When they went back to the Vaterland…But what if, as seemed all too likely, this was world without end, amen? What if they never went back? Didn’t doing everything you could to stay alive longer make perfect sense then?
Luisa refused to believe any such thing. If that made her a stiff-necked, priggish fool, then it did, that was all. If it made her a dead, stiff-necked, priggish fool, well, was life in the gulag worth living?
The count was taking longer than usual. Were the guards dumber than usual? Or had there been an escape during the night? Luisa didn’t miss anybody’s face from her barracks or her work gang, but no telling how much that meant.
At last, the MGB lieutenant nodded and said, “Khorosho.” They’d just had trouble counting on their fingers. Again. He turned—awkwardly, because one of his legs didn’t work well—and waved toward the mess hall.
Along with the rest of the women lined up out there, Luisa rushed toward the door. She threw a few elbows to get inside fast. One of them would have earned her a stern talking-to from a referee on the football pitch. No referees here. She also caught a couple of elbows like that.
Bread. The chunk she got was bigger than most, and less full of husks and grit. They’d thrown a little salt pork in the stew pot. She could smell it in the broth, and saw, or thought she saw, a few shards in among the cabbage and turnips and nettles and whatever else they’d boiled up. A glass of weak sweet tea. No coffee white with milk, not here. You grabbed what they gave you, and you were glad you got even so much.
Latrine call was as filthy and noxious as always. Luisa fled as fast as she could. Then she lined up again, this time with her work gang. As she shouldered an axe, a mosquito whined around her head. They infested the taiga as long as the mercury stayed above freezing.
Trudl, of course, wasn’t with the work gang any more. She stayed inside the barbed wire, counting paper clips or polishing doorknobs or doing whatever she got to do in exchange for putting out.
“Come on, you cunts!” a guard sergeant bellowed in bad Russian. “Out to forest to do real workings!”
Whatever Trudl did wasn’t real workings. Luisa was sure of that. Whenever she thought about it, it infuriated her and made her jealous at the same time. All Trudl had to do was lie down or get on her knees, and….
Stop that, Luisa told herself as she trudged past logged-off stumps and out to the current work area. But, for once, she couldn’t stop it. That camp barber had had the hots for her since he first cropped her head—and her armpits and crotch. He probably wouldn’t last long or want it very often. If giving it to him kept her from working herself to death here, why not?
Because he’s a filthy animal, Luisa answered herself. Because Gustav will find out if you do. You may think you’ll get away with it, but if you get back to Germany word will, too. She knew what would happen then. Her husband would beat her up and throw her out, and she’d never be able to hold her head up in public again. If she moved away, gossip would follow wherever she went.
If she got back to Germany. If she didn’t go back, if she wouldn’t or couldn’t ever go back, weren’t things different? Trudl thought so. Luisa might have, if the idea of having that barber touch her didn’t make her want to hurl.
“Now, pussies, hard workings!” the sergeant shouted.
Another way to get things over with in a hurry would be to go after him with the axe. She might even kill him before he or his pals leveled their machine pistols and filled her full of holes. That would be worth something. Not enough, though. Coward that she was, she still wanted to live.
Despite yells and threats from the guards, she worked no harder than she had to. Nobody in the gang did. The Russians called people who worked hard for the sake of the state shock workers or Stakhanovites. They were rare among the zeks, and seldom lasted long. You had to guard your strength, what there was of it.
The day was warm and muggy. It felt like summer, in other words—till an hour or two before sunset, when a breeze from out of the northwest reminded everybody how young summer died in this godforsaken part of the world. In a couple of months, maybe sooner, breezes like that would carry snow on them.
She shambled back to the camp, gave up her axe inside the barbed-wire perimeter, and lined up for the evening count. Before the guards let the zeks go to supper, the camp commandant came out to speak to them. With his eye patch, his hideously scarred face, and his hook, he held a post like this so someone with all his working parts could go off to fight foreign foes.
