Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

He let out a long sigh, then, after a moment, another one. “Well, let’s see if we can patch things up,” he said. “It was during the war. Everybody was crazy. You’ve got to be crazy to have a war.”

  “Women understand that,” Trudl said. “Men mostly don’t. I’ll be as good as I can for you, Max. I do love you.”

  He weighed that. How could anyone be better than as good as she could? “I’ll try, too,” Max said. “We’ll see how it goes.” Something else seemed called for. He found it: “I love you, too.” And it might prove true, and it might not. All they could do was go on and find out.

  —

  The doctor at the Knoxville veterans’ hospital looked up at Cade Curtis from his perch on one knee. “You ready, Major?” The doc was no Southerner; by the way he talked, he came out of New York or Philly.

  “I guess I am.” Cade glanced at the crutches leaning against the chair he was sitting in. “I reckon I’d do darn near anything to get away from those bastards.”

  “You tell ’em,” Jimmy said.

  “I don’t blame you a bit,” the doctor said. “Let’s see how you do with this, then.” He fitted the padded cup at the top of Cade’s new artificial leg to his stump and fastened the prosthetic in place with leather straps that went above his real knee. When he had it the way he wanted, he asked, “How’s that?”

  “Okay so far. Now comes the fun part, though—I get to put weight on it.”

  “That’s kind of the idea. Can you stand up by yourself?”

  “I think so. We’ll both find out in a second.” Cade used the arms of the chair to lever himself upright. His own arms were thick with ropy muscle.

  Half his weight settled onto the padding in the cup. He remembered as if from a mile beyond the moon the Army doctor back in Korea bragging about what a good stump he’d made and how there was plenty of flesh below the end of the bone to act as a different kind of pad. As was often the way of the world, the Army doctor seemed half right and half wrong. No, the bone wasn’t grinding against the artificial leg. But he could feel the pressure even so.

  Both Jimmy and the doctor here reached for him when he took a step forward. He waved their hands away. He wasn’t going to fall flat on his face. He didn’t think he was, anyhow. And he didn’t. To celebrate, he took another step. He felt them both—and the one thigh was weak, because it hadn’t done any work after he got wounded. But he could manage.

  “I know what I need,” he said, standing there by himself and taking a few deep breaths.

  “What’s that, Major Curtis?” the doctor asked.

  Major still felt unreal to Cade. He’d earned captain’s rank, earned it and then some. The gold oak leaves he’d got with his discharge, though, were nothing more than a going-away present. He had to work not to let that distract him. “I need a three-cornered hat with a big red plume sticking up from it, and I need a parrot that sits on my shoulder and talks dirty.”

  Jimmy looked confused. “Why you need that crap?”

  Korean pirates, Cade realized, must not have dressed the way their swashbuckling brothers in arms in the Caribbean had. “If I have to be Peg-leg Pete the Pirate, I may as well look the part,” he said. “I should have a cutlass on my belt, too.” He made as if to slash and chop.

  “There you go!” the doc said. “I like it.”

  “Submachine gun or rifle kill better,” Jimmy said. “You can smash or stab with rifle butt or entrenching tool.”

  The doctor eyed him. “You were a soldier yourself, weren’t you?”

  “Oh, you bet!” Jimmy nodded.

  One more time, Cade went through the story of how they’d met, how Jimmy’d hauled him to the aid station, and how they were now related. He’d told it so often by now, he found himself using the same phrases over and over. He almost felt as if he were talking about someone else, not himself.

  “They gave you permission to legally adopt him?” The doctor sounded surprised.

  “Yeah, they did.” Cade also nodded. “Partly on account of what he did for me, I reckon, partly on account of I had a good record in Korea myself before I got hurt, and partly on account of I knew some people who were able to give me a hand with the papers and things.”

  “I got you,” the doctor said. “Lots of times, you can go further on who you know than on what you know.”

  “Uh-huh.” Cade wasn’t even slightly embarrassed at Dr. Marcus’ help. What else were connections for?

  The doctor brought him back to the here-and-now. “Think you can turn around, walk over to the chair again, and sit down in it?”

