Things turned uglier after that. Red Army men started shooting at any Lithuanians they saw. The Lithuanians started not just murdering but also mutilating any Soviet soldiers they caught alive.
Nodar Gachechiladze glumly shook his head. “Is bad. Is very bad,” he said. “Is as worse as fighting Hitlerites.” His Russian was shaky, but nothing was wrong with his judgment.
“Fucking Lithuanians fought alongside the Hitlerites. I learned that in school,” Alexei Yakovlev said. “Same with these other Baltic cocksuckers.”
It wasn’t even that he was wrong. Unlike most of the Soviet Union, the Baltic republics had indeed preferred the Nazis to the Communists. But I learned that in school made Konstantin flinch. Alexei would have been a short-pants kid during the Great Patriotic War. Time marched on…everybody.
Pyotr Polikarpov said, “Comrade Sergeant, shall we take out any locals we happen to run across?”
“If you see men with rifles—hell, if you see women with rifles—that’s why you’ve got your machine gun.” Konstantin’s gaze slid to Yakovlev. “That’s why you’ve got yours, too. But don’t go killing people for the fun of killing people. The ones who keep living won’t give up because you do. They’ll just cut your balls off and stick your dick in your mouth if they get hold of you.”
The kid gulped. Maybe he hadn’t learned about that kind of thing in school. Konstantin knew damn well it had happened often enough during the last war. Plenty of Germans had saved a last cartridge for themselves to keep Soviet soldiers from capturing them and having fun with them before they died. And it wasn’t as if the Nazis gave Red Army men great big kisses and bowls of borscht when they caught them, either.
This war in Germany had been cleaner…A-bombs aside, of course. Remembering how flat radiation sickness had left him, Morozov knew that was a large aside. Without A-bombs, the bandits here couldn’t kill in carload lots. But knives and hammers and hot iron—those, they had and used.
In the middle of the night, mortar bombs hissed down and burst not far from the T-34/85. Konstantin and his crewmates were sleeping in holes dug under the old tank. Sharp steel fragments clattered off its road wheels and side. The beast couldn’t take on a modern battle tank, but it was plenty good enough to stop such nuisances cold. Konstantin woke up, swore, wiggled, and went back to sleep.
—
“Are you sure you want to proceed with this…adoption? Absolutely sure?” By the way the judge advocate sounded, he’d just found Cade Curtis in his apple.
Cade was used to those tones by now. “Yes, sir,” he said, and left it right there. The less you said, the smaller the handle you gave them.
Major Horatio Bowers shuffled papers. “We cannot find anything suggestive of moral turpitude in your application.” He seemed disappointed, even devastated, that they couldn’t.
“Yes, sir,” Cade repeated. They thought he was a fairy or Jimmy was a fairy or they were both fairies who’d spend their time in the States playing filthy games with each other. Cade wanted to rise up from his bed and punch Horatio Bowers square in the snoot. He couldn’t, of course. This was the first time losing his leg had ever done him any good.
“Your colleagues speak well of your relationship with this young Korean.”
“I’m glad, sir.”
“His home town has been under Communist rule. With the armistice, it returns to the jurisdiction of the Republic of Korea. Unfortunately, it has seen no small amount of fighting. Full recovery of Chun Won-ung’s birth records and other information may not be possible.”
“I see, sir,” Cade said. Why don’t you go ahead and believe what he tells you? But if he said that, he’d shock the bureaucratic Bowers to the depths of his little shriveled-up mule turd of a soul. If it wasn’t on paper, preferably with three carbons, it didn’t exist.
Bowers examined a sheet he took from one of the three manila folders he carried. Whatever was on it made him look as if his stomach pained him. Coughing, he said, “Due to your outstanding combat record, Captain, and due to the wounds you suffered in the service of the United States and the United Nations, and due to your longstanding association with the aforesaid Chun Won-ung, the authorities have chosen to grant your petition and have approved not only the adoption but also transportation to the USA for this individual.”
“Thank you very much, sir!” Cade felt as happy as he did right after a big slug of morphine. Man had bitten dog! He’d got one past the American military higher-ups in spite of everything! Another thought occurred to him. Whatever connections Dr. Nathan Marcus had, they were pretty goddamn good.
