Off to Blue Front he went. At least he didn’t have to bother people for a lift any more. He never would have been able to do that if he hadn’t lived close to the warehouse. Still and all, he’d be buying the guys who’d gone out of their way for him lunch and cigarettes for weeks to show he was properly grateful. The scales had to balance. His father had knocked that into him with a heavy hand.
If only his old man had really been even half as smart as he thought he was. Back around the time of the First World War, Mendel Finch had run a moving and hauling business up in Oregon. In his wisdom, he’d decided that trucks were just a fad, while horses and wagons would stay around forever.
Not surprisingly, he’d gone broke about a year after the Armistice was signed. And, somehow, he’d avoided honest work ever since. Well, he was within two years of his ninetieth birthday now. But to this day he wouldn’t admit he’d made a mistake with his business. He had to be right, always right, right no matter what.
There in the car with nobody else to laugh at him, Aaron laughed at himself. “Wonder where I got that from?” he said. Yeah, Marvin had it worse, but neither of them was in the same league as their father.
Here was the intersection where that Russian came parachuting down from his bomber after it sent downtown Los Angeles up in smoke. Had Aaron cut his throat with a pocket knife or caved in his skull with a tire iron instead of capturing him, chances were he wouldn’t have that letter from Harry Truman on his wall now.
He laughed again, mirthlessly this time. Whether he had it or not, Roxane and Howard would still think he got his kicks oppressing the proletariat. Aaron was a good union man and a good Democrat, and that was plenty for him. To some people in his wife’s family—and to some in his own—that meant he might as well have worn a swastika button on his lapel.
When he pulled into the Blue Front parking lot, Jim Summers was just getting out of his Hudson. It was dirty. The paint was starting to peel. Jim didn’t give a damn. He paused outside the car to light a Camel and blew a stream of smoke up into the air.
Aaron parked two spaces away. He nodded to his partner. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“Not too bad,” Summers said. “How about you?”
“I’m hanging in there.” Aaron lit a Chesterfield of his own. Camels were too harsh for him—unless the choice was smoking Camels or not smoking at all. He couldn’t imagine doing without coffin nails.
“You listen to Joe McCarthy on the radio last night?” Summers asked.
“Afraid I missed him.” Aaron tried to keep that as diplomatic as he could. He thought the junior Senator from Wisconsin was a blowhard with delusions of grandeur, and he thought anybody who didn’t think so was out of his tree. But he also thought fighting with the people you had to work with wasn’t the smartest thing you could do.
Jim, by contrast, liked Senator McCarthy himself, and so couldn’t imagine that any right-thinking American wouldn’t. “You shoulda tuned him in,” he said. “He ripped into old Harry Falseman somethin’ fierce. If we’d smoked out all the damn Reds we got poisoning the country a lot sooner’n we did, we wouldn’t be in the mess where we’re at now. That’s what he said—I boiled it down a little, y’understand, but there it is.”
“Isn’t that interesting?” That and How about that? were the only two phrases Aaron had ever found that you could drop in almost anywhere without making anybody want to grab for a broken bottle.
Or he’d always thought so, anyway. Jim’s furry eyebrows zoomed up toward his hairline. “Interesting? It’s important, is what it is! He says he’d got hisself a list as long as my arm of all the Commies and traitors we need to get rid of so’s we can straighten up and fly right from now on.”
Aaron wondered whether the list was real or a figment of McCarthy’s imagination. If by some chance it was real, he wondered how many of Ruth’s relatives, and of his own, were on it. To him, that seemed more an honor than a point against them.
He kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. Glancing at his watch, he said, “We’d better go on in and punch the clock. I don’t want to get docked for being late.”
Jim Summers’ mouth twisted. “Yeah, Weissman’d do that, sure as hell. Crummy Hebe squeezes ever penny till he can make flour out of the wheat on the back.” He ground out the Camel under his heel as if wishing it were his boss’ head. Then he said, “Plenty o’ that kind on ol’ Senator McCarthy’s list, I betcha.”
