Getting to the checkpoint was nothing but a relief. He could browbeat civilians, which was almost as much fun as browbeating soldiers. If he hadn’t been so angry with the Catholics in Münster, he would have given a pretty young Jewish woman a harder time. Her papers were in order, but he might have felt her up anyway, just for the fun of it. As things were, he let her go with no more than a growl. Only after she’d got half a block away did he wonder if he was going soft.
Sarah Bruck didn’t need long to decide she liked German soldiers better than blackshirts. Oh, the corporal who checked her papers had a mean face and piggy eyes, but you couldn’t blame a man—too much—for the way he looked. He examined her documents and handed them back with no worse than, “Well, all right, get the hell out of here.”
For once, the Nazis in Münster weren’t shrieking about the Jews. The Jews here weren’t up in arms against the government. There weren’t enough of them, and they knew too well what the SS would do to them if they did have the nerve to rise.
There were lots of Catholics in Münster, lots and lots. They had the sort of safety numbers gave. Not even the Nazis could snuff out a whole German city, no matter how much they might want to. Himmler had to find other ways to scare the locals into submission. No doubt he had spies planted among them. But Sarah would have bet the Catholics had spies in the SS and the SD, too. Not everybody put the Führer ahead of the Savior.
None of which should have had anything to do with her, since she couldn’t stand the Führer and didn’t believe Jesus was the Savior. But Jews could get caught in the crossfire like anybody else. Regardless of her likes or beliefs, she also had to worry about other people’s: an ancient lesson for Jews.
She came to another checkpoint a few blocks later. Again, she presented her papers. Again, they passed muster. But as she went on, one of the Wehrmacht men patted her on the behind.
She kept walking, her back stiff. Anything else would have been worse. This way, they just laughed. If she provoked them … She didn’t want to find out what would happen if she provoked them. All at once, though, she didn’t like ordinary soldiers so much.
Only a couple of pharmacies still let Jews buy, even during the restricted hours they could use for shopping. She’d never imagined getting a bottle of aspirins could turn into an adventure. Of course, she’d never imagined all kinds of things that had happened since the war started.
Marrying a baker’s son? Being widowed a few months later? Being widowed by bombs from England, which was Hitler’s enemy and should have been the German Jews’ friend? More mystery in any of those than in the familiar bottle with the white tablets with the familiar BAYER stamped on them crosswise.
Had the Nazis pressed the Bayer company to change the shape of their stamp to a swastika? Sarah supposed they wouldn’t have. They made noises about tolerating Christianity … as long as the people who professed it did what the regime told them to. German Christians, so called, seemed eager to blend their beliefs with Nazi ideology.
Catholics went along less readily. Some of them conformed where they could. Others, not so much. If they’d conformed more readily, Münster wouldn’t lie under martial law now.
A rifle cracked, once, twice, back in the direction from which she’d come. A moment later, a machine gun snarled an angry reply. Someone screamed, a voice faint in the distance. The shrieks went on and on. Sarah wanted to stick her forefingers in her ears to block them. A badly wounded human sounded too much like a big dog hit by a car.
Heading home, she went around the checkpoint where the soldiers had handled the merchandise. She realized she took the same kind of chance at every checkpoint she came to. Maybe the new troops she met would be even worse. But maybe they would leave her alone.
“Why are you out?” asked a sergeant she’d never seen before after he inspected her identity documents.
“I needed some aspirins.” She showed him the bottle.
He made a thoughtful noise halfway between a cluck and a grunt. “All right. Münster’s a headache for everybody, I guess. But go on home now, and stay there till you really need to come out.”
“Thanks,” she said in glad surprise.
“You’re welcome,” he answered. Then he spoiled it by adding, “Heil Hitler!”
Or did that spoil it? Sarah wondered as she hurried away. He’d just been decent to a Jew, or as decent as a German soldier was likely to get. Wouldn’t he need to give his men a signal that he remained loyal to the regime and that what he’d done didn’t mean anything?
