“I’m already fucking sorry,” Kuchkov said. Baby Trotsky’s smile didn’t get to his eyes. A good thing, too, because the Red Army sergeant went on, “But you pricks’ll be a lot sorrier if you don’t listen up.”
They growled. Some of them hefted their weapons: like their clothes, a crazy mix of Soviet and Fascist designs. They didn’t have the mindless discipline both Germany and the USSR thumped into their troops. If one of them felt like killing Ivan, he was liable to go ahead and do it.
Their leader gestured. That calmed them-a little. He nodded to Kuchkov: not a friendly nod, but one that did allow the Russian to exist a while longer, anyhow. “Go on. We’re listening.”
“I’m here to tell you you should all get lost,” Ivan said. “The Nazi cunts, they’re falling back in the Ukraine. You fuckers aren’t too dumb to see that for yourselves. And fuck all your mothers if you can’t work out what it means. Pretty soon, the Red Army won’t have to worry about those Fascist turds any more. Oh, no-they’ll worry about you shits instead. And they’ll land on you with both feet if you’re still around to be landed on.”
“We aren’t afraid of the Red Army,” Baby Trotsky said. His followers’ heads bobbed up and down.
“You scared of the NKVD pricks? You scared of the fucking camps?” Ivan demanded. “You assholes’re out here playing soldier in the woods. You scared of your wives and your sisters getting gangbanged back in the villages?”
“Fuck you in the mouth, Russian pig,” one of the nationalists said. That was a woman’s voice. Her German tunic was enough too big to mask her boobs. And she was as rough-skinned and dirty as any of her comrades, if less hairy. She was also as ugly as any of them.
Even Kuchkov could tell saying that wasn’t smart. “Get lost,” he repeated. “We need these fucking woods. The whole corps is moving up. We’re damn well gonna give it to the Hitlerites, and we’ll give it to any other cocksuckers who get in our way, too. But if you, like, go and disappear, I don’t know who the fuck you are. I don’t give a shit, either.”
“Then what?” their leader asked bitterly. “Chekists? Commissars? How many have they already murdered down here?”
You pricks had it coming. Ivan didn’t say that, either. “You fight my guys, you’ll fucking lose,” he did say. “You can’t whip us without the Nazi pricks, and they can’t whip us even with you assholes.”
That drew more growls from the Ukrainian nationalists. “We ought to kill you just for coming out with such shit,” Baby Trotsky told him.
“Chance I took when I came over here,” Ivan answered with a shrug. “But if you do, my thieves are coming after me, and they won’t put down their machine pistols when you tell ’em to. They’ll fuck you all in the mouth with them, fuck your mothers if they won’t. I left a smart kike in charge of them. He’ll take care of all that shit-you bet he will.”
The nationalists’ leader spat on the muddy ground. “Kikes! They’re Christ-killers and they’re Reds. Say what you want about Hitler, but he’s got the right idea on them.”
“I don’t wag my dick at any of that political bullshit,” Kuchkov said, more or less truthfully. “So listen up, fuckers. You can shoot me, and then you can fight my guys. Or you can clear out and give somebody else shit later. What’s it gonna be?”
Baby Trotsky couldn’t just issue orders like a proper officer. No, the Ukrainians had to put their heads together and hash things out. When they did, they used their own language. Ivan could follow maybe one word in four. Some of them wanted to do for him; he was pretty sure of that.
But their leader didn’t. At last, his view prevailed, even if some of the other bandits looked disgusted. Returning to Russian, Baby Trotsky said, “All right, you can have these goddamn woods. Give us two hours to withdraw.”
“That’s what you told her, too, I bet,” Ivan said. The ginger-bearded guy snorted. Kuchkov went on, “You got a fucking deal.”
“That’s just the kind of deal I think we have,” the nationalist said bleakly. He pointed in the direction from which Kuchkov had come. “Go on. Get lost. Two hours, remember. Move sooner and we’ll shoot at you.”
“You don’t need to stick your cock in my ear. I heard you.” Ivan headed back to his own men. The Ukrainians hadn’t swiped his PPD, as he’d at least half expected.
“Good to see you in one piece,” Sasha Davidov said. “Time was getting low. What’s the deal. Is there one?”
