“You were never affiliated with any organizations now illegal?”
“Nein. I was Wehrmacht.” Max could say that and mean it. Rolf would have said it, too, and banked on records being too badly damaged to make a liar of him—or banked on no one’s ever checking. Rolf wouldn’t have to tell any more lies, though. Ironic that one of his own country’s old mines got him…ironic and a nasty way to go. What would he have to say to St. Peter? Or would someone else, at a warmer entranceway, ask the questions?
Clack! Another X went into the right box. “Sehr gut,” the clerk said. “Now I need your signature on this affirmation that all your statements are true and correct, and then you may go on to the paymaster, collect the money due you and the mustering-out bonus, and proceed from there to a transportation manager, who will arrange your journey to, uh”—he checked the form—“to Fulda, ja.”
Max signed without even looking at what the form said. His name would have gone on the dotted line even had the paperwork insisted he was a blue baboon with bad morals. On to the paymaster, who doled out Deutschmarks with as much eagerness as if they came from his own billfold. The mustering-out bonus was three hundred Deutschmarks.
“That’s generous,” Max said. “Just about fifty pfennigs a day. Nice to know the Bundesrepublik thinks so much of me.”
He couldn’t have been the first discharged soldier to complain to the paymaster. By the man’s martyred expression, he couldn’t have been the three hundredth, either. “If you don’t want it, you don’t have to take it,” the fellow snapped.
“Oh, I want it. I want about ten times this much.”
“So does everybody who was in the Bundeswehr. And if they pay out that kind of money, they’ll start another Weimar inflation.”
“I’d take the chance,” Max said. He’d been born around the time the mark zoomed into the ionosphere. By the time that inflation got done, it took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy half a wheelbarrow of food. A dollar or a pound brought billions of marks. He didn’t believe for a second the government feared that would happen again. He believed the burghers who ran the government were a bunch of damn skinflints.
“Go on to the transportation section.” The paymaster didn’t say and get out of my hair, but Max needed no magnifying lenses to read between the lines.
“Fulda…” said the corporal he eventually saw. “Well, I’ll try. It will take some work. The road network is pretty chewed up around there.”
“How about a train ticket?” Max said. “You think a train ticket on top of my great big bonus here would bankrupt the state?”
“You’ve been listening to your paymaster too much,” the transportation manager said. “I’d give you a train ticket in a second if we had trains that could get there. The Russians’ Jabos and the ones from our side have chewed up the railway lines like you wouldn’t believe.”
Since Max had seen some of that destruction, he did believe it. “Maybe I should just hitchhike,” he said.
“Drivers who’ll pick you up and take you where you want to go don’t fall under the federal assistance program,” the corporal said.
“What does, then?”
“Let me see what I can do.” The corporal flipped schedules and muttered to himself. He went off to commune with an officer. When he came back, he gave Max not one but two travel vouchers. “The first one is for a bus ride as far as Kassel,” he explained. “The second one will—eventually—put you on a four-wheel-drive vehicle that should get you to Fulda. Maybe a jeep, maybe a truck, maybe a halftrack. I don’t know. You’ve got food and lodging vouchers to go with that one. You may have to stay in Kassel a while.”
“As long as I’m going the right way, I don’t care.” Max stuck the travel vouchers in an outside pocket on his jacket. The cash was stowed in an inside pocket, to make it harder for ambitious optimists to separate him from it. He wished the powers that be would have let him keep his Russian machine pistol. He could see why they didn’t want civilians armed with military weapons, but made his wish even so.
The bus left the demobilization center in Paderborn that afternoon. It was full of German veterans in full American kit. “Back in ’45, I killed anybody I saw who looked like me now,” one of them said in broad Bavarian dialect. He’d be going farther than Fulda.
Max had seen plenty of smashed country during the last war. As the Germans retreated, they wrecked all they could so the Red Army couldn’t use it. Scorched earth, the generals called it. Some of those generals went to prison for war crimes because of it. Several towns had been fought over four different times as the winds of war blew back and forth.
