Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  An hour or so later, one of the doctors at the military hospital showed up at Cade’s bedside. “Vera tells me you’ve gone round the bend,” Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Marcus remarked.

  “Sir, if you ask me, Vera’s the one who’s gone Asiatic,” Cade said.

  Marcus studied him with dark, pouchy, mournful eyes. “Well, you don’t look like I need to send for the guys with the butterfly nets.”

  “No, not much need for that,” Cade said bitterly. “I’m not flying anywhere real fast.”

  “Asiatic gets us back to where she was going,” the doctor said. “She told me you were talking about legally adopting a Korean soldier and taking him back to the States. Why would you want to do that, son?”

  Cade told him why, starting with how he’d liberated Jimmy from his own brutal captain—“Ever take in a puppy, sir?”—and ending with the mortar attack and Jimmy lugging him to the aid station. “I probably wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t,” he said. “I expect I would’ve bled out pretty damn quick.”

  “I expect you’re right.” Dr. Marcus pinched his chin between his thumb and bunched fingers. “Well, you’ve got your reasons, sure as hell, and if you ask me they’re good ones. I’ve seen a couple of these requests before, and….” He shook his head.

  “What do you mean, sir?” Cade was in many ways still an innocent young man. To be fair, he was also a long way from at his best.

  “Let’s put it like this—the Americans who wanted to adopt those Koreans liked them for different reasons than yours.”

  “Huh? Oh!” Even with morphine in him, Cade’s cheeks heated. “That’s disgusting!”

  “The people in charge of such things agree with you. Those requests were rejected. I think yours could go forward. The paperwork is a bitch, though. Would you like some help with it?”

  Which could only mean I want to give you a hand. How much clout did Marcus have? More than a little, for sure. “Thank you very much, sir. Anything you can do, I’d be grateful for.” Cade added, “Can you tell Vera to go fly a kite, too?”

  “As a matter of fact, it would be a pleasure,” Dr. Marcus said. “You have kind of a drawl—you must be a Southern gentleman. I would have found something hotter than that to tell her to do.”

  “My father always told me to be polite to ladies,” Cade said. His father had also backed up the telling with his hard hand, and sometimes with his belt.

  “Nice to hear you listened to him. My old man told me all kinds of things, too. He told me I was a natural for the used-clothes business, which was the line he was in. But I quit listening to him when I was eleven, twelve years old. I’m better off for it, too.”

  Since Cade had never stopped listening to his father, he could only shrug. But he didn’t think Nathan Marcus was wrong.

  —

  A car door slammed, out on Irving Street. Aaron Finch grinned a sharklike grin. “Somebody’s here,” he called to Ruth, who was working in the kitchen.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  He looked out the living-room window. “Marvin,” he answered.

  “Uncle Marvin!” Leon squeaked. He liked Aaron’s younger brother. That sometimes made Aaron wonder if something was wrong with the kid.

  Aaron opened the front door. Marvin came in, along with his wife, Sarah, and their teenage daughter, Olivia. Leon liked Olivia, too. That was good, because she babysat him fairly often. Marvin and Aaron shook hands. Marvin had an odd grip; Aaron had cut off his little finger with a hatchet while chopping wood when they were kids. Marvin rarely let him forget it, even more than forty years after the fact.

  “You told me Roxane and Howard were coming,” Marvin said.

  Another couple of car doors closed. Aaron looked out the window again. “Here they are now, in fact. And I hope you don’t mind, but I invited a young guy who started working with me at Blue Front. He came over from Europe not too long ago, and Mr. Weissman gave him a job.”

  “A Yehuda?” Sarah inquired.

  “Fraygst nokh?” Aaron answered. Do you need to ask? He went on, still in Yiddish, “His name’s Istvan Szolovits.” He pronounced the Hungarian handle as best he could, adding, “He hasn’t learned much English yet, so we all get to trot out the mamaloshen.”

  Olivia looked pained. “I can mostly understand you—Mom and Dad talk Yiddish when they don’t want me to know what’s going on, so of course I learned to follow—but I don’t speak it for beans.” By the way she said it, she didn’t want to, either. To the second generation born in America, Old Country ways flew out the window.

