You had to know your enemy. The men on his ward didn’t, and didn’t want to. Maybe that meant nothing. Pete couldn’t say for sure; he was only a lousy two-striper himself. But what if American admirals and generals had the same attitude as the men they led? That wouldn’t be so good.
He did know for a fact that the Japs were interested in everything America did. People said they only imitated. Okay—fine. Say their equipment wasn’t quite as good as the stuff Uncle Sam handed his boys. If the men using the gear were better, didn’t that wipe out the difference?
Pete was a Marine. The Marines were based on the idea that you could kick the other guy’s ass if you were meaner and faster than he was. They’d done it against the Germans in the last big wingding, and in half a dozen banana republics since. It wasn’t always pretty, but it worked for them.
So why wouldn’t it work for the Japs, too? No reason at all, not that he could see. But he couldn’t explain it to the Army and Navy men who’d hurt themselves or come down sick. They believed in firepower the way Mormons believed in Joseph Smith. To them, the quality of the men holding on to the guns was just a detail.
“Okay, fine,” he said to Houlihan at last, throwing his good hand in the air. “Have it your way. I hope to God you’re right, to tell you the truth. But I’ve got news for you—if you’re wrong, we’re in deep shit.” Houlihan and the other guys laughed at him. He wished he thought it was funny, too.
NOBODY WAS BOMBING Münster any more. Sarah Goldman liked that fine. Rationing went on, of course. The war was still going. If you took the newspapers seriously, it was going hotter than ever. Of course, if you took the newspapers seriously, you needed to have your head examined.
Troop trains rattled through town, all of them going from west to east. The papers said some of them held French and English soldiers on the way to Russia to help the Wehrmacht against the Bolsheviks and the Jews who ran the Soviet Union.
“I wonder how many soldiers on those trains are Jews,” Samuel Goldman said at breakfast one morning. “I wonder what they think of the orders they have.”
“Maybe some of them will …” Sarah didn’t finish the sentence. They didn’t talk about Saul and what he was doing. None of them really believed the house was bugged, not any more, but none of them believed in taking chances, either.
“Yes, maybe they will,” Father agreed now, understanding what she was saying even if she hadn’t said it. “That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Very interesting indeed.”
“It would,” she said. The idea that Saul might run into anyone with whom he didn’t have to hide what he really was drew her on like a will-o’-the-wisp. How long could you live a lie? If your other choice was dying, as long as you had to. But living the lie here also involved the risk of dying, and not a small one. Papers printed black-bordered casualty lists every day.…
Father set a checked cloth cap on his head. “Away I go,” he said as he stood up from the table. “What I do won’t be very interesting, but it will remind the powers that be of my wonderful virtues and my strong back.”
He stumped toward the door. His limp was worse than it had been. Unlike Saul, he didn’t have a body made for hard physical labor every day. He should have stood in front of a classroom, chalking names and dates and Latin and Greek phrases on the blackboard. No matter what he should have done, this was what he did. It was what the Nazis made him do, and all they let him do now.
What would happen when the labor gangs ran out of work? Now that the bombs had stopped falling, wouldn’t the workers get ahead of the rubble? Sarah shook her head. She was being silly. The bosses could always keep their laborers busy, even if they had to invent work for them.
They had labor gangs full of Jewish women, too. The only reason Sarah and her mother hadn’t got dragooned into them was Samuel Goldman’s war wound. That was the kind of privilege it won: nothing to make anyone celebrate in sane times, but better than nothing when madness called the shots.
Or was it madness? The Führer had an amazing knack for getting exactly what he wanted. If England and France helped him finish off Stalin, he would bestride Europe as no man had since Napoleon. And then wouldn’t he turn on them the first chance he got? How did they think they’d stop him when he did?
The day dragged along. In the late afternoon, Sarah went shopping. The Big Switch hadn’t made things any better there. Soldiers from the Western democracies might cross the German frontier, but food didn’t seem to. Hadn’t England lifted the blockade? Maybe so, but food still meant war bread and cabbage and potatoes and turnips.