And now the same thing was visited on West Germany. Americans had dynamited roads and bridges as they fell back. Scorched earth? Close enough. Land mines, fighter-bombers, and Russian occupation finished the job of wrecking the countryside.
Most of the roads down from Paderborn were bad. The rest were worse. The corporal who’d arranged Max’s travel knew what he was talking about, all right. And Kassel was nothing but a sea of rubble. An A-bomb would have had a tough time leveling it any more completely. Olive-green tents housed men waiting to go farther south and the ones who fed them and eventually sent them on their way. People who actually came from Kassel lived in huts made from wreckage and caves dug into it. Women offered themselves for ration tins or cigarettes, the way they had after Hitler stuck the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Max stayed there four days before he finally climbed aboard a halftrack that stopped at Fulda. It was an American model, a little roomier and more comfortable than the ones he’d ridden on the Ostfront. The alleged roads were all craters and shell holes and chunks of asphalt and concrete sometimes mounded in near-barricades. Towns and villages were almost as flat as Kassel. Not all the burnt-out hulks of enemy fighting vehicles had been cleared yet. Once, skirting a killed tank, the halftrack nearly bogged down in the mud. Passengers had to jump out to lighten the load. Engine roaring, the halftrack pulled itself free.
Fulda didn’t look as bad as Kassel, but it came close. Max had to remember that he’d come down from the north to get his bearings. As he got nearer to where he’d lived and worked, he began to see people—mostly women—he’d known. He asked one of them about Trudl.
“Ach, ja, she got back a few days ago,” the mechanic’s wife told him.
“Back? Back from where?”
“Why, from Siberia, aber natürlich.”
It wasn’t of course to Max. He found his shop and his apartment block had both been flattened. A few minutes later, he found Trudl in a crude lean-to that would have embarrassed a Red Indian. She was as skinny as if she’d just come out of Dachau. “I’m better than I used to be, too,” she said. The scary thing was, he believed her without hesitation.
THE AIR FORCE didn’t set up its C-54 Skymasters for comfort. They were the military version of the Douglas DC-4, but you wouldn’t have known it from looking inside the passenger compartment. You could jam fifty men inside a Skymaster. They’d almost be sitting in one another’s laps, but the Air Force didn’t care. It just wanted to haul as many troops in one plane as it could.
Bruce McNulty didn’t care, either. Cramped seating he could handle. To get back to the States, to cut his last ties with the service, he would have hung by his heels like a bat if he had to. Scrunching up his knees so he wouldn’t give the dogface in front of him a back massage? Piece of cake.
On one side of him sat an Air Force sergeant who tugged his service cap down over his eyes and started to snore even before they took off. On the other was a kid with his right arm in a plaster cast. “How’d you do that?” Bruce asked, raising his voice as the engines roared to life.
“Car accident. Jeep accident, I mean,” the kid said sheepishly. “I had me a couple-three beers and I forgot they drive on the wrong side of the road over here. Hit a car comin’ the other way. Got thrown out and landed on my shoulder. Broke my arm. Doc says the bone’s called the humerus, but the way
the son of a bitch hurt, that wasn’t funny one bit.”
“I know,” Bruce said. “Busted my collarbone falling out of a tree when I was twelve. I howled like a coyote—you bet I did.”
“Oh, yeah,” the kid said. The C-54 began taxiing toward the runway. “Sure will be good to get back to the US of A. This here is the biggest airplane I ever seen, let alone rode on.”
“How about that?” Bruce had been thinking how small it was. He’d also been thinking how old-fashioned it seemed next to a B-29. And a B-29 was yesterday’s engineering. The Skymaster came from day before yesterday.
But it could cross the Atlantic. As long as it landed safely outside of Portland, Maine (Bangor, having been A-bombed early in the war, was no longer preferred), he wouldn’t fuss.
