Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  “Hey, it’s work. It keeps a roof over your head and food on the table while you’re getting ready to do what you want to do,” Aaron said. “Speaking of which, feel like driving the truck down to Westwood?”

  “Can I?” Istvan sounded eager, which only went to show how new he was behind the wheel. Aaron didn’t mind driving, but he wasn’t the kind who went out for a spin every Sunday. He’d done it two or three times after he married Ruth, but it lost its appeal in a hurry.

  Istvan didn’t shift smoothly, but he was still learning. He was careful on the road; he didn’t make Aaron wish the truck came with seat belts. For somebody with brand new credentials, he did fine.

  And he was starting to learn his way around. As he turned left from Ventura Boulevard to Sepulveda for the trip into Westwood, he said, “I came north this way on the bus the first time I went to Blue Front. I had my route memorized, but I don’t know what I would have done if something went wrong.”

  “You’d have taken care of it. You would have found someone who spoke a language you did, or else shown a taxi driver the address. It would’ve been okay.”

  “I hope so,” Istvan said. “But I was new getting around then. I had next to no English. People would have decided I was a spy.”

  Aaron started to laugh, but maybe it wasn’t so funny. A foreigner who knew no English and plainly wasn’t a Spanish-speaking Mexican? People like Jim Summers might have guessed his Yiddish or Hungarian was really Russian and called the cops. And a cop who wanted to be a hero could have put handcuffs on him and tossed him into the clink. Lots of dopes running around loose, some of them wearing uniforms…

  The refrigerator went to a place only a few blocks from the UCLA campus. Both husband and wife were home to welcome it, which was unusual. Richard House taught medieval history; his wife Mary Ann was an administrative assistant in the history department. Their little boy looked just like Richard, including the shock of combed-back black hair. The home was shaded by trees and full of books in several languages. The Houses looked to have themselves a nice life.

  “Thank you so much,” Mary Ann said after Aaron plugged in the icebox and made sure it worked. She gave him and Istvan two dollars apiece and some iced tea. Richard might be the professor in the family, but his wife plainly ruled the roost. And Ruth doesn’t, with you? Aaron thought as he got back into the truck to head south toward Culver City. He laughed under his breath. He knew darn well she did.

  —

  Marian Tabakman opened the oven and reached in with a pair of overstuffed mittens to take out the roasting pan that held the turkey. It wasn’t a great big bird—not quite eleven pounds—but it would be plenty to feed her and Fayvl and Linda through the Thanksgiving weekend.

  “That smells yummy!” Linda said.

  “Stay back, honey. It’s real hot,” Marian said. She relaxed once she put the turkey on the counter and kicked the oven door shut.

  “Does smell good,” Fayvl said, lifting the hand he’d set on Linda’s shoulder for a moment to make sure she didn’t do anything foolish. “Before I come to America, I don’t think I ever eat turkey.”

  “How come?” Linda asked, beating her mother to the punch.

  “Don’t have many in Poland. Turkey is mostly American bird, not like chickens and ducks and gooses—I mean geeses—that live all over everywhere.”

  He had his own notions about what was good in the turkey, whether he’d had it often or not. Marian would have used the gizzard in the gravy and tossed out the heart and liver and neck. He asked her to boil them for him instead, and ate them for lunch before the rest of the bird was even close to done. He did the same thing with chicken giblets. Poor-people food, he called them. They were just that, but he ate them with as much relish as if they were filet mignon.

  After the turkey rested, he carved it more deftly than Bill ever had. The bread-crumb stuffing inside was fragrant with sausage and chopped onions and celery. There was gibletless gravy for it and the turkey and the mashed potatoes. There were candied yams with marshmallows (Fayvl said yams hadn’t made it to Poland, either) and cranberry sauce and string beans and a tossed salad. A pumpkin pie and an apple pie sat in the refrigerator.

  Fayvl opened a bottle of California white wine with a corkscrew. He poured a glass for Marian and another for himself. And he poured a splash in the bottom of a glass for Linda. When Marian gave him a look, he said, “A bissel won’t hurt her none. Is Thanksgiving.”