She got what she could at the grocer’s, and precious little it was. A sign in his front window claimed he had plums, but they were all gone by the time Sarah and the other Jewish shoppers were allowed to buy. She would have been angrier had she been more surprised. Some of the cabbages and beets he was selling looked better than usual. Maybe the Aryan women had got so excited about the plums, they hadn’t picked over the ordinary vegetables so carefully.
Her stringbag fuller than she’d expected it to be, she crossed the street to the bakery. BRUCK’S, it said over the door. On the window was taped a faded, swastika-bedecked sign: German people! Don’t buy from Jews! Sarah smiled mirthlessly. She wasn’t a “German person.” The “Jew” stamped on her identity card proved as much.
As she’d hoped, Isidor stood behind the counter instead of his father. His face lit up when he saw her. “Hello!” There were other people in the bakery; he couldn’t say everything he might have. By the way an older woman’s eyebrow quirked, he’d said plenty with one word.
“Hi,” Sarah answered.
“What do you need today?” Isidor did his best to sound businesslike and matter-of-fact, but his best wasn’t very good.
“Two kilogram loaves,” Sarah answered, also as plainly as she could.
“Coming up.” Isidor took them off the shelf with as much ceremony as if they were fit for a king. They were plain, solid, black war bread; a king would have to get mighty hungry before he cut slices from them.
The other shoppers paid for what they’d bought and parted with ration coupons. After they left, Isidor reached under the counter. He pulled out half a dozen lovely purple plums, displaying them in the palms of his hands. “Where did you find those?” Sarah exclaimed.
“Across the street,” Isidor answered. “Old Böhm at the grocery isn’t such a bad guy. He’ll trade this for that. If we’re careful, we can get away with it.” He gave her the fruit. “Anyway, these are for you.”
“For me?” she squeaked. “No, Isidor. That’s too much!” Half a dozen plums, and she was carrying on as if he’d given her a kilo of gold. It was silly—or would have been if she weren’t what she was where she was.
“Hush,” Isidor said firmly. “I can’t get you the kinds of things I want to. They’d shoot me if I tried. Besides, nobody in Germany can get that kind of stuff nowadays except guys like Göring. So I do what I can. Today, it’s plums. Next week, who knows? Maybe even lamb shanks or something.”
He sounded a hundred percent serious. He was most of the time. Sarah had more whimsy in her. She wagged a finger at him. “Don’t you know the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?” Even as she said it, she realized there were probably Jewish girls in Münster who would sell their body for half a dozen plums. The difference between bad and worse was far bigger than the difference between good and better.
“I know how you got to my heart,” he answered, and her cheeks heated. He’d got to hers the same way, there hidden by the tall grass at the park. He glanced up toward the flat over the bakery. “If my folks weren’t home right now …”
She nodded. Getting together when no one else was around wasn’t easy, which was putting it mildly. Maybe that should have relieved her. If she were what people called a good girl, she supposed it would have. She must not have been, because it didn’t. She wanted him to touch her again the way he had then. She’d touch him, too, even if that got messy. And
if he wanted to do even more …
You lost your reputation when you did things like that. It would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. As if a Jew in the Third Reich had any reputation worth losing!
“Maybe Father and Mother will go out one night before too long,” Sarah said. “Curfew’s not as tight as it has been. Neither is blackout. If they do—”
“Let me know!” he broke in.
“I will.” She had to hide a smile. She’d expected him to be eager. She hadn’t exactly expected him to be that eager. Everybody said men were like that when they thought they were going to get what they wanted. A lot of the time, what everybody said was a bunch of Dreck. Not here, evidently. Then she thought of something else, something different. “Can you give me some newspaper to cover up the plums? If people see them in my stringbag, they’ll wonder how I got them.”
“Sure.” He handed her the front page from the day’s paper. “Nice to think it’s doing something useful, anyhow.”
“I know. I’d say it was only good for wrapping fish, but when’s the last time you had fish to wrap?” Sarah said.
“Been a while,” Isidor said sadly.