“Two hours for them to fuck off. Then the woods are ours,” Kuchkov said. To his amazement, the Red Army men raised a cheer for him. He couldn’t remember the last time anything-well, anything but pussy-made him feel so good.
Chapter 16
Wehrmacht quartermasters doled out winter clothing as if they’d had to pay for it themselves. Wearing chevrons on his left sleeve helped Willi Dernen acquire some for himself. The padded jacket he got reversed from white to blotchy camouflage. So did his quilted trousers. And his felt-and-leather overboots were almost as good as Russian valenki.
He whitewashed his helmet, too. “Could be worse,” he allowed. “Our first winter in Russia, we had to make do with ordinary uniforms and whatever we could steal from the Ivans.”
“I remember,” Adam Pfaff said. “Snow smocks made from bed sheets-that kind of crap.”
“Oh, yeah.” Willi rolled his eyes. “And the nails in the regular marching boots that sucked cold right up into your feet.”
“Jesus Christ! Don’t you jokers ever do anything but piss and moan?” Arno Baatz said. “We’ve got this good stuff now. Why do you want to keep bitching about the old days? We made it through, didn’t we?”
“Some of us did, anyway,” Willi said darkly. “Some of us froze to death.”
Awful Arno glared at him. “Quit pissing and moaning, I told you!”
“No, you didn’t, Herr Unteroffizier. You asked me if we ever did anything else. We do: we kill Ivans.”
Baatz opened his mouth. Then he shut it again without saying anything. He stomped off, his own winter gear slung over his left arm. “He’ll make you pay for that,” Adam Pfaff predicted.
“I’ve been paying since I put on the goddamn uniform,” Willi said. “Some units have good corporals and sergeants. Just by the law of averages and dumb luck, they’re bound to. But me, I’ve been dealing with Awful Arno Baatz since 1938. Where’s the justice in that?”
“Justice? Ha!” Pfaff sad. “Count your blessings he hasn’t screwed you over worse than he has.”
“If those are blessings, the anti-sin cannon”-Landser slang for chaplains-“shoot more shit than the quartermasters do,” Willi replied.
“That’s how it looks to me, sure as hell. Most of what the chaplains come out with is pure shit.” Pfaff looked back over his shoulder to make sure he hadn’t said that loud enough for Awful Arno to overhear. Baatz had all the usual small-town, small-soul pieties, and expected everyone else to come equipped with them, too.
Something off in the distance, almost too faint and too low to hear … Willi’s head swung that way, as a dog’s would have. “Those are panzers,” he said-not quite the worst thing he could think of (the worst thing he could think of would have been a volley of the Russians’ screaming rockets-Stalin’s Organ, soldiers called them), but close enough.
Adam Pfaff brought it closer yet: “Those are Russian panzers.”
Willi nodded glumly. For one thing, they were coming out of the east, where the Wehrmacht had no panzers. For another, the Ivans’ diesels sounded different from the gasoline engines his own country used. To Willi, they sounded more sinister, more evil, but he would have admitted he was prejudiced.
Awful Arno’s face was a study. He wanted to deny that there were panzers in the neighborhood. If he couldn’t do that, he wanted to deny that they belonged to the Red Army. If he couldn’t even do that … Well, no wonder his ugly, overfed mug was a study.
He yelled for the radioman. That worthy couldn’t come quickly, not with his set and the batteries that powered it in a h
eavy pack on his back. Awful Arno wasn’t just yelling by the time he did arrive. The underofficer was screaming: “Get us an 88! Schnell! Call the regiment! Call the division! Call your granny if you want to-I don’t care who you call! It doesn’t matter if you pull that 88 out of your asshole! Just get it here! On the double!”
Pfaff giggled helplessly. Willi found himself doing the same thing. He was much too likely to get killed in the next few minutes, but here he was, laughing like a fool. If you had to go, he supposed there were worse ways. He didn’t want to go, but he was unpleasantly aware he might not get a choice.
Well, there was always a choice. You could run away. But it wasn’t much of a choice, not here, not now. No guarantee the T-34s wouldn’t catch up with you anyway. No guarantee the guys on your own side wouldn’t shoot you in the back for bolting. And the certain sour knowledge that you’d be letting your buddies down. That carried more weight than either of the others.