The harder you looked at things, the more complicated they got. Her father had said as much. But he was talking about things like how closely the speeches in Thucydides matched what the speakers really said or why Brutus joined the plot against Julius Caesar. If it was true everywhere, what did that mean?
What is truth? Pilate asked. It was a good question in New Testament days, and it remained a good question now. Truth was something like whatever remained after you looked at a question from every angle you could.
Sometimes, of course, nothing was left after you did that. Hitler’s speeches sounded splendid, but he hardly ever said anything but I want it because I want it. A three-year-old would have got his bottom warmed for that. The Führer got thousands of people yelling Sieg heil!
Sarah wondered what would have happened if the war had gone the way Hitler wanted, if Paris had fallen in the early days of 1939. Would people here be up in arms against him now? She didn’t think so. England would have made peace then—what choice would she have had? And the German flag might be flying over the Kremlin right this minute.
As things were … As things were, she made it through the rest of the checkpoints without getting groped again. She supposed it was a triumph of sorts. When you were out of sorts, though, you wished for bigger triumphs than that.
“I hope it wasn’t too much trouble,” her mother said when she got home.
“It could have been worse,” Sarah said. If it could have been better, too, she didn’t spell that out.
She also didn’t need to. “Oh, dear,” Hanna Goldman said. “Maybe I should have gone myself. They wouldn’t have bothered me.”
“I’ll live.” Sarah suspected her father would tell her it was only soldiers being soldiers, which was to say, men being men. The really scary thing was, that might well be true. Men could get annoying enough any time if they thought you were attractive. Men with rifles at hand, she was discovering, could be worse. How were you supposed to say no if one of them insisted that you say yes?
But when Samuel Goldman came home, he was excited about other things than man’s inhumanity to woman. He pulled a tinfoil tube out of one of the inside pockets of his jacket. “Look at that! Will you look at that?” he exclaimed. “It’s half full—more than half full—of butter! Butter! Can you believe it? A soldier just threw it away, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. And if he could afford to throw butter out, he didn’t. When’s the last time we saw any?”
“Before the war,” Sarah said. “Has to be.” They’d cut Jews’ rations sooner and harder than those of Aryans.
“I thought so, too,” Father agreed. “With this”—he tapped the tube with his finger—“we could fry some eggs if we only had some eggs.”
“Maybe a soldier will throw them away,” Mother said. Father looked so wounded, she backtracked: “Well, I’m glad you got it any which way. It will taste good on bread, and we have got some bread.”
Samuel Goldman seemed happier. “I don’t think even the Party Bonzen get butter very often any more. And the soldiers throw out cigarettes they’ve hardly smoked, too. They’ve got it soft in the Army.” He paused. “People would have said the same thing about us in 1918. But soldiers helped make the Kaiser leave.” His eyes twinkled. “We can hope, anyhow.”
So this was what victory looked like. Vaclav Jezek had never seen it before, not in all the days since the Czechoslovakian Army conscripted him. He’d lost in his homeland, fought to a draw in Fra
nce but then had to leave when the politics shifted under his feet, and now he’d spent a good long stretch in the trenches here in Spain.
No more. The war, what was left of it, was out in the open now. Here and there, the Nationalists would try to make a stand, but regiments seemed to distrust the men on either side of them even more than they hated the Republic. As often as not, they would surrender, especially when they saw they were facing foreign troops and not their vengeful countrymen.
Vaclav was glad when it was easy. He was especially glad when he didn’t have to do a lot of marching. Carrying upwards of ten kilos of antitank rifle in the trenches was one thing. He could take it off his shoulder or his back a lot of the time. When he sneaked out into no-man’s-land, he was down on all fours or on his belly. Tramping along with it from sunup to sundown he could have done without.
Benjamin Halévy watched a section of Nationalists stack their arms after giving up. The Czechs searched them, more to get rid of holdout weapons than in hopes of loot. The Spaniards were a poor and raggedy lot. They had nothing worth stealing, not any more.