Behind him, somebody went through Our Fathers and Hail Marys as the plane lumbered down the runway and into the air. Bruce hid a smile. When you were a pilot, you forgot how flying scared some people out of their skins.
“Thank you, Jesus!” the prayerful fellow said loudly.
The kid with the cast turned his head to stare out of one of the transport’s small windows. “Ain’t that somethin’?” he said. “There it is, all spread down there like a map.”
“How about that?” Bruce repeated. He took such views, and better ones, for granted. You saw more from the cockpit than any mere passenger ever could. But passengers saw things with fresh, unjaded eyes. They didn’t take looking down at the world from a mile or two above it for granted. It was something, all right, when you let it be something.
Then the plane seemed to lurch in the sky. The Catholic started praying again. Bruce hoped it wouldn’t be too bad. When you flew against the prevailing winds, things could get rough. And the DC-4 wasn’t pressurized, so it couldn’t fly above the nasty weather. He shrugged. The Skymaster was as reliable as any machinery could be, no matter what the man gabbling Latin thought.
By the time they landed in Portland, Bruce felt ready to do some praying of his own. He’d bounced as if he were on a carnival roller coaster. He hadn’t been airsick himself, but several other travelers had. The aroma did nothing to improve the trip.
It was dark when the plane touched down. People stumbled off onto the tarmac. Signs by the runway guided them to different doors in the terminal prefab. One said MUSTERING OUT. Bruce went that way, along with half a dozen other men.
Customs inspectors searched them and their duffels. One guy had a .45 confiscated. He squawked, but the inspector wouldn’t bend. “That’s Uncle Sam’s piece, not yours,” he said. “I could jug you for smuggling.”
The man called him a piece of something. Bruce wouldn’t have done that, not to someone who could land him in hot water. But the customs inspector had the air of someone who’d already heard everything twice; it rolled off him.
A yawning sergeant dealt with people one by one. Bruce gave him his paperwork. “Here you go, sir,” the noncom said after he’d been through everything and filled out some more forms. “This shows you aren’t in the Air Force any more—we’ll put you up for a night at the barracks here, but after that you’re on your own.”
“Can I get a taxi to the train station in the morning?” Bruce asked.
“Ayuh,” the sergeant said. Bruce looked at him. He chuckled. “Sorry. I mean uh-huh. I really am from Maine.”
“How do I find these barracks? I could use some shuteye after that bronco ride across the ocean. Some chow, too, if the mess hall’s still open.”
It was. Greasy fried chicken and lukewarm baked potatoes didn’t fill Bruce with delight, but they kept his boiler fueled. His cot was…a cot. He’d long since lost track of how many of them he’d slept in. Breakfast, being fresher, was better than supper had been. After Bruce finished, he flagged a cab. It was a big Buick with portholes on either side of the front end. After jeeps and the one-lung English cars he’d driven, it seemed as roomy as a house.
He bought a ticket to San Francisco at the station. The train that would get him to Boston didn’t go out for an hour and a half. He went to a newsstand to buy some magazines to kill time with, but found it almost empty. “How come this is all you’ve got?” he asked the white-mustached man who ran the stand.
“ ’Cause they’re mostly put together and printed in Noo Yahk,” the newsstand man answered in a Down East accent thick enough to slice. “And Noo Yahk, it went up in smoke, hear what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah.” Bruce had heard about the A-bomb that hit Manhattan, but he hadn’t thought of everything it might mean. Boston had got hit, too, of course. He asked the local how things went there.
“Fubar,” the guy said. At Bruce’s sandbagged expression, he chuckled and added, “My boy, he was in the Marines. But the train goes through, even if it don’t stop there no more. You do your switching in Worcester now.” The town’s name came out as Wustah.
Bruce checked his ticket. Damned if the newsstand man wasn’t right. He hadn’t even noticed. He bought a Portland newspaper and read every word of it, including a recipe for roast duck with a cranberry glaze.