  Marian thought it over and relented. “Okay,” she said.

  “Wow! Like a grown-up!” Linda was excited.

  Fayvl raised his glass. “I got lots to be thankful for this year, on account of my wonderful wife and mine little girl.” He clinked with Marian, then with Linda. They all drank. Linda made a face; the wine was on the dry side.

  “We’re thankful for you,” Marian said. She and Fayvl drank again.

  Linda discovered that some grown-up pleasures were an acquired taste. She didn’t raise the little bit of wine in her glass to her mouth this time. “Let’s eat!” she said.

  Eat they did, till they were groaningly full. At the end of supper, Marian stared in disbelief at the empty big plate of Thanksgiving food and the smaller empty plate of pumpkin pie in front of her. “I can’t believe I ate all that,” she said. “Now I want to lie down and curl up and sleep through the winter, the way a bear does.”

  “Bears hibernate, Mommy,” Linda said, so something she’d learned in school or heard in a story had stuck.

  Her husband set both hands on his stomach. “You know, I don’t think I eat this much the whole time I’m in Auschwitz. Not even close.” He has to be exaggerating…doesn’t he? Marian thought.

  “What’s Auschwitz, Papa Fayvl?” Linda didn’t pronounce the death camp’s name very well.

  Instead of answering right away, Fayvl made a small production of lighting an after-dinner cigarette. He blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. Then he said, “It was a bad place where I went a long time ago—before you were born, even. But I’m not there no more, and the place, it ain’t there no more, neither. It’s kaput.”

  “What does that mean?” Linda was full of questions.

  “Done with. Finished. Gone,” Fayvl said.

  Linda nodded understanding. She got that, all right. She said, “May I be excused? I’m not sleepy. I’m gonna go color.”

  “Go ahead,” Marian told her. Watching Linda scoot away, she shook her head. “Boy, whatever kids have, I wish somebody would bottle it. I’d sure buy some.”

  “In a minute, I would,” Fayvl agreed. Where Marian had watched her daughter, he eyed her. “I’m full, too, but you want I should wash dishes tonight?”

  Part of Marian felt she wouldn’t be doing her housewifely duty if she told him yes. She wasn’t sure Bill had ever offered to do dishes. But she’d spent all day cooking and then eating, and it was catching up with her. “Would you? Do you mind?” she said.

  “If I minded, I wouldn’t say I’d do it,” Fayvl answered. He set to work with Ajax and steel wool. Marian wondered if he’d make such a mess of it that she’d end up sorry she’d let him start. But he washed up at least as well as she did, maybe better.

  When he started to dry, too, she said, “Just let ’em sit, honey. They’ll be fine in the morning. That’s what I was gonna do.”

  She thought he’d tell her no and keep on with the dish towel. After a moment, though, he nodded. “Hokay. I do that.”

  The next day, she had to go in to work. That irked her, but what could you do? Linda had the day off from school, of course. Fayvl kept his shop closed. He stayed home to take care of her. Marian didn’t think he would have done much business anyhow, so that was probably cheaper than paying Betsy.

  Nothing much was going on in the Shasta Lumber Company’s office, either. Most of the people the company worked with stayed home to enjoy the long weekend. The phone rang once all day, and it was a wrong number. Marian and the other clerks and secretaries sat around and talke
d, swapping recipes and gossip. Most of them were happy the Republicans had done so well in the election. Marian wasn’t, but kept quiet about it.

  She yawned her way through the afternoon. When she punched out, she was glad to escape the office and get some fresh air. If it’s not too much food, it’s too much nothing, she thought, yawning again as she slid into the Studebaker. She counted herself lucky that she got home without dozing off behind the wheel and running into a mailbox or a dog.

  Fayvl had leftovers heating in the oven and on top of the stove when she walked through the door. “Dinner in fifteen minutes,” he said after they kissed.

  “You’re terrific!” Marian exclaimed.

  “Is gurnisht—nothing, I mean.” Fayvl seemed embarrassed that she was getting excited about what he’d done. Either he really thought it was nothing or he had an act plenty good enough to take it on the road.

