“Nu?” he asked Istvan on the way back.
“I can do the work. I have to learn to drive,” Istvan answered. “It’s not…real exciting, is it?”
He was less than half Aaron’s age. “You wanted excitement, you should have stayed a soldier,” Aaron said. Istvan shut up.
—
Dwight D. Eisenhower walked into the Philadelphia office that made do for the White House. Harry Truman rose to greet him. “Good to see you, General,” Truman said, though Ike had retired from the Army. “Thanks for coming.”
“It’s my privilege, Mr. President,” Eisenhower answered. He’d been born in the Midwest—Kansas, if Truman remembered straight—and his accent wasn’t too far from the President’s.
“Have a seat,” Truman urged, and sank back into his own chair. When his visitor was also comfortable, he went on, “I’m grateful that you understand I haven’t postponed the Presidential election because I’m all sweaty to keep running the country.”
“Yes, I do understand that, but you also have to understand how I feel about it,” Eisenhower said. “You have been running things since 1945, and I—”
“Almost certainly would be running for the Republicans right now, especially since Senator Taft and Senator McCarthy aren’t with us any more,” Truman finished for him. “Between you, me, and the wall, I don’t miss Senator McCarthy even one goddamn little bit, but that’s neither here nor there. Nixon’s trying to carry on for the SOB, but I don’t think he can derail you.”
“Between you, me, and the wall, I don’t miss McCarthy, either. And Richard Nixon is a nasty little piece of work in his own right, but I also don’t think he’ll derail me,” Eisenhower replied. “As you say, none of that has anything to do with it. If the election came around in the usual way, I’m pretty sure I’d win it. I’d like to hear you tell me I’m wrong.”
“I’d like to hear me tell you you’re wrong, too. I don’t think I can do it, though.” Truman didn’t love Eisenhower. The general had been more a military executive than a field commander. Truman could see him heading one big company or another. The United States? That, to him, was different. Still, Eisenhower had it straight. He would have been odds-on in November. But…“Let’s get Congress back in one piece first. Governors are still appointing replacement Representatives, and they’ll all have to run again this fall. They can’t appoint replacement Senators. They have to hold a special election for each one. And some of those guys will have to run in November, too. Remember, Congress has to certify the votes from the Electoral College to make a Presidential election official. Popular vote doesn’t cut it.”
Eisenhower made a face. “That hadn’t occurred to me, though I’m sure it has to some of my associates more familiar with the Constitution’s fine print.”
“I won’t drag my feet on this, I promise. I was thinking of delaying the election for a year,” Truman said. “If Congress wants to say the new term will only be three years, and the following election will come in 1956 and get us back on the regular cycle, I won’t say boo. A year, I hope, will be long enough, especially since the—armistice, I guess you’d call it—seems to be holding.”
“We won’t be back to where we were in a year’s time,” Eisenhower said.
“Of course we won’t.” As he had to Vyacheslav Molotov, Truman quoted Mother Goose to the loyal opposition’s leader:
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
We won’t get back to where we were for years and years, if we ever do. But we will be back in something like working order, or I hope we will.”
“ ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,’ ” Eisenhower echoed sadly. “Yes, that’s about the size of things, isn’t it? I hope we’ve learned our lesson and we never do anything like this again.”
“So do I. The United States knows better now. I daresay Russia does, too,” Truman said. “But England’s working on the A-bomb. She’s very close to having one. France will want one, too. With de Gaulle running things there, you can bank on that.”
Eisenhower pulled another face. “He thinks too much of himself. He thinks too much of his country, too—when he can tell the difference between himself and France, I mean.”
Truman laughed. “Good one, by God! He’ll pretend he’s running a great power, and all the people in France will love him till something rubs their noses in the truth that they aren’t big enough to play those games any more. Then they’ll turn on him and throw him out.”
“They’ve already done it once,” Eisenhower said. The President nodded. De Gaulle wouldn’t have survived to head the French Committee of National Salvation if he hadn’t been writing his memoirs out in the provinces because the Fourth Republic’s politicians wanted nothing to do with him.