  As Howard and Roxane walked in, Marvin told Olivia, “Don’t worry, kid. Children should be seen but not heard, anyway.” She made a horrible face at him. Marvin would have done the same thing or worse had anyone said that to him when he was Olivia’s age.

  Istvan arrived a couple of minutes later. He was driving a Hudson from before the war that smoked more than Aaron did. The way he ground the gears didn’t do the transmission any good, either; he was still learning how. But he’d bought it for a hundred bucks. It got him back and forth to Blue Front. With luck, it would keep running till he could afford something better.

  He was wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt and Levi’s, but he bowed over women’s hands like a count from the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire. Olivia was visibly smitten. Istvan said, “So good of you to invite me to meet your charming family, Aaron. I thank you so much.”

  “My pleasure, believe me,” Aaron said, which was true in ways the kid from Hungary didn’t begin to understand. “Can I get you something to drink? Can I get everybody something to drink?”

  Requests were about evenly split between beer and scotch. Marvin asked for a martini: “Just wave the vermouth over it. Can’t get too dry for me.”

  Istvan asked for a brew. When Aaron gave him a Burgie, he swigged and then made a face. “America is the richest country in the world. Why is the beer so much worse here than in Europe?”

  If Aaron hadn’t drunk beer in European ports during his hitch in the merchant marine, he might have been offended. As things were, he knew Istvan was right. He said about the only thing he could: “Any beer is better than no beer at all.”

  “What smells good?” Howard asked. He was beginning to get a lean and hungry look. Being out of work would do that to you. Roxane brought in some money typing and clerking, but not a lot.

  “Holuptzas,” Ruth answered. That sparked some interesting talk. There were almost as many version of the Yiddish name for stuffed cabbage as people in the house. Aaron heard holishkas and golubtsy and a couple of others.

  Howard said, “During the war, I knew a gal from Chicago who called ’em pigs in blankets—in English, I mean. She was Jewish, too.”

  “Crazy.” Aaron turned to Istvan. “How do you say it in Hungarian?”

  “Töltött káposzta,” he said, which was way out in left field.

  Or Aaron thought so, anyhow. Ruth said, “Cabbage is kapusta in Russian, too. My mother and father would call it that sometimes, along with kroyt.” The common Yiddish word was German kraut’s half-brother.

  They sat down to dinner in a little while. Everybody devastated the stuffed cabbage. Howard Bauman ate as if they’d outlaw the stuff at midnight. He kept saying “Boy, this is good!” to soften the gluttony. It did help, some.

  “How did you come to America, Istvan?” Roxane asked when people had slowed down enough to talk as well as eat.

  “I was in the Hungarian People’s Army. I got sent to Germany—I was fighting there when I got captured. They questioned me at a POW camp in France, then sent me here for more,” he said. “When they finished with me, they told me to keep my nose clean and fixed up the job at Blue Front.”

  “What did you think of the progressive government in Hungary?” By the way Roxane asked the question, she was sure she already knew the answer.

  “Well…” Istvan was a polite young man. He did hesitate. But he answered with the truth as he saw it: “Rakosi is a Russian
puppet, of course. The Communists are better than the Arrow Cross, I will say. The Arrow Cross killed everybody they didn’t like. The Communists just kill the ones they really don’t like. The rest, they send to prison or a lunatic asylum or a labor camp. Admiral Horthy was better than the Communists or the Arrow Cross, way better.”

  That a country without a coastline should have been ruled by an admiral said something about Hungary. Aaron was damned if he could see what, though.

  As for Roxane, she looked as if she’d just walked into a straight right from Joe Louis. Here was somebody from an actual Communist country—maybe the first somebody from an actual Communist country she’d ever met—and he didn’t like the workers’ paradise? Aaron, who’d already heard what Istvan thought of the current rulers in Budapest, had invited him with malice aforethought.

  “But…wasn’t Horthy a Fascist dictator?” That was Marvin. His politics didn’t lean as far to the left as Roxane’s and Howard’s, but lean they did.

