Aaron knocked on the front door. When it opened, a woman of about his own age looked back at him. She had a nose more “Jewish” than his and eyebrows that met above it. He found that off-putting, but somebody’d told him it was a beauty mark for Armenians. To each his own, he thought with profound unoriginality.
Her smile was nice. “Hello, Aaron,” she said, and then, “Hello, Leon.”
“Flarns!” Leon showed off the dandelions.
“Morning, Elizabeth,” Aaron said.
“You need eggs today?” Elizabeth Kasparian had a faint guttural accent. She’d come to the States after surviving the Turkish massacre of Armenians during World War I.
“And a chicken, if you’ve got one to sell,” Aaron answered.
“We do, yes.” She nodded. “Go around the back, and Krikor will let you pick one out for yourself. Do you want him to do the honors for you?” She meant killing and gutting the bird.
“Thanks, but I’ll take care of it myself and save a quarter. We kept poultry in Oregon when I was a kid, and I used to do it then. Chopped wood, too.” Aaron didn’t tell her that he’d also chopped off the last joint of his younger brother Marvin’s right little finger. He hadn’t meant to, which didn’t make Marvin—or their father—any happier.
“However you please,” Mrs. Kasparian said. “Some people don’t care to do the killing themselves. They would rather not think about that—only the eating.”
“They’ve never raised livestock, then,” Aaron said. Mrs. Kasparian nodded again. If you ran a farm or even kept a few chickens for eggs and meat, you couldn’t get sentimental about your critters. Of course, most city folks knew animals only as pets. Aaron steered Leon toward the gate by the side of the Kasparians’ house. “C’mon, kiddo-shmiddo.”
Leon bounded ahead. Aaron wouldn’t let him watch when the chicken met the hatchet. He was too little for that. But he sure did think live chickens, and especially ducks, were fascinating as all get-out.
Krikor Kasparian had a graying mane of wavy hair and a mustache bushier than Joe Stalin’s. He was shorter than Aaron, but wider through the shoulders. He puffed on a stogie foul enough to fall under the Geneva Convention rules against poison gas.
“Hallo, Aaron,” he said, his accent thicker than his wife’s. “Eggs this morning?”
“A dozen, yes, and a chicken. That one, I think.” Aaron pointed at a plump bird pecking corn and bugs from the dirt. Leon ran past the rooster toward the muddy little pond the ducks used. He stared at them, wide-eyed. He didn’t bother them or anything—he just stared. He really did seem to be paying his respects. He got muddy doing it, which wouldn’t thrill Ruth, but he was a little kid. Little kids drew mud the way magnets drew nails.
“Feed has got more expensive since the bomb fell,” Krikor said gravely. “And we have more demand, because the supermarkets that get birds from far away cannot do it so easily. So it will cost you half a dollar more than last time.”
I’ve got you over a barrel, was what he meant. He was one of the price gougers big shots in Sacramento and Washington went on about. But he was also a neighbor, and he could have tried to extract more than he had. Aaron paid him without haggling. Life was too short. As long as you had the money, life was too short. For the moment, he did.
“Hey, Leon!” he called. “Come on! We’re going home!”
Pretty soon, from what Ruth said, Leon would start saying no whether he meant it or not. He hadn’t done it yet, though. He started back toward Aaron, but stopped to go eye-to-eye with the rooster. Maybe he enjoyed doing that with something that was shorter than he was. The rooster’s golden eyes bored into his brown ones. Leon reached out—Aaron was convinced he was experimenting, not being mean—to touch the bird’s red comb.
“Careful, kid,” Aaron said. He knew, as Leon didn’t, that a rooster was boss of the henyard and had no use for intruders—especially not for intruders who weren’t much bigger than it was.
He spoke up just too late. The rooster hauled off and kicked Leon in the shin. Since Leon was wearing short pants, it hurt even more than it would have otherwise. He let out a squeal that literally ruffled the rooster’s feathers, then dashed back to his daddy. Aaron picked him up to inspect the damage.
“I am very sorry about that,” Mr. Kasparian said.
