Right this minute, he didn’t care. It looked as if he might get out of here pretty much in one piece. Next to that, nothing else mattered.
IVAN KUCHKOV HAD NEVER gone to the Ukraine before. Now that he was here, he wouldn’t have minded getting the devil out. The locals talked funny. A lot of them were anti-Soviet, and hardly bothered to hide it. They seemed to be waiting for the Nazis to run the Red Army out of their neighborhood. As far as Kuchkov was concerned, they could all go …
For once, he and the politruk were on the same side. “Show traitors no mercy!” Lieutenant Vasiliev said furiously. “Think what they’ll do to you if they get half a chance. And don’t give it to them!”
The men listening to the political officer nodded. By their wide eyes, some seemed not to have had any such notions on their own. Were they really so wet behind the ears? Kuchkov feared they were. Milk-fed, too damn many of them. If you didn’t learn to watch out for yourself, you could bet somebody would jump on you. With both feet, too. In hobnailed boots.
And Vasiliev added, “One thing you don’t need to worry about. The victory of the glorious Soviet Union over the debased and degenerate jackals who nibble at her is certain. Certain, I tell you!”
Was it? As far as Kuchkov was concerned, the only certain thing was that, sooner or later, somebody would screw you. Or sooner and later, more likely. And, if victory was so bloody certain, why had his division been shipped south to try to slow down the Nazis here? And how come all the fighting these days was on Soviet soil? Shouldn’t things be moving the other way?
“Questions?” the politruk added.
One of the reasons he asked was to see what kind of questions he got, and from whom. Kuchkov kept his right arm down by his side. What kind of idiot were you if you gave them extra rope to hang you with? They could build a case against you out of nothing if they wanted to. It was a million times worse if they really had something. The Germans would kill you. But so would the people you were supposed to be fighting for.
That had to be why so many Ukrainians were ready to raise a hand in the Nazi salute. Ivan Kuchkov grunted to himself. Well, at least now it made sense. He knew he still had to plug the worthless bastards without hesitation if he thought they had anything to do with the Feldgrau boys.
There were Romanians in the neighborhood, too, but he didn’t worry about them. The Poles farther north hadn’t had as much fancy equipment as the Germans, but they meant it when they fought you, and that counted for more. Marshal Antonescu’s swarthy soldiers? Nah. The only reason they were here was that they’d get it in the neck if they tried to bail out. You did have to be careful not to mistake them for your own guys, because they wore khaki, too. But their uniforms had a different cut, and they used funny helmets, easy to recognize since they were so long fore and aft.
The Germans were the trouble, though, and the Ukrainians, and his own superiors. Fuck it, he thought. Nobody’s done for me yet.
He and half a platoon of soldiers cautiously entered a village the next day, not long after sunup. The peasants stared at them with expressionless faces. Ivan didn’t quite point his submachine gun at a guy with a cloth cap and a big, bushy white mustache. “How you doing, Grandpa?” he said. “Seen any Fritzes around here?”
Grandpa came back with a paragraph of Ukrainian. For all the good it did Kuchkov, it might as well have been Portuguese. He glanced at his own men to see if any of them made sense of it. Some Russian dialects were closer than his to the crap they spoke down here. A private said, “I think he says there haven’t been any around.”
That was what Ivan thought the old geezer’d said, too, but he hadn’t been even close to sure. He nodded—unpleasantly. “Search the houses, boys. We find any Nazi propaganda shit, we’ll clean out this whole whore of a place.” He rather looked forward to it.
One of the Ukrainian women screeched like a cat after a door got slammed on its tail. Grandpa put his head together with some of the other old farts. Only a couple of young men here. Maybe the rest were in the Red Army. Or maybe they’d run off to join the Hitlerite swine. You never could tell.
All at once, though, Grandpa spoke Russian an ordinary human being could understand: “Pavel here, he says maybe the Germans are that way, not too far.” He pointed west, then toward one of his drinking buddies. Pavel looked as if he didn’t need to be singled out.
