Moishe went into the kitchen. Water ran when he turned the faucet handle. “How is the plumbing?”
“Verkakte,” the landlord answered, which made Russie suspect he might have some honesty lurking in him. “But for Lodz, for now, it’s not bad. Two seventy-five is about as low as I can go, pal.”
“It’s not that bad,” Moishe said grudgingly. “If I let my little boy go hungry, I might make two twenty-five.”
“You give me two twenty-five and my little boy will starve. Shall we split the difference? Two fifty?”
“Two forty,” Moishe said.
“Two forty-five.”
“Done.”
“And you call me a ganef.” The landlord shook his head. “Gottenyu, you’re the toughest haggler I’ve run into in a while. If I told you how much more money I was getting out of the last people in here, you’d cry for me. So when are you and your family coming in?”
“We could start bringing, our things in today,” Moishe answered. “It’s not that we have a lot to move, believe me.”
“This I do believe,” the landlord said. “The Germans stole, the Poles stole, people stole from each other—and the ones who didn’t had to burn their furniture to cook food or keep from freezing to death last winter or the one before or the one before that. So fetch in whatever you’ve got, nu? But before one stick of it goes in there, you put your first month’s rent right here.” He held out his hand, palm up.
“You’ll have it,” Moishe promised, “Mister, uh—”
“Stefan Berkowicz. And you are who, so I can tell my wife the name of the man who cheated me?”
“Emmanuel Lajfuner,” Russie answered without hesitation, inventing an easily memorable name so he wouldn’t forget it before he got home. He and Berkowicz parted on good terms.
When he described the haggle to Rivka, he proudly repeated the landlord’s praise for his skill and tenacity. She shrugged and said, “If he’s like most landlords, he. says that to all the people who take a flat in his building, just to make them feel good. But you could have done worse; you have, often enough.”
Praise with that faint damn left Moishe feeling vaguely punctured. He let Rivka go downstairs and hire a pushcart in which to haul their belongings. Then it was just carrying things down to the cart till it was full, manhandling it over to the new building, and lugging them up to the flat (Berkowicz got his zlotys first). Except for the bedraggled sofa, there wasn’t anything one man couldn’t handle by himself.
Two small sets of dishes and pans, moved in different loads; some rickety chairs; a pile of clothes, not very clean, not very fine; a few toys; a handful of books Moishe had picked up now here, now there; a mattress, some blankets; and a wooden frame. Not much to make up a life, Moishe thought. But while he was alive, he could hope to gain more.
“It will do,” Rivka said when she first set foot in the new flat. Having expected worse sarcasm than that, Moishe grinned in foolish relief. Rivka stalked into the bedroom, prowled the tiny kitchen. She came back nodding in acceptance if not approval. “Yes, it will do.”
Without talking about it, they arranged such furniture as they owned in about the same places it had occupied in the flat they were leaving. Moishe looked around the new place. Yes, that helped give it the feeling of home.
“Almost done,” he said late that afternoon. He was sweaty and filthy and as tired as he’d ever been, but one of the good things (one of the few good things) about moving was that you could see you were making progress.
“What’s left?” Rivka asked. “I thought this was just about everything.”
“Just about. But there’s still one more stool, and a couple of old blankets that went up on the high shelf when spring finally got here, and that sack of canned goods we hid under them for whenever, God forbid, we might be really hungry again.” As Moishe knew only too well, he was imperfectly organized. But he had a catchall memory which helped make up for that: he might not put papers, say, in the pile where they were supposed to go, but he never forgot where he had put them. So now he knew exactly what had been moved and what still remained in the old flat.
“If it weren’t for the food, I’d tell you not to bother,” Rivka said. “But you’re right—we’ve been hungry too much. I never want to have to go through that again. Come back as fast as you can.”
“I will,” Moishe promised. Straightening his cap, he trudged down the stairs. His arms and shoulders twinged aching protest as he picked up the handles of the pushcart. Ignoring the aches as best he could, he made his slow way through the crowded streets and back to the old flat.