“Doesn’t seem to be much harm done,” Aaron said. Leon had a red mark on his leg and might get a bruise, but the rooster hadn’t broken the skin. “You have to watch out for things like that,” Aaron told him.
Leon had no idea what he was talking about. He’d keep finding out the hard way how the world worked for quite a while yet. But, as long as Aaron had hold of him, things couldn’t be too bad.
After a minute or two, Aaron set him down. He paid Krikor Kasparian, took the eggs and the chicken, got hold of Leon’s hand, and went home. He’d have a new story to tell Ruth.
—
They said you never saw the one that got you. As far as Sergeant Konstantin Morozov was concerned, they said all kinds of silly crap. This once, though, they happened to be right.
Morozov was frantically traversing the T-54’s turret so the tank’s big gun would bear on an English Centurion—he thought it was a Centurion, anyhow, since it looked more angular than the American Pershings. Next thing he knew, something slammed into the T-54 hard enough to smash his face into the periscope eyepiece. Blood ran down his cheek.
“Fuck your mother!” Pavel Gryzlov bawled. “We’re hit!”
“Fuck your own mother,” Morozov said irritably. “I never would have known without you.”
From the front of the tank, Mikhail Kasyanov reported the situation in two words: “Engine’s dead.”
“Oh, fuck your mother, too,” Morozov told the driver. If that round, wherever the hell it came from, had hit the turret or bored through the hull into the fighting compartment, they wouldn’t still be here banging their gums about it. With luck, they would have died before they knew they were dead. Without luck…Morozov didn’t want to think about that, so he didn’t.
“What do we do, Comrade Sergeant?” Mogamed Safarli asked.
Morozov marveled that even a blackass could be so goddamn dumb. “We get the hell out, that’s what,” he answered. In his mind’s eye, he pictured an American or English tank commander ordering his gunner to put another round into the Red Army tank with the black smoke pouring out of the engine compartment—he couldn’t see that smoke, but he knew it had to be there.
Out they went. The driver had a floor hatch behind his seat. The others escaped through the one in the floor of the fighting compartment. They crawled forward as fast as they could—burning diesel fuel was dripping down from the stricken engine.
“I feel naked,” Gryzlov said.
“Tell me!” Morozov exclaimed. Under the tank wasn’t so bad. But they had to get out, get away. That meant exposing themselves to bullets and shell fragments and all the other things the T-54’s thick, beautifully sloped armor had held at bay…till it hadn’t.
Sure as hell, as soon as Morozov came out from between the tracks, a bullet cracked past him. More rounds stirred the grass in front of the tank. Staying as low as he could, he slithered along to put the T-54’s bulk between him and those unfriendly strangers out there. How the devil did any infantryman live longer than a minute and a half?
Misha Kasyanov yipped in pain. He clutched at the calf of his left leg. Red began to soak through the khaki of his coveralls. “Keep going if you can,” Morozov called to him. “We’ll get you bandaged up as soon as we find cover.”
“I’ll try,” was all Kasyanov said. That was as much as anyone could do. Morozov knew how lucky he was not to have stopped something himself.
Another armor-piercing round did hit the T-54 then. It brewed up. Flame and smoke shot from all the turret hatches. The turret itself didn’t blow off, which was also a matter of luck. One perfect smoke ring did come into the sky from the cupola, as if the Devil had paused in the middle of smoking a cigar.
<
br /> “Heh!” Pavel Gryzlov said. “They wasted ammo there. That pussy wasn’t going anywhere anyhow.”
“I don’t know,” Morozov responded. “If we recovered it, we might have been able to slap in a new engine.”
“I don’t believe it for a minute,” the gunner said. Then, remembering to whom he was talking, he quickly added, “Uh, Comrade Sergeant.”
“Right.” Konstantin Morozov’s voice was desert-dry. He pointed to the east. “I think those are our men in the holes there.” He hoped like anything those were Red Army men there. Neither he nor anybody from his crew carried anything more lethal than a Tokarev automatic. That was fine if you were shooting somebody trying to clamber aboard your tank. If you had to hit anything out past twenty meters, you might do better throwing rocks.
