Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  “Would I? Not unless it was really cheap,” Aaron said. “The top part of my head is sure it’s safe. Poke a little deeper, though…” He turned his thumb down.

  The Harbor Freeway stopped not far south of downtown. It was years from pushing down to L.A.’s harbor district, San Pedro (which had got an A-bomb of its own). Istvan kept going south on Figueroa. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, he found Emma Watson’s house. Looking north after he got out of the truck, he could see the stub of City Hall sticking up above the closer rubble fields.

  Mrs. Watson opened the door as soon as Aaron knocked. “Good to see you, gentlemen,” she said. She was a nice-looking woman in her early thirties, about the color of coffee before cream went in. Istvan tried to hide his surprise. No reason Negroes shouldn’t buy televisions and washing machines, none at all. Money was money, no matter who spent it. He was surprised anyhow.

  Aaron took it in stride. He treated Emma Watson the same way he would have dealt with a white woman. He’d done that with the colored housekeeper in Pasadena, too. But Mrs. Watson was a customer, not hired help.

  She gave Aaron and Istvan lemonade—“from a tree in the back yard”—and tipped them a buck apiece as they left. Looking at the block with new eyes, Istvan saw several Negro children playing in front yards and on the sidewalk. A house a few doors down from Emma Watson’s had a FOR SALE sign out front.

  Aaron saw that, too. “Probably a white family moving out,” he said. “The neighborhoods here are changing.”

  “Is that good or bad?” Istvan asked.

  “Beats me,” Aaron said. “An awful lot of whites don’t want to live next door to shvartzers. I think that’s silly, but what I think doesn’t make it any less real.”

  “Captain Kovacs, the guy who chose me to come to America, he told me Negroes in America get what Jews get in Europe,” Istvan said. “I’m beginning to see what he meant.”

  “Yeah, there’s something to it, all right.” Aaron paused in the middle of lighting a Chesterfield. “Captain Ko-vach, huh?” He pronounced the name more or less as Istvan had. Then he went on, “There’s a funny guy on TV named Ernie Ko-vacks. That’s how he says it, too. Is he wrong?”

  “Maybe he was born over here. He’s pronouncing it the way somebody who speaks English would if he was just reading it,” Istvan said.

  “Okay. I gotcha.” Aaron nodded. “When I was in the merchant marine, one time I shipped with a big old Polack who spelled his name S-Z-U-L-C. In English, it looks like it oughta be Zulk, right? But he wanted everybody to say it Schultz.”

  “Sounds like Poles trying to spell a German name the way they’re used to,” Istvan agreed. “They don’t do it like you or like us. With us, s is like English sh and sz is like English plain s. With the Poles, it’s the other way around.”

  “Funny,” Aaron said. “I mean funny-peculiar, not funny-haha.”

  Istvan had to think for a moment before he understood what the older man meant. When he did, he grinned. “Talk about funny guys! You’re one, the way you put things.”

  “That’s not me.” Now Aaron shook his head. “People just say that sometimes. People who speak English, I mean. Funny can mean the one thing or the other, and sometimes the person who’s listening can’t tell which right away.”

  “I suppose so. It sounded like you, though.” Istvan lit a cigarette of his own, blew out the match, and tossed it out the window. He added, “Girls can be funny-peculiar and funny-haha at the same time.” Most of that—all of it, in fact, except for Aaron’s two words—was in Yiddish.

  Aaron glanced over at him. Behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, his eyes sparked. “They sure can! You find somebody?”

  “Maybe. Gina’s in my classes at Pasadena Junior College. We talk before and after the class time, too. I got her telephone number.”

  “Decent start,” Aaron observed. “So you see what happens, that’s all. Maybe it goes nowhere. Maybe you have some fun for a while and then it goes nowhere. Or maybe you get lucky, like I did with Ruth.” He made it sound so simple. Of course, he hadn’t married till he was in his mid-forties. That argued it wasn’t so simple all the time, even for him. Istvan puffed hard on his cigarette. As if I didn’t already know! he thought.

  —

  Doc Toohey nodded at Marian Tabakman. “You’re in a family way, all right,” he said. “From what you tell me, the baby should come some time in July. Congratulations to you and Fayvl both.”