“Don’t thank me.” Major Bowers made a pushing motion with both hands, denying everything. “I’m only the messenger here. If it were up to me, I would be delivering a different message. I don’t approve of letting more Asiatics into the United States. If you ask me, we’ve got too many already. But the decision wasn’t mine. I’m here to tell you what it was.”
“Yes, sir.” Cade bit back everything else. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. By the way Horatio Bowers talked, if Jimmy wasn’t the mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu with his mustache shaved off, he surely was the evil doctor’s number one henchman. Jimmy had about as much Fu Manchu in him as your average cocker spaniel puppy. Cade knew that, but Major Bowers would never believe it if he lived to be 190.
“I hope your recovery continues to progress,” the major said stiffly. With a brusque nod, he went off to inflict his charm and warmth on someone else.
The guy in the next bed leaned toward Cade. “They’re no-shit gonna let you take your buddy back to the States?”
“Yeah.” Cade nodded. The guy didn’t say gook buddy, as a lot of men would have. He didn’t when he was talking about Jimmy, anyhow. He’d seen how it pissed Cade off. He still let fly with it for other Koreans, though.
“That’s pretty neat,” the other wounded man said. His left arm and upper torso were encased in enough plaster to stucco a couple of houses. “When’ll they let you go?”
“Beats me. Whenever they do,” Cade answered. “Longer I stay here, the more practice on crutches I get.” His arm and underarm muscles were starting to get used to them. They didn’t make him hurt the way they had when he first started stumping around on them.
“They’re not gonna fit you with a peg leg while you’re here?”
“Nah. They want the stump to heal some more. I’ll have to wait till I get back.” Cade didn’t say get home. He always had a place to stay as long as his folks lived. But Tennessee didn’t feel like home any more. Korea did. Especially, trenches in Korea did. Hot and dusty in the summer, muddy during spring and fall, frozen iron-hard and half the time full of snow during winter, the enemy no more than a few hundred yards away, your own guys always in your pocket…That was the life he’d known most of the past two years. As a young man will, he’d adapted to it and made it his own.
But he couldn’t have gone back to it now even if the war had continued. The English let Tin Legs Bader keep on flying fighter planes, but they’d been desperate—and you didn’t run around a hell of a lot in the cockpit. Tin Leg Curtis wouldn’t help his own side in an infantry action.
A couple of days later, Dr. Marcus paused to watch him making his slow way along a hospital corridor. “How are you doing there?” the surgeon asked.
“I’m doing,” Cade said. “I won’t ever make the Olympics, but I’ll get where I’m going. Eventually.”
“The Olympics.” Nathan Marcus rubbed his chin. “We missed 1940 and 1944. They would’ve been in Helsinki this year, but we missed that, too. Maybe we’ll make it in ’56. That’d be the second one since Hitler’s Games. Not such a hot track record, y’know?”
“I guess not.” Cade hadn’t given it much thought.
“If I get you and your adopted son on a ship in a couple of weeks, will you be ready to go?” the surgeon asked.
His voice had changed. This was business, not small talk. “I think so, sir.” Cade returned to military formality. “I can’t
thank you enough for everything you’ve done.”
Marcus waved that aside. “Get well. Find a pretty girl. Settle down. Raise some kids who aren’t Korean. Have a good life. You can do it, you know.”
Cade aimed his chin at his stump. “You think any girl will look at me twice when she sees this?”
“Some will,” the doctor said. “I guarantee it. And most of the ones who let that bother them aren’t worth much to begin with.”
“I wish I could believe that. I’m gonna try real hard, I tell you.”
“You’ll find out.” With a friendly nod, Nathan Marcus went on his way. Neither of his legs stopped a little below the knee, but maybe he knew what he was talking about anyway. Cade hoped so.
At least when it came to travel arrangements, Dr. Marcus did. Cade had the feeling he usually did. A halftrack took Jimmy and him and four other soldiers discharged from the military hospital over a horrible road (Korea had no good ones) to the port at Masan. Everything there was new and hectic. The Russians had bombed Korea’s main port, Pusan, the year before.