He was just pulling the sack of cans down from the shelf in the bedroom when someone rapped on the open front door. He muttered under his breath and put the sack back as quietly as he could, so the cans didn’t clank together—letting people know you had food squirreled away invited it to disappear. He wondered whether it would be one of his neighbors coming to say goodbye or the landlord with a prospective tenant for the flat.
He’d be polite to whoever it was and send him on his way. Then he’d be able to get on his own way. Fixing a polite smile on his face, he walked into the living room.
In the doorway stood two burly Order Service men, both still wearing the red-and-white armbands with black Magen Davids left over from the days of Nazi rule in the Lodz ghetto. They carried stout truncheons. Behind them were two Lizards armed with weapons a great deal worse.
“You Moishe Russie?” the uglier Order Service ruffian asked. Without waiting for an answer, he raised his club. “You better come with us.”
Flying over the Russian steppe, traveling across it by train, Ludmila Gorbunova had of course known how vast it was. But nothing had prepared her for walking over what seemed an improbably large chunk of it to get where she was going.
“I’ll have to draw new boots when we get back to the airstrip,” she told Nikifor Sholudenko.
His mobile features assumed what she had come to think of as an NKVD sneer. “So long as you are in a position to draw them, all will be well. Even, if you are in a position to draw them with none to be had, all will be well enough.”
She nodded; Sholudenko was undoubtedly right. Then one of her legs sank almost knee-deep into a patch of ooze she hadn’t noticed. It was almost like going into quicksand. She had to work her way out a little at a time. When, slimy and dripping, she was on the move again, she muttered, “Too bad nobody would be able to issue me a new pair of feet.”
Sholudenko pointed to water glinting from behind an apple orchard. “That looks like a pond. Do you want to clean off’?”
“All right,” Ludmila said. Since she’d flipped her U-2, the time when they returned to the airstrip, formerly so urgent, had taken on an atmosphere of nichevo. When she and Sholudenko weren’t sure of the day on which they’d arrive, an hour or two one way or the other ceased to mean anything.
They walked over to the orchard, which did lie in front of a pond. Ludmila yanked off her filthy boot. The water was bitterly cold, but the mud came off her foot and leg. She’d coated both feet with a thick layer of goose grease she’d begged from a babushka. If you were going to get wet, as anyone who traveled during the rasputitsa surely would, the grease helped keep rot from starting between your toes.
She washed the boot inside and out, using a scrap of cloth from inside her pack to dry it as well as she could. Then she splashed more water on her face: she knew how dirty she was, and had in full measure the Russian love of personal cleanliness. “I wish’ this were a proper steam, bath,” she said. “Without the heat first, I don’t want to take a cold plunge.”
“No, that would be asking for pneumonia,” Sholudenko agreed. “Can’t take the risk, not out in the field.”
He spoke like a soldier, not like someone who’d surely enjoyed a comfortable billet in a town until the Nazis invaded the SSSR, and maybe till the Lizards came. Ludmila had to admit he performed the same way: he marched and camped capably and without complaint. She’d viewed
the secret police as birds were supposed to view snakes—as hunters, almost fascinating in their deadliness and power, men whose attention it was far better never to attract. But as the days went by, Sholudenko seemed more and more just another man to her. She didn’t know how far she could trust that.
He knelt by the side of the pond and splashed his face, too. While he washed, Ludmila stood watch. What with Lizards and collaborators and bandits who robbed indiscriminately, not a kilometer of Ukrainian territory was liable to be safe.
As if to drive that point home, a column of half a dozen Lizard tanks rolled up the road the pilot and NKVD man had just left. “I’m glad they didn’t see us carrying firearms,” Ludmila said.
“Yes, that could have proved embarrassing,” Sholudenko said. “For some reason, they’ve developed the habit of firing machine-gun bursts first and asking questions later. A wasteful way to conduct interrogations, not that they asked my opinion of it.”