  “Thanks,” Marian said.

  “Both of you have perked up this town since you got here,” the doctor said. “It’s nice you got together. I’m sure you’ll spoil the kid rotten.”

  Marian smiled. “Fayvl will, if I give him half a chance. And you know what? I probably will.”

  “That’s fine.” Doc Toohey smiled, too. “Nothing wrong with spoiling a kid a little bit.” The smile slipped. “It’s a darn sight better than smacking one in the face for dropping a jar of jam or something like that. Some of the loggers, they knock their kids around when something goes wrong for them. Or they kick the cat into the wall. Or they smack their wives instead of the kids, or along with the kids.”

  “How awful! You should call the cops!” Marian said.

  “I’ve done it a few times, when it went way beyond bumps and bruises,” he replied. “But the wives, they mostly don’t want to file charges. They tell the police ‘Oh, I fell down’ or ‘I walked into a door’ or ‘Junior tripped over a cap gun and landed on his face’ or…I’ll tell you, I’ve heard enough bullsomething to fertilize every field in the Central Valley.”

  He’d said things like that before. Along with policemen, doctors saw life in the raw. It left them cynical. Marian wasn’t, not that way. “If somebody I was married to did anything like that to me, I sure wouldn’t stay married to him for long. Either I’d get a lawyer or I’d stick a knife in him after he fell asleep. They can’t stay awake all the time.”

  “You know what? I believe you. But a lot of women aren’t like that,” Doc Toohey said sadly. “I had one of ’em tell me, ‘That’s how I know he loves me, when he slaps me. He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t really care.’ ”

  “What a bunch of bullshit,” Marian said. The doctor might tiptoe around the word, but she didn’t, not after her time in Camp Nowhere.

  “You know it and I know it, but they don’t know it.” Toohey still sounded sad. “A lot of them grew up watching their fathers haul off and belt their mothers, and they think that’s how things are supposed to work.”

  “Somebody ought to do something about it,” Marian said.

  He smiled again, crookedly. “You and Fayvl got Weed an ambulance. I wouldn’t have believed that would ever happen, but this one would be tougher. You just had to convince a few big shots then. With this, half the guys in town think they’ve got a God-given right to belt Suzie if she burns the roast. And too many of the Suzies think the same way. So you can try, but looks to me like you’re tilting at windmills.”

  Marian knew that meant you’re wasting your time or you haven’t got a chance. It was from some book or other. She’d run into it when she was in high school, but she couldn’t remember how.

  It was gray and chilly when she went outside. She gauged the clouds. Maybe it would rain, maybe not. Wind whipped the banners and streamers plugging stores’ after-Christmas sales. In spite of the hoopla, not many people were going in or out.

  She walked over to the cobbler’s shop to get Linda. Her daughter went in with Fayvl in the week between Christmas and New Year’s when school was out. Linda didn’t want to leave. She had coloring books, and she helped her stepfather do things that weren’t likely to hurt her. But when Fayvl told her to go, she went.

  “Am I gonna have a baby brother or a baby sister?” she asked Marian when they got out on the sidewalk.

  “You sure are, sweetie,” Marian answered. “C’mon. The car’s in front of the doctor’s office.”

  “I know I am. You already told me.” Linda sounded im
patient. “But which?”

  “I can’t tell you that, honey. The doctor can’t tell me, either. Nobody will know till the baby comes out and we see.”

  “Oh.” Linda looked disappointed. Marian opened the Studebaker’s passenger door. As Linda slid in, she said, “They should be able to tell stuff like that. They don’t know much, do they?”

  “They know a lot more than they used to,” Marian said as she got in herself. They had all the wonder drugs to kill germs. They had anesthetics so operations weren’t something you only did if you were almost dead and had nothing left to lose.

  Of course, the knowledge that led to X-rays also led to A-bombs. Maybe ignorance would have been bliss. Or maybe not. Had X-rays saved more lives than A-bombs had taken? Marian didn’t know.

  Fayvl came home himself not too much later. “Wasn’t much business today,” he said with a shrug. “Is the season of the year.”

  His eyes slid to the Christmas tree with the lights and the tinsel and the Santa ornaments and the big gold star at the top. He hadn’t said a word when Marian put it up. It was part of a holiday important to her faith, however watered-down that was, so he respected it. Marian wondered why more people couldn’t have done the same with his faith.