“So is it a bargain, then?” Truman said. “Congressional elections on schedule. We’ll get the House and Senate up and running again, and then in a year we’ll get a new President. I said before that I wouldn’t run again no matter what, and I mean it more than ever now.”
“Well, I understand that,” Eisenhower said. He could have meant it several ways. Maybe it was You’re not young, and you’ve had a bellyful of politics. Maybe it was You lost your family, so you’re ready to give someone else the ball. And maybe it was You screwed up this war so hard, you know nobody will ever want to vote for you again.
Truman could have got huffy. He didn’t see the point. He’d been beating himself up with the third one since Stalin answered A-bomb with A-bomb instead of blinking. The second one had hit him like an avalanche when one of Stalin’s A-bombs fried Bess and Margaret in Washington.
“And yes, Mr. President, it is a bargain,” Eisenhower continued while Truman’s thoughts went on the unhappy journey they took too often these days. The Republican leader held out his hand. The Democratic President took it.
“You know what else we’re going to have to keep an eye on one of these days?” Truman said.
“Tell me,” Eisenhower replied. He thought he’d be doing this job after the next Presidential vote, whenever the next Presidential vote happened to come along. If Truman wanted to talk, he’d listen. Then he’d ignore what he’d heard if he felt like it.
“Red China.” Truman held up a hand. “I know, I know—not for a while. They aren’t within miles of building an A-bomb yet. They’re years away. But there are a hell of a lot of ’em and they’ve got a big country. It could be rich if they quit messing it up. And they’re sore at us on account of what we did in Manchuria, and they’re scared of us for the same reason. It’s a lousy combination, if you want to know what I think.”
“Will you drop more A-bombs on them if they don’t cut a deal in Korea?” Eisenhower asked. “I know you told Molotov you wouldn’t, but—”
“I won’t do it unless the Russians use A-bombs on the satellites or the Baltic republics,” Truman said. “That was the deal. The Russians can still hurt us if we renege on it. If they go back on it, we have a free hand. But I don’t think they will. We have an armistice, not a surrender. I can’t get too pushy. They’re still a nation under arms.”
“Okay. I see your point.” Eisenhower nodded, with luck in wisdom. “This is Germany after Armistice Day in 1918. It isn’t Germany after V-E Day in 1945.”
“That’s it exactly!” Truman exclaimed. Eisenhower looked so perfectly corn-fed, he surprised you when he came out with anything astute. He wasn’t a dope; he just looked and sounded as if he ought to be one. The President went on, “I don’t want to stick the Russians with a Treaty of Versailles they’ll resent, either. Whoever comes after me will have the last word on that, but I hope he’ll follow through, whoever he turns out to be.” Yeah, Ike, I’m talking to you.
“We don’t want to be too hard on the Soviet Union, no,” Eisenhower said. “But do we want to be so soft, we make it easy for them to rebuild and think about trying again?”
“This map is secret,” Truman said
as he pulled it out of his desk. “Red stars show Russian cities we hit with A-bombs. Yellow stars show the ones that only got conventional weapons dumped on them.”
Eisenhower studied the map. He knew, of course, what the USSR had done to the USA. This was…a good deal worse. “They won’t start up at the same old stand any time soon,” he said at last.
“No. They won’t. I don’t take much satisfaction from this war. What little I do take, I take from that,” Truman said.
—
Ihor Shevchenko fastened new shoulder boards to his uniform tunic. These had three red stripes, not one. The authorities liked his defense of the railway line so much, they skipped junior sergeant and promoted him straight to sergeant.
There were things the authorities didn’t know, of course. One of those things was that he’d shot a particularly obnoxious Red Army sergeant in the back. The late underofficer had taught him all the lessons he needed in how not to do the job.
A good thing they didn’t know, too, because along with the new shoulder boards they’d given him a company to command. “We may have to take it back in a while,” the earnest captain in charge of the regiment said apologetically. “If the replacement depot coughs up some more officers, I mean. The bandits’ snipers concentrate on people with officers’ shoulder boards.” He shrugged a fatalistic shrug. “Nichevo.”