“I know.” Sarah nodded. “We’ll, I’d better go. Thanks again.” She felt his eyes on her as she left. It didn’t bother her one bit.
ere you go, Rudel.” Colonel Steinbrenner signed Hans-Ulrich’s furlough papers with a flourish and handed them to him. “Do you know what you’ll do?”
“Well, sir, I wasn’t thinking of going anywhere very far,” Hans-Ulrich answered. “Five days … That’s not much time, and I don’t want to spend most of it sitting on a train. I thought maybe, oh, Bialystok. It’s a city, and it hasn’t got smashed to the devil like the White Russian towns.”
“Have a good time,” the squadron commander said. “You’ve got a girl back there, don’t you?”
And here Hans-Ulrich thought he’d been so casual! He coughed a couple of times. “Uh, not exactly, sir.”
Colonel Steinbrenner seemed to riffle through a mental card file. “Oh, that’s right,” he said when he came to the card he wanted. “You’re the one who was chasing that little Jew or half-Jew or whatever she is at the tavern. Go on, then. Have fun. I hope you catch her.”
“Thank you, sir.” Hans-Ulrich got out of there as fast as he could. He hoped he caught Sofia, too. Marrying a Jew, or even a half-Jew, would shoot down your career faster than flak from the Ivans. Laying one, though … If there were any regulations against that, he hadn’t heard about them. And he would have, because he kept his ear to the ground.
The nearest railhead was in a town northeast of Minsk. Hans-Ulrich took the squadron’s Kübelwagen to get there; one of the groundcrew men rode along so he could drive it back. As Hans-Ulrich hopped out, the noncom said, “Enjoy yourself, Lieutenant. Fuck that bitch till she begs for mercy.”
“Um,” Rudel said, and was spared the need for anything more because the groundcrew man put the Kübelwagen in gear and drove away. Did everyone in the whole wide world know he was interested in Sofia? Everybody in the squadron did, anyhow.
A Feldgendarmerie sergeant with a shiny gorget checked his papers and his ID before letting him board the train. “Go ahead, sir,” the fellow said when he was satisfied. “You’re you, all right.”
“I hope so,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I’m not likely to be anybody else, am I?”
“You’d be surprised,” the military policeman answered. “Matter of fact, you’d be fucking amazed. Some of the guys who try to go west on bad papers or no papers at all … Makes you wonder whose side they’re on, by God.”
With such encouragement ringing in his ears, Hans-Ulrich climbed onto the train. It was already crowded, but he wedged his way into a compartment. He promptly fell asleep. Several hours later, shouts of “Bialystok! All out for Bialystok!” roused him and sent him staggering down onto the platform at the train station.
Yawning, he tried to figure out where Sofia’s place of employment lay. East of the station—he thought. He started that way. If he couldn’t find it, he’d ask somebody. Most Jews and some Poles here understood German.
Quite a few men in Feldgrau prowled the streets—fewer in his Luftwaffe gray-blue. Bialystok wasn’t Paris or even Warsaw, but it wasn’t the front, either. It had enough bars and brothels and cinemas to keep the Germans amused while they unwound after weeks nose-to-nose with Ivan.
He found the place without too much trouble. Since the signs in Bialystok were in two languages he couldn’t read—one with an alphabet as meaningless to him as Hindustani—he took that for a good omen. The next interesting question was whether Sofia would be working when he walked into the tavern. Had he come all this way just to sit around and drink mineral water or coffee?
But there she was, small and dark and slim and maddening. “Oh. It’s you,” she said, as if he hadn’t been away blowing up Russian panzers for weeks. “Well, come on over here and sit down.”
She led him to a little table off in a corner. “What? I don’t deserve a better seat than this?” he said, more or less joking.
Sofia, plainly, wasn’t joking at all. She shook her head. “Why should you? You don’t spend enough cash to make it worthwhile to put you anywhere else. Coffee! Fizzy water!” She rolled her eyes at what they did to profit margins. The expression and the logic behind it certainly made him think of her as a Jew. They didn’t make her any less attractive, though, even if they should have.
