant thick enough to slice. He knew how much his spoken English left to be desired.
“How funny!” she said. “How did you get here?”
Before he could tell her, the teacher tapped her lectern with a pointer to call the class to order. Mrs. Valentine taught more interesting things than Mr. van Zandt did, but she was a less interesting person. “How many of you read Hamlet’s soliloquy before you came in tonight?” she asked, sounding as if she expected the worst.
Istvan raised his hand. So did the young woman from the other class and about half the students in this room. The others just sat there. The instructor looked unsurprised. Again, Istvan was. Why take a class if you didn’t care enough to keep up?
Then one of those students raised his hand for a question. “Yes, Rodney?” Mrs. Valentine asked. She’d made a point of quickly learning everybody’s name.
“Why do we got to learn this weird stuff at all?” Rodney said. “Thee and thou and ’tis and all like that. Nobody talks like that any more! And it makes the rest of the story hard to understand, y’know?”
Mrs. Valentine breathed out through her nose. If she wasn’t irked, Istvan would have been amazed. He was more surprised. All of English seemed strange to him, Shakespeare no less than what he heard in the Pasadena Junior College eatery. If anything, Shakespeare might have been a little easier; his word order was closer to the German that Istvan had studied in Budapest.
After a long moment, Mrs. Valentine said, “I don’t suppose the fact that it may be the most magnificent poetry anyone’s ever written has anything to do with the way you look at it.”
Rodney shook his head. “Nah. If I don’t get it, how great can it be?”
“Well, let’s see if I can help you get it—you and everyone else in here.” Mrs. Valentine did her best. Istvan was sure he understood the soliloquy better at the end of the hour than he had at the start. He’d fought through it in his apartment with a dictionary and a lot of patience. He wasn’t sure how much help the instructor gave some of the other people in the classroom, Rodney among them.
As he was getting up to go back to the parking lot, the young woman asked him, “What’s your name?”
“Istvan.” He repeated it so she’d get it right. Ishtvan was how it would have been spelled in English. Then he thought to ask, “Uh, what yours is?”
“I’m Gina,” she said. “See you next
time, Istvan.”
“See you,” he said, and a silly grin spread across his face.
—
Regardless of temptation, regardless of provocation, Max Bachman didn’t go looking for a bazooka after the insurance company feathered its nest instead of his. He knew damn well Rolf would have done it, though he had trouble imagining Rolf running an insured business. Rolf got even when he got mad. Max made sour jokes and tried to go on with his life.
It wasn’t easy. He’d never dreamt Fulda would be so battered when he finally came back to it. It had fallen fairly fast. But air power counted for even more in this war than it had in the last. No flat to go home to; no business to restart. Nothing except his mustering-out pay and the clothes he had on his back.
The shape poor Trudl was in made everything else seem inconsequential by comparison. He’d really never dreamt the damned Russians would haul ordinary women whose only crime was to have patriotic husbands off to the other side of the world and stick them in camps. He would have fought them even harder if he had dreamt any such thing.
I would have been more like Rolf, he thought. Then he shook his head. No matter what happened, he didn’t think he could ever have been like Rolf. He hoped not, anyhow.
But Trudl…He wanted to fatten her up like a Christmas goose. American army rations weren’t good for much—as someone who’d eaten too damn many of them the past couple of years, he could cite chapter and verse on that—but by God they’d give you a double chin in nothing flat.
She didn’t want to talk about what had happened in Siberia. Max knew several people who’d come out of German concentration camps after the Nazi collapse. She wasn’t quite so scrawny as they’d been then, but she shared with them the desire to forget everything that had happened to her while she was inside.
The only trouble was, you could not talk about something like that, and you could not think about something like it, but not talking about it and not thinking about it didn’t make it go away. Now Max had two wars’ worth of things like that. When he came home after the last war, Trudl told him he used to wake up shrieking. After a couple of years, he stopped. Now he’d got some new memories to have nightmares about.
From things Luisa’d told Trudl and Trudl’d told Max, he knew Gustav had had those wake-up-screaming dreams, too. He wouldn’t have been amazed if the same news channel, working in reverse, had informed Max about his nightmares. Poor Gustav! He’d been a good soldier. If your luck ran out, though, how good you were stopped mattering.
And poor Luisa! She’d come home all happy at getting out of the labor camp, only to find, almost the second she got back into West Germany, that her husband was dead. That had to be the hardest thing in the world. No wonder she seemed halfway around the bend these days.
She was less shy than Trudl over talking about what it was like in the labor camp. She always called it the gulag—the ugly Russian name seemed to fit the ugly kind of place it had been. Little bits of Russian flavored her speech these days, too. Trudl had to know the same things, but she didn’t use them. Her attitude was the same one the Victorians had had about sex: if you didn’t mention the horrid thing, maybe it would disappear.
He walked on. A big American bulldozer, painted yellow as a lemon, cleared away wreckage that might include chunks of his old apartment block. Sooner or later, something new would go up where the old place had stood. Fulda wouldn’t look the same once all the new buildings rose.
Max’s mouth twisted. And what would happen here in, say, 1975 or 1980, when some new hotshot Russian leader decided it was time to send his panzer divisions through the Fulda Gap and see if he could make it all the way to the Rhine? That day might not come. The threat of A-bombs and H-bombs might make even a Russian think twice.
Or, of course, it might not. Who in politics ever remembered anything for very long? Rolf’s precious Führer hadn’t. He’d dragged his Reich into a two-front war, the same way Kaiser Wilhelm did with his. Hitler’s war hadn’t turned out as bad as the Kaiser’s. No—it had turned out worse. No one who’d lived through the First World War would have believed it, but there it was.
