He slathered horseradish on the tender, fatty meat now, for the same reason he salted his beer. He hadn’t needed to do that when he was living with his mother. Well, that was a long time ago.
Leon ate tongue and carrots and potatoes with a two-year-old’s enthusiasm and lack of manners. He used a small, blunt-tined fork. Sometimes the food went into his mouth. Sometimes it ended up all over his face. After he finished, Aaron plucked him out of the high chair and carried him to the kitchen sink under one arm. Something not far from steam cleaning followed. Leon wiggled and spluttered and laughed, all at the same time.
“Coffee?” Ruth asked.
“Sure,” Howard said. Roxane also nodded. Aaron wondered how often they could afford it, or a feast like this. By the way Howard stuffed himself, he hadn’t eaten so well in a while. And whom did he have to blame for that but himself?
But Aaron couldn’t wag his finger at Howard too hard. He’d been light on hours at Blue Front himself lately. Anyone would have thought that atom bombs falling on a city were bad for business or something. Now he’d had a couple of pretty full weeks, so Ruth could splurge a little.
And he couldn’t wait for Roxane and Howard to go home so he could tease his wife. He’d said they would pitch a fit when they saw Truman’s letter. How often did a man get a legit chance to tell his nearest and dearest Told you so? And how often did a prophet turn out to be without honor in his own house?
—
Marian Staley kissed Linda good-bye. “See you in the afternoon, sweetie,” she said.
“ ’Bye,” Linda answered without looking back as she trudged into the tent that held her class.
Do I laugh or do I cry? Marian wondered. Even in a place as awful as Camp Nowhere, her daughter was growing up a pretty normal little girl. She knew she had to go to school, and she also knew she didn’t need her mommy while she was there. The teacher would take care of whatever went wrong between now and dismissal time. Having started late, they weren’t bothering with summer vacation. That made adults happy, if not children.
Bill would have been proud of his daughter. He might even have been proud of Marian for the job she was doing of raising Linda as a pretty normal little girl. But he wouldn’t be proud of anything ever again. Either he’d burned to nothing when his B-29 went down in flames in Siberia or the Russians had dragged what was left of him from the dead plane’s wreckage and buried him thousands of miles from where he should have been.
Every so often, usually when she was looking the other way, so to speak, loneliness would reach up and stab her in the back. It wasn’t happening so often as it did right after she got word Bill was dead. Whenever it did, though, it hurt as bad as ever.
Fayvl Tabakman said passing time made things easier to bear. If anybody knew what he was talking about along those lines, Fayvl was the one. He’d watched his wife and children go to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The Nazis had decided he was strong and healthy enough for them to work him to death instead of just killing him.
Somehow, they didn’t quite manage to do it before they started losing the war too fast to let them finish. So Tabakman came to America and opened his little cobbler’s shop in Everett. The Russian atom bomb didn’t quite manage to do him in, either.
And now he was in Camp Nowhere, too. He took all the camp nonsense in stride more readily than Marian could. Unlike her, of course, he’d been in worse places. They gave people enough to eat here. It might not be great food, but there was plenty of it. Doctors in the camp could and would do as much for their patients as doctors outside.
No, Auschwitz hadn’t been like that. There, if you didn’t starve, the camp doctors might use you for a guinea pig and experiment on you. From the news that came out of the war-crimes trials, they would use you up as casually as if you were a guinea pig, too.
Shuddering at the idea—why, it seemed nearly as inhumane as dropping atom bombs on sleeping cities!—Marian walked over to the enormous tent where the camp’s inmates got fed. She thought breakfast was especially bad, but she tried not to complain where Fayvl Tabakman could hear. He worked hard at being a gentleman, so he wouldn’t have told her what a jerk she was, but he wouldn’t have been able to keep a sardonic glint from his eye, either.