By the look in his one good eye, he hated all the prisoners for whom his word was law. “I have an announcement,” he said, first in Russian and then, to Luisa’s surprise, in German as well. “We are going to begin a repatriation program for female prisoners from Germany sentenced to corrective labor. I do not know when the program will commence. I have not yet received any orders on that subject. When I do receive them, I will follow them. In the meantime, camp administration and routine will continue unchanged. That is all.”
He turned and limped away. He had a damaged leg, too. He didn’t wait for questions. To him, questions would have been an affront. He did what he was told when he was told to do it. He told the zeks what to do, and he expected them to obey him the way he obeyed his superiors. If they didn’t, he would make them sorry. It was that simple. It was to him, anyhow.
No one in the prisoners’ ranks said anything. No one even moved. Luisa wanted to scream and dance and carry on. Fear of the guards and of the grim commandant held her where she was. Fear held all the women where they were.
Luisa glanced around to see where Trudl Bachman stood. Trudl’s face was a study. She looked as if someone had smacked her in the chops with a large, dead fish.
The wages of sin seemed pretty good till you discovered you might have to pay them back after all. What was going through Trudl’s mind right now? Was she hoping Max had caught one fighting the Russians? Even that wouldn’t help her much. Her reputation would still go up in smoke, only as a widow rather than a wife.
“Dismissed to supper!” a guard sergeant shouted.
Russian zeks ran to the mess hall the way zeks usually ran. The German women moved more slowly. Luisa knew she could hardly believe what she’d just heard. Why should she be the only one? For the first time since she’d got here, she didn’t care at all what kind of supper she got.
—
Boris Gribkov spooned up borscht in the dining hall outside of Mogilev. He didn’t know what kind of meat had gone in with the beets and other vegetables, and he didn’t much care. He’d found out in the last war that not knowing was often better. Cook it long enough and it all tasted tolerable. As long as there was plenty of it, who cared?
“Moscow speaking,” came from the radio that ran off a truck battery. Radio Moscow went right on pretending it still emanated from the Soviet capital. Boris didn’t know where Roman Amfiteatrov was reading the Party’s version of the news. Moscow, though, struck him as one of the less probable places.
“What’s gone wrong now?” somebody behind Boris said. All things considered, it was a reasonable question.
“Soviet naval infantry have landed unopposed on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria,” Amfiteatrov intoned in his bovine southern accent. “Their mission, to help restore the full control of the lawful socialist government in that country, is expected to be quickly and victoriously accomplished.”
“Bulgaria? Bozhemoi!” No, it wasn’t the voice that asked what had gone wrong. Whoever it was, he had a mouth that ran kilometers ahead of anything resembling good sense. If you said something like that where people you didn’t know well and trust could hear you, you were just asking to get to know the Chekists.
Or you would have been, while Stalin ran the USSR and Beria the MGB. Now? Who could tell now? Molotov was a hardliner—no doubt about that. But how hard a line could the new Soviet leader take with his country in ruins and the satellites in revolt? If he did try to take a hard one, how many people (assuming secret policemen were
people) would follow him?
“I regret to have to inform the Soviet people that our ambassador in Prague, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, was assassinated last night by reactionary Czechoslovak elements. Despite this atrocity, the USSR is doing everything in its power to cooperate with the progressive socialist government in place there. Czechoslovakian leaders have pledged that their nation remains firmly within the Soviet camp.”
Two or three people in the dining hall coughed. Boris didn’t, but he felt like it. The last time he’d personally cooperated with the progressive socialist government of Czechoslovakia, insurgents shot down his Tu-4 over Bratislava. As far as he knew, he was the only one who’d got out and hadn’t got captured or killed on the ground.
“In Poland, Defense Minister Rokossovsky has announced his resignation because he has been unable fully to suppress banditry within his country’s borders,” Roman Amfiteatrov continued. “The government of the Polish People’s Republic is expected to name a replacement within twenty-four hours.”
“All kinds of good news today!” Boris thought that was the fellow who’d wondered what had gone wrong. By the sound of the news, everything had.