“Poor bastards. They don’t know what they’re getting into,” Halévy remarked. “The Republicans will send them to reeducation camps, and who knows how many will come out, or when?”
“They would’ve been just as nasty if they’d won, or even worse,” Vaclav said.
The scrawny, dirty, shaggy Nationalist prisoners nudged one another. “Russos,” one of them said, pointing to Jezek and Halévy.
Even with his rudimentary Spanish, Vaclav got that. “They think we’re Russians,” he said, laughing.
“Czech has to sound as foreign to them as Spanish does to you,” Halévy answered. He didn’t say to us. He was fluent in Czech, French, and German, and could manage Catalan, Spanish, and Yiddish—and maybe other tongues, too, for all Vaclav knew.
Off the prisoners went, hands clasped on top of their heads. When they got to the rear, Republican Spaniards would take charge of them. Then their fun would really start, as Halévy had said. But the Republicans weren’t—for the most part—killing prisoners out of hand these days. Both sides had done too much of that. They meant it when they said they hated each other.
Vaclav hated Fascists and Fascism. He rather liked Spaniards. They were so different from people he’d known before he got here, they fascinated him. They sometimes drove him crazy, too, but he suspected that worked both ways.
As the Czechs started marching again, he said, “Remember how some of our guys went back to France again after the alliance against Stalin fell apart?”
“I’m not likely to forget,” Halévy replied. “The French Army tried to recall me, too, you know.”
“I was thinking, now that this war’s pretty much won, I’d like to get up there and give the Nazis some more.”
“I wouldn’t mind so much, either,” the Jew said. “Chances are I could tell them I never got their stupid recall letter.”
“Would they believe that?” Vaclav asked.
“I doubt it. But they couldn’t prove I was lying. That would be enough to keep them off my back,” Halévy said. He touched the lieutenant’s badge painted on his helmet. “I’d have to get used to being a sergeant again. My own country won’t let me stay an officer—God forbid!”
“Wasn’t that Dreyfus guy a captain back when?” Vaclav inquired, perhaps less cautiously than he might have.
He didn’t faze Halévy—or if he did, Halévy didn’t let on. “He sure was, and look what that earned him. Devil’s Island, no less! And when it was all sorted out at last and he got his rank back and everything, what then? Why, he won the right to get shot at in the last war. Lucky fellow, Dreyfus!”
“Some luck! Did he make it through? I never knew how the story came out,” Vaclav said.
“As a matter of fact, he did,” Halévy replied. “He ended up a lieutenant colonel. If he hadn’t been a Jew, he might have commanded a brigade.” He shrugged a very French shrug.
They passed a boulder that faced the road. A graffito in Spanish defaced the ancient gray stone. “ ‘Death to traitors,’ ” Vaclav said. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen that threat. Every Nationalist faction thought all the others were traitors.
“Hell of a slogan, isn’t it?” Halévy remarked. “All it means is ‘Death to everybody who doesn’t agree with me.’ ”
“That’s what politics comes down to, isn’t it?” Vaclav said.
“No, no, no, no!” Benjamin Halévy said it in French, so it sounded even more negative than it would have in Czech. He went on, “Politics isn’t about killing the other fellow. It’s about getting him to go along with you so you can get rich off of him. You only kill him when you see he won’t go along with you.”
“Ah, thanks. Now I get it,” Vaclav said. They grinned at each other, for all the world as if they’d both been joking a moment before.
Planes buzzed high overhead. The Czechs looked up anxiously, ready to jump off the road and dive for cover if the fighters belonged to the enemy. But the planes were marked with the Republic’s red, gold, and purple, not the black X in a white circle the Nationalists used. They might have attacked by mistake—such things had happened before. This time, the fighters kept on flying north.
A woman in a long dress weeded a vegetable plot by a roadside farmhouse. She wasn’t a witch, but she was a long way from a beauty. If she had a pretty daughter, the younger woman stayed out of sight. Vaclav didn’t see any livestock, either. Maybe the animals were hidden, or maybe the Nationalists had already eaten them. Soldiers could be worse than locusts: locusts didn’t carry rifles.