He was on his second reading when the train finally came in. He found a seat and watched the countryside roll by. Maine gave way to New Hampshire. New Hampshire yielded to Massachusetts. Boston was another example of what he’d been doing for a living. The train crossed the Charles River on a bridge thrown up by the Army Corps of Engineers to replace the slagged, melted mess that had been there before. The field of wreckage stretched as far as the eye could see. Bulldozers and steam shovels labored to clear paths through it. They looked as puny and hopeless as ants struggling to move the carcass of a dead hippo.
“Wonder if the air around here is good to breathe,” a woman said, puffing on a cigarette.
His voice boneyard-dry, an unmistakable New Englander responded, “Try not breathin’ for ten or twelve minutes an’ see if you like that bettah.”
Since the bomb had fallen half a year earlier, it probably was safe enough, at least if you were only passing through. Bruce wasn’t so sure about the men operating the heavy machinery and stirring up the dust. Were they wearing gauze masks? If they were, would those be enough? Wouldn’t real gas masks protect better?
Poetry from high-school English ran through his head:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
And what did Robert Oppenheimer say after the first A-bomb blew up in the New Mexico desert? I am become death, the destroyer of worlds—that was it. Looking at the ruins of what had been a great city, Bruce understood the verse from the Bhagadvad Gita better than he ever had before. Boston vanished behind the train, but stayed in his memory.
—
Was love easier the second time around? Marian Tabakman—she still had to concentrate every time she signed her new last name—hadn’t thought so before she tried it. But now she felt as if they’d been married for years, not weeks. They fit together more naturally than she and Bill had. Bill had had to learn how to live with a woman, and then how to be a father. Fayvl already knew. He’d done it before, for longer than Marian had.
They’d also both had brushes with death. After you came through something like that, you didn’t get so excited about the little things. You forgot to defrost some hamburger? One of the Studebaker’s headlights burned out? Linda was being impossible? You dealt with everything as best you could. Not perfect? Okay, not perfect. Good enough, and on to whatever came next.
And she and Fayvl got along. They didn’t yell at each other. Fayvl hardly ever raised his voice. He worked hard to make her happy, in bed and out of it. She tried to do the same for him. They were comfortable with each other.
And Linda blossomed like a flower when the sun came up. She liked having a man in her life again, maybe even more than Marian did. She called hi
m Papa Fayvl, which made him smile and which also suited Marian. Bill would always be Linda’s daddy, but Bill wasn’t here. Fayvl was.
Some stepfathers turned into ogres with their new wives’ children by old husbands. Fayvl seemed just the opposite. He was gentler with Linda than he would have been with his own flesh and blood. A couple of times, when she drove him crazy, he said he’d give her a potch in tukhus. Marian needed some work to find out that that meant a swat on the behind. But his bark was worse than his bite. He never lifted his hand against her.
Little by little, his things came out of the room above his shop and into the house. He had not much in the way of clothes or furniture or kitchen goods, but several boxes of books in English and Polish and German and Yiddish—or was it Hebrew? Whatever it was, its alphabet meant nothing to Marian.
He also brought a chess set: a nice one, with pieces carved from ivory and ebony. He’d made some of the stake he needed to come down to Weed by playing chess in Camp Nowhere. He knew what he was doing, in other words. Marian knew how the pieces moved, but hardly more than that.
“I can teach you more, if you want,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s not my game,” she said honestly. “I’m halfway decent at bridge, if we can find people to play against. Maybe Linda will be more interested.”
Linda was interested in doing anything with Fayvl. He taught her with the same care and precision he used to put a new heel on a logging boot. She soon picked up the rules. Before long, she was better than Marian had ever dreamt of being.
Seeing that, Marian asked, “How good can she be?”
“Pretty good,” Fayvl said. “She sees the board. She remembers mistakes. She don’t too often make them twice.” He nodded. “Yes, she can be a good player. Samuel Reshevsky, she’ll never put out of business.”
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