The radioman gabbled into his microphone or telephone or whatever the hell you called it. He fiddled with the set-switching frequencies? Then he talked some more, louder and more urgently.
Willi didn’t hang around to find out how that particular story wound up. He ran for his foxhole. The Ivans had learned better than to send panzers forward without infantry support (so had the Wehrmacht). He couldn’t do much against thirty tonnes of steel with a scope-sighted Mauser. But he could make the luckless ground-pounders who slogged along with the Russian panzers good and miserable.
Horizons and landscapes in Russia seemed ridiculously wide. They did if you’d grown up in the more confined spaces of Western Europe, anyhow. There were the T-34s: tiny as mice at the moment, but getting bigger all the time as they clattered forward. And those little bugs scuttling along between them and behind them, those bugs were the Red Army foot soldiers from the slings and arrows and grenades and Molotov cocktails of outrageous Landsers.
They didn’t look like bugs through his scope’s crosshairs. They were men then, by God-men in the almost-Swiss-pattern helmets the Russians stamped out, men carrying rifles that might not be quite so good as his but that were plenty good enough for most murderous purposes. If he didn’t do for them, they would damn well do for him. Even if he did do for some of them, the rest-or those panzers-might finish him all the same.
He fired. One of the Ivans spun and toppled. He was proud of himself. Even with a sniper rifle, he couldn’t hit out past a kilometer every time. Nope, not even close, especially on a moving target. But there was one Red Army man who wouldn’t come any farther forward.
Not far away, a mortar team opened up with their 81mm stovepipe. The Germans had started the war with a smaller, shorter-ranged mortar. Seeing how useful this caliber was to the Red Army made Wehrmacht designers imitate it. Why don’t they do that with the goddamn T-34? Willi wondered.
The mortar team got lucky. One of their bombs came down right on top of an advancing Russian panzer. The big machine went up in a spectacular display of fireworks. The crew couldn’t have had any idea of what hit them. There were plenty of worse ways to go. Willi’d seen too many of them, and hoped not to meet any of them in person.
He also hoped the explosion would make the other panzer crews think the 88 was here. It could kill them from farther away than they could reach it. No such luck, though. The Ivans came on. Pretty soon, they stopped, but only so they could shell the Germans in front of them. They didn’t shoot especially well, not by German standards. Splinters whistled past Willi. They shot too well to suit him.
Hauled by a half-track, an 88 arrived in the nick of time, like the cavalry in an American Western. The comparison fit, not least because the Germans called their foes Indians. The Ivans fought like savages, that was for sure. Willi didn’t even know the gun was behind him till it blasted two T-34s in quick succession.
The surviving enemy panzers turned their fire on the 88. If they could smash it or kill its crew before it got done murdering them … In that case, this movie wouldn’t have the happy ending the director and the screenwriters should have come up with.
Willi popped up out of his hole like a jack-in-the-box, squeezing off shots at the oncoming Russian foot soldiers. As with his first round, some he was sure he hit. Some who went down might have been diving for cover after bullets cracked close to them. You might not want to miss, but you did when you were short on time to aim.
Up he popped again. He got an Ivan in his sights. And another Ivan got him. A Stahlhelm stopped splinters. A rifle round? Not a chance. He knew an instant’s surprise, nothing more. Yes, there were worse ways to go, not that he knew anything about that any more, either.
Sarah had gone to a lot of trouble remembering to sign her married name. She’d written Goldman only a couple of times after Isidor put the ring on her finger. Bruck flowed from her pen, at first with a mental discipline her father would have admired and then, as she got used to it, more naturally.
Officially, Bruck she remained. Without Isidor beside her, though, without his parents, without the bakery (and, thanks to the Nazis, without whatever the bakery had been worth), she didn’t feel like a Bruck any more. She was back with her own parents, having nowhere else to go. Didn’t that turn her into a Goldman again?
“If you want to think so, then it does-for you,” her father said when she asked him about it.
“You’ll always be our baby, no matter what you call yourself,” Mother added, which helped and didn’t help at the same time.
