“Is good,” Fayvl insisted. “Not muddy instant, like in Camp Nowhere. Not ground acorns and chicory, like in Europe during the war. Coffee.”
He had a knack for looking on the bright side of things that Marian wished she could match. She wondered how he did it when he’d seen so much more darkness than she had. Slowly, she set her half-full cup back in its saucer. “Fayvl,” she said, and then stopped.
“What is?” he asked when she didn’t go on.
“If you want to…” She ran down again, then brought the words out in a rush: “If you want to, I guess we can. If you want to.” Her face felt on fire. Nice girls didn’t talk like that. Well, she hadn’t been a nice girl for a long time, and she hadn’t liked herself much while she was.
He looked at her. “You sure?” he asked.
She nodded. “It’s about time, isn’t it? It’s past time, really. Let me just make certain Linda’s down for the count.” She stuck her head into the hall and listened. Only slow, steady breathing floated out of her daughter’s bedroom. She nodded again and turned back to Fayvl. “Come on.”
After he walked into her bedroom with her, she closed the door behind them. She did it as quietly as she could; her habit was to leave it open. It was very dark in there. “Do you want me to turn on the lamp by the bed?” she whispered.
“Will be fine like it is,” he whispered back.
They reached for each other at the same time. They clung to each other, helped each other out of their clothes, then clung to each other again. “It’s this way,” Marian said, and took the two crabwise steps that guided him to the bed. They lay down together.
First times were always strange. Neither of them was sure of just what the other liked. After a while, Fayvl surprised her by going down on her without being asked (Bill had almost always needed cajoling). She liked that fine, or better than fine. His tongue was warm and quick and knowing. “Oh,” she sighed, and “Oh” again. She reached down to hold him there. He wasn’t going anywhere, but she did it even so.
When her breathing steadied and her heartbeat slowed, she returned the favor. She’d often needed cajoling herself with Bill. Fayvl didn’t have to know that, though. “Easy,” he said before too long. “Is something else, too.”
He poised himself above her. “Ah,” she said when he went in. He’d already brought her joy. She did her best to make sure he got some, too. At the end, he pulled out of her and squirted his hot seed onto her belly and her bush.
“Good. I was able to be careful.” He sounded pleased with himself. “Don’t want to have to think about a baby.”
“No,” Marian agreed. Pulling out was less reliable than wearing a rubber, but it was bound to be better than nothing. “Let me up, will you?” When he did, she grabbed a Kleenex from the box on her nightstand and did some quick mopping. “I’m going into the bathroom to clean up. I’ll be right back.”
She was still naked. If Linda popped out…But Linda, bless her, slept like a log. When Marian came back, Fayvl took his turn in the john. He carried his clothes in there and came back dressed. By then, she’d put on a housecoat. So much for romance, she thought with a wry smile.
“I should oughta go,” he said. She didn’t try to tell him no.
Romance briefly returned when he kissed her goodbye. Off he went into the darkness. Marian got ready for sleep. She kept wondering whether guilt would grab hold of her. It didn’t. The thought that filled her mind was the same one she’d had before. We should have done this a while ago.
—
Vasili Yasevich squatted in a foxhole. Machine-gun bullets cracked past over his head. Every so often, he’d see a red tracer. The USSR could call the Polish rebels bandits as often and as loudly as it pleased. They were stubborn and brave no matter what it called them.
He’d learned a lot about soldiering the past few weeks. Baptism by total immersion, he thought. He wasn’t late hitting the dirt any more. He could dig a hole in nothing flat. He could camouflage it once it was dug, too. He read ground as easily as he read a newspaper.
But the most important thing he’d learned was, he didn’t want to be a soldier. He especially didn’t want to be a Red Army soldier. The idea that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was using him to help reconquer a country that hated Russia made him want to puke. The only problem was, his comrades or the unsmiling MGB sons of bitches not far behind the line would kill him if he tried to do anything about the way he felt.
There were always angles, though. You just had to find one. Growing up in Harbin made him sure of that. Chinese society was built on angles, on looking for any edge you could find and then riding it for all you were worth. Bribery and favors called in counted for more in China than bullets ever had.