“Jim—” Aaron wondered whether going on was worth the tsuris. They’d worked side by side since not long after the end of World War II, and Jim had no idea he was Jewish. No one would ever accuse Summers of being the brightest bulb in Times Square.
“What?” he said as they walked to the door. “C’mon. You started to say somethin’. Spill, goddammit.”
“Okay.” Aaron didn’t think it would be, but he spilled anyway: “What the devil do you think I am, a Chinaman?”
“You? You’re—” Summers broke off. Maybe he could spell CAT if you spotted him the C and the A. He grinned a rather sickly grin. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Aaron. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Hey, some o’ my best friends is Jews.”
Bad grammar aside, Aaron had never heard that said when it wasn’t a lie. Had Jim Summers been born a Bavarian, he would have been a brownshirt. Here, he was only a bigot—just the kind of guy Joe McCarthy was looking for.
They walked inside and punched their cards in the time clock. In spite of gabbing in the parking lot, they were on time. Jim stumped over to the big percolator in one corner and filled a waxed-cardboard cup with coffee. The java was still good now; it would be battery acid by the afternoon.
Still muttering and shaking his head, Jim went into the little cubicle he and Aaron shared while they were in the warehouse. The pinups and nudies decorating the walls were all his (which didn’t mean Aaron didn’t sometimes glance their way). He slammed the door behind him.
“What’s his problem?” Herschel Weissman asked Aaron.
“Believe it or not, he just found out I’m a Jew,” Aaron said.
His boss looked at him. Aaron knew what Weissman saw: the same very Jewish-looking mug that peered back from the bathroom mirror every morning. The older man raised an eyebrow. “Ripley wouldn’t believe that,” Weissman snorted, shaking his head.
“It’s true anyway. Now he has to figure out how much grief he’ll get from Goebbels and Himmler for working with me.” Not at all apropos of nothing, Aaron went on, “Did I ever tell you the guy we rent our house from has a number on his arm?”
“No. Well, at least he lived.” Weissman set a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “And you can’t expect a shlemiel not to be a shlemiel. It’d be a better world if you could, but you can’t, dammit.” Aaron nodded. He knew that, too, however much he wished he didn’t.
—
Whenever Vasili Yasevich went to sleep, he wondered if he’d wake up smelling smoke. Grigory Papanin and his hooligan friends didn’t seem to have the balls to challenge him openly. (That Vasili still carried Papanin’s pistol was bound to be another reason they didn’t want to mess with him when he could mess back.)
Asleep, though, he was vulnerable. He dossed in a long wooden building the people of Smidovich called a dormitory for single men not otherwise lodged. In Harbin, it would have been a flophouse. However you named it, it made even the shack he’d lived in after the Americans bombed Harbin seem a palace by comparison.
Compared to the Chinese, Russians were not a cleanly people. Vasili had seen that in nothing flat. Being more used to the Chinese way, he found Soviet grubbiness worse than someone accustomed to it would have. Living with other bachelors, some of them real refugees from Khabarovsk, didn’t help. Even young Chinese men with no women to keep them in line could be slobs. Young Russians…
Vasili wondered why the people who hired him to do their carpentry didn’t have him make a pigpen for the men who shared the dormitory. It smelled of unwashed Russians—who stank worse than Chin
ese—and stale food. The other bachelors left their junk wherever it happened to fall. The only two besides him who made up their cots were veterans of the Great Patriotic War. Nobody changed his bed linen. Vasili’s guess was, the dormitory had no spare sets.
People in the dormitory stole from one another whenever they saw the chance. They treated it as a game, something you did to amuse yourself or to make your life a little better. Vasili rapidly learned to keep everything that mattered to him in his pockets.
But if Papanin and his friends poured gasoline by the doors and windows and threw down three or four matches, what could he do? Cook was the first thing that occurred to him.
The second thing that occurred to him was Do unto others before they do unto you. If he roasted Grigory Papanin about medium-well, he wouldn’t have to worry about him any more. How hard would the militia work to find out who did it? They might put in some effort to pin a medal on the right guy, but that was about it.