  “We’ll both find out, won’t we?” Cade said with a tight grin. He’d had little trouble going forward in a straight line. He hadn’t been a hundred percent sure he could, but he saw how to do it right away. Turning…Would the artificial leg hold him up while he rotated?

  He used his arms and torso for most of the twisting motion, more than he would have if he were all in one piece. He’d been facing away from the chair. Now, suddenly, he was looking right at it. He took two steps towards it. Then he had to turn again so he could lower his behind into it.

  “Good job, Major Cade!” Jimmy’s enthusiasm, like any puppy’s, knew no bounds. His grin showed white, perfect teeth. Cade grinned, too, partly in response to Jimmy’s broad smile and partly because his Korean adopted son sounded exactly the way he did when he was congratulating Jimmy for learning something new.

  “That was a good job, Major,” the doctor said seriously. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to, but I’m going to send the leg home with you. Don’t overdo things. Don’t wear it too much. If you get persistent pain in the stump, or especially if you get any bleeding, take it off right away and go back to your crutches. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll do it, cross my heart.” Cade made the gesture to show the doctor he was serious.

  “Okay. We’ll go on from there, then.” The doctor turned away from him. “Jimmy!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You make sure Major Curtis doesn’t act like a jerk. If he has any trouble with his stump or with the prosthetic, get him back here right away so we can take care of it. Understand me?”

  Cade realized he was talking the way he might have to the wife of a patient who was liable to get obstreperous but who would let her calm him down. He wondered whether he ought to get mad about it. After a moment, he decided not to. He was likelier to listen to Jimmy than to anyone else on this side of the Pacific.

  Jimmy got that, too. “I take care of it, sir. You betcha!”

  “Outstanding! That’s what I thought you’d tell me.” Having dealt with higher authority, the doctor gave his attention back to Cade. “Ask you something that’s got zip to do with your leg?”

  “Sure,” Cade said, “but what?”

  “I’ve been in Knoxville all through this war. You took the train across most of the country. From, uh, San Francisco, if I remember your file right. What’s it look like? How bad off are we? How long will we need to get back on our feet?”

  “Well, San Francisco caught a bomb, of course. They’ll be a while getting things back together. I have no idea how long it’ll take to open up the Golden Gate all the way and turn the steel in the wrecked bridge into paper clips and steak knives and car fenders and all. And I really don’t know how long they’ll need to build a new bridge. We didn’t go through Denver, I suppose because they got an A-bomb, too. There’s a detour—I think it’s new—that takes you through Colorado Springs instead. As for the rest of what I saw, it looks like it’s going on the same as always.”

  “USA is great big country,” Jimmy put in. “I know that before, here.” He tapped the side of his head. “Now I know here, too.” This time, he set the palm of his hand on his belly.

  After they left the hospital, Cade and Jimmy waited on the corner for the bus that would take them to within a couple of blocks of Cade’s parents’ house. Cade was back on crutches. Jimmy carried the artificial leg in a big paper bag with the cup end sticking ou
t of the top. Cade looked at it and said, “I can do this. Maybe I can do it by the time next semester starts. If I can, I’ll go back to school.”

  “I come, too,” Jimmy said. “I want to learn.”

  “I know you do,” Cade said. “I bet you will, too. We may not be going anywhere real fast, the two of us, but we’re going, and we won’t stop till we get there, wherever there turns out to be. Not for anything.”

  “You goddamn right.” Jimmy still talked like a dogface. Cade didn’t care. And if anybody else didn’t like it, too goddamn bad for him. The bus pulled up. The doors hissed open. Jimmy helped Cade board. Cade put two dimes in the fare box. The bus growled away.

  —

  Luisa Hozzel lined up for supper at the soup kitchen closest to her tent. It was cold and wet, with drizzle that wanted to freeze spattering down out of a darkening sky. That sky matched her mood. Her quilted zek jacket, made to hold off Siberian winters, kept her warm enough. It wasn’t waterproof, though. She draped an old Wehrmacht camouflaged shelter half over her shoulders as a rain cape. Gustav must have done the same thing a hundred times.