Many people inside the Soviet Union would take the last squib as a time-waster, a space-filler. If you knew more, as Boris Gribkov did, you also tried to read between the lines. Polish Defense Minister Rokossovsky was also Soviet Marshal Rokossovsky: a Pole gone gray in service to Moscow. Had Molotov sacked him because he couldn’t stifle the uprisings in Poland? Or were the Polish Communists who’d had to flee Warsaw getting frisky and ousting someone they knew they couldn’t trust?
Boris didn’t know enough to guess which. Neither would help the rodina. As for the Soviet marshal who’d doubled in brass as the Polish minister, his long career was probably over.
“The Trans-Siberian Railway now passes through Moscow once more, with no unfortunate stoppages and reroutings,” Amfiteatrov said proudly. Boris couldn’t imagine a more bloodless way to talk about A-bomb damage. The newsreader continued, “Shock brigades drove tracks through the heart of the city two weeks ahead of schedule.”
“And now they glow in the dark!” a mess-hall comedian put in.
“Fuck ’em! What difference does it make? They’re just zeks anyway,” someone else rationalized.
It really is falling apart. No one would talk that way if it weren’t, Boris thought. Had people joked about the Tsars like this before Lenin tossed Nicholas onto the ash-heap of history? They probably had. When you started laughing at a regime, it wouldn’t last long.
The base commandant got to his feet. Colonel Volodymyr Petlyura was Ukrainian by blood, but, like Colonel Dzhalalov back at Tula, acted more Russian than the Russians. Boris hadn’t even noticed him up till now; he’d been shoveling borscht into his gob like everybody else. He noticed him now. So did everyone else in the dining hall. It got very quiet. Even Roman Amfiteatrov’s moos seemed to recede.
“That will be enough of that,” Petlyura said in a harsh, flat voice. “That is too much of that, in fact. We serve the Soviet Union. We had better remember that we serve the Soviet Union. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Comrade Colonel!” the assembled flyers chorused.
Boris added his voice to the rest. You couldn’t fail to acknowledge a challenge like Petlyura’s. The regime might be falling apart, but it hadn’t completely broken down. A determined loyalist with connections could make mockers very unhappy. The commandant struck Boris as such a man.
Amfiteatrov returned to the foreground of his attention. The newsreader was bragging about industrial and agricultural norms being shattered through Stakhanovite exertions. Propaganda as blatant as that would have spawned smiles even when the USSR seemed sure to go on for the next thousand years. Now, though, no one said a word. No one looked anything but respectfully attentive.
Maskirovka, Boris thought. If you lived in the Soviet Union, if you lived through a purge or two, you learned how to hide what went on behind your eyes. If you couldn’t learn, they’d get you. It was that simple.
“And in sporting news, Dinamo Kiev defeated Lokomotiv Moscow by a score of three goals to two,” Amfiteatrov continued. “The match was played before a capacity crowd in Polotsk.”
He didn’t say why the match was played in Polotsk. The Americans had hammered both Kiev and Moscow. Chance were neither club had a home stadium worth playing in, or supporters who felt like watching a match. A provincial town like Polotsk wasn’t worth incinerating with A-bombs. People there got to see a fancy football game…if the first-stringers hadn’t got roasted and replaced by stumblebums wearing shirts they didn’t come close to deserving.
Boris remembered the smashed groundcrew sergeant reeling along the airstrip runway at the Tula base. So many first-stringers from every branch of the Soviet armed forces were roasted now. So many of the people wearing those shirts didn’t come close to deserving them.
He suddenly felt more sympathy for men like Petlyura and Dzhalalov. The base commandants had been fighting the rot longer and harder than he had. They hadn’t given up. They were still in there battling. The Romans had given one of their generals a commemoration after Hannibal slaughtered the legions at Cannae. Why? Because he hadn’t despaired of the republic. The Ukrainian and Tajik deserved awards like that. They were still trying to bring their people with them, too.
It was noble. Boris feared it was hopeless. Petlyura and Dzhalalov didn’t care. The USSR had been good to them. They were doing their best to be good to it.