“Fuck your mothers, Russian cunts!” a Russian-speaking Pole shouted. A moment later, half a dozen others took up the call.
“A dog fucked your mothers in the ass!” Yuri yelled back. Vasili clapped both his hands to his mouth to keep from giggling. He ignored the Poles’ insults. They threw them out the same way they sprayed ammunition around: in the hope that some would hurt.
Yuri didn’t see things that way. To the veteran with the expensive dentistry, you returned fire whenever you got the chance. If he wanted to get excited about it, he could. Vasili didn’t see the point.
He might have struck a nerve. The Poles had been content to hose down the Soviet lines with that machine gun and with rifle fire. Now mortar bombs started coming in, too. Mortars were most of what the Poles used for artillery. Vasili stopped wanting to giggle. He folded himself into the smallest ball he could and huddled in the bottom of the hole. The thick mound of dirt in front of it shielded him from bullets. Mortar rounds dropped almost straight down. If one dropped straight down onto you, you had to hope everything ended in a hurry.
Red Army mortars and, a few minutes later, field guns answered the Poles. From what Yuri said, the Russians had been in love with mortars for years. They gave infantry firepower it couldn’t get any other way.
After ten or fifteen minutes, the heavy stuff on both sides let up. Small-arms fire went on. From what Vasili had seen, some small-arms fire went on just about all the time when two armies bumped into each other. As long as it wasn’t too heavy or too close, you learned not to pay attention to it.
But then a Russian let out a shout of alarm: “Look out! They’re coming!” He punctuated it with a long, ripping burst from his submachine gun. Most of those bullets would fly high and wide, but maybe they’d make the Poles keep their heads down.
Vasili popped out of his hole, fired a couple of shots from his rifle, and ducked back down again. He wasn’t keen on killing Poles, but he didn’t want them killing him, either.
“By the Devil’s uncle, how many of those pussies are there?” Yuri shouted. “They’d better get the artillery going again, or we’re all in deep shit.”
That made Vasili peer over his earthen parapet again and fire at the Poles. He thought he hit one of them, but an enemy round almost hit him, so he disappeared again. If a sniper was drawing a bead on the foxhole…That wouldn’t be so good, would it? he thought unhappily.
Someone yelled, “Back! Back to the far side of the creek!”
Even as Yuri shouted “Don’t do it! It’s a trick!”, quite a few Red Army soldiers, obedient as usual, left their holes and started to retreat…whereupon the waiting Poles cut them down. Fighting an enemy who spoke your language had all kinds of horrible complications.
Some of the bandits’ bullets were coming from the flanks now, not from in front. That couldn’t be good, either. “Hey, Yuri, what do we do now?” Vasili called.
“Save the last bullet for yourself. You don’t want to let the bandits capture you,” the veteran answered. That was less encouraging than anything Vasili wanted to hear.
The next interesting question was, was Yuri right? Maybe getting captured was exactly what Vasili wanted. He had more sympathy for the Poles than he did for the regime whose uniform
he wore. Of course, the bandits didn’t know that. To them, he was just another goddamn Russian occupier. Even if he put his hands up, they might kill him for the fun of it. They might do it in some lingering and humorous way, too, rather than with the abrupt simplicity he could use to finish himself.
If he didn’t bug out pretty damn quick, he’d find out exactly what they’d do. They’d caught the Red Army with its pants down here, and they were taking advantage of it.
He scrambled out of his foxhole and ran for that creek. He would have given himself up to the Poles if he’d thought they had a prayer of beating the Russians, but he didn’t. Spirit and courage took you only so far. The Japanese in Manchukuo had had plenty of spirit and courage in August 1945. The Red Army steamrollered them even so. He guessed it would do the same thing here.
Sometimes all your calculations weren’t worth a damn. As Vasili ran, he tripped over a root and fell on his face. He hit hard. He got dirt in his eyes and dirt in his mouth. When he brushed at his face, his fingers came away bloody—he’d smashed his nose, too.