Too bad, cocksucker, Kuchkov thought. “How do you know?” the sergeant growled. Pavel looked blank. That failed to impress Kuchkov. “How do you know, cuntface? You better sing out, ’cause you’ll be fucking sorry if you don’t.”
Pavel did: “In the fields yesterday afternoon, I saw dust from their tanks and trucks. Had to be theirs. None of yours in that direction.”
Yours should have been ours. Ivan could have nailed him for that. He would have, too, but he had bigger worries. “Just dust?” he snapped. “No soldiers?”
“Nyet,” Pavel said. “No soldiers.”
Ivan considered. If there had been Fritzes in eyeball range then, chances were his half-platoon would have had to clear them out of this pissy hole in the ground—or would have walked into an ambush, one. So chances were the local wasn’t bullshitting: not right this minute, anyhow.
“All right.” Kuchkov turned back to his men. “Georgi, you and Avram go half a kilometer out that way, see what the fuck you find. Go on. Get your sad asses moving. If you see Fritzes, Georgi, you come back and tell us. Otherwise both of you hang on there.”
Avram sent him a wounded look. Ivan pretended not to notice. Avram was a Hebe. You could count on him to fight the Germans. And he made a damn good point man, not least because he was so jumpy. If anybody could stay out there and not draw the enemy’s notice, he was the guy. Georgi was pretty good in the field, but not as good as the Jew. If the Nazis were coming up, Avram was the man to keep an eye on them.
Off they went, both glum. And well they might have been, because a Mauser barked almost as soon as they left the village. One of them—Ivan didn’t see which—fell. The other dove for cover. “We’ll fight ’em in here,” Kuchkov declared. “House to house if we have to. Misha, go back and tell the captain we need help doublemotherfucking quick. Scram!”
The Ukrainians started screeching again. They didn’t want their village smashed up. Well, how often in this lousy old world did you get what you wanted? He wanted to have a mortar team here, for instance. Wouldn’t that make the Fritzes howl!
He dashed into a tavern at the west end of the village. As soon as he did, he grabbed a bottle. This was a hell of a lot better than the Red Army’s daily hundred grams. He swigged and whistled. The vodka was better than the gasoline-tasting stuff the army issued, too.
He peered out through a knothole. Sure as hell, the Germans were coming up. Life sucked sometimes. He sucked, too, at the vodka bottle. Best thing in the world, except maybe a pretty girl’s tit. Smooth fire ran down his throat. He grabbed another bottle, just in case. In case of what? The Nazis had a Panzer II with them. Maybe he could turn the virgin bottle into a Molotov cocktail. Or maybe he’d go ahead and drink the son of a bitch.
The Panzer II sprayed the village with machine-gun bullets. Kuchkov had hoped the Fritz commanding it would be dumb enough to drive inside, but no such luck. One of his men fired at the tank from another house. The round clanged off steel, but so what? The enemy tank’s cannon fired several rounds into that house. No more rifle fire came from it. Maybe the soldier had learned his lesson. Maybe he wouldn’t need to learn any more lessons from now on.
But you couldn’t not shoot, not with the German foot soldiers advancing. They’d sure as hell shoot you. Kuchkov stuck the muzzle of his PPD-34 out through the knothole and gave them a burst. Then he threw himself flat on the rammed-earth floor.
Sure as shit, machine-gun bullets stitched through the woodwork half a meter above his head. Vodka bottles shattered noisily. “Fucking waste,” Ivan mourned.
Then he heard a noise like an accident in a machine shop—a bad
accident. He put an eye up to one of the brand new holes in the wall. The Panzer II was blazing as if it had just gone to hell. The Fritzes on foot had stopped and were staring in the same horrified dismay he’d felt a moment earlier. Machine-gun bullets stitched through them from right to left. They all went down, some dead or wounded, others just sensibly hitting the dirt.
Sometimes your officers actually knew what they were doing. Sometimes you got lucky instead. A pair of brand new T-34s stopped the German advance on the village. The Nazis couldn’t do anything against the latest Soviet tanks. A Panzer II was nothing but a snack for their 76mm guns. The Fritzes who could legged it back to the west at top speed. And Ivan Kuchkov drank from his liberated vodka bottles till the newly ventilated tavern spun dizzily around him.