All he wanted to do was go on about his business in Smidovich without having anybody pay much attention to him. Drawing notice was dangerous. If the government officials decided to investigate him, they’d find that nobody who really was from Khabarovsk had ever set eyes on him. Then…Then he’d find out why his father and mother thought swallowing poison was a better bet than letting the Chekists get hold of them.
In the meantime, he wandered through the village, looking for things other people would pay him to do. After he shored up a cabin’s sagging wall, the babushka who lived there said, “You did that faster than I thought you would, and it looks like a good job.”
“Thanks very much, Gospozha,” he answered, and bit his tongue a split second later. Ma’am was one of those un-Soviet words people weren’t supposed to use.
The old woman noticed, too. She wagged a blunt, work-roughened finger at him. “Where did you learn to talk, sonny?” she asked. “Not around here, that’s for sure. Around here it’s all mat and filth.” But she seemed more pleased than affronted. Unlike people Vasili’s age, when she was a girl Gospozha had been something you’d want to hear, not a slip that could land you in a gulag.
“I must have been raised by wolves,” Vasili said with a wry grin.
“Very polite wolves.” The babushka also grinned, showing off a mouthful of gold teeth. If she ever found herself in big trouble, she might bribe her way out of trouble by parting with them. She went on, “Heaven knows you’ve got better manners than that Papanin item. And you work harder than he ever did, not that that’s hard.”
“I’m just trying to get by, that’s all,” he replied. People here kept telling him how hard he worked. He’d never heard any such thing in Harbin. There, he’d felt like a man on a treadmill, running as hard as he could just to stay in one place. The Chinese had been desperately poor, but they’d all done everything they could to escape their poverty. If you didn’t do the same, you’d go under.
“You seem to be doing pretty well for yourself.” Her gray eyes, nested in a taiga of wrinkles, were disconcertingly shrewd. “And have you seen that Papanin lately?”
“Lately? No.” There, Vasili told the truth. The less he saw of the fellow who had been Smidovich’s handyman before he got here, the happier he was.
“You haven’t missed much—I’ll tell you that,” the babushka said. “He never was what you’d call pretty, but these days he looks like somebody threw him into a stone wall face-first. His snoot leans to one side and it’s flatter than a Chinaman’s, the Devil’s uncle grab me if I’m lying. And he walks like a truck ran over him.”
“Well, what do you know?” Vasili said. Did she think he’d brag about ruining Papanin? He wasn’t that dumb. He hoped he wasn’t, anyway.
“What do I know? I know what I’ve seen, or I wouldn’t’ve said anything about it.” She knew, all right, whether he bragged or not. What he’d done wasn’t a secret, however much he wished it would have been.
All the same, he gave back his most stolid, most Russian shrug. “I don’t care a kopek for Papanin. I’ll go my way, and he can go his.”
“His almost took him to the undertaker,” the old woman said. Vasili shrugged again. After a moment, so did she. She was twenty centimeters shorter than he was, but her shoulders might have been broader. “Khorosho. Those wolves who raised you must have known how to keep their mouths shut. Pretty smart wolves, hey? Don’t you go away, now.” She ducked back into the cabin for a moment.
When she came out, she was carrying two jars of pickled mushrooms. She handed them to Vasili. “Thanks very much,” he stammered, caught by surprise. “You already paid me, you know. You don’t have to do this.”
She waved his words aside. “Enjoy them. I picked them myself, and I put them in the jars. They’re good.” She stuck out her chin, daring him to make something of it.
He didn’t have the nerve. He knew he’d have to share them with the other guys at the dormitory, but that was all right. Without an icebox, they wouldn’t keep after he opened the jars. He tapped one with his thumbnail and said, “I’ll bring them back after they’re empty.”
“Thank you. Everything costs so much these days. I remember when…” She slowed to a stop and then laughed at herself. “That was years and years before you were born, so it wouldn’t matter to you.”
Vasili maintained a prudent silence. Prices in Smidovich were cheap compared to what he’d been used to in Harbin. China had too many people clamoring after not enough stuff. As soon as you crossed the Amur, all of that changed. There wasn’t much stuff here, either, but there was hardly anybody around to go after it.