He was rubbing at his eyes and groping for his PPD when somebody screamed, “Rukhi verkh, Russki metyeryebyets!” It wasn’t very good Russian, but he understood it. Hands up, Russian motherfucker! was hard to get wrong.
Nerves thrilling with fear, he raised his hands. Two Poles grabbed him and jerked him to his feet. Another covered him with a PPSh. One of the two frisked him. He didn’t have much worth stealing. What he had, they stole. The man with the submachine gun asked, “Holdout weapon? You don’t tell us and we find it anyway, you’re dead meat.”
“Right boot,” Vasili answered dully. They relieved him of the little knife he carried there.
“Well, come on,” the Pole with the submachine gun said. Vasili lurched away from his former comrades. The Polish rebels hadn’t killed him out of hand, anyhow. The fellow with the PPSh asked, “You fight to liberate us before you fight now to enslave us?”
“No.” Vasili wanted to laugh. “I was in Harbin through the last war.”
“Where in Russia is Harbin? I never heard of it.”
“Not in Russia. In China.”
“Tell me another one,” the Pole scoffed. “If you were in China, you’d speak Chinese, right?”
“Of course I speak Chinese, you stupid turtle,” Vasili snapped in that language. If anything, he spoke it better than Russian. He thought in it more than half the time, though less often lately.
“Fuck me. Sounds like you do.” The bandit sounded astonished. “But if you were in China, how’d you end up a Red Army asshole?”
“It’s a long story. The short part is, Mao’s men were so nasty, I hoped Stalin’s would be better. So I went from Manchuria to Siberia. It was about as bad—not quite the same, but nothing great. Then the Russians drafted me. They would have thrown me in the gulag if I said no. That’s how I wound up here.”
“Fuck me,” the Pole repeated. “I’ll take you to the major, let him figure you out. Get moving, prick.” Vasili got moving. Anything that kept him alive a while longer sounded good to him.
—
After the wretched breakfast, after the hurried and stinking latrine call, Luisa Hozzel joined her work gang. Aside from the guards’ new uncertainty, nothing much had changed in the gulag after Stalin’s death. Luisa suspected the authorities in Moscow, or wherever Soviet authorities worked from these days, had long since forgotten they’d ever set up this camp.
She looked around for Trudl Bachman so she could share the conceit. They’d stood side by side in the early-morning lineup. She knew Trudl hadn’t reported to sick call or anything—sick call might have been the biggest waste of time in the history of the world. Going to the camp infirmary was more likely to make you worse than better, and everybody knew it.
They started out toward the taiga, carrying the axes and saws they’d use to knock down pines. The guards were alert: axes and saws could turn into weapons in the blink of an eye. Luisa’d daydreamed of smashing in a guard’s head if she ever got the chance. She didn’t have the nerve, but what were daydreams for but thinking about things you dared not do?
She casually found a place near an Asiatic guard who was more easygoing than most of the bastards with machine pistols. “How it goes, Mogamed?” she asked in her bad Russian.
“It goes,” he answered. His Russian wasn’t a whole lot more fluent than hers. “How is with you, German lady?”
“It goes,” Luisa echoed. “I don’t see Trudl. You know where she is?”
“She your friend, yes? She your work partner, yes? Or she was. How come you not know where she is?” Mogamed said.
“I don’t know why I don’t know where.” Luisa listened to that after she said it, to make sure it meant what she wanted. Satisfied that it did, she went on, “You know where?”
“Da.” What could only be a smirk crossed Mogamed’s flattish face. “Her back inside camp.”
“Is she sick? Not at sick call.”
“No, not sick.” Mogamed smirked some more. “Her back in camp with friend.”
“With friend?” Luisa didn’t like repeating his words over and over, but she found she couldn’t help herself. What he said made no sense for a few seconds. Then, when she noticed the masculine ending on friend, it did. Luisa gasped in horror. “You mean she—?” She broke off. She couldn’t make herself go on.
“She fucking him, da,” Mogamed said matter-of-factly. “He have pull to keep her out of work gang.”