  But Gustav was gone. And ten meters in front of her stood Max and Trudl Bachman, also waiting for Yankee rations. Trudl held up a black umbrella with a couple of broken struts. You’ve been scavenging, dear, Luisa thought unkindly. Max had a shelter half of his own. He wore his as a poncho, not a cape. He must not have cared if his head got wet.

  Luisa didn’t care if his head got wet, either. If he caught pneumonia and pegged out before anybody could pump him full of American antibiotics, that wasn’t her worry. She wouldn’t shed one single tear.

  What she did care about was that he and Trudl were standing there side by side, obviously still a couple. She’d told Max the truth about what Trudl had done in the gulag, even if she hadn’t named names. Nothing wrong with the truth, was there? Of course not!

  She’d hoped the truth would set Trudl free—that Max would walk out on her when he found out she’d laid a camp guard. Luisa knew Gustav would have if he found out she’d done anything like that. Knowing as much was one of the reasons she hadn’t done anything like that. What she hadn’t known was that Gustav was dead. She could have screwed around and eaten more and worked less without worrying about him at all.

  What kind of man was Max, anyway? Didn’t he have any pride? Any self-respect? Evidently not. If he did, wouldn’t he have made Trudl as miserable as Luisa already was?

  The door to the soup kitchen opened. The line snaked forward. Germans were almost as good as Englishmen at behaving well in a queue.

  In went Max and Trudl. He stood back to let his wife precede him. That show of politeness made Luisa grind her teeth in futile fury. She gave herself to a worthless camp guard for some extra rations and cushy work inside the barbed wire. Don’t you understand that? She wanted to scream the question at Max. Only the certainty that other people in line would stare at her and tap their foreheads and spin a finger by their ear made her keep quiet. Even then it was close.

  After what seemed forever and was in fact three or four minutes, Luisa shuffled into the soup kitchen herself. They gave her American tinned beef stew poured over boiled potatoes and cabbage. That made a reasonably filling and more than reasonably uninspiring supper. A pair of hard candies—one butterscotch, the other mint—and a cup of muddy instant coffee finished the meal.

  She also snagged a five-pack of Lucky Strikes from a bowl at the end of the serving table. American military rations weren’t to her taste (or, as best she could see, to anybody else’s), but she liked Yankee cigarettes fine. And the instant coffee might taste foul, but it packed more kick than German ersatz had during the last war. Her eyes opened wider and her heart beat faster after she drank it.

  As she left the soup kitchen, she had to fight the urge to run for the closest toilet. The Russians had trained her in the gulag the way Professor Pavlov—one more goddamn Ivan!—had trained his dogs to drool whenever they heard a bell.

  The only other zek she’d seen in the soup kitchen was Trudl. Nobody who hadn’t gone through the labor camps would have had any idea what she was talking about. Trudl’s bowels, though, had been through the same training program. But Luisa no longer had anything to say to Trudl, and Trudl didn’t want to talk to her, either.

  Why didn’t Max knock out her front teeth? Why didn’t he throw her out, so she could turn tricks here the way she did there? More questions she couldn’t scream at him. She hadn’t imagined he could be so pussy-whipped.

  A jeep came up the road, slowly, dodging Germans and potholes and rubble. Both men in the rugged little machine wore American uniform, but that meant nothing these days. Both West Germans and French troops used leftovers from their patrons across the Atlantic. Only when Luisa heard the men speaking English was she sure they were Yanks.

  She didn’t really know English, but she did know the sound of it. Fulda had been full of Americans from the day the last war ended to the day this new one started. They’d known the Russians would charge through the Fulda Gap and head for the Rhine if fighting ever broke out again. Anybody who could read a map would see that.

  Luisa gave the Amis their due. They’d fought hard to stop the Red Army. No matter how hard they’d fought, though, it hadn’t been hard enough. They’d pulled back. The Ivans occupied Fulda. They decided to settle accounts with the women here whose husbands took up arms to defend their country.

  And Luisa’s life turned upside down and inside out because they did. Trudl’s, too, but Luisa wasn’t inclined to worry about that.