In the last war, Red Army snipers had concentrated on Fritzes with fancy shoulder straps the same way. The Hitlerite officers quickly learned to turn the straps upside down so the snipers wouldn’t spot pips and silver or gold braid.
The company’s junior sergeant was a swarthy, mustached Azerbaijani named Safir Safarli. Anatoly Prishvin, the pussy Ihor had scragged, would have given him endless grief about his looks and his accented Russian. Ihor treated him the way he would have treated a man from Leningrad.
Safarli didn’t need long to notice. “How come you no call me blackass or nothing?” he asked, sounding more suspicious than pleased.
“Hey, I’m a Ukrainian. Russians come down on me, too,” Ihor answered with a shrug.
Safarli scratched his head. To him, the difference between Ukrainians and Russians was as incomprehensible as the difference between an Azerbaijani and a Turkoman was to a Slav. He asked, “What we do now?”
“Whatever the captain tells us to, for the big stuff. We’re stuck with that,” Ihor said. The junior sergeant nodded. Ihor went on, “For the small stuff, sit tight as much as we can get away with. I don’t want people killed for no good reason. Make damn sure our sentries don’t fall asleep or get snookered when they’re out there. Damn sure, you hear?”
“I hear, yes.” Safarli touched his ear with his index finger. As if admitting something he half felt he ought to keep to himself, he added, “Serving under you maybe not so bad.”
“Wait till you get to know me. You’ll really hate my guts,” Ihor said.
Safarli looked puzzled, then realized it was a joke and laughed. “You not like a lot of sergeants,” he remarked.
“A lot of sergeants are drippy dicks. I’ve served under too many like that myself, thank you very much,” Ihor said. “Me, I don’t give a shit about the little crap. As long as the guys clean their weapons and they’re ready to fight when they need to be, the hell with the rest. I treat ’em the way I’d wanted a sergeant to treat me.”
He thought of the Golden Rule. He didn’t know where or how Jesus had talked about it; when he was growing up, nothing got you in trouble faster than teaching your children religion. Safir Safarli wouldn’t know, either. Muslims had a whole different set of teachings, though a lot of their moral rules weren’t far from what he was used to.
The Polish bandits didn’t seem eager to prod his company. He must have taught them a lesson when he chewed up that aristo’s band of rebels. Instead, they went after outfits that hadn’t proved themselves.
Sometimes Red Army squads or platoons would surrender en masse to the Poles. Ihor kept hearing that, but had trouble believing it. It turned out to be true, though. Captain Pavlov sought him out to pick his brains. “You’ve been around the block a few times, haven’t you, Shevchenko?” he said.
“Comrade Captain, I fought in the last war till I got a leg wound,” Ihor answered honestly. “You know I still limp. For a while, it kept them from conscripting me this time. Then it didn’t, because they needed more men. So I went back to it again.” He didn’t say They would have shot me if I’d told them no. Pavlov had to understand that already.
“Most of the, ah, weak units had a majority of men who weren’t Slavs,” the captain said. “Sometimes that’s the luck of the draw, but we have to keep an eye on it.”
“My junior sergeant’s a good, solid soldier, sir, and he’s a blackass,” Ihor said. “They aren’t all bad apples. And—forgive me, ’cause I don’t mean you—I’ve heard Russians giving Byelorussians and Ukrainians a hard time like they were a bunch of Kalmuks.”
“I’ve heard it, too. It stinks,” Pavlov said. “It disgraces the Soviet Union.”
“Yes, sir.” Ihor hadn’t realized he was poking one of his superior’s buttons.
“Well, it does, dammit,” Captain Pavlov said. “Russians still give Jews grief, too, same as they did in Tsarist times. No wonder so many of the Bolsheviks who made the October Revolution were Jews. They wanted a better place for themselves and their children.”