  “He was a dictator, yes. More nationalist than Fascist, I think,” Istvan said. “The Arrow Cross, now…They were Fascists. They made the Nazis proud of them. And Rakosi, he made Stalin proud of him the same way. He acted just like the people who told him what to do.”

  “But didn’t he break up the landed estates and give the peasants farms of their own?” Howard asked.

  “He broke up the estates, yes. But most of the land went to collective farms, and people didn’t like them,” Istvan answered. “The peasants didn’t get rich, or even middle-class. Now that I’ve seen America…I’m not sure even Rakosi has as many good things as this house does. Telephone, TV set, radio, books, all with no censor, terrific food—this is wonderful!”

  “Who wants dessert?” Ruth asked quickly. Unlike a lot of her relatives and even more of Aaron’s, she didn’t relish argument for its own sake. She went on, “They’re cherry pies from Van de Kamp’s bakery.”

  She was a good cook most ways. She’d done her own baking once, not long after she and Aaron got married. The result showed why bakeries made money. After that, she’d bought baked goods.

  For some reason, conversation languished even though the pies were good. People went home early. To his credit, Marvin told Istvan he was glad to have met him. Roxane and Howard didn’t.

  “You did that on purpose,” Ruth said after everybody was gone.

  “Who, me?” Aaron tried for innocence, but felt himself failing. He changed the subject: “The holuptzas will be even better tomorrow after they’ve sat in the icebox all day. The flavors blend.”

  “You aren’t fooling me one bit, Buster,” Ruth said, and Aaron felt like a chess player who’d just watched a gambit fail.

  —

  Boris Gribkov minded bombing Budapest less than he would have with, say, Warsaw. He’d been through Hungary. He knew damn well that the country was chock full of bandits. They’d taken shots at the Soviet convoy that brought him back to the capital.

  Matyas Rakosi and his pro-Soviet faction were supposed to be in charge in Budapest. Theory was wonderful. Boris hoped the people throwing antiaircraft fire at his Tu-4 weren’t committed Communists. If they were, they needed to be committed, all right—to the loony bin.

  “Can we unload?” he shouted to the bombardier.

  “Another fifteen seconds, Comrade Pilot, and we’ll be over the rebellious area,” Fyodor Ostrovsky said.

  Anther fifteen seconds flying straight like this and they were liable to be dead. That was one of the chances you took when you flew bombing runs. Boris had lived through all of them so far. It only took one, of course. The heavy bomber bucked in the air from the turbulence near misses kicked up.

  “Bombing the target!” Ostrovsky said. The bombs fell free. The bomb bay hissed closed. Boris jammed the throttles on all four engines to the red line. He wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as he could.

  Intelligence types had assured him that the Hungarian People’s Air Force remained loyal and that no warplanes had gone over to the reactionary counterrevolution. Unfortunately, Soviet intelligence types had assured him of any number of things that later turned out not to be true. He hoped the radar operator wouldn’t suddenly start screaming about bogies. Even obsolescent fighters could outperform the still more obsolescent Tu-4.

  Boris patted the yoke. Tu-4s might be obsolescent, but they’d visited enormous destruction on the USA and its allies. The B-29s after which they were modeled had visited even more on the Soviet Union, though. That he wouldn’t be landing in Minsk—that he couldn’t be landing in Minsk—proved the point.

  How would the rodina get back on its feet after two devastating wars in the course of a decade? The Soviet Union had just started recovering from the last war when this one broke out. And Truman had done to Soviet cities what Hitler only dreamt of doing.

  They came down at the airstrip outside of Mogilev. No A-bombs had hit Mogilev, which only proved what a miserable little town it was. Now towns like Mogilev were the centers from which the USSR would have to pull itself back together.

  After the landing, Boris reported on the attack to Colonel Petlyura. The Ukrainian officer went on as if obedience to Soviet central authority were the only possible course. For him, it was. That made him admirable. Whether it also left him out of touch with reality was a different question.

  “How heavy was the flak?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Boris said, “but it shouldn’t have been there at all, should it?”