The tankers made for the holes. They all yelled “Tovarishchi!”—Comrades!—at the top of their lungs. Bullets kept cracking past and clipping the young, so-green grass—with April here, everything was sprouting like mad—but none hit any of them. And whoever was in the holes didn’t slaughter them, which would have taken next to no effort.
Morozov tumbled into a foxhole beside the burnt-out ruins of a shack. A Red Army corporal with one of the new Kalashnikovs grinned at him. “Look what the cat drug in,” he said. “I didn’t know they let you people out of your cages.”
“When the cage starts burning, you go,” Morozov assured him. “Listen, help me bring my driver in, will you? He’s got a wounded leg.”
“I’ll do that,” the infantry noncom said at once. Wounded men were serious business.
He was less leery about leaving his foxhole than Morozov had been of bailing out of the dead T-54. To him, going around in the open was all part of a day’s work. Morozov couldn’t very well hang back himself. They bundled Mikhail Kasyanov into their arms and got him into the hole.
“Let’s see what we have here,” the corporal said, as he used his bayonet to cut Kasyanov’s coveralls so he could examine the injury. “Doesn’t seem too bad.” He began to bandage it with skill that told of experience.
“Aii!” Kasyanov said, and then, “Up yours, you whore! It isn’t your motherfucking leg!”
“That’s a fact,” the corporal agreed placidly. He examined his handiwork. “Not bleeding too much now. You’ll be on the shelf a while, for sure. If the war’s still going when you get better, though, I bet they let you serve again.”
“Happy fucking day,” Kasyanov said. “You have a morphine shot? It hurts like they shot the head of my dick off.”
“Ouch!” The corporal cupped his hands in front of his crotch. Morozov wanted to do the same thing. The foot soldier took a syringe from a pouch on his belt and stuck the tank crewman. He said, “This ought to do the trick. I took it off a dead American. Those whores carry all kinds of goodies. They must all be millionaires over there.”
Someone who wanted to land him in trouble could do it if he kept talking like that. The Soviet Union declared over and over, at the top of its ideological lungs, that the American proletariat, like the proletariat in other capitalist countries, was oppressed by the bourgeoisie and especially by the magnates, the plutocrats. What would an American soldier be but a member of the proletariat, dragooned into service by his vicious overlords?
And yet…During the last war, Morozov had seen for himself that even Poland was richer than the workers’ and peasants’ paradise, and that people lived better there. He’d seen that Germany was much richer than the USSR, though he hadn’t seen any parts of Germany that weren’t knocked flat before he got to them.
During this war, he’d seen that the Western-occupied parts of Germany were richer and were rebuilding faster than the section the USSR controlled. The corporal must have seen some of those things, too. Unlike Morozov, he didn’t know enough to keep his big mouth shut.
So the tank commander without a tank just asked, “Where’s the closest aid station?”
“Back that way, not quite a kilometer,” the corporal said, jerking his thumb to the east. “You want your other two guys to take him? Once they get away from the front, he can probably drape his arms over their shoulders and go on his good leg.”
“How’s that sound, Misha?” Morozov asked.
“Fine by me.” Kasyanov spoke as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Morphine was good stuff, as Morozov had also seen before. The wounded driver let his comrades take him to the sawbones. Morozov went back with them, wondering what the Red Army would do with him next.
BACK IN THE black days of October 1941, the Soviet Union had chosen Kuibishev, on the Volga just west of the Urals, as the capital in case the Nazis took Moscow. There’d been a panic and a skedaddle out of Moscow that October, when it looked as if the Hitlerites would do exactly that. These days, people talked about the skedaddle in whispers when they talked about it at all.
Boris Gribkov understood why they whispered, and why they didn’t like to speak at all. That was called a working sense of self-preservation. Underlying the reticence was the question of whether anyone would have paid attention to Stalin had he tried to give orders from a provincial town dusty in the summer and frozen in the winter. The Soviet Union was lucky: it hadn’t had to find out.
But Kuibishev was now what it had been intended to be then: the alternative capital of the USSR. Jackbooted SS men didn’t goose-step through Moscow’s streets. Atomic fire, though, had burnt too many of those streets out of existence. Too many commissars and generals were burnt out of existence, too.