Scrambled powdered eggs this morning, with chunks of sausage as chewy and flavorful as bootsoles. Linda would be getting the same thing in her tent; they’d started bringing breakfast into the school instead of worrying about kids being tardy because they got stuck in long, slow lines. Marian could see why they shipped the sausage to Camp Nowhere by the boxcar. Plainly, it would keep forever. Add in scorched toast and instant coffee and you had a breakfast she wouldn’t have given fifteen cents for out in the real world.
Of course, here the bored kitchen hands didn’t ask for any money. Except to bet with, you hardly needed cash in the refugee camp. Marian couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent any—which was good, because she had so little.
Tabakman came in a few minutes after she did. She waved. He touched the brim of his tweed cap, filled his own tray, and came over to sit across the table (plywood over sawhorses) from her. The sausage was bound to have pork in it, if it held any real meat at all. As she’d seen, he didn’t let that bother him. If he’d kept kosher before Auschwitz, he hadn’t since.
“How are you?” he asked politely.
Marian shrugged. “I’m here. My husband’s dead. My house burned up. Otherwise, I’m not too bad.”
“I know what you mean,” he said, and she found herself nodding. If anyone did, he would. “Sooner or later, though, we get out. Life starts over. We get on with it again.”
Later, Marian suspected. She didn’t presume to argue with him, though. He’d used that kind of going from one day on to the next to live through Auschwitz. This wasn’t a death camp. It was only a boring, soul-deadening one.
He took a sip of the coffee. Bad as it was, he drank it with the air of a man used to worse. And no doubt he was. Then he said, “So I was thinking—” and broke off more abruptly than he was in the habit of doing.
When he didn’t go on without outside prompting, Marian gave him some: “Yes?”
“So I was thinking—” He bogged down again. This time, though, with the air of a man remembering he’d used grenades against his German tormentors before they caught him (which he had), he managed to go on on his own: “So I was thinking, maybe you and Linda could come with me to the moving pictures Friday night?”
Of all the things Marian had looked for, being asked out on what amounted to a date came low on the list. It wouldn’t be much of a date, not with a five-year-old along. She wasn’t sure she was ready for even that much. But Fayvl Tabakman looked more frightened than he would have if one of those camp doctors aimed an index finger at him like a rifle. If she told him no, would he ever have the nerve to speak to her again? Or would she lose the one friend here she was sure she had?
“We can do that,” she said, and then, “Linda likes you, you know.”
It wasn’t quite I like you, you know, but it seemed to come close enough. “Good,” Tabakman said. “That’s good. Her I also like. So we do that, then.” He gulped more coffee. That way, he didn’t need to keep talking. How nervous had he been, asking her?
She had to do the good-byes herself, the way she had with Linda. Then, when she was on her way back to the Studebaker she called home, the camp’s loudspeakers came to rusty-sounding life: “Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately! Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately!”
“Christ!” Fear filled Marian. The last time they’d summoned her to the administrative tent, it was to tell her the Russians had killed Bill. What horrible news were they going to hit her with now?
Like anyone in Camp Nowhere with an ounce of sense, she stayed away from the people who ran the place as much as she could. The less they noticed you, the better. But she had no trouble finding it. A big flag flew from a tall flagpole in
front of the tent. That flagpole was one of the first things that had gone up here.
Typewriters spat machine-gun bursts of noise. Adding machines clunked—a chugging generator powered them. The twentieth century was alive and well here. Marian gave her name to a clerk who finally looked up from whatever he was doing.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “You need to see Mr. Simmons, in accounting.”
“I do?” she said. “Why?”
Instead of answering, the clerk took her to Mr. Simmons, who looked more like an auto mechanic than an accountant. He had an envelope on his desk. “This is the government life insurance policy for your late husband, Mrs. Staley,” he said. “The check is in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars. Less than his brave service deserves, but the amount prescribed by law.”
They’d told her about this when they told her Bill was gone. They’d told her, and she’d forgotten. You could live for two or three years on $15,000. Or you could buy a house free and clear, with money left over. You didn’t have to sleep and live in your car for the rest of your days.