  The soldier driving the jeep hit the brakes and tapped the horn so it made a little blatting noise. That was enough to make Luisa turn and look, which was what he wanted. “Hey, babe!” he called. “Want some cigarettes?” He took a pack of Raleighs out of his pocket and held it up as if it were the Holy Grail.

  Right after the war, plenty of Amis had bought women for a couple of cigarettes. In that rough stretch, tobacco was money. And the Americans were the winners, and plump and pink and well-dressed, unlike the shabby, wretched German men coming home from a losing war. No wonder they’d had lots of fun in those days.

  Things were bad now, but they weren’t that bad. Luisa stuck her nose in the air. “I don’t speak English,” she said auf Deutsch.

  To her surprise, the Yank tried her language: “Willst du Zigaretten, Liebchen?” He sounded like what he was—an American who didn’t speak German very well—but she couldn’t very well pretend not to follow him.

  So she shook her head instead. “No, thanks. I’ve got my own.”

  He said something in English that wasn’t an endearment. His pal in the passenger seat laughed at him. The driver took his billfold out of a trouser pocket. “Will you be friendly for this?” he asked, displaying a ten-dollar bill.

  She’d just been thinking about Trudl and whoring. That was funny, or as funny as things got these days. She shook her head again. “Sorry. I’m not one of those. If you look around, you can probably find a brothel.”

  “I don’t want a brothel,” he said. He looked mad at her. He wanted to be irresistible, and thought that with all the money he had he would be. And chances were he would have been to someone else. Not to Luisa, though.

  His friend had a grease gun across his knees. If he pointed that at her…I’ll scream my head off, Luisa thought. The Russians wouldn’t have cared what their soldiers did to German women. The Americans did. Some of the time. When they felt like it.

  The friend poked the driver on the arm. Cussing in English, the driver put the jeep back in gear and went on to wherever he’d been going when he spotted Luisa.

  He must have been desperate, she thought as she walked back to the leaky tent where she slept. She knew she looked like hell. She was still skinny, her camp jacket robbed her of any bustline, and the shelter half made her look like a demobilized soldier. But men were men. When they got the urge, anything with a pussy would do.

  No doubt that was how Trudl ha
d snagged herself the guard at the gulag. When you let them know you would, they were putty in your hands. Afterwards, they’d blame you and sneer at you, but not till they’d got what they wanted.

  Luisa wondered what she would have done had the Ami offered her a hundred dollars, not just ten. A hundred dollars, that was real money. She knew more than a little relief she hadn’t had to find out. Rain splattered on the shelter half as she headed off to what passed for home.

  —

  This was the second time Vasili Yasevich had watched Soviet tanks rumble into a city that didn’t want them. They’d run the Japanese out of Harbin more than seven years ago now. Here they were in Warsaw. Some of them might have been the same tanks both times, too. T-34/85s weren’t a measure of the state of the art, as they had been in 1945, but they were still a lot better than no tanks at all.

  Some of them flew the hammer and sickle on their radio aerials. Others flew the Polish flag, white over red. Drivers and commanders on Soviet and Polish tanks all smiled and waved to the glum people who stood on the sidewalks and watched them pass. No one shot at them or flung a Molotov cocktail at a tank. The rebels in Warsaw had surrendered. Soviet brutality was a simple tool, but it worked.

  Beside Vasili, Ewa whispered, “We were free for a little while. Now we’re going back into slavery.”

  “I’m sorry,” Vasili whispered back. She wasn’t wrong, but Warsaw still felt freer to him than Smidovich had. It also felt freer than Harbin had under Mao’s rule, or Stalin’s before that, or the puppet Emperor of Manchukuo’s before Stalin’s.

  Behind the tanks marched a regiment of Polish soldiers in the service of the People’s Republic. Some of them wore Russian-style helmets, others the distinctive square-topped cap the Poles called a csapka. That told the spectators they weren’t Russians. So did the big pole-mounted pictures of Boleslaw Bierut their standard-bearers carried. The jowly politician ran the country for Moscow. As long as he did exactly what Molotov told him to, he could do whatever he wanted.

  Ewa sniffed. “And they have the nerve to call us traitors!”