“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Luisa burst out—Russian wasn’t enough to satisfy her. Trudl’d wavered more than she had herself when it came to rejecting advances from the guards and trusties. She’d wavered, but she hadn’t fallen. Not till now she hadn’t, that was.
It couldn’t have been love. Both male zeks and guards were among the least lovable men Luisa had ever imagined, much less met. But when you were half starved all the time, when you were more than half exhausted all the time, lying down with somebody in exchange for more food or for work inside the barbed wire might not seem such a bad bargain.
Trudl must have decided she’d never see Germany again. If you thought that way, making the best of the gulag had to seem more sensible. Luisa still clung to hope. Here, as in the Nazi concentration camps, they did their best to take it away from you. Their best was mighty good, too.
But Luisa knew how stubborn she was. If she’d had any doubts, things Gustav said would have removed them. But she had none. She understood herself pretty well. Dying seemed better to her than giving a guard any satisfaction—and you could take that however you pleased.
She’d thought Trudl felt the same way. Finding out she didn’t made the axe on Luisa’s shoulder seem fifty kilos. She trudged out to the stretch of forest the work gang was systematically denuding. Then she had fresh trouble—there she was, without her work partner.
Some of the female zeks in the gang smirked the way Mogamed had. They knew why Trudl wasn’t there. How many of them were close to making the same choice she had?
Finally, Luisa hooked on as a helper with two other German women. Their names were Elena and Susanna. They had her do the hard, rough work, cutting a trunk into manageable lengths and trimming branches from those lengths while they started felling another pine. She was a spare wheel and a labor-saving device for them, nothing more.
The day seemed to go on forever. Days in the taiga often did, especially when summer stretched them like elastic. This was worse than usual. She felt more dead than alive by the time the guards finally marched the gang back to the camp. Her progress was more shamble than march, but she liked the direction in which she was going.
When they got back, the guards counted the tools of the lumberjack’s trade as carefully as they would soon count the zeks. Worries over weapons, again. If the women managed to hide some, they might rise up against their oppressors. Luisa thought that a forlorn hope, but the guards didn’t.
Once the axes and saws were seen to be all present and accounted f
or, the prisoners took their places for the evening lineup and count. Luisa saw Trudl up near the front of the square. She couldn’t get near her. She had to stand where she was while the guards tried to get the camp to come out straight. They had to do it twice before they got an answer they liked. Since that happened almost as often as not, Luisa could only tiredly fume.
Then it was supper. As always, she emptied her bowl in nothing flat and wolfed down her chunk of husk-filled black bread. The noisome latrines again after that, and back to the barracks. The zeks had a little time to themselves after that, till lights-out forced quiet on them.
Trudl’s bunk wasn’t far from Luisa’s. Luisa went over to her and said, “I missed you in the woods today.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Trudl’s chin rose.
“Is it worth it?” Luisa asked.
“I’m not hungry. Do you hear me? I’m not hungry,” Trudl said. “For the very first time since they hauled us out of Fulda, I’m not hungry. I didn’t remember what it was like to have enough to eat. I’m not dead-tired, either. Can you believe that?”
Luisa had trouble recalling what a full belly and a little extra energy felt like. She hadn’t known such luxuries since they got taken out of Germany, either. But she said, “One of these days, we’ll go home again. What will you do then?”
“Home?” Trudl laughed raucously. “We’re never going home. We’ll be in Siberia till they throw us into a hole in the ground.”
“I don’t believe that. I won’t believe that,” Luisa said.
“Believe whatever you want. But believe this, too.” Trudl grabbed Luisa’s arm and pulled back the sleeve of her quilted tunic. Beneath dirt and mosquito bites, the skin stretched tight over tendons and bones. The arm looked hardly thicker than a broomstick. “How much longer can you last?”
“You’re as skinny as I am,” Luisa said.
“I am now. I won’t be for much longer. That’s why I’m doing…what I’m doing. If I die tomorrow and they throw out my carcass, the wolves will leave it alone—not enough meat on it to be worth eating,” Trudl said. “I don’t want to starve to death or get worked to death. I don’t want you dying like that either, Luisa.”
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