THE NAZI OFFICIAL at the Münster Rathaus couldn’t have looked more disgusted if he’d found rotten, stinking fish on his supper plate and been compelled to eat it. Sarah Goldman didn’t care. If anything, she enjoyed seeing that look on his face. She wasn’t rash enough to show what she was thinking, of course.
Beside her stood Isidor Bruck. His features also stayed carefully blank. Behind him stood his parents, as Sarah’s mother and father stood behind her. Despite everything the Reich’s bureaucracy could do to make things difficult for them, Sarah and Isidor had finally finished all their paperwork. They’d won the state’s very grudging permission to marry.
“Moses Isidor Bruck and Sarah Sarah Goldman”—the pen-pusher with the swastika armband used the first names the Nazis had forced all Jews to adopt (Sarah’s renaming with her own name never failed to make her giggle, at least inside)—“you have conformed with the requirements the Reich and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party place on marriages for persons of the Hebrew religion. You have also paid all the necessary fees to complete the process.”
Sarah somehow felt her father stir behind her. She could tell what he was thinking. It wasn’t on account of the fees, which were fat. The professor in him wanted to correct the Nazi flunky for calling the religion “Hebrew.” For a heartbeat, she feared he would. He didn’t. Odds were no Jew in the Reich would have been so rash. But she knew he wanted to.
Scowling, the official went on, “This being so, the Reich recognizes and permits the marriage.” He glanced Sarah’s way. “You are now Sarah Sarah Bruck. Your identity card and records will be altered to reflect the new situation.”
She made herself nod. She made herself hold her face straight while she did it. Beside her, Isidor nodded, too. He even smiled a little. That was more than she had in her.
She waited for the man in the armband to congratulate them. She should have known better. He seemed surprised to discover the half-dozen Jews were still standing there in front of him. With a brusque, impatient nod, he said, “That is all. You may go.” It wasn’t quite Now drop dead, but it might as well have been.
They left in a hurry, before the fellow changed his mind. Isidor pulled something out of his pocket—a thin gold band. He put it on the index finger of her right hand, the place where Jewish women traditionally wore wedding rings. She took it off and put it on the fourth finger of her left hand. Both her mother and Isidor’s kept their rings there, too. They wanted to fit in with the German majority. That wasn’t so easy when you wore a yellow star that screamed Jew! at the world.
“I love you,” Isidor said.
“I love you.” Sarah wondered if she really did. This wasn’t a fairy tale where you got married and lived happily ever after. But it was a world where you had to grab whatever happiness you could. If you didn’t, you knew you’d never see it again. She added, “Let’s go home.”
From now on, home would be the flat over the Brucks’ bakery. Her folks had made the mistake of asking for permission to put that door through between her room and Saul’s abandoned one. New construction? For Jews? Impossible! The arrangement wouldn’t be ideal, but nothing in Münster was ideal for Jews.
There should have been a reception, with music and dancing. There should have been more food than a regiment could eat, and more liquor than a division could drink. There should have been all kinds of things. There was … a loaf of bread from the bakery, and a couple of stewed rabbits Samuel Goldman had unofficially and expensively obtained from one of the other men in his labor gang. The way things had gone for Jews in Germany the past couple of years, that would do for a feast.
And there was schnapps. Somehow there was always schnapps, no matter how bad things got. It wasn’t the best schnapps, perhaps—it wasn’t the best schnapps, certainly—but it was schnapps.
Sarah drank enough to let her know she’d been drinking. She evidently drank enough to let other people know she’d been drinking, too. Isidor’s father said, “You don’t want to get too shikker, you know.”
He laughed in a peculiar, almost goatish way. To Sarah’s surprise, and to her mortification, her own father’s laugh sounded identical. Her mother, and Isidor’s, sniffed at their husbands. But then they laughed, too. Sarah stuck her nose in the air. That only made the older people laugh harder. Isidor put his arm around her, as if defending his new bride. Their parents laughed some more.