So the authorities hadn’t brought Boris and his bomber crew to Moscow to congratulate them on dealing a similar blow to Seattle. No, they’d pinned Hero of the Soviet Union medals on them here in Kuibishev. They’d photographed them for Pravda and Izvestia and Red Star. And, after that, they hadn’t seemed sure what to do with them next.
“You know what really bothers me?” Leonid Tsederbaum said quietly as he and Gribkov walked from their barracks to the mess hall at the Red Air Force base where they were being kept. Confined, Gribkov judged—and hoped—was too strong a word.
“No. What really bothers you, Leonid Abramovich?” the pilot asked. It wasn’t as if he didn’t also have a list of things that really bothered him. Tsederbaum was a clever Zhid. He might be bothered by some things that hadn’t even occurred to Gribkov.
“What really bothers me,” he said, pausing to light a papiros and blow a stream of smoke up toward the watery sky, “is that, as far as I can tell, we’re the only Tu-4 crew that bombed America they’re making propaganda about.”
“Oh.” Gribkov felt vaguely disappointed. “That crossed my mind, too.” He nodded to himself, admiring the understatement. “Even so, though, considering what we all did, you have to say the rodina got a good return on its investment.”
“How capitalist!” Tsederbaum exclaimed. Boris eyed him. In the USSR, a man could disappear without ditching in the Pacific or having the Americans shoot him down. A Hero of the Soviet Union could become a nobody in nothing flat. But the navigator didn’t look like someone getting ready to report him to the MGB. He just looked like somebody cracking wise. Of course, what somebody looked like didn’t mean a thing.
“Have you heard anything about our next assignment?” Gribkov asked. Being a clever Zhid, Tsederbaum was liable to have connections in all kinds of interesting places.
Just because he was liable to didn’t mean he did. He shook his head. “Not a word. Since you’re the pilot, I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Sorry,” Gribkov said. “I serve the Soviet Union, but they haven’t told me how they want me to serve it next.”
He wondered how much Soviet Union would be left to serve by the time the war ended. The Red Army was still advancing in Germany, at least if you believed Radio Moscow. Here, Gribkov did. He knew the signs a newsreader used when he was hedging—or, for that matter, when he was just lying. He hadn’t noticed any of those in the reports.
Even if the advance stopped, even if the Americans and their We
stern European lackeys somehow turned the tide and fought their way through Russia’s allies in Eastern Europe and invaded the USSR, they wouldn’t be able to conquer and occupy it. Boris was sure of that. If Hitler hadn’t been able to, nobody could.
Which might not have anything to do with anything. He knew what the bomb his Tu-4 had dropped did to Seattle. How many of those bombs had fallen on the Soviet Union? How many holes did you need to blow in the fabric of a country before it was more holes than fabric? Boris Gribkov didn’t know, but he did know the experiment was going on right this minute, both here and in America.
He and Tsederbaum walked up three wooden steps to the mess hall. His nose twitched as soon as he opened the door. A cook with a ladle stood next to an enormous cauldron of borscht. Another stood next to an equally enormous cauldron of shchi. Beet soup or cabbage soup? That had been the Russian question for as long as there’d been Russians. The cauldron of kasha—buckwheat groats—was smaller but still formidable. There was also black bread and peppery sausage coiled like rope.
Gribkov loaded up his tray. So did Tsederbaum. They both took twenty or twenty-five centimeters’ worth of sausage. The stuff was bound to have pork in it. Gribkov couldn’t imagine a Soviet military kitchen worrying about kosher food. To Russian military cooks, the meals they turned out were like gasoline: fuel for the body, nothing more.
He didn’t say anything about it to Leonid Tsederbaum. The Jew had to know what kind of meat went into the sausage—and the shchi, and the borscht—as well as he did. If Tsederbaum didn’t care, that was the navigator’s business.
Glasses of tea from a samovar completed the meal. Gribkov and Tsederbaum spooned in sugar, then sat down on one of the long benches and ate. It wasn’t the kind of meal anyone would go looking for in a restaurant. All the same, Gribkov knew he was getting more food and better food than most civilians did.
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