He lit a cigarette: an American Old Gold. The German brands had come back to life after the defeat, but now their factories lay in ruins again. Max puffed. American tobacco was all right, not like the horrible harsh black stuff the French smoked. And he could smoke his cigarettes whenever he wanted. They weren’t currency, the way they had been after the collapse.
An old woman with a cloth-covered basket waved to him. “I’ve got prunes for sale,” she said. “Prunes and sun-dried apricots, too.”
“No, thanks,” Max said. “Not today.”
Her scowl turned her into something scary, a witch straight out of one of the Brothers Grimm’s grimmer fairy tales. “You cheap bastard!” she screeched. “Hitler should’ve thrown you in the oven with the rest of the kikes!”
He wanted to cross himself to ward against evil, and he wasn’t even Catholic: just a Lutheran who hadn’t gone to church in years. Germany wasn’t the place it had been when Hitler called the shots. Rolf had understood that, no matter how much he’d hated it. But not all the poison was gone yet. Max shuddered. Would it ever be? Could Germany ever become a nice, quiet, ordinary country?
He shrugged. He had no idea.
Down the street was a sort of makeshift market where people sold whatever they had. Farmers in from the country had vegetables and eggs. Fishermen who’d been lucky sold bream or carp. And townsfolk sat behind blankets and battered tables displaying ashtrays and lightbulbs and cooking pots and books and anything else somebody might want to buy. Maybe those were desperate people selling off their worldly goods so they could live. Or maybe—and, Max judged, more likely—they were scroungers who pawed through the wreckage in the middle of the night and grabbed whatever was still in one piece.
That skeletal figure in the quilted jacket…That could only be one of the recently returned prisoners. When she turned, he saw it was Luisa. He’d thought so, but she’d changed so much he hadn’t been sure. When their eyes met, he waved and walked over to her.
“Can I get you anything? What do you need?” he asked, adding, “Insurance or not, I think I’ve got more Deutschmarks in my pocket than you do.”
Her face twisted; he needed a moment to realize she was laughing. “How about a time machine, like the one in the book that Englishman wrote?” she said. “Then I could jump on it and go back to when none of this had ever happened.”
“That would be nice, but I don’t know the shop where they sell them,” Max said. “How about a duck and some potatoes? Then you won’t need to open ration tins for a few days.”
“I don’t like the rations—who would, who isn’t an American?—but eating them isn’t what bothers me so much. Queuing up to get them bothers me,” Luisa said. “It’s humiliating. When I was in the gulag, I had dreams about food like you wouldn’t believe. People there would do anything for food, anything at all.”
“I’m sorry.” Max remembered too well how wonderful half-rotten horse (or maybe it was dog; you quickly learned not to ask too many questions of the guys with the Goulaschkanonen) was when you’d been chewing on snow for two days so you’d have something in your mouth.
But Luisa said, “You don’t know what it’s like for us, Max. It isn’t the same for women as it is for men.”
“No, I don’t suppose it would be.” During the last war more than this one, Max had seen and done some things he’d never talked about with Trudl.
“Some women, they would do anything at all to get more food, better food,” Luisa said again. Max thought she was about to come out with some confession, but she went on, “I wasn’t one of them, thank heavens.”
“All right, Luisa,” Max said gently.
“Some women I knew were, though,” Luisa continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Some women you know were.” She turned on her heel and walked off: walked quite fast, in fact, with her head thrown back. Max stared after her.
Was she laughing? He opened his mouth to call to her, then closed it again. If he didn’t have to know, he didn’t want to know.
—
After years of hating his father’s trade, avoiding it, running from it, Vasili Yasevich found himself in that trade once more, helping out at Witold’s. He knew enough to make a pretty tolerable druggist. The way the art was practiced in Warsaw was close to the way his father had brought it out of Russia and into Harbin.
But his father had learned from Chinese druggists after he went into exile. He’d shown that side of the practice to Vasili, too. Some of the herbs the Chinese relied on didn’t grow in Poland. Sometimes, though, he could find equivalents because his father had trained him in both schools. Ma huang, the Chinese stimulant, was known in the West as Ephedra sinica. No one on this side of Eurasia could get it. He found out that other species of Ephedra did grow in Europe, though.
“Oh, yes, jointpine. We put that in medicines now and then,” Ewa said. “It helps tired people get through a day.”
“That’s the stuff,” Vasili agreed. “They use it all the time in China.”
“Do they?” The druggist’s daughter sounded interested. “It’s a once-in-a-while thing here.”
“If fighters use it, they can keep going longer than if they don’t,” Vasili said. “That might help against the Russians.”
“It might. Let me talk to my father about it,” Ewa said. “You may have something there.”
“I hope so,” Vasili said.
But he turned out not to. “They make pills that do the same thing,” Ewa reported. “Benzedrine, they call one of them. It’s almost like ephedrine, the stuff that comes out of jointpine. We can buy or steal plenty.”
“Oh,” Vasili said, crestfallen.
“It was a good idea.” She sounded serious. She usually did. “It shows you mean it about giving the Reds trouble.”
“Of course I do,” Vasili said.
Ewa just looked at him. With Casimir dead, no one in Warsaw could vouch for him. Ewa and Witold trusted him with the work of a druggist. That involved people’s lives, too, but not so dramatically as the war against the Soviet Union. As a druggist, he couldn’t expose other people who were conspiring against disease and malnutrition.
Armistice Page 39