It wasn’t as if the older Goldmans and Brucks weren’t drinking with her and Isidor. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her father’s cheeks turn pink. His hard work and bad diet usually left him sallow. Pink he was, though. And the meat he cut from the rabbits made him looked remarkably content. Sarah understood that. She had trouble remembering the last time her own belly had felt so happy.
“Well …” Puffing on a pipe charged with the same kind of nasty tobacco her own father smoked, David Bruck stretched the word out. He gathered his wife and Sarah’s father and mother by eye. “What do you say we go downstairs for a while, maybe take a little walk, hey?”
“Now why would we want to do that?” Samuel Goldman said, for all the world as if he couldn’t think of any reason. Everybody except Sarah laughed again. She was sure her cheeks weren’t just pink—they had to be on fire.
All the older people left. Isidor stared as the door closed behind them. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen my mother go out after we eat without washing dishes first,” he said.
She looked at him. “Do you want to think about your mother now?” she asked. Then she blushed again. Had that really come out of her mouth? As a matter of fact, it had.
And the way Isidor looked at her left her with no doubts his mother wasn’t the first thing on his mind. She thought she would blush one more time, but the warmth spreading through her started lower down. “Come on,” Isidor said.
When they got to the doorway to his room, he picked her up and carried her over the threshold. She squeaked. He silenced that by kissing her as he put her down. Then he shut the door behind them, even though they were alone in the flat. The door had a hook and eye to keep it from being opened from the outside. Isidor fastened that, too.
He looked on what he’d done and found it good. In very short order, he and Sarah were officially man and wife. “You’re squashing me,” she said.
“Sorry.” Isidor didn’t sound sorry. He couldn’t have sounded much happier if he’d tried. Sarah was pretty happy, too—maybe not quite so happy as she’d imagined she would be on her wedding day, but her imagination hadn’t taken into account the way things were for Jews in Germany these days.
After apologizing, Isidor rolled off her. That also made her happy. He didn’t roll far. He couldn’t, not without falling off the narrow bed. They would have to get a bigger one … somewhere, somehow, sometime.
His hand roamed her. She let it happen. Pretty soon, she started enjoying it and the other things he did. Before long, they were making things official again. Sweat beaded on Sarah’s skin. She was doing a warm thing, it was a warm summer’s day, and the room was above the ovens.
After a while, she said, “Again?” in surprise.
“Again,” Isidor answered proudly.
“What if they come back
?”
“What if they do? The door’s shut. They won’t come barging in. And even if they break down the door or something, you’re my wife, right? We don’t have to sneak any more.”
He sounded like a boy with a new toy. Too much like that? Sarah wasn’t sure. She liked the new toy, too. But … three times? Things wouldn’t go well if she said no on her wedding day. She turned toward him and kissed him instead. That seemed to be the right thing to do, at least for the moment. And three times it was, even if the third round wasn’t so easy as the first two had been.
If he tried for four, she was going to tell him no. Enough was enough, and she was getting sore. He didn’t. He fell asleep instead, quite suddenly and quite deeply.
Sarah was miffed—till she fell asleep herself, even though she hadn’t expected to. When she woke up, she and Isidor were entangled almost as intimately as they had been before. Noises outside the closed door said Isidor’s parents—and, she recognized a moment later, hers as well—were back.
What do I do next? she wondered. For now, nothing seemed a good answer. Her new husband—her new husband!—was still snoring. But her life had just changed forever. Much too soon, she’d find out how.
Chapter 17
Something was wrong. Peggy Druce knew that. She also knew she was afraid she knew what it was. The complicated, inside-out reasoning should have made her laugh. Instead, it left her more afraid than ever.
Most of the time, she would have taken the bull by the horns. She had a low tolerance for bull generally, as even the Nazis came to understand. Without that low tolerance, she knew she would still be stuck in Europe. But going nose to nose with somebody you couldn’t stand was one thing. Going nose to nose with the man you loved more than anyone else in the world was something else again. Boy, was it ever!
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