Doing his best to sound reasonable, he answered, “I don’t get drunk and tear the place up and break things, either.”
“We can collect on that—sometimes, anyhow. I suppose you’ll want coffee now.” Without waiting to find out whether she supposed accurately or not, she bustled away. Hans-Ulrich admired her trim ankles. He’d never particularly cared about ankles before—things got more interesting as you moved north—but he made an exception here. Hers were turned on a superior lathe.
She came back with the coffee, set it down on the table, and stood there waiting. He gave her money. That made her turn to go again. Before she could disappear, he spoke quickly: “What time do you get off today?”
“Past your bedtime,” Sofia said. Glancing at the steaming cup she’d brought, she added, “Past your bedtime no matter how much coffee you drink.”
“But I came all the way back here to see you,” Hans-Ulrich said. “There’s sure nothing else in Bialystok that would have brought me back.”
“Why is this supposed to be my problem?” Sure as the devil, Sofia specialized in being impossible.
“Because—” Hans-Ulrich hesitated. Because I love you would make her laugh in his face. Because I want to go to bed with you was more honest, but too likely to get him slapped. Hoping the hesitation wasn’t too noticeable, he tried again: “Because you’re the most interesting girl I’ve met since I don’t know when.”
A black eyebrow leaped toward her hairline. “You talk prettier than most of them, but you mean the same thing.” Somebody with an empty beer stein banged it on the table and shouted for her. “I’ve got to go,” she said, and she did.
Hans-Ulrich sipped the coffee. It was better than what a field kitchen made but, he thought, not so good as it had been the last time he was here. The war was rough on everybody, at the front or not.
He watched Sofia. He bought more coffee, and more coffee, and more coffee still. If she kept working till after his bedtime now, she’d be doing a twenty-four-hour shift and then some. He got rid of the used coffee in a crowded, odorous pissoir made more cramped still by the infantry sergeant passed out next to the urinal.
A panzer crew and some foot soldiers started punching one another. Hans-Ulrich helped break up the brawl and throw them out. Then he went back to his table.
After a while, Sofia came over with a fresh cup of coffee. She had his rhythm down, all right. Pausing, she said, “Why should I want anything to do with you? You’re a German. That makes you trouble with a capital T.”
He shook his hea
d. “Nah. Germans in Poland are only trouble with a small t. That’s what your government decided. Russians are trouble with a capital T.”
“I don’t care what the government decided. The government is stupid,” Sofia answered, which could have sent her to a camp had she been overheard in Germany. “Germans are always trouble.”
“This isn’t about Germans and Poles or Germans and Jews or Germans and Portuguese, if you happen to be Portuguese,” Hans-Ulrich said. “It’s about you and me, that’s all.”
“Easier for the one who drops the bombs to talk like that than for the poor so-and-so they land on.”
How did she know he dropped bombs? He supposed she could find out. Or she might have been using a figure of speech. Before he could find any sort of comeback, a shouted call for a refill sent her scurrying away. He sipped his coffee. His eyes were wide, wide open. Not quite benzedrine, but not so far away.
The tavern stayed crowded no matter how late it got. Sofia accidentally on purpose spilled a mug of beer on a German who tried reaching up under her skirt. The guy’s friends laughed at him, so he couldn’t get mad. He was drunk and hopeful, not really determined. Lucky for him, too, because Hans-Ulrich would have murdered him if he’d tried to take it out on the barmaid.
And then Sofia came to his table without a cup of coffee in her hand. “All right, Herr Hotshot. I’m off work,” she said, her sharp chin lifted in defiance. “Now what?”
Hans-Ulrich sprang to his feet. He was so surprised and happy, he wondered why he didn’t bounce off the ceiling. He offered her his arm. The way she took it was more challenge than anything else. He didn’t care. All he cared about was that she took it. “Let’s both find out,” he said.
“NIGHT BOMBING.” Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko spoke the words as if they tasted bad. “This is what we are reduced to until we can reequip with Pe-2s or some other new bombers. We serve the Soviet Union, of course.” Plainly, he wished the squadron could serve the country some other way.
The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Page 31