There would be people like that from one end of the vast country to the other. They’d run this way and that, plugging a hole here, patching a rip there. They’d be Stakhanovites in the cause of holding things together. Tsar Nicholas would have had men like that, too. Much good it did him.
Polotsk! These days, Polotsk counted for a metropolis, a place where top-division football clubs could square off. If Polotsk is a metropolis, I’m a hippopotamus, Boris thought. He almost wished he were a hippo. Then all he’d have to worry about would be crocodiles. Compared to Soviet predators, they were nothing much.
—
Bruce McNulty pulled back on the stick. The plane, which had been taxiing sedately down the runway, lifted its nose and hopped into the air. “Christ, I wish it was this easy all the goddamn time!” he exclaimed.
Of course, he wasn’t in a B-29. He didn’t have to worry about trying to make an emergency landing if one of his overstrained, chronically overheating engines quit just when he was getting off the ground. This was a Piper Grasshopper, the Army version of the good old Piper Cub. It was made to be forgiving.
He smiled at the instrument panel. The only way it could have been more basic was not to be there at all. Altimeter, airspeed indicator, fuel gauge, revs, oil pressure, ammeter, artificial horizon, turn-and-bank indicator, compass…What more did you need? Not a thing, not in a Grasshopper. Again, a Superfort was a different bird.
There was the Channel, dead ahead. He droned on to the southeast. The Grasshopper bounced in the choppy air. He remembered the Kaydet biplane in which he’d learned to fly, and how it had shivered with every air current. In a B-29, you hardly noticed them.
Once, he’d talked with a Navy guy who’d flown a blimp on antisubmarine patrols out over the Atlantic. From what the gasbag pilot said, those babies were way more sensitive to weather than any plane. No surprise if you thought about it—a blimp gave the wind a hell of a lot of surface area to play with.
“Land ho!” he said when France—or would it be Belgium?—emerged from the mist ahead. He steered east along the coast. Pretty soon, he found what he was looking for. There was Antwerp, with the heart torn out of the great harbor as if it were an Aztec sacrifice.
The area where everything had been smashed flat was about a mile across. Beyond that, the damage looked more like the kind he’d seen in the last war: buildings that leaned drunkenly away from the blast center or had chunks bitten out of them or had burned down. He circled above the wr
eckage at 8,000 feet, getting an eyeful.
This is what I do for a living, he thought. This is what I owe Daisy, to see it with my own eyes. He could have flown to Paris instead, but this was easier. The Grasshopper didn’t have the range to reach the German cities that got leveled to stop the Red Army.
He wondered how much fallout he was breathing. Enough to notice, was his guess, but not enough to hurt him if he didn’t stick around too long. That being so, it behooved him not to stick around too long. He swung the light plane away from ravaged Antwerp and back towards England.
Flying a B-29 was work. Even with the hydraulics, hauling the big bomber around the sky involved hard physical labor. No hydraulics here, just wires leading from the controls to the surfaces they moved. This was flying as God meant flying to be. It was simple, easy, direct.
The only way it could have been any simpler would have been for Bruce to grow wings on his back like an angel and do his own flapping. The limeys called each thousand feet of altitude an Angel. Right now, he was at Angels Eight.
He wondered what he’d do now that the war seemed over. When you were flying at right around a mile a minute, nothing happened fast. It was almost like crossing the ocean on a sailing ship. You had time to think.
One thing was too obvious to need much thought: he wouldn’t keep flying a B-29. The big bombers had been obsolete when this war started. They soldiered on because the USA could bring a lot of them back into service in a hurry. Except for the asshole-puckering takeoff at full combat weight, the bugs had been worked out of the aircraft, too. Neither of those things held true for the B-36 or the B-47.
They were the coming thing, though. The B-36 was a hybrid, with a couple of little jet engines helping its props push it along. It was bigger and faster and could carry more bombs than a B-29, but prop jobs, like Kansas City, had gone about as far as they could go. In the B-47, the future was now. The jet bomber flew high enough and fast enough to give it a decent chance against even the hottest new fighters.
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