  Marian didn’t eat as much as she had on the big day, but she still put away more than she usually did. She found herself yawning again. “I need some toothpicks to prop my eyelids open,” she said.

  “You want I should make a fresh pot coffee? I could do with some mine own self,” Fayvl said.

  “Make it, then, but I don’t want any, thanks,” Marian said. “The last cup I had at the office tasted funny.” She made a face. She’d had to force herself to get it down. It wasn’t just bitter, the way percolator coffee got as the day wore on. It tasted peculiar to her, almost metallic.

  Fayvl studied her. “I remembering my Rivke said the same thing when she first find out she is in a family way. You think…?”

  “Uh—” Marian tried to remember when her next period was due. When did I have the last one? She had to think back. It would have been in the second week in October, which meant she’d been due before the middle of November. She hadn’t been paying attention; she hadn’t even noticed she was late till Fayvl asked her. In a small voice, she said, “I don’t know. I could be.”

  “Huh. I think—no, I thought—so.”

  By the sound of it, Fayvl’d been keeping closer track than she had. Well, he had a male ulterior motive she didn’t. But that small thought got lost in the bigger one. “A baby!” Marian breathed. “Our baby! That’s wonderful, or whatever one step up from wonderful is.”

  “Our baby,” Fayvl echoed. “I don’t expect so soon, but yeah—one step up from wonderful.” He kissed her. As soon as they broke apart, Marian yawned again.

  MAX BACHMAN DUCKED OUT of the shack where he and Trudl were staying. He had an American greatcoat in the dark green color the Yankees called olive drab. He shivered even with it. Winter’s official start might lie three weeks away, but his breath smoked. The bloodless sun shone pale in a gunmetal sky.

  He lit an Old Gold and peered at the ruins of the town where he’d hoped to live happily ever after, as if he were in a fairy tale with a happy ending. He’d come back to Fulda when Hitler’s regime went belly-up. He’d got his printing business going, he’d made friends with the American occupiers so he’d get trade from them, too, and he’d hired Gustav to give him a hand. For a while there, he’d had plenty to eat and plenty to do and a wife he loved and who loved him back. How much more did a man really need?

  Now Fulda would be years getting back on its feet…again. And the wreckage all around him struck him with the force of a Max Schmeling uppercut as a perfect metaphor for the wreckage of his life.

  He ground out the cigarette butt under the sole of his U.S. Army marching boot. He ground extra hard, as if he had Luisa’s face under his boot. It wasn’t wanting to shoot the messenger. Not quite. He wouldn’t have hated her nearly so much for telling him Trudl’d been unfaithful in the Siberian labor camp if she hadn’t made it plain how much she enjoyed telling him.

  Muttering, Max lit another smoke. When he felt charitable, he remembered that Luisa had precious little left to enjoy. Her life was even more completely ruined than his. The first thing she found out when she came back to the Bundesrepublik was that Gustav had been dead for a year. Nothing at all remained of the block of flats where she’d lived. When he felt charitable, all that came to mind.

  But he didn’t feel charitable very often. She could have kept her big trap shut. What he didn’t know wouldn’t have hurt him. If she had to tell him, she could have done it with a little compassion, a little understanding.

  She hadn’t. She’d enjoyed hurting him. During two wars now, he’d seen too many people who hurt other people on purpose, because it was fun for them. Not surprisingly, bastards like that congregated in the SS. Rolf was only the latest in a long line of those.

  But you didn’t have to be a fighter to enjoy other people’s pain. Max shook his head. Wasn’t life hard enough any which way? Did you need to go out of your way to make it worse for others who went through it with you?

  He didn’t think so. He didn’t think decent, normal people did think so. But then, he’d always tagged Luisa as a decent, normal person. Shows what I know, doesn’t it? went through his mind. He didn’t believe she would have acted that way before the Russians hauled her and Trudl and most of the other women here in town whose husbands had gone to war off to the labor camp at the far end of the world.

  A man with gray hair and gray stubble pushed a cart piled high with brown coal through the streets. Every so often, when a wheel didn’t want to climb over a brick or a stone, he’d back up and change course a trifle. “Get your coal!” he called. “Stay warm! Get your coal here!”