“Yes, sir,” Ihor repeated. He’d known that a lot of the Old Bolsheviks were Jews, even if many of them took Russian-sounding names. And he knew what had happened to those Jewish Old Bolsheviks. Kaganovich still survived, but he was almost the only one. Some made the mistake of backing Trotsky against Stalin, and got read of out the Communist Party in the 1920s. The rest lingered on into the next decade, only to perish in the show trials and purges before the Great Patriotic War.
They could have been Ukrainians, he thought somberly. Whatever else you said about Stalin, he didn’t believe in half measures. His methods were brutal, but no one in the whole Soviet Union mounted a successful challenge against him as long as he lived.
And, now that he was dead, everybody else had to pay the piper. All the resentments nobody dared let out for fear of his monstrous strength came bubbling up like swamp gas. The Poles, the Czechoslovakians, the Hungarians, even the Bulgarians! The Bulgarians, more than any other satellite nation, had actually liked Russia. Things inside the USSR were starting to boil, too.
“Comrade Captain,” Ihor said, not quite out of the blue, “have you heard of any troubles in the Ukraine?” He wondered what the Banderists were up to these days. A few of them had lurked in the woods even before those MGB men dragged him back into the Red Army. They’d wanted an independent homeland, a lot of them had been willing to collaborate with the Nazis to get one (thought the Hitlerites were none too eager to collaborate with them), and some hadn’t given up even after the Red Army threw the Germans out.
“By all I know, things are pretty quiet there.” Captain Pavlov eyed Ihor. “Et tu, Brute?”
“Comrade Captain?” Latin was Greek to Ihor.
“Never mind,” Pavlov said. “We’ve had too many desertions, though, even from units where the men don’t give themselves up to the bandits.”
“I know, sir.” Ihor knew why, too. Those guys mostly headed east, back toward their homelands, to help them throw off the Soviet yoke—which all too often seemed to them the same as the Russian yoke had. He suddenly understood the captain’s measuring stare. “You don’t got to worry about me, sir. I’m not going over the hill.”
“That’s good.” Pavlov’s voice sounded desert-dry. How many men had told him the same thing just before they bugged out? He might be a kid, but he’d likely heard enough bullshit by now to turn a saint cynical. He went on, “The rodina needs good men to hold things together when times get tough. I want you to be one of them now.”
“Yes, sir,” Ihor said yet again. But Captain Pavlov’s motherland wasn’t his and had done horrible things to his. How much
loyalty did he owe it?
“Everything will work out for the best. You’ll see,” Pavlov said. “We’ll whip the Poles into line here, and then we’ll clean up the Soviet Union. We’ll all be better for it.” No more than a second after he finished, something blew up with a rending crash. It wasn’t close enough to be dangerous—it had to be a kilometer off—but it did remind Ihor how far the Poles still were from getting whipped into line.
ANOTHER MORNING OF WAKING UP to a guard banging a hammer on a shell casing hanging from a rope. Another morning of taking your boots out from under your head and putting them on your feet. Another morning of rushing out to roll call as fast as you could so the guards wouldn’t have the excuse to beat you. Sometimes they’d beat you without any excuse, but they were worse when they had one.
Luisa Hozzel took a place in the roll-call grid without having anything uncommonly horrible happen to her. She hated the gulag with a bitter, implacable hatred made worse because so much of the bitterness sprang from hopelessness. She had been here, she was here, she would be here. World without end, dammit.
Trudl Bachman stood a few meters away. Luisa eyed her without seeming to. Did Trudl look sleeker, pinker, better fleshed? Luisa thought so. Whore. Russian’s whore. The words resounded inside her head.
But so what? What difference did words like that make? Not much, not in a place like this. What made a difference was that Trudl had more to eat and did easier work than most zeks. She was dying more slowly than Luisa. She fucked? She sucked the Ivan’s dick? Again, so what?
It’s only so what? here, Luisa reminded herself as a guard stumped by, his brow furrowed in concentration as he worked on the count. When they got out of Siberia, when they went back to the Vaterland, what would Max say when he found out his wife prostituted herself for extra helpings of black bread and stew? What would Gustav say if Luisa did the same?
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