“The ocean! The ocean! Never see before! The ocean!” Jimmy said over and over. Cade thought of Xenophon’s Greeks shouting Thalassa! Thalassa! after they fought their way across the Persian Empire to the Black Sea.
He’d wondered if he would go back to America in a hospital ship, all gleaming white with red crosses everywhere. No such vessel was tied up at any of the piers. The halftrack unloaded its passengers at the harbormaster’s office. They didn’t see the harbormaster, only a petty officer. He examined their hospital papers and gave Cade an honorable discharge from the Army. Cade had to look twice to notice that they had promoted him to major before they turned him loose. The promotion officially dated from the day he was wounded, so he got a little extra cash to go with it.
Then the petty officer said, “Youse guys is all on the SS Joe Harris. Pier Four—it’s the closest one.” He eyed Cade’s crutches and pinned-up trouser leg. “You don’t got far to go, sir.”
“Thanks,” Cade said.
The SS Joe Harris was a Liberty ship that had seen a lot of hard use. Instead of white paint everywhere, she was streaked with rust. Cade needed Jimmy’s help getting down the steep stairway to the cabin they shared with two other men. It was cramped and airless. A Liberty ship would take a month waddling across the Pacific. This would be no luxury cruise.
All the same, Jimmy started to cry when the freighter pulled away from the pier. “America! I go America!” he said. Cade wished he could get even a fraction that excited himself.
LUISA HOZZEL LOOKED UP and to her left at the neat bullet hole in the passenger-car window. It was thirty centimeters above the top of her head. The bullet hadn’t hurt anybody. Even the little sprays of glass it had blown out hadn’t caused anything worse than a couple of scratches on the women who shared her compartment.
They couldn’t have gone ten kilometers inside Poland before they got that greeting. They’d had to change cars at the border between the USSR and Poland. The Soviet Union used a broad rail gauge, not the one standard farther west. The Ivans did that on purpose, to make it harder for invading Germans to exploit their railroads.
Whether the whole train had got shot up or only this car, Luisa didn’t know. She did know the train hadn’t stopped to let off any wounded. She also knew the stories that had been whispered through the camp at the other end of the USSR were true. The Poles were in revolt against their Russian overlords.
Maybe the Russians had a way of letting the rebels know the train carried only returning zeks. The Poles didn’t fire at it after that once. Once was at least twice too often. How many bullets had come that close to Gustav? Luisa didn’t want to know the answer.
No one opened up on the train after it pushed through Poland and into the Soviet zone of Germany. Even though it was the Soviet zone, with slapdash Russians and humorless German Reds running things, it seemed much cleaner and more orderly than Poland did…at least to her eye.
They passed south of Berlin. Whether that meant the Americans had incinerated the city was one more thing she didn’t know.
On the border between the Soviet zone—the so-called German Democratic Republic—and the American zone—the biggest part of the Federal Republic of Germany—the train halted once more. Germans in Soviet-style greatcoats shouted, “Out! Everybody out now!”
“What’s the matter?” Luisa asked as she stumbled onto the platform. She never would have dared to question a Russian. Asking something of one of her own folk, though, seemed possible. “Why aren’t they taking us all the way home?”
He looked at her like an attendant eyeing an inmate in a home for the feeble-minded. “The Soviet Union’s responsibility ends the moment you leave the DDR,” he said, as if she should have known that for years. “How you proceed from then on is your worry. The capitalist authorities have established a control point on their side of the frontier. They will process your entry into the American zone.”
Guards with machine pistols and fierce, barking dogs herded the women towards a gateway festooned with barbed wire. The gateway stood open, though. On the far side flew the West German flag, without the hammer-and-compass-flanked central shield the East Germans used. The soldiers on that side wore American uniforms, but they were also Germans.
At the control point, Luisa gave her name and home town to a military clerk, who checked a register. He ran his finger down the typewritten list. The moving finger stopped. The clerk nodded. “Ja, Frau Hozzel,” he said. “We have a report of your arrest and deportation. Welcome back to freedom.”