  Brown coal—lignite—barely deserved the name. It was a short step up from peat. It gave far less heat and more smoke than good black coal. Then again, it was a lot cheaper than good coal.

  Max waved to the brown-coal seller. The cart rattled and banged over to him. He bought fifteen kilos of lignite. No scale, but he and the guy with the gray whiskers both knew about how much that was. The coal seller went on his way. Had he used that same cart in the last war? Had he tagged along after it with, say, his grandfather during World War I?

  The door to the hovel creaked when he opened it. He took the brown coal inside. You didn’t want to leave it out in the open, or it would disappear when you weren’t looking. Or a pack of punks would steal it from right under your nose, and beat you up if you squawked.

  Trudl looked up from the stew that bubbled over a fire made from more brown coal and from boards taken from the wreckage of Fulda. “Oh, good,” she said. “I could see we’d need some more pretty soon.”

  “Me, too.” Max nodded. As long as they talked about fuel or food or scrounging or how to turn the shack into something more like a real house, they were all right. It was only when they went back to talking about what they’d done in the war, and especially what Trudl had done in Siberia, that things went wrong.

  She’d tried her best to deny everything. Max always knew when she was lying, though. Her ears turned red. She might not have known they did that herself, and she couldn’t help it. She burst into tears when she finally admitted it. I was starving! she’d said. I didn’t think we’d ever come home, and I didn’t want to die.

  He supposed that was even true. He knew the Russians treated German POWs about as badly as the Nazis had treated captured Ivans. They died like flies, in other words. No reason to expect Soviet labor camps to be any bargains, then.

  Still…He hadn’t wanted to touch her that way since he found out. To him, it felt like picking up some Ami’s discarded chewing gum from the sidewalk and popping it into his own mouth. (That he’d spent a couple of years cadging other people’s discarded cigarette butts and smoking or spending them didn’t cross his mind.)

  She’d asked him point-blank if he’d gone and visited any soldiers’ brothels after he went off to fight the Russians again. When he told her no, he was telling the truth. She could hear it in his voice. He remembered how her face had fallen.

  If she’d asked Rolf, now…But when Rolf lied, he would have made her believe it. Max also thought Gustav had got his ashes hauled a time or two. If he ever
got mad enough at Luisa, he’d throw that in her face. He’d just never been inclined to go buy it himself.

  “How’s the stew coming?” he asked. Yes, that kind of question was all right.

  “You can have some if you want,” Trudl said. It was American Spam chopped into chunks and cooked with potatoes and turnips and greens she’d bought from local women: far from exciting, but better than, or at least different from, the canned rations the soup kitchen doled out.

  They had bowls and plates and silverware. No two pieces were alike, not so far as Max could tell. They’d all been pulled from the wreckage of other people’s flats and houses. A couple of forks and a spoon were heavy enough to be sterling; the rest were just cheap pot metal. Max dug in. Yes, it was something different. Trudl ate, too, after he’d taken as much as he wanted.

  She washed dishes in an enameled basin. She carried water to the shack in two clean jerrycans. The place had no running water, but a few nearby faucets worked. The chamber pot boasted a tight-fitting lid.

  When the dishes were clean, Trudl looked up and said, “Max?”

  “What?”

  “Max, I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t do it. I thought I was going to stay in Russia forever. I didn’t want to die there. It’s not like I cared anything for him. I wanted a full stomach, that’s all.”

  Did not caring for the guard you lay down with make it better or worse? Max was damned if he knew. Luisa hadn’t slept with any guards, and she hadn’t starved to death, either. Of course, when you got hungry enough you feared you’d starve well before you did.

  Why couldn’t Luisa just have shut up about what happened all those thousands of kilometers to the east? But he’d already figured that out. She enjoyed hurting Max and Trudl. Maybe she was also paying Trudl back for eating better and working less while they were in the labor camp.

  Which meant…If I stay angry at Trudl, who wins? Max wondered. Do I? Or does Luisa score some more points? When you asked it that way, the question answered itself.