The casual way he talked about such things made the hair prickle up on Ludmila’s arms, as if she were a wild animal fluffing out its fur to make itself look bigger and fiercer. She wondered what sort of interrogations he’d conducted. Once or twice she’d almost asked him things like that, but at the last minute she always held back. Even though he was NKVD, he seemed decent enough. If she knew what he’d done instead of having to guess, she might not be able to stomach him any more.
He said, “I wouldn’t mind following those tanks to find out where they’re going . . . if I could keep up with them, and if I had a radio to get the information to someone who could use it.” He wiped his face with his sleeve and grinned wryly. “And I might as well wish for buried treasure while I’m about it, eh?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Ludmila said, which made Sholudenko laugh. She went on, “Those tanks may not be going anywhere. If they hit some really thick mud, they’ll bog down. I saw that happen more than once last fall.”
“Yes, I’ve seen the same thing,” he agreed. “Doesn’t do to count on it, though. They’ve swallowed up too much of the rodina without bogging down.”
Ludmila nodded. Strange, she thought, that an NKVD man should talk about the rodina. From the day the Germans invaded, the Soviet government had started trotting out all the ancient symbols of Holy Mother Russia. After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks had scorned such symbols as reminders of the decadent, nationalistic past—until they needed them to rally the Soviet people against the Nazis. Stalin had even made his peace with the Patriarch of Moscow, although the government remained resolutely atheist.
Sholudenko said, “I think we can get moving again. I don’t hear the tanks any more.”
“No, nor I,” Ludmila said after cocking her head and listening carefully. “But you have to be careful: their machines aren’t as noisy as ours, and could be lying in wait.”
“I assure you, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova, I have discovered this for myself,” Sholudenko said with sarcastic formality. Ludmila chewed on her lower lip. She had that coming—the NKVD man, having to serve on the ground, had earned the unlucky privilege of becoming intimately acquainted with Lizard hardware at ranges closer than she cared to think about. He went on, “It is, even so, a lesson which bears repeating: this I do not deny.”
Mollified by the half apology (which was, by that one half, more than she’d ever imagined getting from the NKVD), Ludmila slid the boot back onto her foot. She and Sholudenko left the grove together and headed back toward the road. One glance was plenty to keep them walking on the verge; the column of Lizard tanks had chewed the roadbed to slimy pulp worse than the patch into which Ludmila had stumbled before. This muck, though, went on for kilometers.
Tramping along by the road wasn’t easy, either. The ground was still squashy and slippery, and the year’s new weeds and bushes, growing frantically now that warm weather and long stretches of sunlight were here at last, reached out with branches and shoots to try to trip up the travelers.
So it seemed to Ludmila, at any rate, after she picked herself up for the fourth time in a couple of hours. She snarled out something so full of guttural hatred that Sholudenko clapped his hands and said, “I’ve never had a kulak call me worse than you just gave that burdock. It certainly had it coming, I must say.”
Ludmila’s face turned incandescent. By Sholudenko’s snicker, the blush was quite visible, too. What would her mother have said if she heard her cursing like—like . . . she couldn’t think of any comparison dreadful enough. Going on two years in the Red Air Force had so coarsened her that she wondered if she would be fit for anything decent when peace returned.
When she said that aloud, Sholudenko waved his arms to encompass the entire scene around them. Then he pointed at the deep ruts, already filling with water, the treads the Lizard tanks had carved in the road. “First worry if peace will ever return,” he said. “After that you can concern yourself with trifles.”
“You’re right,” she said. “From where we stand, this war is liable to go on forever.”
“History is always a struggle—such is the nature of the dialectic,” the NKVD man said: standard Marxist doctrine. All at once, though, he turned human again: “I wouldn’t mind if the struggle were a little less overt.”
Ludmila pointed ahead. “There’s a village. With luck, we’ll be able to lay up for a while. With a lot of luck, we’ll even find some food.”
As they drew closer, Ludmila saw the village looked deserted. Some of the cottages had been burned; others showed bare spots in their thatches, as if they were balding old men. A dog’s skeleton, beginning to fall apart into separate bones, lay in the middle of the street.