“Danke. Can you tell me if my husband is well, please?” Luisa said. “His name is Gustav, Gustav Hozzel.”
“One moment, bitte.” The clerk reached behind him to pull out a different register. He flipped through it, then went down another list. His index finger stopped again, more abruptly than it had before. Something in his face tightened. He tried not to change expression, but he couldn’t help it. Luisa knew what he was going to say before he came out with it: “I am more sorry than I can tell you, Frau Hozzel, but Gustav Hozzel was killed in combat not quite a year ago.”
“Are you sure?” Luisa understood how hopeless the question was even as she asked it.
“I am sorry,” the clerk repeated, “but there can be no possible doubt. You will receive a payment from the Federal government to compensate in some small way for your loss….”
The words seemed to come from a billion kilometers away. “I don’t care a fart for any of that,” Luisa said. “What am I going to do without my Gustav?” The pain hadn’t hit yet—only the loss.
Sensibly, the military clerk didn’t try to answer that. “If you go to Stop Four, Frau Hozzel, you will find there a bus that goes through Fulda. Let me give you this first.” He handed her five hundred-Deutschmark bills. “This has nothing to do with your husband’s loss. This is a welcoming payment to all returning from Soviet captivity. It will keep you going for a little while.”
This was the first money Luisa had handled since the Russians seized her. Numbly, she tucked it into a pocket on her camp jacket. Like a sleepwalker, she stumbled toward Bus Stop Four.
Trudl was already on the bus. Without thinking, Luisa sat down next to her. Trudl beamed from ear to ear. “So wonderful!” she said. “We’re going home! Home! At last! We’ll be able to put our lives back together again.”
“Yes,” Luisa muttered in a voice like ashes.
For the first time, Trudl looked at her face. “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” she exclaimed. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Gustav…isn’t coming home.” Luisa had thought her husband was a damn fool for going off and playing soldier again. Hadn’t he got all that out of his system forever in the last war? Did he want new nightmares to wake him up screaming when the old nightmares didn’t?
Well, no nightmares would wake him now. He’d never scream again. He hadn’t been playing soldiers after all. When you played, you could walk away
from the game and start over. This was real. When you got killed, you stayed dead. Forever.
“Oh, no!” Trudl folded Luisa into a hug she didn’t want. “Oh, you poor thing! I’m so sorry. I’ll help you any way I can.”
“Thanks.” The word felt meaningless in Luisa’s mouth. Everything felt meaningless to her, meaningless or worse. All the meanings she could tease out of the past couple of years were bad. She needed a couple of seconds before realizing she ought to ask, “Did you hear…? Is Max…?”
“I did hear, ja. He’s all right, danken Gott dafür.” Trudl worked to sound more serious with her good news than she would have if she hadn’t just heard her friend’s husband was dead. As far as Luisa was concerned, that was wasted effort. She hated Trudl anyway, for her good luck.
And how ironic was it that she’d got skinnier and skinnier in the gulag, not taking easier work and better rations in exchange for lying down with a guard or a clerk or a barber? She’d kept herself for Gustav long after Gustav wasn’t there to be kept for. Trudl, who did have a husband to come home to, had ended up screwing somebody so she could eat better. Why hadn’t Max got killed, so he wouldn’t find out about her shame?
She won’t tell him, never in a million years, Luisa thought. So how will he find out? But that was one of those questions that answered itself, wasn’t it? Why should Trudl, who’d done wrong, get to enjoy life when Luisa couldn’t even though she hadn’t? How was that fair or right?
More women were climbing onto the bus. Some lived in Fulda, others in towns not far away. Some of the German women who’d vanished into the vast reaches of the USSR wouldn’t be coming home. The war had killed them no less than it killed Gustav.
The driver, who wore a gray uniform that looked more American than German, started the engine. With a hiss of compressed air, the doors closed. Gears ground as the bald, grizzled man started driving.
East Germany had been bombed but not fought over. This side of the border, everything that could be shattered was. Including my life, Luisa thought. No one had let the Russians take anything. Whatever they’d grabbed, they’d paid for. Even the road was cratered. The bus dodged holes as best it could. More than once, it had to go off onto the shoulder.
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