A body hung from one of the higher branches of an olive tree half a kilometer farther on. He wore a yellowish khaki Nationalist uniform. Around his neck hung a placard. “What’s this one say?” Vaclav asked.
“ ‘I betrayed my friends,’ ” Halévy answered. His arched nostrils flared. The dead Spaniard had been hanging for a few days, by the way he smelled and looked. The carrion birds would go to work on him in earnest before long.
“Some friends,” Vaclav said. A moment later, he spoke again, this time in musing tones: “I wonder how many trees will sprout fruit like that when we clean up Czechoslovakia.”
“Quite a few. Lampposts will grow that kind of fruit, too,” Halévy said. “You may not want to do too much of that, though, or all the trees and lampposts will sprout again twenty years from now.”
“Huh,” Vaclav said. “Plenty of people back there deserve hanging. You do what the Nazis tell you, you suck up to the Germans who’re holding you down, what do you expect? A big kiss?”
“No, but people have to live with each other afterwards,” the Jew replied. “I don’t think the Republicans have figured that out yet. They want to pay back everybody who wasn’t on their side.”
Vaclav had seen Spanish notions of revenge. He said the worst thing about them he could: “These people are worse than Hungarians.” For people from his part of Europe, Magyars were the touchstone of touchiness.
He made Benjamin Halévy smile. “My mother comes out with things like that,” Halévy said.
“Well, good for her!” Vaclav exclaimed.
They tramped on. A few Spaniards fired on them from rocks up ahead. The Czechs spread out and moved forward in short rushes. The Spaniards fell back to keep from getting outflanked. The advance went on.
It was bloody cold. Snow and sleet fell together. Aristide Demange swore at the miserable weather in Belgium. It wasn’t so bad as it had been in Russia, but nothing was that bad, the last circle of Dante’s hell included. Before long, it would be Christmas, and then 1944.
A little farther east, the Germans were holed up in a village they’d held for years. They were comfortable there, and warm. Half the kids under four had probably come out of their mothers making the Nazi salute.
Crouching in a miserable, freezing hole in the ground wasn’t the same. Demange wanted either to take the village ahead away from the Fritzes or fall back to the
last one the French had liberated.
His superiors didn’t feel like listening to him. Regimental headquarters lay a couple of villages back. The colonel there was plenty comfortable. “Your zeal does you credit, Lieutenant, but the weather militates against a successful attack, I fear,” he said, spreading his clean, well-groomed hands in regret. “It is a pity, isn’t it?”
“The Germans didn’t think this kind of weather was too shitty in 1938,” Demange pointed out.
“And they failed,” the colonel said placidly.
They’d failed to take Paris. They’d sure taken everything from the Dutch border to the suburbs of the capital, though. Demange refrained from pointing that out; he could see it wouldn’t help. Instead, he said, “Well, how about letting us fall back a kilometer or two, then, to get into warmer quarters?”
“Give back even a millimeter of liberated Belgium? Give it up?” The colonel shook his head. “Pas possible! You will stay where you are and accommodate yourself to your circumstances.”
“Right, sir. I see you’ve accommodated yourself to your circumstances mighty well,” Demange said. He didn’t know this had been the mayor’s house before the colonel ensconced himself in it, but that was the way to bet. It was the biggest, most comfortable house in the village. He knew that, all right.
The colonel’s graying mustache quivered. “Why should I not demote you for insubordination?” he asked, no doubt thinking the mere idea would reduce Demange to a quivering slice of gelatin.
To the colonel’s unhappy amazement, Demange laughed in his face instead of quivering. “Because I’d thank you for it, that’s why,” he snarled. “I never wanted to be an officer in the first place. I got stuck with it, is what happened to me.”
He left without saluting. He also left without waiting for permission. If Monsieur le Colonel wanted reasons to demote him, now the stinking con had a whole raft of them.
Last Orders: The War That Came Early Page 26