That was the last thing Ludmila noticed before a shot rang out and kicked up mud a couple of meters in front of her. Her reflexes were good—she was down on her belly and yanking her own pistol out of the holster before she had time for conscious thought.
Another shot—she still didn’t see the flash. Her head swiveled as if on a pivot Where was cover? Where was Sholudenko? He’d hit the dirt as fast as she had. She rolled through muck toward a wooden fence. It wasn’t much in the way of shelter, but it was a lot better than nothing.
“Who’s shooting at us? And why?” she called to Sholudenko.
“The devil’s uncle may know, but I don’t,” the NKVD man answered. He crouched behind a well, whose stones warded him better than the fence shielded Ludmila. He raised his voice: “Hold fire! We’re friends!”
“Liar!” The shout was punctuated by a burst of submachine-gun fire from another cottage. Bullets sparked off the stone facing of the well. Whoever was in there yelled, “You can’t fool us. You’re from Tolokonnikov’s faction, come to run us out.”
“I don’t have the slightest idea who Tolokonnikov is you maniac,” Sholudenko said. All he got for an answer was another shout of “Liar!” and a fresh hail of bullets from that submachine gun. Whomever the anti-Tolokonnikovites did favor, he gave them plenty of ammunition.
Ludmila spied the flame the weapon spat. She was seventy or eighty meters away, very long range for a pistol, but she squeezed off a couple of shots anyway, to take the heat off Sholudenko. Then, quick as she could, she rolled away. The relentless submachine gun chewed up the place where she’d been.
The NKVD man fired, too, and was rewarded by a scream and sudden silence from the submachine gun. Don’t get up, Ludmila willed at him, suspecting a trap. He didn’t. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes the gunner opened up again.
By then, Ludmila had found a boulder behind which to shelter. From that more secure position, she called, “Who is this Tolokonnikov, and what do you have against him?” If the people who didn’t like him acted this way, her guess was that he probably had something going for him.
She got no coherent answer out of the anti-Tolokonnikovites, only another magazine’s worth of bullets from the submachine gun and a yell of, “Shut up, you treacherous bitch!” Deadly as shell fragments, rock splinters knocked free by the gunfire flew just above her head.
She wondered how long the stalemate could go on. The answer she came up with was glum: indefinitely. There wasn’t enough cover for either side to have much hope of moving to outflank the other. She and Sholudenko couldn’t very well retreat, either. That left sitting tight, shooting every so often, and hoping you got lucky.
Then the equation suddenly grew another variable. Somebody showed himself for a moment: just long enough to chuck a grenade through the window from which the fellow with the submachine gun had been firing. A moment after it went off, he jumped in the window himself. Ludmila heard a rifle shot, then silence.
The grenade chucker came out by way of the window, too, and vanished from her sight. “Whose side is he on?” she called to Sholudenko.
“I keep telling you, ask the devil’s uncle,” he answered. “Maybe Tolokonnikov’s, maybe his own, maybe even ours, though I wouldn’t bet my life on that.”
The anti-Tolokonnikovite with the pistol, the one who’d fired first, took a fatal moment too long to realize his comrade had been disposed of. Ludmila wasn’t sure what was happening because she couldn’t see, but she heard another grenade, a rifle shot, a pistol shot, and then two rifle shots closer together; After that came silence all the more deafening because of the clamor that had gone before.
“Now what?” Ludmila asked.
“I think we wait some more,” Sholudenko answered. “After they got cute when I fired at them, I don’t fancy taking any more chances, thank you very much.”
The highly charged silence persisted. At last, from out of the village, came a cautious call: “Ludmila, bist du da?”
She shook her head. “Someone here knows you?” Sholudenko asked quietly. “Someone German here knows you?” That was not a good thing to admit to an NKVD man, but she did not see she had much choice.
“Georg, is that you?” she asked, also in German. If Sholudenko spoke it, well and good. If he didn’t, she’d already become an object of suspicion in his eyes, and so had little more to lose.
Turtledove: World War Page 108