  “Traitors everywhere,” the colonel said. “Once we have things under control again, they’ll get what they deserve.” If he had any doubts about whether that would happen, he didn’t show them.

  “I hope you’re right, Comrade Colonel,” Boris said.

  “Once we put enough soldiers on the ground there, and once the fence-sitters in the satellites see which side their bread is buttered on, things will be all right,” Petlyura said. “Some of the fools there think the Americans will come to their rescue, but that isn’t going to happen.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Boris repeated.

  Petlyura nodded. “I am right,” he said, sounding as certain as Stalin ever had. He had his reasons, too: “The armistice lets us do what we have to do with those people, as long as we don’t drop any more A-bombs on them. The Americans don’t like that any better than you did.” He’d talked with Dzhalalov back at Tula, then, or the information had gone into Boris’ file. His scowl said Boris’ reluctance to have anything more to do with atomic weapons should have been a firing-squad offense.

  Were the war against the USA still going on, it might have been. Of course, were the war against the USA still going on, Boris might not have been so reluctant. As things were, with the situation less urgent and with the Soviet government less sure of itself, he had a little more leeway to act like a human being.

  Poor Leonid Tsederbaum hadn’t had that kind of leeway. And he’d been issued or acquired a soul more finely grained than Boris’. Tearing the heart out of Paris was more than he could stand. He hadn’t waited for a firing squad or even done anything to deserve one: the rodina called him a Hero of the Soviet Union. He used his service pistol to show what he thought of his own wartime exploits.

  “Comrade Colonel, may I ask you something?” Boris said.

  Volodymyr Petlyura’s pale eyes narrowed further. “Go ahead,” he said. Go ahead if you dare was what he meant.

  But Boris said, “Thank you, sir. After we finish putting down the bandits in the satellites, how much good will we be able to get out of them?”

  “Quite a bit,” Petlyura said implacably. “The Americans didn’t hit them nearly so hard as they hit the Soviet Union. More of their factories and farms are intact than ours. Their economies can be the starter motors that help our larger one get moving again. And, of course, they are still our shield against aggression from the west.”

  The worst of it was, he might have been right. The Hungarians, the Czechoslovakians, the Poles, and the East Ge
rmans would certainly welcome American invaders with open arms—their women with open legs. But Soviet troops garrisoning the satellites would have hundreds of kilometers of non-Soviet soil to fight on. And those countries hadn’t taken so many A-bombs as the USSR.

  “With everything going on in the Baltics and the Caucasus, can we keep the satellites under control?” Boris asked.

  “Oh, absolutely,” the air base commandant said. “My people resisted the Russians, but in the end there are always too many Russians to fight. The Nazis found out the same thing. There are just too many Russians. You’re one yourself, Gribkov, so you don’t think about that. But all the neighbors do. We have to.”

  Under the law, everyone in the Soviet Union was the same as everybody else. In practice, things ran pretty much as they had back in the days of the Russian Empire. Russians ruled the roost. Byelorussians and (despite what Petlyura said) Ukrainians were all right, too, as long as they forgot where they came from and acted as Russian as they could.

  The same held true for small, clever groups like Armenians, Georgians, and Jews—though they had a harder time making Russians forget their origins. Jews, without a state of their own till Israel was born again, couldn’t do much about that. Armenians and Georgians longed to get out from under the Russians’ muscular thumb.

  For their part, the Balts looked down their noses at Russians. They might almost have been Germans, as far as that went. Back in the day, a lot of their nobles had been German.

  As for the Asians—the Kazakhs and Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmens and all the rest—they had to be twice as good as Russians to get half as far. Russians didn’t take them seriously. When you thought ahead of time that someone would be ignorant and superstitious, chances were you’d see him that way regardless of whether he really was.

  Colonel Dzhalalov, back in Tula, had beaten those odds. Colonel Petlyura here certainly showed he was aware of them. And what did he think of Russians? He’d given Boris a hint. Pushing for more wouldn’t be smart. Boris said, “Comrade Colonel, we need to make sure this is a country worth living in. All of us do.”