  As if apologizing, she said, “We’ll take it down right after New Year’s.”

  “You don’t got to do it on account of me. Don’t t’ink you do,” he said. “You don’t tell much about what Doc Toohey says when you get Linda. Nu?”

  “He says I’m gonna have a baby, like we didn’t already know,” Marian replied. “But the test makes it official.”

  “Hokay. Better than hokay,” Fayvl said. “We gonna have something what is part of both of us. Is pretty good.”

  “I think so, too.” No matter what Marian thought, she found herself yawning. She was sleepy all the time, the way she had been when she first got pregnant with Linda. “I’d better fix dinner while I can still keep my eyes open.”

  Dinner was a hamburger casserole, about as simple and brainless as cooking got. A good thing, too; she sleepwalked through it, and almost dozed off waiting for it to finish in the oven. Eating perked her up a little. Everything stayed down. That was great. People called it morning sickness, but Marian knew it could hit any old time at all.

  Afterwards, Fayvl said, “Here. I do dishes,” and he did. He didn’t make any fuss about it. He didn’t act as if he deserved a medal for his heroism, the way Bill would have. He just washed the dishes, the way he had at Thanksgiving and several times since. He’d got into the habit of leaving them in the drainer afterwards now, but so what? They’d dry by morning. Marian wasn’t going to criticize, especially since she did it herself, too.

  He fiddled with the radio, trying to get some station, any station, to come in. Static hissed all along the dial. “Sorry about that,” Marian said.

  Shrugging, Fayvl said, “Maybe we have some money one of these days, I get a shortwave set. Then we don’t think so much we is stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That was the camp,” Linda said out of the blue.

  Marian and Fayvl both laughed. “The camp was nowhere, all right,” Marian said, remembering all those nights on the front seat of the Studebaker.

  “They done what they could,” Fayvl said. “But what you can do after an A-bomb goes off in a big city, it ain’t much.”

  Marian nodded. And the A-bomb that had wrecked Seattle was only one of half a dozen or so that smashed most of the major towns on the West Coast, and Denver with them. No wonder relief efforts had been so spotty and so shaky. The wonder, Marian supposed, was that the government did as well as it had.

  The same held true for the later attacks on the other side of the country, the ones that laid waste to Boston and New York City and Washington. The United States was like a prizefighter who’d come out of the ring with one eye swollen shut, with a cut over the other one, and with his whole face swollen and bruised—but whose hand the referee raised in victory. When he talked to reporters, what would he say? Something like I look good next to the other guy!

  Perhaps thinking along the same lines, her new husband—the father of the baby she was going to have—said, “It ain’t like I thought it was gonna be, but it ain’t so bad, is it?”

  “It’s good, Papa Fayvl,” Linda said. “It’s good.”

  It wasn’t how Marian had thought it would be, either. She nodded again even so. “It is good, Fayvl. It really is,” she said. He came over and gave her a kiss. She squeezed him. Linda clapped her hands together once. Marian nodded yet again, this time against Fayvl’s right shoulder. No, not what she’d expected, but good just the same.

  —

  Aaron Finch kept sticking a finger inside his collar to try to loosen it a little. He’d never liked wearing neckties. Muttering under his breath, he wondered for the umpty-umpth time why Marvin had decided to throw a fancy New Year’s Eve bash. The only answer that occurred to him was, his brother didn’t know the difference between doing something and overdoing it.

  His wife saw him fiddling with the tight collar button. “You look very handsome, sweetie,” Ruth told him.

  “If you say so,” Aaron answered. “We could have stayed at home and gone to bed early, or had a couple of drinks if you felt like seeing in 1953….”

  “Oh, come on! We’ll have a good time.” Ruth was used to his grumbling, and to discounting it. And maybe they would have a good time, and maybe they’d go home in the wee small hours with Aaron wishing he’d given Marvin a right to the jaw. As far as he could see, it was about even money.

  From the Chevy’s back seat, Leon asked, “Are we almost there yet?”

  “Won’t be long, kiddo,” Aaron said, which was true—no part of Glendale was very far from any other part. “Now you’ve asked once, so genug already. Do it again and you get in trouble.”