Samuel Goldman went on, “Even if you’re Sarah Goldman in your head, you’d better stay Sarah Bruck on paper. If you turn into somebody else, what will happen? Some Party functionary at the Rathaus who can’t count to eleven without taking off his shoes will wonder what’s going on. Is a dirty Jew trying to pull a fast one? You don’t need that kind of tsuris.”
He dropped the Yiddish word into his professorial German the way he might have used a Greek or Latin terminus technicus into a lecture when he was still allowed to teach at the university. He used it for the same reasons he would have trotted out the classical languages, too: because it said something with no precise German equivalent, and to show the world he knew such things.
“More tsuris I need like a hole in the head. I’ve got plenty already,” Sarah agreed. Father rarely used Yiddish. He looked down on it-it was the jargon Ostjuden spoke. Jews from Eastern Europe, with their beards and caftans and long dresses, had seemed as alien to him on German soil as they did to his Aryan neighbors. He’d hoped their odd look and habits were what fueled the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. He’d hoped … in vain. The Nazis hated Jews because they were Jews, and that was the long and short of it.
He sighed now, and made a small production out of rolling a cigarette from dog-end tobacco and a scrap of newspaper. It was a big, fat cigarette; his butt-scrounging must have gone well on his shift in the labor gang. The match he scraped alight filled the kitchen with a nasty reek. A moment later, the smoldering newspaper and tobacco filled it with another one. He smiled as he inhaled all the same.
“We’re still here,” he said. “That puts us ahead of a lot of people.”
“Samuel!” Reproach filled Hanna Goldman’s voice.
“What?” Father said. Then he got it. He grimaced. “I’m sorry, Sarah. Sorry for what happened, and sorry for reminding you of it like a shlemiel.” There was another bit of Yiddish with no exact German equivalent.
“It’s all right,” Sarah answered, which was at least approximately true. “Sometimes it hurts like you wouldn’t believe. Sometimes … Sometimes it hardly feels like I was married at all. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. It’s one of the reasons I feel like a Goldman again.”
“You weren’t married very long, poor thing,” Mother said gently.
“And wartime marriages can be crazy things,” Father added. “I saw that the last time around. Some of the girls the men I fought with married … Well, the ones who lived fixed things afterwards. Or, a couple of times, they mad
e it work when I didn’t think they had a prayer. You never can tell.” He blew smoke toward the ceiling and left things there.
How had he felt about her marrying a baker’s son? However he’d felt, he hadn’t said much. He must have realized he couldn’t do anything to change what she’d decided to do. When you couldn’t change something, keeping your mouth shut about it wasn’t the worst idea in the world.
She thought she and Isidor would have been able to work through the rough spots life threw at them. They’d done pretty well in the little while they were together. But life threw more rough spots at Jews in Germany than ordinary married couples faced all over the rest of the world.
Come to that, life threw more rough spots at everyone in Germany than people in most of the world had to worry about: the RAF, for instance. Sarah had hoped the RAF would blow every Nazi in the Reich to the moon. When it killed her husband and in-laws instead … What was she supposed to think about it then?
She’d asked herself the same question ever since British bombs fell on the bakery. Now she asked it out loud.
Her father and mother looked at each other. Neither said anything for a little while. At last, Mother said, “They weren’t trying to kill the Brucks. They were trying to kill the Germans who were trying to kill them.”
“I know that,” Sarah replied with a touch of impatience. “If I didn’t, I would hate them.”
“During the last war, sometimes our guns would tear up the French farms and the like when we were going after their soldiers,” Father said slowly. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault, not after the war got rolling. The farmers … just got in the way.”
“Like the Brucks?”
“Like the Brucks,” he agreed. “If you want to blame somebody, blame the people who started the war, not the ones who got stuck in the middle.”
He didn’t say who he thought had started the war. They still weren’t sure their house wasn’t wired for sound, even if the Gestapo had never given any sign it was listening. Sarah could draw her own conclusions. Yes, that Czech, that Jaroslaw Stribny, had assassinated Konrad Henlein. But it wasn’t as if Henlein, the Sudeten German leader, hadn’t been doing his best to tear Czechoslovakia to pieces.
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