Life starts over. We get on with it again. Fayvl Tabakman’s words echoed in her head. He was right. Because he was, she didn’t think she’d see the movie with him after all.
—
The train wheezed to a stop. Luisa Hozzel wasn’t sure where she was—not which country, not which continent. She’d had no idea a train ride could take so long. She’d never been so hungry, so thirsty, so filthy, so exhausted, in all her life.
She’d had to get off only once after they shoved her aboard in Fulda: at a place with a name she couldn’t pronounce but that sounded like a sneeze with a head full of snot. Herded by guards with machine pistols and snarling dogs—or maybe they were wolves; she couldn’t have proved otherwise—she got into a truck. She couldn’t see much out the back. What she could see looked horrible. Maybe she was crossing land an A-bomb had flattened. She was too miserable too many other ways to care much.
She got into another train on the far side. This time, she rode in a jammed freight car, not a jammed passenger car. It made less difference than she’d imagined it would. She hadn’t been able to see out of the passenger car, either, not with bars and shutters over the window.
Somebody—a guard, no doubt—opened the bar that secured the door. Air and light came in. Luisa hadn’t had much of either lately. She blinked against the glare, but inhaled gratefully. The smell of a pine forest beat the devil out of her own stink, that of all the other women crammed in here with her, and the reek of the slops buckets, which had long since overflowed.
She could see pine trees, too, uncounted swarms of them, darker and gloomier than the ones she’d known in Germany. The only buildings she could see were made from the trunks of some of those same pines.
More guards with machine pistols stood on the siding. They screamed at the confused new arrivals in Russian. No one in the car spoke the language, or had admitted she did. Even when the guards gestured with their weapons, no one seemed eager to come out. Unlike the halt at the smashed city, this—camp?—in the middle of the vast forest was all too plainly the last stop.
Then someone realized that they’d come from beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union. A plump man in a better-quality uniform strode up to the freight car and bellowed, “Raus! Raus sofort!”
Out! Out right now! Luisa couldn’t very well misunderstand him. She also didn’t dare misunderstand him. She had little experience of Russian guards, but she could imagine what would happen if she were a Jew with SS men roaring at her like that and she didn’t do what they said. She’d never dreamt living under Hitler would give her practice for Stalin, but there you were.
And here she was. Wherever here was.
She and the other women in there stumbled out and stood swaying in front of the car. All of them did but one. When a guard went in to get her out, too, he found she was dead. He heaved out the body. It lay on the muddy ground, staring up sightlessly at the gray-blue sky.
The German-speaking officer made a note on a scratch pad. He didn’t care whether people got here alive or dead. He just wanted to make sure nothing confused his count from each car.
He stuck the pad into his breast pocket again. “You will come with me,” he said. “You will follow my orders. You will follow all orders. You will learn Russian as fast as you can, so you can follow orders in it. We have no time to waste on special talk for reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries.”
He and the other guards took them to the closest building, a large one. A sign was mounted above the door. Luisa had no idea what it said. Not only did she not know the language—even the alphabet in which it was written meant little to her.
“You will be made clean before you enter the camp,” the officer said loudly. “Your hair will be cut. Remove all your clothing and proceed into the disinfection chamber.”
“But—but—” One woman finally managed to get out what Luisa and the rest had to be thinking: “But all you men are still here.”
“Ja,” the officer agreed. He nodded to one of his flunkies. The lesser guard clouted the woman who’d objected with the butt of his submachine gun. That got the rest of the new camp inmates moving. Luisa tried to pretend all this was happening to someone else, that she wasn’t really here in what looked too much like Siberia, that she was back in Fulda going on about her everyday business.
She didn’t believe any of that. She knew too well where she was and what was happening to her. But pretending that way let it happen as if to someone else. She wasn’t pulling her filthy dress off over her head or taking off her even filthier underwear. No, it was some other person. No guards were peering at her naked body the way only Gustav should have. And if they weren’t peering at somebody else, then this was all a bad dream. Pretty soon she’d wake up.