  “Okay, Daddy.” Leon took the idea of getting into trouble seriously, which was more than Aaron remembered doing when he was a little boy. As for Marvin—well, if trouble wasn’t his middle name, it should have been.

  They pulled up in front of Marvin’s house on East Glenoaks five minutes later. Leon hadn’t asked again. Aaron gave him points for that. Ruth shivered when they got out of the car. “Brr!” she said. “It’s chilly.” Aaron didn’t think so, but he wore a wool suit jacket over a long-sleeved shirt. Her dress left her arms bare. And he was on the male half of the it’s-too-hot-no-it’s-too-cold divide. That was one more thing people could argue about, but not if they wanted a happy marriage.

  Leon ran ahead and knocked on the door. Not to put too fine a point on it, he banged on the door like Buddy Rich working out on the drums. Inside the house, Caesar started barking. That made Leon run back to Aaron.

  Marvin opened the door. “Oh, it’s you guys,” he said. “I thought that was the whole Eighty-second Airborne out there.”

  “Nah. They would have parachuted down your chimney,” Aaron said. His brother made a face at him. Remembering why he was here, Aaron added, “Happy New Year.”

  “Same to you, same to you.” Marvin leered at Ruth. “And especially same to you.”

  “Oh, cut that out,” Ruth said. Aaron didn’t get huffy about it. His brother talked a better game than he played. Aaron suspected it was the residue of his being on the fringes of Hollywood.

  “Well, come on in.” Marvin stood aside so they could.

  Aaron said hello to Sarah and Olivia, and to Sarah’s mother, who lived in the house with them. Roxane and Howard were there, and Herschel Weissman, and a couple of second- and third-string Hollywood people, and several men Aaron hadn’t met before, and women who were their wives and girlfriends. One of the men, an eager fellow in loud clothes that made him look like a racetrack tout, said, “So you’re Marvin’s brother? I sure hope you’ve got some jack in that franchising scheme of his. You’ll be on Easy Street this time next year if you do. Grabbing a franchise first chance I got, it’s the smartest thing I ever done.”

  “I
’m just fine, Mr. Lefkowitz, thanks,” Aaron said, and disengaged himself. It took some doing; Hy Lefkowitz was as adhesive as an abalone. But he managed. If getting in on a hot-dog chain was the smartest thing Lefkowitz had ever done, Aaron wouldn’t have wanted to let him pick horses.

  Howard Bauman greeted Aaron with, “You don’t have your little Hungarian Republican in tow tonight?” He did grin when he said it.

  Disarmed, Aaron grinned back. “Hey, he was there. He saw it with his own eyes. You don’t want to listen to him, I can’t make you.”

  “Republicans all over the place in Congress, too,” Bauman said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “They’ll make a mess of the country—you watch. And it seems like we’re dumb enough to elect one President, too.” As if he had some good news, he added, “Looks like Poland and Hungary will stay allied with Russia.”

  “Yeah, it does.” Aaron nodded, though he didn’t think that was such a great thing. He’d seen a newsreel of the Red Army reentering Budapest. The city was flatter than it had been when the Russians took it away from Hitler in 1945. Now he also knew what Matyas Rakosi looked like. Not a great advertisement for Communism, as far as he was concerned. Not a great advertisement for Judaism, either. You couldn’t win them all.

  Howard was right that the Poles and Hungarians—and the Czechoslovakians with them—would stay under the Soviet thumb. Aaron couldn’t disagree with him. But did he have to sound so cheerful about it? When Budapest fell, Istvan had stayed in the dumps for a couple of days. Aaron let it alone tonight. If he started quarreling so early, Ruth wouldn’t be happy with him.

  Olivia squatted next to Leon, teaching him whatever dance was popular with the hep cats these days. Leon wiggled enthusiastically, but with nothing even resembling rhythm. If he ever ended up with a girl who liked to cut a rug, he’d make her very unhappy.

  Well, that was a worry for another day, another year, another decade. Leon wouldn’t start alarming the female population till the 1960s rolled around. Aaron laughed to himself. When Leon was born, he and Ruth had worked out that their son would graduate from high school in the class of 1967. In 1949, it felt as if it were a million years away.