“Oh, and the next time you tangle with Grigory Papanin, hit him harder, why don’t you?” the babushka said.
So much for making like I’m innocent, Vasili thought. “If I hit him any harder than I did before, I’ll kill him.”
“No loss.” She might be a Russian, but no Chinese could have sounded more callous.
AS SHE HAD TO DO, Luisa Hozzel picked up bits of Russian: a word here, a clause there, a verb phrase somewhere else. One or two of the guards who took the women out to chop down trees had scraps of German. That made Luisa wonder what they’d done—and to whom they’d done it—during the last war, but she didn’t ask. They might tell her. Or they might shoot her. Sometimes not knowing was better. They weren’t even supposed to use their Deutsch, but they did. It let them get across what they wanted from the women.
One phrase the guards with some German all had down was “More work, cunts!” They yelled it at any excuse or none. They yelled it in Russian, too, which built Luisa’s vocabulary.
She didn’t need long to realize the Russian she was learning was filthy. If she’d used that kind of German, people would have stared at her, or possibly locked her up. But everybody in the gulag, guards and zeks alike, talked this way. Obscenity here was small change, not a big bill. When people really got mad, they could curse for ten minutes without repeating themselves once.
And the guards had other ways to make their prisoners unhappy. A flat-faced Tatar-looking fellow with a wispy black mustache pointed at Luisa and asked, “How you likes being in Jew country, bitch?”
“What do you mean, please, sir?” Luisa asked cautiously. She wasn’t sure she’d understood. He hissed like a snake when he spoke. And what would he know about Jews?
But he did. “You German, ja? You Germans kill Jews last war, ja?” He waited for Luisa to respond.
“I never killed any Jews. I never hurt any, either,” she said, which was true. True or not, it made the guard scowl and heft his machine pistol. Quickly, Luisa added, “I know that Germany killed Jews, though.”
The guard nodded. “Germans kill Jews, ja. And now you in Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Region. How you like that?”
Her first thought was that, if Jews lived in this godforsaken stretch of Siberia, they were as much exiles as she was herself, whether or not they lived inside the barbed wire like her. Her second thought was that the guard—Uzbek? Tajik? Kalmuk? Mongol?�
�would clout her if she came out with her first thought. All she said was, “I’m here. I have to get through it if I can.”
“Maybe you not so dumb, even if you is German,” the guard said.
Luisa laughed bitterly. “If I’m so smart, what am I doing here?”
“Don’t gots to be stupids to end up here. I seen that plenty,” the Asiatic said. And he was bound to be right. Then he realized he’d been chinning with a zek. Guards weren’t supposed to act human around prisoners; Luisa had seen as much. His face hardened. “Get to workings back. Plenties of branches to chopping.”
Back to work, or even workings, Luisa got. The guards didn’t push the zeks too hard. If you stayed anywhere close to the pace they demanded, chances were you’d stay out of trouble. Luisa had seen the same pace from Poles and Russians brought to Germany in the last war. She hadn’t recognized it for what it was then. She’d just thought they were a pack of lazy foreigners. Untermenschen, if you wanted to get right down to it.
Now the shoe was on the other foot: her foot. She found out all the places it pinched. Here she was in a country where she didn’t want to be, thousands of kilometers from home, doing work she didn’t want to do because they’d rape her or kill her or rape her and then kill her if she didn’t.
No wonder those Poles and Russians had moved in slow motion! She moved in slow motion herself, as slow as she could get away with. She picked up a little when the guards growled at her. When they turned and growled at somebody else, she slowed down again.
Yes, now she recognized the rhythm this unwanted labor called forth from the people who had to do it. It was a rhythm as ancient as the Pyramids and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It was the rhythm of the slave.
From things the bitches said, most Russians, even the ones who weren’t in one gulag or another, worked at this pace whenever they could get by with it. Luisa hacked at a branch. She was better with a hatchet than she had been when she got here. She hacked again, then paused. Why not? The guard who might have ridden with Genghis Khan had gone off to shout at some other women. They worked harder…till he turned his back.
Fallout Page 19