The tub was enormous and stank of some strong, nasty disinfectant. Luisa didn’t care. Hot water was wonderful after so long without. She scrubbed and scrubbed, trying to get off as much dirt as she could. If she’d had a wire brush, she gladly would have used that.
Worse was to come. The guards drove the women out of the tub. They marched them along, still naked and dripping, to a room where barbers—male barbers with numbers on their shabby clothes, men who had to be prisoners themselves—waited with scissors and clippers. Luisa wasn’t one of the very first ones to meet them. She got to watch what happened before she had to go through it herself.
Those barbers sheared their victims convict-close. That, Luisa could almost have lived with. To the Russians, they were convicts. But the men didn’t stop at the head. They clipped underarms and crotches as tight to the skin as they did with scalps.
If they liked the way a woman looked, they did more than crop her. They felt her up, brazen as you please. When one German slapped a hand away, the barber slapped her in the face, hard enough to stagger her.
Luisa had time to see all that before she had to walk up to one of the men. Her dark-blond hair tumbled from her head and fell to the floor to lie with other locks of assorted colors. The barber gestured for her to raise her arms. She did. He clipped that hair, too. His barber tools weren’t all that moved between her legs.
“Stop that, you filthy little man!” she hissed in German—she was five or six centimeters taller than he was.
She didn’t expect him to understand her, but he did. “Bitch, you better find somebody to look after you,” he answered. “Might as well be me, huh? You’ll be sorry if you don’t got no connections.” He had a thick accent and must have learned the language from somebody uneducated.
She just shook her head. He laughed, gave her a stinging swat on the butt, and pointed down the hall. She told a convict clerk who also spoke German after a fashion her name. He assigned her a number: Г963. Then he sent her on to get new clothes at last.
Only they weren’t new. The padded trousers and quilted jacket had seen hard use. So had her shoes. The strips of cloth they gave her instead of socks had old bloodstains on them. S
omeone had to show her how to wrap them around her feet. Someone else painted over the old numbers that had been on her jacket and pants and applied Г963 with a stencil.
It was official. She wasn’t Luisa Hozzel any more, so maybe this truly hadn’t happened to her. She was this new thing with a number whose initial character she couldn’t read.
They took the new thing and her fellow prisoners to the women’s barracks, which was separated from the men’s by a barbed-wire fence. She wouldn’t have kept chickens in the place, much less people. The bunks went up five and six high. She got one. The mattress was thin and stuffed with sawdust. No one bothered giving her a blanket—it was August.
A tough-looking Russian woman who knew some German greeted the newcomers: “Get used to it, cunts! You’ll be here a fucking long time! Tomorrow we go out and chop down some trees. Have fun!” She laughed and laughed.
—
Harry Truman and George Marshall dolefully studied a map of Western Europe in the Secretary of Defense’s office. Holes in the map showed where red pins had been a day or two before. The pins themselves almost all sat farther west now.
“Good God in the foothills,” Truman said. “It can’t get any worse than this.”
“Sir, you can’t be sure what will happen next,” Marshall said. “I was still in uniform, of course, when Hitler invaded Russia. Three weeks into that fight, I was sure Stalin wouldn’t last another month. So was every other military man I talked to. Shows how smart we were, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but Stalin looks to be on the winning side this time, too, damn him,” Truman said.
“It’s taken him as long to get across West Germany as the Nazis needed to go from the border to the suburbs of Moscow, Mr. President,” Marshall replied. “He isn’t having an easy time of it—not even close.”
“Well, neither are we. In spite of everything”—by which Truman meant all the A-bombs the USA had dropped on Russia and her satellites—“the Red Army’s just about to the borders of Luxembourg and Holland. If it keeps heading west, that’s not a disaster. It’s a catastrophe.”
Fallout Page 10
